“Leave your cell phone by the door,” I said, and she did.

The place was a box, maybe twenty by fifteen. It was dry-walled and painted in a butter-yellow color and had wood laminate floors. To my right was an open door with a bathroom and a standing shower. A toilet bowl and a small pedestal sink.

I glanced around the room. A couch was turned up on its side, a space heater beside it. The air smelled stale but clean.

“Adrian lived down here?” I asked.

She nodded. “He had it done up nice, but it was temporary, while the mold got fixed.”

“I thought you said it was all dirt?”

“Next room over,” Maria said, pointing at a single thirty-by-eighty-inch door on the far side of the room. “This structure is built on a hill,” she said. “So that’s the real basement. This is the basement apartment.”

“Open it.”

The door swung toward us, and I pointed my flashlight inside. It was another box of a room, but this one had a concrete floor, and the walls only went up about halfway. Above that, you could see the crawl space under the building. Could stare in at the wooden studs that protruded from the foundation and held up the structure above us.

“Y’ever come down here?” I asked.

“Not much of a reason to,” she said. “But my old place was . . . over there.” She pointed. “Above, I mean. If we could keep walking.”

But we couldn’t keep walking, at least not without ducking our heads, because dirt covered half of the concrete floor and the room itself. At first, on the side by the door, the dirt was an inch high. But as you walked across the giant substructure, the dirt got thicker and you had to scrunch down, so as not to hit your head on the bottom of the building above. Eventually the dirt reached all the way up to the studs.

“Over there was where the smell was.” She pointed at an area piled with three or four feet of dirt.

“So what happened to Adrian when they closed this up?”

“He left.”

“Just like that?”

“He didn’t seem to care.” She shrugged. “Maybe the owner paid him some money. He was packed already.”

I pointed back at the main room. “So John Adrian lived out there—in the finished room?”

“For a few months, yeah.”

“And this dirt area was what?” I asked. “Before it got filled in.”

“Kinda like storage, back then, if you owned or ran the place. Machinery. Plumbing and electrical supplies. I mean, there wasn’t a big-ass pile of dirt here back then.”

“Where do you store those things now?”

“They put one of those Tuff Sheds in when I took over,” she said. “Out by the alley.”

I crouched, close to the ground. There was no smell, except if you counted the musty stink of dirt. “Bring me a couple shovels.”

“Of course.”

I pointed to her cell on the ledge outside. “Don’t go calling anyone.”