Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mei Lin chose a pair of leggings and a sweater from the bag of clothes Ethan had bought for her, along with a thick pair of socks. She would never take thick socks and warm feet for granted again.
She was returning to the living room when Ethan’s phone rang.
Ethan scooped it off the coffee table and looked at the screen. “It’s Michael.” He explained that to her before he answered and pressed the speaker icon.
“Sorry about my brothers.” Unlike Ethan, who spoke with a lilting Southern accent she loved, his cousin’s accent was rougher, his tone more abrupt.
“Derrick and Jasmine were here when I was texting you. We married sisters, so I have to see him a lot.” He sounded part-frustrated and part-pleased by that last bit.
“The idiot grabbed my phone before it locked. They think they’re being supportive. ”
Mei Lin had no idea what Michael was talking about. She glanced at Ethan, who wore a slight smile.
“It’s fine. It’s nice to be…supported.” He waved a hand at her, mouthing later. “I have Mei Lin here. She’ll tell you what’s going on.”
“I’m listening.”
She related the short version of what had happened in Fuyin before her arrest. Lu Feng, the missing women, the evidence she’d gathered and hidden. Michael listened without interrupting, which she appreciated.
When she finished, there was a brief pause filled with the sound of keys on a keyboard in the background.
“Ethan had given me the guy’s name,” Michael said, “and I did some digging. Dr. Lu Feng grew up in Beijing and attended school at…”
“Peking University.” Ethan looked surprised that she had that information, so she added, “It was a big deal that someone of his caliber would practice at a small hospital.”
“Okay.” Michael seemed to be chewing on that. “It looks like he went to school on scholarship, so maybe working in the village was part of the deal. For whatever reason, the man has an excellent reputation, both as a doctor and as a humanitarian.”
Ethan smirked. “That’s rich.”
“Oh, it gets better.” Michael’s angry words dripped with a rich sauce of sarcasm. “He’s on an international committee dedicated to the eradication of human trafficking.”
“No kidding?” Ethan shook his head. “That’s crazy.”
Yes, but it answered at least part of Mei Lin’s questions about Lu Feng. “It explains why he is more connected now than he was six years ago. At least, if he was so connected then, I wasn’t aware of it.”
“No, you’re right, Mei Lin,” Michael said.
“It looks like a few years ago, he exposed a human trafficking ring he’d gotten wind of in Shaanxi Province.
He reported it, and because of his work, the whole operation was shut down.
It’s how he gained national recognition—and was appointed to the committee.
If nothing else, that afforded him the opportunity to travel. ”
“And cut out some of the competition,” Ethan said.
“That too. We’re still digging into his finances, but we haven’t found anything suspicious yet. Mei Lin, tell me about the hospital. What are we looking at?”
“It’s three stories tall, about two hundred beds.
Because it’s the largest hospital in the region, it has most of the departments you’d expect—ER, surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics, an ICU.
” She settled on the sofa and looked out the windows at the mountains in the distance.
“The pathology department is in the basement. There’s a storage area within it where they keep the samples.
It’s small, maybe twenty square meters, with floor-to-ceiling shelving units lining every wall.
I hid the evidence in an amber jar filled with water to look like formalin.
I labeled it with a random patient’s name from that year and set it on the shelf behind other glass jars. It will still be there.”
“Maybe,” Michael said. “But it could’ve been moved or destroyed during a renovation.”
“It wouldn’t be destroyed.” She kept her voice patient.
“The law requires retention of all biological samples for a minimum of thirty years, and anything mislabeled or misidentified is quarantined rather than disposed of. My jar is logged properly. I made certain of that before I hid it.” She’d been thorough, for all the good it had done her.
Michael uttered a hmm sound. “Impressive. You think you could find it again?”
“Yes, of course.” She glanced at Ethan, who was glaring at the phone. “It shouldn’t be a problem.”
“You’ll have to tell me where it is,” her husband said.
Michael ignored that. “What about security? Cameras, access controls, staff rotations—what are we working with?”
