CHAPTER 8 — The Red Door
Detective Valdés changed the operation immediately.
Instead of sending officers through the main entrance, she divided the team and approached the abandoned clinic from three directions.
Daniel was ordered to remain behind.
He ignored the order.
He followed in Valdés’s vehicle, determined to see the place where his son had been held.
The clinic stood behind a rusted fence, surrounded by weeds and dying trees.
The windows had been painted black from the inside.
Officers entered through a loading door.
The building appeared empty.
But beneath the dust, Valdés found fresh shoe prints.
They led downstairs.
At the bottom of the staircase stood a red metal door.
Leo had remembered correctly.
The door was locked with three deadbolts.
Police forced it open.
Behind it was a narrow hallway containing six small rooms.
Each had a mattress.
A camera.
A chain secured to the wall.
On one door, someone had scratched dozens of lines into the paint, counting days.
Daniel stared at the marks and imagined Leo making them.
At the end of the hallway, investigators found a control room filled with monitors.
Several screens showed old recordings of Leo.
Others showed children Daniel did not recognize.
One monitor displayed the protected apartment in real time.
Mariana was sitting beside Leo’s bed.
Inés was coloring at the kitchen table.
“They still have access to the safe house cameras,” Daniel said.
Valdés called her officers.
No one answered.
Then the live video flickered.
A masked figure appeared in the hallway outside the apartment.
The two guards were lying motionless near the elevator.
The figure approached the door.
Daniel shouted at the screen as though Mariana could hear him.
The apartment door began to open.
On the video, Inés looked up.
The masked person stepped inside.
But Mariana was waiting.
She swung a heavy lamp and struck the intruder’s shoulder.
A violent struggle followed.
Mariana pulled Inés behind her and slammed the emergency alarm.
The attacker escaped through the stairwell seconds before backup officers arrived.
One drop of blood remained on the floor.
DNA later confirmed the attacker was Camila.
But investigators found something else in the clinic’s control room.
A police access card.
It belonged to Officer Reyes.
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On the back, written in black marker, were five words:
Patricia knows where the ledger is.
