Karen thought a minute, then pressed a speed-dial number on her phone. “It’s Pastor Karen. I’ve been with one of our critically ill patients and have some soiled linens. Where can I find the nearest bin? … I stupidly carried them down to my office … No, I’ll come back up. I want to get them out of here, and I’m going to have to scrub after handling them, anyway … Number eleven, right.”

Her mouth set in a thin, firm line, she opened her door, looked around, and beckoned me. “Elevator eleven. Let’s go.”

I followed her through the maze of corridors, muscles tensing, to a rear service elevator. We could hear the scratchy echoes of police radios, the frightened shouts of Lionsgate residents wanting to know if there was a killer running loose in the halls, but we didn’t actually see any cops. Karen pushed the button on elevator 11. There was a stairwell nearby, and I could hear the pounding of feet. Our elevator arrived, but I stood frozen, watching the stairwell door until Karen shoved me into the elevator and pressed the button to close the doors.

I let out a loud breath. “Thanks. I’m losing my nerve.”

She put a finger over my mouth, jerking her head toward a camera in the ceiling, and began talking excitedly about the need for the janitor staff to do more for the AIDS cases in the hospital. “I have to scrub now because I’ve been handling infected linens and syringes. Can’t the cleaning crew do more?”

“It’s what happens when you outsource cleaning,” I said, switching on the harsh nasal of the South Side. “They’re paid by the room, not by the hour, and they don’t do the job an in-house service does.”

The elevator was hydraulic, and it seemed to me that in the time it took us to go from the second floor to the sub-basement a crew could have disinfected all fifteen floors of the manor. Karen and I babbled about AIDS and cleaning until my mouth felt like a bell with a very dry clapper hanging in the middle. The hydraulics finally hissed to a halt.