Dr. Halevy broke away from the group of nurses, and came over to Gregor and Billie and the police. She was red in the face and short of breath.
“Yes,” she said, “yes. Screwups happen in hospitals. They happen all the time. It’s a scandal. But this is really egregious. One of those women over there said she thought the low blood pressure readings she was getting were normal, because Mrs. Mgrdchian is in a coma, and that’s the kind of thing comas produce. Of course, very low blood pressure can give you a coma. She doesn’t seem to have thought of that.”
The two homicide detectives came forward and introduced themselves as Allejandro and Kennedy. Dr. Halevy said hello to everybody but didn’t really take them in.
“What we need to know,” Gregor said, “is whether or not this could have killed Sophie Mgrdchian if it had been done on purpose. If somebody had given her medication to lower her blood pressure when she didn’t need it, could that have resulted in death?”
Dr. Halevy sighed. “You can kill anybody with any kind of medication,” she said. “It’s just that some things would take larger doses than others. In this case, it would have been mostly a matter of time. If this had gone on for another, I don’t know, week or so, with the patient this elderly and somewhat frail—yes, it would have resulted in death. And as a murder method, it wouldn’t be bad. It would be hard to pin down.”
“How do you mean, pin down?” Billie asked.
“Well, you’ve probably all talked about it already,” Dr. Halevy said, “but you know how people are with the elderly. The same way they are with children. If I was the doctor on the case, and I had an elderly patient who died from taking the wrong medication—well, I’d just assume there’d been a mistake, or an accident. That the patient had become confused or forgetful. Two old women in a house, both of them have pill organizers, one of them picks up the wrong one.” Dr. Halevy shrugged.
“Exactly,” Billie said.
“Except,” Gregor said, “that this is an experienced con woman. I’ll guarantee it. She made friends with the real Karen Mgrdchian, got all she could out of her, found out about Sophie and the chance that Sophie had something worth stealing—”
“Does she?” Billie asked.
“Well, she’s got a house in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Philadelphia,” Gregor said. “And my guess is that you’ll find it without a mortgage. She almost certainly had money, and social security income if nothing else. She wasn’t starving. The house was in good enough repair. She must have been paying somebody for that, or for some of that. If Sophie hadn’t lived in the same neighborhood she’d been in all her life, and if there hadn’t still been people there who had known her for years, this woman would have been able to move into the house and take over. That’s what she almost certainly did with the real Karen Mgrdchian. Moved in, took over the house, then either ran through the money or started to feel she’d be better off getting out of town. So, having heard about Sophie and her house from the real Karen Mgrdchian, she came out here.”
“Just like that?” Dr. Halevy asked.
“I think we’ll start looking for where this Karen Mgrdchian lived,” Billie said. “We’ve got twenty-four hours, as far as I can tell, and then it’s over. And I hate to tell you this, but as things stand, I’m not sure we can stop her from going back into that house. There aren’t any relatives, you see, to say she isn’t welcome there, and what she says is that she was invited in to live there permanently. Or, you know, that’s what her lawyer said she said.”
“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “Whoever this woman really is, she isn’t interested in going back to Sophie Mgrdchian’s house.”
2
By the time Gregor left the hospital, it was pitch dark. There were still a lot of people on the street, but most of them looked hurried. He walked a few blocks and tried to stay oriented. This was not a part of the city he knew well. The trouble, he thought, was that the two cases had so many odd similarities—women who claimed to be other people than they really were, for instance, and who simply stayed quiet and shut up and wouldn’t say anything except to their lawyers. But that was a little thing. There was also the problem that both cases looked terribly complicated when they were really terribly simple—
No, Gregor thought. That was not quite right. The case of Sophie Mgrdchian actually looked simple when it was really very complicated. It wasn’t complex. There was nothing complex about a con game. Of course, newspapers and magazines and television shows liked to call con games “elaborate,” because that made them sound more plausible. Nobody likes to think he’d fall for the simplest and most obvious little lie. Everyone likes to think he’d see through the nonsense right away.