Buried Strangers (8 page)
“IT’S ANOTHER ONE OF those crummy undercover jobs, isn’t it?” Babyface Gonçalves said, looking back and forth between Hector Costa and the device on the table in front of him.
They were in the conference room of the federal police field office in São Paulo. The device was one of the latest-generation speakerphones. It looked like a little, gray pyramid.
Gonçalves was one of the principal participants in the conversation that was taking place, Hector a mere bystander.
“It is,” Silva said, his voice emanating from the instrument.
“What are you guys gonna do when my face catches up with my age, huh?” Gonçalves said.
Agent Heraldo “Babyface” Gonçalves was going on thirty-five, but he looked to be in his early twenties, hence the nickname.
“Plastic surgery.” Now it was Arnaldo’s voice. “We figure you’ll be able to go on forever.”
“You read the report?” Silva asked, addressing Gonçalves, ignoring the exchange.
“Boceta’s? About cults? Yeah. You told me to read it, and I read it.”
“Good. Now, pay attention. The rest is confidential. You know Cavalcante, the minister of tourism?”
“We’ve got a minister of tourism? What the hell for?”
“Shut up and listen.”
Silva related his conversation with Sampaio and Cavalcante.
“What’s with him?” Gonçalves said when Silva finished. “Sticking his nose into an investigation like that? He’s the minister of tourism, for Christ’s sake, not the minister of justice.”
“Thank you for your trenchant observation,” Silva said. “The answer to your question is exactly what I want
you
to find out. We have two hypotheses at the moment: the first is that the minister is being absolutely straightforward when he says his concern is tourism—”
“Sounds like bullshit to me.”
“The second is that he’s protecting someone.”
“Who?”
“His daughter.”
“Why?”
“She’s a Wiccan.”
“What the hell is a Wiccan?”
“A witch.”
“Huh?”
“A witch. You know, black cats, broomsticks, magic potions.” “You’re putting me on, right?”
“I’m not.”
“And how did you—”
“Tarcisio Mello.”
“Ah. Him. And you think—”
“I don’t
think
anything. I
know
the girl’s a Wiccan. I
know
her father is aware of it. I
suspect
he believes that she and her coven—”
“Coven?”
“A group of witches, generally thirteen in number.”
“Where are you getting this stuff?”
“The Internet. Now, as I was saying, I suspect that Cavalcante believes his daughter and her coven might be murdering people for ritual purposes.”
“What do
you
think?”
“I have no opinion one way or another. I’m not even sure Boceta’s right about a cult being responsible for the deaths. But we have to check it out. And that’s where you come in. The girl’s a contemporary of yours. She’s twenty-six and—”
“She’s not. She’s not a contemporary. I’m almost thirty-five.”
“And she works as a disc jockey in a club by the name of Banana Banana. You know it?”
“Everybody knows Banana Banana.”
“Wrong,” Arnaldo said. “I don’t.”
“Because you’re a fucking dinosaur,” Gonçalves said.
“And neither do I,” Silva said.
“Probably because you live in Brasilia, Senhor,” Gonçalves said, without missing a beat. “It’s
the
place to see and be seen in this town. They say the decor alone cost a million reais. They’ve got a sound system with speakers even bigger than my dick.”
“Tweeters?” Arnaldo said.
Gonçalves continued, undeterred: “The bouncers are all Neanderthal types with low foreheads like Arnaldo Nunes. Unlike him, they’re smart enough to separate glitterati from riffraff, maybe because they’re riffraff themselves, again like Nunes.”
“But you,” Silva said, “being a handsome and person-able young man, should have no trouble getting past those bouncers and turning your considerable charms onto the minister’s daughter.”
“What if she’s got a boyfriend?”
“She hasn’t. Tarcisio checked. She’s unattached and lives alone.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“You don’t think being a witch might be an impediment to forming relationships?”
“Not if she’s hot.”
“That’s the trouble with kids,” Arnaldo said. “Their dicks speak louder than their brains, even when the dicks have tiny, little voices.”
“Hey,” Gonçalves said, “at your age I wouldn’t have expected you to remember. I’ll bet your dick hasn’t talked to you for forty years.”
“The girl’s name,” Silva said, “is Randi Calvacante.”
“Randi? What kind of a name is that?”
“Short for Miranda.”
“Okay. Suppose I get in there and make her acquaintance. Then what?”
“Before you even approach her, you do what I did. You get on the Internet and learn all about Wicca. Then you strike up an acquaintance, find a way to steer the conversation around to religion and express an interest. If she bites, you get her to introduce you to her coreligionists, find out if there are any grounds for us to be concerned.”
“In other words, I’m supposed to find out if these . . .”
“Wiccans.”
“ . . . these Wiccans are mass murderers?”
“Exactly.”
“What if they are? What if they come after me?”
“You want to wear a wire?”
“Hell, no. What if she finds it?”
“How would she find it? What do you have in mind?”
“You want me to get close to her don’t you?”
“See?” Arnaldo said. “What did I tell you? Kid’s already thinking about how he can get her into her pants, and he hasn’t even met her yet.”
“It’s purely professional,” Gonçalves sniffed. “How else do you expect me to extract . . . uh, confidential information? How about expenses?”
