The Hua Shan Hospital Murders by David Rotenberg Page B

to smile, then said, “I do.”
    “About the bombing?”
    “Not directly. I need to understand more about abortion ORs.”
    “Fine,” the nurse said curtly, “the clinic is filling up, so please be quick.”
    Lily didn’t like the woman’s tone but that made things equal. Clearly, the woman didn’t like Lily’s very presence in her office.
    The woman quickly went over the basic scheduling of an abortion surgery – the time involved on the table, prep times, clean-up regimes, etc. When she finished, she looked at Lily, “Anything else?”
    “In the bombing, a human fetus was found . . .”
    “. . . in a cage. Yes, I heard.”
    “It had to have come from somewhere.”
    “Clearly.”
    “Could it have come from your surgery?”
    That seemed to put the nurse back on her stubby heels. When she found her voice it was not nearly so assured as before, “How would I know?”
    Lily’s head quickly filled with a terrible image. She forced it aside and asked, “Is an inventory kept?”
    “Of what?”
    “Of . . . the product.”
    The head nurse looked as if she’d been asked if she’d visited Mars lately. Finally, she said, “No. No inventory is kept.”
    “So what do you do with . . .?” Lily couldn’t find the word she wanted – or was willing to use.
    The nurse nodded and said simply, “The detritus? What do we do with the detritus?”
    “Yes,” Lily answered, aware that the nurse had helped her. “Thank you,” Lily said.
    The nurse nodded and then said, “Nothing very sophisticated, officer. If the ‘product’ is big enough – if it can’t be flushed – we double-bag it and it goes out with the hospital’s trash. It’s the same at all the hospitals, I expect.”
    Lily thought about the constant comings and goings of trash collectors. She had no idea where garbage eventually went – incinerated she guessed. But she suspected that whoever took this detritus didn’t wait til the final drop point. She knew it wouldn’t be difficult to don a garbage collector’s overalls and pick up the refuse from one of the many abortion clinics around town as long as you were Chinese, but things here pointed toward an American.
    “Has your clinic received any threats?”
    “No.”
    “Have there been any Caucasians around the clinic?”
    “Not that I’ve ever seen.”
    “This is my card . . .”
    “I know where to find you if I need you, Lily.” The woman turned and headed out to the crowded, angry waiting room.
    Lily watched the woman go and wondered how she managed to deal with so much sorrow on a daily basis.
    Fong looked around the conference room. They already appeared as tired as he felt. A folder was open in front of Wu Fan-zi; the new head of CSU was to his left. Six detectives were seated around the room completing their interview notes. Lily sat to one side, sipping from a steaming jar of cha. Her exhaustion carved deep patterns on her face making her look severe, stern. Fong knew she’d rushed home yesterday to settle Xiao Ming in for a night with her mother and then returned to the lab to get ready for the meeting. He didn’t know about her early morning meeting with the head nurse of the Hua Shan Hospital’s abortion clinic.
    All eyes slowly turned to Fong, and what little chatter there had been in the room died.
    The silence that followed was rife with possibilities. Everyone at the large oval table knew that this was Fong’s first big case since his return from west of the Wall and his still shadowy success at Lake Ching. In the corridors of Special Investigations these events were collectively referred to as The Resurrection. Everyone also knew that there were many in the department anxious to see Fong fall on his delicately boned face.
    The meeting room smelled of pungent cigarette smoke. Fong instinctively reached for his pack of Kents. But they weren’t there. He hadn’t smoked since he’d killed the assassin Loa Wei Fen in the construction pit in the Pudong. Fong cleared his