Wanting Sheila Dead(110)

“Did you know the girl who died?”

“The little blond one?” Mary-Louise said. “No, I didn’t know her. I mean, I didn’t know who she was or where she came from. But I’d seen her before, you know, in the Ballroom. And before that, too.”

“Before that?”

“I was the first in line, so I didn’t notice her in line, because she must have been behind me,” Mary-Louise said. “But she was in the pink room, the same one with Grace. I know because I saw her come out of there and go to the place where the panel was. You know, the judging panel, where we all came and talked to you guys. Then they called my name and I went in and when I came out she wasn’t there anymore. I have no idea where she went.”

“Have you ever been arrested?”

“Oh, of course not.”

“Have you ever owned a gun?”

“We’ve got a shotgun at home,” Mary-Louise said. “It belongs to my father. He uses it because of the animals, you know, the ones that get into the yard.”

“If I asked you which of the girls you would choose as the one who had been firing shots at me, which one would it be.”

“Oh,” Mary-Louise said. “That’s easy. Everybody in the whole house says it’s Coraline who’s doing these things, and that it’s Coraline who killed that girl, too. Grace says Coraline is a religious fanatic and she’d kill anybody for God, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. Coraline seems like she’s all right. Most of the girls do. It’s that Ivy person who really makes me get the hives. I don’t understand her at all.”





FIVE



1


By the time Gregor Demarkian got to Sophie Mgrdchian’s hospital floor, there were several uniformed officers and two homicide detectives as well as Billie Ormonds and David Mortimer already there. Dr. Halevy was also there, yelling at nurses in what sounded like Arabic. Gregor went to the door of Sophie’s room and looked in. She still looked like she was sleeping.

Gregor went up to Billie Ormonds and tapped her on the shoulder. “So?” he said.

Everybody turned to look at him at once.

Gregor cleared his throat. “I take it I’m not crazy,” he said. “I take it giving blood pressure medication to somebody without a blood pressure problem, or a low blood pressure problem, can cause what we’ve been seeing.”

Billie looked back at Dr. Halevy and the nurses. “I don’t think they even know what she’s saying. She’s livid, by the way. People didn’t write things down on charts. People didn’t double-check other people.”

“The problem,” Mortimer said, “is that this still won’t get us what we want.”

“Meaning an excuse to keep Karen Mgrdchian locked up,” Billie said. “We’ve got homicide here now, and we can start treating this as an attempted murder, but the simple fact of the matter is that we can’t really prove it was one. Sophie Mgrdchian had this other woman’s pills in her own pocket—well, they’re old ladies, aren’t they? They could have become confused. They could have picked up one another’s medication by accident.”

“She’s not Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said. “She’s the wrong type, if that makes any sense.”

“That’s not exactly enough to go on,” Billie said. “And you’ve got the fact that this woman was in Sophie Mgrdchian’s house. Her friends on the street say she wasn’t disoriented or going into dementia—”

“As far as they know,” Gregor said. “Sophie Mgrdchian hasn’t been running around being social for years.”

“Even so,” Billie insisted. “You have to at least assume that the woman would have been able to recognize her own sister-in-law.”

“No,” Gregor said. “She hadn’t seen the woman in decades. Literally decades.”

“Again,” Billie said. “Not enough to go on. She was in Sophie Mgrdchian’s house. There’s no evidence that entry was forced, and in fact we know it wasn’t, because we know she was there for some days. Are you trying to say that this woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian forced her way into the house and stayed there by—what? Threatening Sophie? But Sophie has been in and out of the house since the woman arrived there; she could have broken free any time. There isn’t a child to be held hostage, is there? Or even a pet. And yes, I do know that sometimes kidnap victims end up collaborating with their kidnappers for all kinds of weird psychological reasons I can’t understand, but there’s no indication of that here.”