“I know,” LeeAnn said. “I know. I know all the arguments. I just get fed up.” The elevator stopped and the doors opened. “Here we are. It’s just as bad as downstairs, isn’t it? Can you imagine being depressed and being committed to a place like this?”
Gregor did not think the fourth floor was as bad as the lobby, because it was full of people, and the people made it feel less dead. There were plenty of nurses up here, and plenty of patients, and not all the patients looked comatose.
“They’ve got them on so many meds, they’re like zombies,” LeeAnn said. “Give me a minute here.”
She went up to the nurse’s station and talked with one of the women there. Then she came back, nodding. “They’ll bring Lily down in a second. She’s got a room at the far end of the hall. We can go in here in the back.”
LeeAnn led Gregor into a small side room. It was painted pale pea soup green, too, and the floors were still linoleum, but there was a table with three chairs and the chairs had padded seats. Gregor wondered when she had time to acquaint herself with all this. She couldn’t have been Lily’s attorney for more than a day.
“Under the usual circumstances, I wouldn’t let you talk to her,” LeeAnn said. “You do work with the police, and the police are not our favorite people. But there doesn’t seem to be a crime here. At least not yet. And it isn’t as if she could say anything that’s likely to be admissible in court.”
“When I saw her, she seemed to be pretty disoriented.”
“She’s that, yes,” LeeAnn said.
“Maybe she has some kind of medication that she needs to have adjusted.”
LeeAnn looked into her briefcase again and came up with a small sheaf of papers. She looked through them for a while and shook her head.
“She had one of those plastic pill organizers on her when she was first brought in to the police station,” LeeAnn said. “There wasn’t much of anything in it except a diuretic and some vitamins. There wasn’t even any blood pressure medication. They did a workup when she first came here and her blood pressure was a little elevated, so they’re giving her something for it. But there weren’t any psychotropic drugs, or anything that would be likely to cause this kind of mental disorganization.”
“A plastic pill organizer means that somebody must have prescribed pills for her,” Gregor said.
“Of course,” LeeAnn said. “But there was just the organizer, as far as I can tell. The police didn’t find the actual prescription bottles. Which is too bad, really, because if they had, we’d have some clue to who she was and where she came from. I’d give a lot to be able to talk to her regular doctor right now.”
“You don’t find it odd,” Gregor asked, “that she’s got a pill organizer full of pills, and she’s very clean, both in her body and her clothes, and that even so all her fingertips are so damaged that the police couldn’t get a clear fingerprint reading from them?”
“Odd?” LeeAnn said. “Why? A lot of people have that sort of damage to their fingertips. I mean, you might not deal with them, but I do, all the time, they mess them up—freeze them to pipes, burn them accidentally on matches, and—”
“And those people are not only mentally ill, but homeless,” Gregor pointed out. “But we’ve just pretty much demonstrated that whoever Lily is, she couldn’t have been a homeless woman.”
“Ah,” LeeAnn said. She considered it. “Maybe this other woman, the one in the coma, maybe she was being a Good Samaritan and—”
“Taking in a stranger? That’s so unlikely as to be impossible. But even if it wasn’t likely given Sophie Mgrdchian’s character, the fact is that in order to get a pill organizer full of pills, Sophie would have had to take Lily to a doctor. And that would have taken time, time for an appointment, time for the prescriptions to be filled.”
“Maybe they went to the emergency room.”
“Did the police find evidence of Lily having been to an emergency room?”
“No,” LeeAnn said. “And they did check, at least preliminarily. It’s in my notes.”
There was a sound at the door. Gregor and LeeAnn both looked up. A woman in a nursing uniform was leading Lily in, leading her by the hand as carefully as if she were a kitten with a broken leg.
“Come over here and sit down, dear,” the woman was saying, patting Lily’s hand over and over again as she said it. “Just come over here and sit down. These people want to have a little talk with you.”