Chapter 4 - SEVENTEEN MINUTES
Laura sat with Salgado in a private consultation room.
Mateo remained beside her.
Jimena slept against his shoulder.
The hospital had given the little girl a blanket, but she refused to let go of Emiliano’s old plastic dinosaur, which Laura had brought from home almost without thinking.
Salgado placed a timeline on the table.
“Tell me about those seventeen minutes.”
Laura rubbed both hands over her face.
“We were in the kitchen.”
“Who?”
“Rebeca, my mother-in-law, two cousins, and me.”
“At what time?”
“Around six.”
“And then?”
“Rebeca got a phone call.”
“From whom?”
“She said it was a client.”
Mateo looked at her.
“You never told me that.”
“It didn’t seem important.”
“Where did she go?”
“Outside.”
“For seventeen minutes?”
Laura nodded.
“When she came back, you had just noticed the door open.”
Mateo remembered it.
The panic.
His mother screaming Emiliano’s name.
Everyone scattering into the yard.
Rebeca entering from the side gate, asking what happened.
Salgado looked through his old notes.
“She told us she had been in the downstairs bathroom.”
Laura shook her head.
“No.”
“You’re certain?”
“I watched her walk outside with her phone.”
Salgado wrote something down.
Mateo stared at the detective.
“You had both versions?”
“We interviewed people separately.”
“And nobody compared them?”
Salgado’s silence answered.
Mateo stood.
“My son spent eleven months underground because your department missed seventeen minutes.”
Salgado looked up.
“You have every right to be angry.”
“I don’t need permission.”
The door opened.
A doctor entered.
Everyone stood.
“Emiliano is severely malnourished and dehydrated.”
Laura covered her mouth.
“But he is stable.”
Mateo closed his eyes.
The doctor continued.
“He has muscle weakness, vitamin deficiencies, several untreated infections, and signs of prolonged confinement.”
Laura began crying.
“Can we see him?”
“Briefly.”
When they entered the room, Emiliano looked even smaller beneath the white hospital blanket.
Laura stopped several feet from the bed.
Her son opened his eyes.
For a moment, neither moved.
Then Emiliano whispered.
“Mom?”
Laura crossed the room so fast the nurse had to stop her from pulling out an IV line.
She bent over him.
“My baby.”
“I thought you stopped looking.”
Laura broke.
“No.”
She pressed her forehead to his.
“Never.”
Emiliano looked at Mateo.
Then at the detective beyond the glass.
His expression changed.
“Is Aunt Rebeca in jail?”
“Yes.”
Emiliano swallowed.
“She used to cry.”
Laura stiffened.
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes she sat beside the hole after the man left.”
“What man?”
Emiliano’s eyes moved toward the doorway.
“Sebastián.”
Mateo stepped closer.
“What did he want?”
Emiliano hesitated.
Then he whispered.
“He kept asking where Grandpa hid the blue book.”
Mateo stared at him.
Laura looked equally confused.
May you like
But Salgado, standing behind them, immediately reached for his phone.
Because thirty-two years earlier, Mateo’s father had died with a blue accounting ledger that authorities never found.
