Chapter 144: She Wants to See You

An early call brings Evan back to the hospital, where the police have an unexpected request.

Once Evan had given his instructions, he left. The rest was up to them.

The patient was stable now, truly out of immediate danger. But even Evan could not cure an illness like hers. She had survived the crisis, yet she probably did not have much time left.

Chinese medicine, too, was often powerless against an incurable illness. In such cases, its approach was to support healthy qi and expel pathogenic factors as far as possible, trying to prolong the patient's life.^[1]

The other aim was to let patients live as normally as possible in the time they had left. Carry on with life. Do the things they had not yet done. Leave as few regrets as they could.

Evan went straight home.

He had spent two whole days at the Chinese medicine hospital. He was embarrassed to have missed two days of work at Mingxin Clinic.

That night, after dinner, he settled down to read.

Early the next morning, he got up and was getting ready for work when his phone rang again. It was Leo Cao.

“Dr. Cao? What's wrong?”

“Well, it's… the patient. The suspect. The police have run into a little trouble questioning her. We may need your help.”

“All right. I'll be right there.”

Evan hung up, puzzled. Trouble with the questioning? What did that mean? Had they pushed her too hard and made her ill again?

He had no time to think it over and hurried off to the hospital. He could only apologize to Clara: he was going to miss work again.

When he arrived, the Cao brothers were waiting downstairs.

Evan parked his electric scooter and came over. “What's happened? Is something wrong with the patient?”

“Her condition hasn't changed. It's just…” Leo looked at his younger brother.

“We started questioning her last night,” Marcus said, “but she hasn't been cooperating. She's only just out of danger and still very weak, so it's difficult to do much of the questioning. But we're running out of time. We can't wait until she's better and then take our time with her.

“This morning, though, she asked to see you. We think it could be a good opening, so we'd like your help, Dr. Xu.”

Evan was taken aback. They actually wanted him to help question a suspect?

“I don't know how to interrogate anyone. I only know how to treat patients.”

“We're not asking you to lead the questioning,” Marcus said. “It's an opening, that's all. Sometimes, when we question a suspect, they're very uncooperative at first. They resist everything.

“But once they start asking us for things—a cigarette, something to drink or eat—we generally give them what they want. It means their defenses are starting to weaken.

“She's only just out of danger, and her condition still isn't stable. There are a lot of interrogation methods we can't use on her. We're hoping you can give us a way in.”

Leo added his encouragement. “That's right. They say a dying man's words are kind. But some bad people, once they know they're dying, start taking their revenge on society instead.^[2]

“The woman in there knows she won't live. It's hard to say whether she'll cooperate. If she refuses to say anything, we'll have a real problem.”

Evan nodded. “All right. But I wouldn't know what to say in there.”

“That's fine,” Marcus said. “I'll give you a wireless earpiece. Go in and talk to her normally. I'll prompt you through it when something important comes up.”

“All right.” Evan could only agree.

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They went up to the ward in the inpatient building where the suspect was being held.

Marcus put the earpiece in Evan's ear, connected the call, and opened the door to let him in.

Evan was still nervous as he entered. He had never done anything like this.

The suspect was propped up in bed. Her hands and feet were shackled, restricting her movements.

Evan looked at her. She looked back at him.

“I've seen you before,” she said. “You're the one who saved me, aren't you?”

She had a strong accent, but Evan could understand her.

He gave a small nod. In his ear, Marcus began prompting him on what to say next.

“How are you feeling today? Any better?” Evan asked.

“Much better. Before, it felt as if someone had tied up my whole body. Now it's finally loosened, and I feel much better. Except around midnight last night, my chest hurt terribly. The pain spread to my back. It felt very tight. It was awful. Then it happened again just after daybreak.”

Evan nodded. “The damp phlegm and stagnant blood lodged in your lungs have begun to move outward after yesterday's treatment. The phlegm's stronghold has been broken, but the stagnant blood is hard to clear. The obstruction is what causes the pain.”^[3]

The suspect shook her head, bewildered. “I'm not educated. I only went to elementary school. I don't know what any of that means.”

“Give me your hand. I'll check your pulse again.”

She held it out.

Her pulse felt much more even now, and her heart rate had returned to 80 beats per minute. The danger from her refractory heart failure and respiratory failure had passed, although the fibrosis in her lungs was still severe.^[4]

“Could you take that thing out of your ear?” the suspect asked suddenly.

Evan froze.

Outside, Marcus froze too.

“I know what it is,” she said. “I just want to talk to you. I don't want to talk to them.”

Evan hesitated.

Marcus's voice came through the earpiece. “Take it out, but don't hang up. Just talk to her as normally as you can. Get her to open up and stop resisting.”

Evan removed the earpiece but left the call connected.

The suspect looked at him. “You're here to tell me to confess too, aren't you? If you didn't still need information from me, you wouldn't have saved me. Right?”

Evan was momentarily taken aback.

She gave a self-mocking smile. “If you'd already caught all of us, I suppose I'd be dead by now. You wouldn't have gone to all that trouble to save someone as bad as me.”

Evan shook his head. “That's not it. I'm just a doctor. To a doctor, there aren't good people and bad people. There are only patients. If a patient is in front of us, we do everything we can to save them.”

She stared at him for a moment. “You don't think I deserve to die?”

Evan saw no reason to hold back. He told her the truth.

“Your guilt, and whether you deserve to die, are for a judge to decide. Even if you're to be shot, the execution officers will do it. I'm just a doctor. My job is to get you to them.”

She stared at him, then suddenly laughed. A strange smile spread across her gaunt face.

Reader Notes

Reader Notes

1. ↩︎ Supporting healthy qi. This traditional treatment principle combines supporting the body's capacity to maintain or recover its functions with addressing pathogenic influences. “Healthy qi” is broader than a particular immune measurement, and “pathogenic factors” need not mean microbes. Here the narrator places that approach within the limits of care for incurable illness: trying to extend life and preserve daily living. It is not a claim that the underlying disease has been cured. Source: WHO — International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Chinese Medicine, entry 2258.
2. ↩︎ A dying person's words. The saying comes from the Analects, 8.4, where the ailing Master Zeng contrasts a dying bird's mournful cry with a dying person's good words. Leo invokes the saying as a familiar hope that approaching death may bring sincerity or goodwill, then immediately questions whether it will apply to this woman. His comment does not establish what she feels or what she will tell them. Source: Robert Eno — The Analects of Confucius, 8.4, p. 36, Indiana University.
3. ↩︎ Phlegm, stagnant blood, and pain. In Chinese medicine, phlegm can mean retained pathological fluids as well as material coughed up. The novel's si xue, literally “dead blood,” is rendered here as stagnant blood within Evan's traditional explanation. His “stronghold” is a metaphor, not a newly identified cavity in the lung. He attributes the remaining pain to obstruction that has not yet cleared. These terms describe his reasoning; they do not establish a biomedical blood clot or explain pulmonary scarring by themselves. Source: WHO — International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Chinese Medicine, entries 342–344, 428, and 1113.
4. ↩︎ An improved pulse and continuing illness. Traditional pulse examination considers the felt qualities of the pulse, alongside other observations; it is not simply a count of beats. The story reports both a calmer pulse and a rate of 80, while separately stating that the immediate crisis has passed. Pulmonary fibrosis means scarring of lung tissue. Relief from the crisis does not mean that scarring has disappeared, and this passage explicitly says it remains severe. Sources: Hong Kong Polytechnic University — Four Diagnostic Methods; NHLBI — What Is Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis?.