Mei Lin stood and paced to the windows. “When I worked there, security was thorough for a rural hospital—badge access on department doors, a guard at the main entrance and the emergency bay, cameras in the corridors and at every exterior door. But that was six years ago, before the pandemic. Everything will be different now.” She thought of the surveillance cameras she’d spotted in Changsha, the face-scanning systems on the train platforms. “Probably, almost everything we do inside that building will be recorded. The question is whether someone is watching the feeds in real time and whether Lu Feng has the reach to have people looking for my face specifically.”
“He does.” Ethan had settled on the arm of the chair, and he seemed to be getting angrier by the second.
“In the government, yes,” Mei Lin said. “But in the hospital? I don’t know how many people he would trust.”
“He wouldn’t tell them the truth.” Ethan pushed himself to standing and crossed his arms. “He’d make up a story. Tell them you’re suspected of stealing so they’ll look for you.”
“Perhaps. But if that was the case, wouldn’t they alert the police? Not Lu Feng?”
“Would that be better?” Ethan snapped. “You want to go back to prison?”
“I’m only saying—”
“Let’s try to focus,” Michael said. “You’ll need to get in and out fast.”
Ethan snatched the phone off the coffee table. “She’s staying where she’s safe. I’ll need to get in—”
“I’m working on a plan.” Michael’s voice was calm despite Ethan’s anger.
“She’s staying here.” Ethan said the words as if he had the authority to decide. “Help me figure out a way in, Michael. Or we find someone local who knows the layout.”
“It won’t work.” Mei Lin kept her voice even. She wasn’t a child he could order around. “I know where the jar is, I know the building, I know the corridors that are most likely to be empty at which hours of the day. Who else can say the same?”
“You’ll tell me what you know.” Ethan straightened to his full height. “I’ll take care of it.”
She was struck, as she’d been so many times since Changsha, at how extremely tall he was—almost two meters. He was handsome and broad in the shoulders and spoke with authority and self-assurance.
“You?” She nearly laughed. “You will walk into a rural Chinese hospital and retrieve evidence from a basement archive without attracting attention?”
“Michael can tell me how—”
“You are a full head taller than every other person in that building. And you’re Caucasian, in case you forgot.
You’ll stand out like a crane among chickens.
” She crossed her arms. “How do you plan to move around when you are the most noticeable human being in the entire hospital? The staff will remember you. The cameras will certainly capture you. And when Lu Feng sees the footage—”
“Fine. I get it.” His eyes flashed an instant before he turned his focus to the phone. “Michael, we’ll have to hire someone.”
“Yeah, about that.” The words came carefully.
“That’d be tricky. It’s not like I have contacts there, and I haven’t been able to find anyone who does.
Even if I could hire someone, he wouldn’t know the layout and wouldn’t know exactly what he’s looking for.
We’d hate to send someone in and have them either not get to the storage room at all or grab the wrong thing.
We’d just put the hospital on alert. Even worse, he could broadcast the location of the evidence to Lu Feng.
” Michael sighed, the sound weary. “I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’ll take days.
That’s a lot of time for you two to stay off the radar.
I hate to say this, but Mei Lin’s right.
She’s our best shot at getting the evidence. ”
“No.” Ethan lowered his voice, which was worse than when he raised it. “Would you let your wife do this? Walk into a building where the people who want her dead could have informants, where she could be recognized in a second?”
“Ha.” Michael’s laugh was as warm as it was surprising. “If you think my wife waits for my permission to do anything—”
“These people want to kill her.” The words came out very measured, very controlled, but Mei Lin knew the fear that hummed beneath. “My wife is not going to put herself in any more danger.”
My wife. She didn’t hate the way the words sounded, though she wasn’t crazy about his dictatorial attitude.
“My husband,” she said. “This is my fight, and you are not my master.”
His gaze swung from the phone to her. “I didn’t mean…” He took a breath, ran a hand over his hair. “I’m trying to keep you safe, sweetheart.”
“I know. But if we don’t get that evidence, then I will never be safe.
