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The drawers of the cabinet had yielded nothing except some loose coins, a broken pair of sunglasses, nail clippers, underwear, folded T-shirts. “In from where?” Griff asked. “Where had he lived before?”
“Foster may have known. I never did,” she replied, following his movements with the beam of the flashlight. “Manuelo showed up here with a small duffel bag of belongings and moved into this apartment. Foster bought him new clothes. He paid for his training as a nursing aide, on how to care for paraplegics. Manuelo was devoted to Foster.”
Griff snuffled. “Yeah. I know.”
Although the bed obviously had already been searched, he felt the mattress and box springs, looking for bumps where something could have been stashed. He moved the bed away from the wall and motioned for her to direct the flashlight onto the floor beneath it. Low-nap carpet. No sign that it had been sliced to form a secret pocket. “Did he have family? Friends?”
“Not to my knowledge. Griff, Rodarte has already asked me all this. The police have been searching for Manuelo since the night…the night Foster died.”
“The first time I saw him, Manuelo struck me as a survivor,” Griff said. “Foster told me he’d walked to the U.S. from El Salva
dor.” A small curtain hid the plumbing for the tiny kitchen sink. He parted it but found only pots and pans, some dishwashing liquid. He looked in the oven and microwave but came up empty. He checked the fridge but found nothing except a few canned drinks, condiments, three oranges.
“Walking through Guatemala and Mexico? That tells me that he was either very, very poor or running from something and didn’t want to risk traveling on public transportation. Probably both.”
In the bathroom, he looked in the tank of the toilet, then took the light from Laura and shone it down the shower drain.
She asked, “How do you know to do that?”
“Some things you learn in prison.”
There was nothing in the medicine cabinet above the sink except shaving implements, toothpaste, toothbrush. He returned to the main room, hands on hips, looking about. The ceiling? He couldn’t see any seams in the material where Manuelo might have cut out a section to form a hiding place.
Inside the closet were several pairs of black trousers, two pairs of black shoes, and a black baseball-style jacket. “Where’s the duffel bag?” he asked rhetorically.
“The what?”
“You said he arrived with a small duffel bag of personal belongings. Where is it?”
“I suppose he took it with him.”
“Trust me, he didn’t stop to pack that night. He didn’t take his clothes or his toiletries. It said in the newspaper that cash was found in his apartment. Nobody leaves money behind, unless they don’t leave of their own accord.”
“Which is why Rodarte suspects you of—”
“Killing Manuelo, too. I know. But I didn’t. Laura, the man was hysterical. Out of his head. He ran like the devil was after him.” He frowned at the look she gave him. “No, it wasn’t me he was afraid of.”
She didn’t respond to that. Instead, she said, “He didn’t pack, so you believe that his duffel bag is here somewhere. So what? What good would finding it do us?”
“Maybe none. But a top-notch rehab hospital wouldn’t have hired even a janitor without immigration documents. If Manuelo sneaked into the country, he must have had help getting falsified papers so he could get work. He had to have had a contact. And I bet he would have stayed in touch with that contact in case he had to get the hell out of Dodge, quick. He would have—”
The wail of approaching sirens cut him off. “Shit!” He grabbed Laura’s hand and pulled her through the door onto the landing of the stairwell. He switched off the flashlight, but just as he did, he noticed the door opposite the one to Ruiz’s apartment. “What’s that?”
“What? I can’t see anything.”
“That door. Where does it go?”
“It accesses the attic space above the other side of the garage. It’s not finished out. Foster had talked about one day flooring it, but—What are you doing?”
Griff had pushed open the door, and the hot, contained air rushed out to envelop them. He switched on the flashlight and shone it into the large space, empty except for exposed insulation and joists, plumbing pipes, and electrical conduits.
About three feet in front of him, an air-conditioning duct stretched along the floor for the entire width of the attic; it was the duct that would have conveyed a/c and heat into Manuelo’s apartment.
Griff aimed the flashlight beam on the silver tube and tracked it from the far wall forward.
The sirens were getting closer, louder.
He tried to block them out and concentrate on the duct, taking in every seam, every wrinkle in the material, looking—
