No, Tomás, you don’t understand,” Mariana interrupted, her voice dropping to a terrified whisper. “The forensic team I called to sweep the house? They just pulled up the floorboards in the master bedroom. The ones right behind where Lili was sitting.”
Tomás felt the air leave his lungs. “What did they find?”
“It’s not just mold, Tomás. There’s a subterranean basement beneath that house that isn’t on any city blueprint. And… oh god, the smell coming out of it… The forensic techs found medical equipment. Old, rusted, but military-grade. And there are files. Dozens of them. All stamped with a government seal from 2012—the same year the city supposedly condemned this block.”
A chill settled deep into Tomás’s bones. The piece of the puzzle he had been missing began to take a sinister, bureaucratic shape. The system hadn’t just ignored Lilia García out of laziness or a lack of funding.
The system had known exactly what was in that house.
“I’m on my way,” Tomás said.
Into the Deep
The midday sun did nothing to warm the skeletal remains of 47 Alamo Street. Yellow crime scene tape now fluttered in the breeze, casting jagged shadows across the dirt yard. Two police cruisers were parked askew outside, their roof lights spinning silently.
Tomás slid under the tape, his hand instinctively resting on the grip of his service weapon. He walked into the house, passing the empty space where he had found Lili just hours before. The wall with her drawings seemed even more ominous now. In the harsh daylight, he noticed something he had missed in the dark: the stick figures of the “daddy” in her drawings didn’t have normal faces. They were drawn with large, completely blacked-out circles for heads, wearing what looked like heavy hoods.
“Down here, Reyes,” Mariana’s voice echoed from a dark corner of the bedroom.
He walked over and saw that a heavy, rusted iron hatch had been pried open from the floorboards. A steep, concrete staircase descended into pitch-black darkness, illuminated only by the harsh halogen work lights the forensic team had strung down.
