“Sorry,” Jennifer said. “I got sidetracked. Yes. I found out on the Internet that they both belong to the same sizable holding company. There are big profits to be made in Indian healthcare, especially with the government providing strong incentives, like various kinds of tax breaks. Big business is becoming more and more involved as a consequence of the high profits yet high start-up costs.”

“Jennifer,” Jack said, “when you started to tell us about the timeline discrepancy, you said that it was the main source of your suspicion the deaths weren’t natural. That suggests there were other sources. What were they?”

“Well, first it was that they were pushing me too hard to make a decision about cremation or embalming right from the word go. Since I’m aware that autopsies either can’t be done or are significantly less useful after either procedure, their dogged persistence eventually raised a red flag. Next was the pat and all-too-convenient diagnosis of heart attack after I’d just had Granny evaluated by the UCLA Medical Center, and she’d been given a blue-ribbon report, especially in relation to her heart.”

“They didn’t do any angiography or anything like that, did they?” Jack asked.

“No angiography, but they gave her a stress test.”

“Anything else that has made you suspicious?” Jack asked.

“The cyanosis that was reported on both Granny and Benfatti when they were found.”

“This is interesting,” Laurie said, nodding her head.

“Not the third patient?” Jack asked.

“Him, too,” Jennifer said. “I asked Rita Lucas, the wife, to ask. There was cyanosis, but it was only when they first found him, and he was still alive but in extremis. When they started resuscitation, the cyanosis cleared rapidly, giving them a false impression that the resuscitation was going to be more effective than it was.”

“How long did the resuscitation go on?”

“I don’t know exactly, but my impression was not that long. The patient started getting rigor mortis while they were still trying to revive him.”

“Rigor mortis?” Laurie questioned. She looked at Jack. Both were surprised. Normally rigor mortis didn’t set in for hours.

“The wife said that the surgeon told her that so she wouldn’t think they’d stopped too soon. She said he attributed it to the hyperthermia.”

“What hyperthermia?” Jack asked.

“It was a very difficult resuscitation attempt. The patient’s temperature shot up sky-high, and so did his potassium. They tried to treat both without much result.”

“Good grief,” Jack said. “What a nightmare.”

“So it turns out that all three had generalized cyanosis, which didn’t make a lot a sense to me with the diagnosis of a generic heart attack.”

“That doesn’t make any sense to me, either,” Neil said, speaking up for the first time. “That’s got to be a respiratory problem more than a cardiac problem.”

“Or a right-to-left shunt,” Laurie said.