Also…these women are worth the risk. You don’t know them, you don’t know their faces or their stories, but I do.
Lu Feng took them from their children and their husbands and their parents, and they have been waiting for someone to do something about it.
I am the only person who can prove what he did.
I spent six years in prison for knowing what he is, and I am not going to hand that evidence to a stranger, and I am not going to watch from a hotel room while you”—she waved toward her too-tall, too-white husband—“try to make your way to a basement where you’ve never been and wander around a room you’ve never seen looking for a jar you can barely picture, while eyes and cameras track your every move. No.”
The muscle in Ethan’s jaw moved, and his face grew a dangerous shade of red. She looked at the phone, not wanting to see the fury in her husband’s expression.
“Michael,” she said, “I look different than I did when I worked there. I’m older, obviously, and thinner, and my hair is short. Any staff members who knew me before might be fooled, even if the cameras aren’t. There must be a way.”
“I think so, and you made a great point about Ethan. We can use him to attract attention, get people looking the wrong direction.” Michael paused, maybe waiting for Ethan to argue.
Her husband was standing at the windows, arms crossed, looking into the distance. She studied his profile, the strong set of his jaw. He didn’t turn around.
“I’ll work on a disguise for you, Mei Lin, and a plan. In the meantime, the two of you need to be on the same page. When you do this, you need to be working together as a team. Got it?”
Ethan said nothing, but his head dipped the slightest bit, which she decided was as close to agreement as she was going to get.
“We will turn to the same page.” Apparently, she hadn’t gotten the idiom quite right because Ethan’s lips twitched at the corner.
“Good,” Michael said. “Meanwhile, I want you moving. I’ve found a place outside Enshi City…”
Enshi.
The name rippled through her like butterflies. Her parents’ village was east of there, a few hours deeper into the mountains. Her home, her people, would be so close.
She wouldn’t reach out to them, not until she was safe. Better to let them go on believing she was dead than get their hopes up.
But the butterflies weren’t about her parents.
It was Enshi, where she and Ethan had spent the first night of their marriage.
Ethan had planned every detail of that trip, including the luxury hotel that had overlooked the river.
He’d ordered so many flowers that the scent of them had permeated every corner of the suite.
They’d eaten dinner in front of the window, they’d talked late into the night about his residency plans, her mother’s garden, a book she’d read, a dream he’d had.
They’d talked and laughed, and when they’d moved to the bed, it had been the most natural thing in the world.
She’d never felt more at home as she had that night. She’d thought nothing could wedge between them.
“…hole up until it’s time to go.”
She had no idea what Michael had said.
Ethan had turned and was watching her, and she felt the intensity of his gaze to her core.
“Did I lose you guys? Are you there?”
“Yeah.” Ethan seemed to force himself to turn to the phone. “We’ll be ready when the car gets here.”
“Great. I’ll be in touch.” The call ended.
Ethan picked up the phone and turned it over in his hands. He seemed to want to say something, but he didn’t. He was still angry with her, and frankly, she wasn’t all that thrilled with him.
“We should pack.”
“Yup.” He pocketed the phone and disappeared down the hall.
He wanted to keep her safe. Of course he did.
But maybe the reminder of their honeymoon had thrown him. Maybe he wanted to keep his distance from her.
Was there something between them? Or perhaps…someone?
He’d held her hands and told her he was proud of her.
He had been kind and gentle with her. But he hadn’t kissed her, not unless she counted the light kisses he pressed to her forehead, the kind of kisses one might give a child.
He hadn’t even kissed her when she’d worn nothing but his T-shirt and she’d seen that look on his face.
Maybe she’d misunderstood.
He had believed she was dead for six years. Whatever those years had held for him, he hadn’t offered a word of it.
Had he moved on?
The thought seeped in as though through a crack, the way the ugliest thoughts always did.
He would have told her, wouldn’t he, if he’d met someone else?
Except she’d been pathetic when they’d found each other. Hungry and tired, and he’d probably thought she was at death’s door.
Would he have told her?
She would need to ask him. Soon. When she was strong enough to accept his answer.