Page 50 of Shadowing You

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.”