“Taco Bell and then back to the station.” ***
Earl Wallace pulled out the original file for Marilyn Ford and put it on his desk. Detective Nguyen watched the wheels of his mentor’s mind chug through the evidence.
“Humor me for a minute?” Detective Wallace asked without taking his eyes off the file.
“Shoot.”
“Ask me questions about the dead lady and see where it takes us.”
“With pleasure. What’s her name?”
“Marilyn Ford.”
“Age?”
“Forty-six.”
“Marital Status?”
“Single. Never married.”
“Address?”
Earl Wallace looked down and read the answer.
“Phone number?”
Once again he read the number off the information sheet.
“Occupation?”
“Secretary.”
“Place of employment?”
Detective Wallace looked down again at the sheet of paper. “Winthrop Enterprises.”
The two detectives locked eyes.
“What was the name of the American businessman in the news clip?
Detective Nguyen checked his notes. “Peter Winthrop.”
Momentary silence fell on the two as the evidence clicked. “Winthrop Enterprises,” they said in unison.
“I’ll be damned,” Wallace added. He looked at the clock on the wall. “You better get home and get a few hours of sleep. Tomorrow we start knocking on doors. Early.”
Chapter 29
The doctor used both hands to roll Wei Ling’s small frame and lost the first knuckle of his middle finger in the rotting flesh of a festering bedsore. Wei Ling’s scream could be heard on the sweatshop floor over the machinery and the cursing foreman. Upstairs, the blood-curdling wail pierced Lee Chang and he knocked a small plate of orange slices off his lap onto his morning paper. The prolonged agony ringing in the air propelled Lee Chang downstairs to the infirmary. He needed to check on his most-prized possession.
“How is she?” Lee Chang asked, out of breath, meeting the doctor in the main room of the infirmary.
“We need to move her,” the doctor said plainly, digging through his black bag of medicinal goodies on the desk.
“Why. Is she ill?”
“No. But she has been restricted for a long time.”
“You said she could be fed through the nose tube,” Lee Chang said hastily.
“She can. But you aren’t trying to keep her alive. It’s the child your father wants.”
“I told you to give her enough food through the tubes to feed both. It can’t be that difficult.”
“Her appetite is not my concern. Even if we stop feeding her through the tube, her hunger strike is not likely to kill the baby…without killing her. But there are other concerns. The feeding tube is causing breathing difficulties and irritation. The body’s natural reaction to having a tube where one isn’t needed. Wei Ling also has bed sores. Serious ones.”
“Bedsores?” Lee Chang asked.
“Bedsores. Rotting flesh. They can form in less than a week of immobility, and Wei Ling has been tied up longer than that.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“Not as dangerous as pneumonia which can take root in half that time, with the right conditions, in the right environment,” the doctor said, thinking aloud. “But, yes, bedsores can be dangerous.”
“I’ve never heard of them.”
“They usually afflict patients in comas and victims of paralysis, but even a broken leg on an elderly person can prove immobilizing enough to develop them.”
“What’s the treatment?”
“With all the modern medicine and medical techniques available, flipping the immobilized patient twice an hour, twenty-four hours a day, is still the best prevention. Wei Ling has been on her backside for ten days, give or take. I added antibiotics to the IV drip, but there is no guarantee the infected sores won’t get worse. If this happens and she starts to run a fever, we could have trouble. Pregnancy is a fragile thing. Even when there are no signs of complications, it can be precarious for both mother and child. But we are talking about a woman who can’t move about freely, who is refusing to eat, and who is being fed through a tube. This puts stress on both the mother and the fetus. While self-forced starvation alone is not likely to cause a miscarriage, her body could reject the fetus in an act of self-preservation under a combination of circumstances. The body works in mysterious ways.”
“Doctor, you were hired by my family to keep her alive.”
“Yes, and I can keep her alive, but not here. Not under these conditions. Not in a storage closet. I need to move her back to Beijing. Put her in a hospital where we can keep her well and provide around-the-clock care. Your father can arrange it.”
“I will call and discuss it with my father.”
“Please. Time is of the essence.”
Lee Chang walked across the infirmary and peaked in the storage room. Wei Ling looked over at the partially open door. “Let me out of here, you bastard,” she said in a surprisingly strong voice. ***
Lee Chang wasn’t sending Wei Ling to Beijing or anywhere else for that matter. She was his guarantee back to a real life. If he sent her back to China, he would be sending back his leverage, and with it, all hope that his father would find it in his heart to bring him back into a position of power within the family. He needed Wei Ling. He needed the senator’s baby. The doctor wasn’t going to take her away.
Lee Chang spent the morning trying to find a medical bed on the island that allowed the patient to be rotated like a pig on a spit. The hospital in Garapan had two such beds. Both were occupied and they weren’t for sale. The nearest medical supply company, in Guam, could have one delivered in a week. Lee Chang thanked the medical supplier with surliness, ordered the three thousand dollar bed, and looked for other options in the meantime. He stared out the back of his apartment at the warehouses and piles of discarded fabric spools. Maybe I could make a bed, he thought. As Lee Chang considered an infirmary improvement project, the doctor downstairs drained the pus from Wei Ling’s bedsores. ***
Lee Chang called his father and ran through the week’s impressive numbers. Output had never been higher. It was amazing what a workforce under lockdown and pulsating with fear could do. Lee polished over the deterioration of Wei Ling’s condition and ignored the medical opinion of the old doctor his father had sent to keep her alive. According to Lee Chang, all was well.
C.F. Chang finished the conversation as he had every call since finding out about the pregnancy—“keep that girl healthy”—and then hung up.
Lee Chang put down the receiver and bounded down the stairs.
The doctor was sliding into his white rental van when Lee Chang approached.
“I spoke with my father.”
“What did he say?”
“He agreed with me. For now, moving the girl to Beijing is too risky. Besides, it will take time to arrange for her to stay at a hospital without raising suspicion.”
“I understand,” the doctor said, fully aware of the lie. C.F. Chang, the family laoban, could arrange for the girl to stay at a hospital with a wave of his hand. The doctor knew to be careful around Lee Chang. Slyness and mental instability were a dangerous combination.
The doctor stuck to his schedule until his evening visit to Chang Industries. When Wei Ling’s blood pressure started to rise unexpectedly, the doctor knew it was time to act. From the phone in the infirmary, the doctor called C.F. Chang directly, speaking in a whisper.
“We need to move the girl back to Beijing.”
“Why? What’s the problem?”
“I thought your son explained it to you,” the doctor asked, expectant of the answer that was forthcoming.