“Didn’t Bennis give you the message about looking in the basement for bodies?” Gregor asked.
“Well,” Billie said, “she gave it to me, but I thought it was mostly metaphorical. Are you trying to tell me you know where bodies are buried?”
“I think so,” Gregor said. “I’ll admit, it’s mostly a guess, but I’m pretty sure it’s only a guess about where, not about if. If I was the woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian, and I’d killed the real Karen Mgrdchian, I’d have put the body in the basement. It’s the most logical place, if I’m working alone and I’m an old lady. It’s out of the way, so that the chances of a smell permeating the immediate area are slim for at least a while. And it’s easy for me to get to and get done.”
“I thought there was a daughter,” Billie Ormonds said.
“There is,” Gregor said. “I don’t know anything about her. That’s why I said it was a good idea to look for two bodies, or even for three. I know Marco Mgrdchian is dead, but not when he died or how he died. Assuming that was natural causes, though, and a bit back, that leaves the mother and the daughter. If the daughter was in the habit of coming over to the house, if she lived close by, if she was responsible and not sick or addicted in some way—then my guess is that you’d find two bodies in the basement and not one.”
“Why?”
“Because the daughter hasn’t called,” Gregor said. “And even if she didn’t have the numbers of the people on Cavanaugh Street, if the address book at that house is missing as the address book is here, then there’s the fact that she hasn’t reported her mother missing. I’ve checked every source I can think of. I’ve looked on the Internet. There’s no missing person’s report on Karen Mgrdchian.”
“Maybe,” Billie said, “the reason for that is that Karen Mgrdchian isn’t missing. She’s here, and her daughter isn’t worried about her because her daughter knows that she’s here.”
“If she was Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said, “she wouldn’t have done that to her fingerprints.”
“It doesn’t matter what she does to her fingerprints,” Billie said, “there are no fingerprints on file for Karen Mgrdchian. We really did check.”
“I’m sure you did,” Gregor said, “but I’m willing to bet that there are fingerprints on file for whoever this woman really is. Because this is not some brand-new, supercreative secret plot. This is an old-time con game. And I’m going to be shocked if it turns out she’s never been picked up for it before.”
“You mean you think the woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian has been—what? Convicted of murder?”
“No,” Gregor said, “convicted of fraud, or, if not, then arrested for fraud. The only reason to destroy your fingerprints is that you don’t want the police to be able to connect you with something you’ve already done, the only reason to destroy your fingerprints is because they’re on file somewhere you don’t want anybody to know about.”
“People do sometimes destroy them accidentally, no matter what you think,” Billie said.
“Not people like Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said. “We need to pinpoint the place where this woman lived and have the local police go out there with a search warrant. And I’m sure they’ll be able to get one. We’ve got an elderly woman, incapacitated under suspicious circumstances, and another elderly woman we’ve got reason to be suspicious of. They’ll be able to find a judge.”
“But you don’t actually know what the address is,” Billie Ormonds said.
“Someplace in or around Cleveland,” Gregor said. “The Very Old Ladies seem to be convinced of that. That would be the best place to start. I’ll ask Father Tibor, to go over the parish records again. They may have a mailing address, although I did have him look once before and he didn’t come up with anything. I wonder what the story is there. Cleveland isn’t all that far away.”
“So?” Billie asked.
“Armenian families tend to stick together,” Gregor said. “They visit for holidays. I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t get along, and after Viktor died, they didn’t see each other because they didn’t want to. I wish we had that address book. It would tell us a lot of things.”
On the other side of the room, Dr. Halevy had stopped speaking Arabic and was onto English. She sounded beyond livid now, and possibly ready to do violence.
“The patient is old,” she said. “We have all kinds of fancy terminology for it, but that’s what it amounts to. The patient is old. We could have killed her. Didn’t it occur to anybody, anywhere, that—never mind. Never mind. I want somebody in here twenty-four seven. I want her every breath monitored. And I want you to come and get me if she so much as sneezes.”