Chapter 8 - A Secret Admirer?

Lily Lin led Halia to the emergency reception desk which faced a large waiting room. Now that they were away from all the drama of the emergency ward, it was a lot quieter. She sat down in front of a computer and gestured for Halia to sit next to her.

"I'm Lily Lin, you can call me Lily in private, but around the patients I would prefer to be called Dr. Lin. I'm a final year intern here. I saw you flip that guy over earlier so I came to help you. You need to be careful, there are cameras everywhere, if they want to, they could sue you for what you did."

Halia looked at Dr. Lin nervously, "Do you think they'd do that?"

"Don't worry, I don't think those guys want any involvement with the police."

Halia looked at Dr. Lin questioningly.

"I can sense a bad boy from a mile away. Plus, Jackson Wu's a regular at this hospital. I've seen him 3 times in the last 3 months and that's only in emergency," Dr. Lin explained.

"What does he do?" Halia asked.

"I don't know and I don't want to ask."

At that time, the head nurse approached, "Halia, I've been looking everywhere for you, come with me?"

Halia thought she was in trouble, but when she looked up, the woman's face was indifferent. She was certainly hard to read.

The head nurse ended up leading Halia out to the garden and they sat down at a bench. The sky was already dark by this time, so the bench was lit up by a lamp. "I was told to give you some assistance with your investigation but I was busy earlier, so I couldn't sit down and chat to you properly. Have you found anything so far?"

"I found this roster and discovered these 9 male doctors weren't working yesterday, is this correct?" Halia showed the suspect list she had compiled.

The nurse had a quick look and nodded her head. "But, if this is a suspect list then Dr. Joe Zhu can be removed from this list," she said as she pointed to a name.

"Why?" Halia asked.

"Dr. Zhu is my husband, we were together all day yesterday."

Halia nodded and quickly crossed out his name.

"Dr. Alfred Li can be removed too, he came in for an emergency surgery. He was in the theater all afternoon."

"OK," Halia replied as she looked down at the remaining 7 names.

"I've already met Dr. Isaac Yan, can you quickly point out the remaining 6 doctors to me?"

"Well, only Dr. Yan, Dr. Chow and Dr. Roberts is in today, so I'll introduce you to Dr. Chow and Dr. Roberts. I'll also show you around the ward properly and explain where everything is and the basic procedures you need to follow. I saw you made a phone call earlier, didn't I tell you not to do anything unless I told you? If you made a mistake, do you know how serious that could be? Don't do anything recklessly again. If you have nothing to do, just follow me around and pretend you're assisting me."

Halia nodded and stood up, "I'm sorry, May, I was getting too into character. I almost thought this was my actual job." The head nurse sighed and started walking back into the ward and Halia quickly followed behind. The nurse immediately walked over to an older man, roughly in his late 40's. His hair was gray and he had fairly prominent frown lines, probably due to the stress of being a doctor.

"Dr. Chow, I'd like you to meet Halia, she's a new nurse here."

The man turned and looked at Halia with a warm smile. "Welcome, I am a senior cardiothoracic surgeon. If you have any patients with complications in that area, let me know. Otherwise, ask May, she's probably better than a lot of the doctors here," the old man laughed.

Halia nodded before she followed the head nurse to another male doctor. This time, the doctor was a foreigner. "I should have figured that out from the name," Halia thought to herself.

"Dr. Roberts, this is Halia, she's a new nurse here."

"Oh, Halia, beautiful name. You can call me Greg," the doctor greeted with a smile that showed off his perfect set of teeth.

Greg looked like a charming gentleman from northern Europe. He was tall and slim with blonde hair and sparkly blue eyes. Judging by his appearance, he seemed quite well off.

Halia looked into his eyes, they were so blue that it looked like the ocean. In fact, the longer she stared at them, the deeper they looked...

At that moment, something really strange began to happen. She saw a fish swim across Dr. Roberts eyes! It was a shark! "A shark?" she thought as she rubbed her own eyes. Next to the shark other little fish began to appear and bits of seaweed and coral slowly materialized.

Next thing she knew, she was at an aquarium! It was the famous one that she often saw on travel shows. She had always wanted to go there!

She looked down at her hands and realized she was holding a bunch of roses. They were beautiful and fragrant but she felt overcome with guilt. Why did she feel guilty?

Next thing she knew, she shoved the roses into a pair of hands in front of her. The hands trembled and dropped the roses on the floor. The petals fell everywhere. She lifted her head to look at the person in front of her, but...