A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [80]
“Hello, Ms. Donna Prince,” she said finally, in perfect English. “My name is Wu Mei. Please call me Mei. I am the floor manager and duty nurse in charge. My aunt told me you are looking for someone.”
“Yes. I’m looking for a woman. Her family name might be Chen. I have reason to believe she’s a resident here.”
“We have several Chens living here,” Mei said with a brief laugh. “It is a very common Chinese name. Perhaps if you could be more specific.”
Again, that photograph.
“Her daughter’s name is Sylvia if that helps.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Is there some sort of problem?”
“We have reason to believe Mrs. Chen’s daughter may have come in contact with a very contagious virus, and then visited her mother here,” Angie said, retelling the story she had conjured up during the flight from Denver. “We are searching for both the mother and the daughter. I’ll need access to all the rooms in this facility.”
“Goodness!” Mei replied, setting her hand to her lips in a show of genuine alarm. “Nothing like what’s happening in Washington, I hope.”
“Possibly. We need to find these women to do some blood work.”
“I’ll be happy to help you look,” Mei said. “This floor is for our low-acuity residents. Higher-acuity patients are on the upper floors.”
“I appreciate your cooperation. It will be noted in my report.”
“Right this way.”
Mei led Angie back to the stairs.
“Pardon me, Wu Mei, but I went to take your elevator up here and could not find one on the first floor. I wondered how you transport your residents from floor to floor and down to the street.”
Mei did not reply immediately, and in fact, kept walking to the stairs. The silence was awkward. Suddenly, the nurse stopped and turned.
“Could I see your credentials again, please?” she asked.
Angie felt herself go cold. Her backup plan, which probably could have been her first choice all along, was simply to tell the truth. But with the FBI failing to find Sylvia Chen, and Genesis eerily prescient, some sort of deception seemed called for.
Now, it appeared, she had been caught.
She handed over her ID.
The young nurse, looking genuinely distressed, scanned it briefly and handed it back.
“We have one,” she said gloomily. “At the back of the building. But we don’t use it very much, and I believe my aunt and uncle, who own this place, have had a long-standing arrangement of some kind with the building or the nursing home inspectors. Please, please don’t say anything about it in your report. The elevator is very old, but I have heard my uncle say that the cost to replace it and the structural support around it would force them to close down. And there is really nothing like this place for our Chinese elders.”
“I understand,” Angie said. “You have nothing to worry about from me.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. I was going to walk you up to the sixth floor. Why don’t we ride instead?”
Angie kept the visage of Sylvia’s mother clear in her mind as she followed Mei down the hallway and to the right. The elevator—truly ancient—was precisely where she had guessed it would be. Mei lifted the wide, double doors and Angie stepped inside the darkened car, turning around and then instinctively backing a step toward the rear wall.
“Stop! Don’t move any more!” Mei cried out in alarm.
She pointed behind Angie at a gap of about two feet between the steel elevator floor and the wooden back wall. Immediately, Angie took a precautionary step forward. Mei closed the doors, then used a key to engage the motor. The car clattered to life and traveled slowly upward, with Angie wondering how close this lift might be to the original one built by Otis in the mid-nineteenth century.
“How long has Riverside been in business?” she asked.
“Since the nineteen forties. My great-grandparents opened the place because too many Chinese were forced to send elderly parents to facilities that did not respect our traditions.”
The elevator came to a hard stop and Angie momentarily lost her balance. Mei turned the key once more to lock the system, then lifted open