“What about them?” Silva said.
“The girl’s the daughter of a minister, right? So she must be accustomed to the good things in life. I might have to buy her champagne, treat her to dinner in a fancy restaurant, that kind of stuff.”
“Shower her with presents,” Arnaldo said, “take her on a cruise.”
“No jewelry, no cruises,” Silva said. “I’ll be going through your expense reports with a magnifying glass. You’d better be able to justify every damned item.”
“I look forward to the opportunity,” Gonçalves said.
“LIEUTENANT SOARES,” SERGEANT BLESSA said, approaching his side of the service window, “How’s that CD player? Still working okay?”
“Working fine,” Soares said.
“And what can I do for you this time?”
Soares rested his briefcase on the counter and regarded Blessa through vertical bars evocative of a theater’s box office.
“You can start,” he said, “by letting me in there.”
Sergeant Blessa slipped him a clipboard. Soares signed in, picked up his briefcase, and walked over to the steel door. There was a rattling of keys and the door swung open, squeaking on hinges long devoid of oil. Blessa motioned Soares inside and locked the door behind him.
Directly ahead, a long, dimly lit corridor stretched into darkness. There were parallel corridors to the right and left. Lining them, up to ceiling height, were metal cupboards. Each cupboard bore a number, a heavy steel hasp, and a pad-lock. The two men were standing in the evidence locker, sit-uated in the basement of the
delegacia central,
headquarters of São Paulo’s policia civil.
Orestes Blessa, the man who ran the operation, had a skin bleached by the sunless light in which he spent his days. He had virtually no neck, a wide mouth, and bulbous eyes, all reminiscent of a toad, an albino toad in a police uniform.
With concrete walls, a steel door, and only one entrance, the evidence locker gave every appearance of being secure.
It wasn’t.
Blessa had been working there for fifteen years and for most of that time he’d been running the place like a shop.
“What’s your pleasure?” Blessa asked, sounding, as he usu-ally did, more like a merchant than a cop.
“I want to be alone with that”—Soares pointed to Blessa’s computer—“and I want access to the cupboards.”
Blessa nodded agreeably.
“Okay, Lieutenant, but remember, if whatever you need is something that might attract attention—”
“It won’t. You won’t even miss it. And it’s small. I’ll be taking it away in this.”
Soares hefted his briefcase.
“I run a special for cases that require, uh . . . a certain degree of discretion,” Blessa said. “Five hundred reais and no questions asked.”
“
Fiv
e hundred?”
Five hundred was nothing. The deal Soares had negotiated with Claudia Andrade was for ten thousand, but it was against the lieutenant’s principles to accept the first price he was offered. He lifted an eyebrow and waited for Blessa to crumble.
And after a few seconds, Blessa did. He was, after all, only a sergeant. Soares was a lieutenant and the brother-in-law of the secretary of public safety, to boot.
“Normally, yeah,” Blessa said, “five hundred, but for you, being a special customer and all, four fifty. A twenty percent discount.”
“I’ll take it.”
Blessa opened a drawer in his desk, took out a brass ring holding a single key, and went over to pull down a shade over the service window.
“Fifteen minutes?” he said, offering Soares the ring.
“Twenty,” Soares said, taking it. “This is the master key?”
“Yeah,” Blessa said. “Fits all the padlocks.”
Blessa might have been a crook, but he was an efficient and extremely well-organized crook. Items in his cupboards were always in their proper place and meticulously listed in his database. The computer allowed searches by name (of both the victim and the accused), by case number, by date of entry into the locker, and by item. Soares started searching by item.
When he couldn’t find the listing he was looking for, he opened his briefcase and took out the notes he’d made dur-ing his search of the archives. The man who styled himself Abdul Al Shakiri was a terrorist, arrested fifteen months ear-lier while in transit through Guarulhos airport.
International pressure, mostly from the Americans, had resulted in a speedy trial. An appeal was under way, but it wasn’t likely that the exhibits used to convict Al Shakiri would be required any time soon, if at all. Soares typed in Al Shakiri’s name and hit ENTER.
Nothing.
He referred back to his notes and tried the man’s real name, Muhammad Wahabi.
And got a hit.
When he’d done the search by item, he’d tried “explo-sive,” “plastic,” “
plástico,
” and “plastique.” Now he could see why he’d been unsuccessful. The stuff Al Shakiri/Wahabi had been arrested with was listed under its brand name: Semtex. The detonators were in the same cupboard as the explosive. Both were securely stored away in his briefcase by the time Sergeant Blessa knocked on the door.
“Find everything you need?” Blessa asked.
“Four fifty, you said?”
Blessa nodded.
Soares fished out his wallet and counted out nine bank-notes of fifty reais each. Blessa put them into his hip pocket and smiled.
“A pleasure doing business with you,” he said, looking very much like he’d just snapped up a fat and extremely tasty dragonfly.
“THREE FULL watts of power.”
The owner of the model-aircraft shop said it with a touch of pride, as if he’d designed and built the thing all by himself.
“And that’s the most powerful one you’ve got?” Claudia said.
The owner looked hurt.
“Well . . . sure,” he said. “That’s the maximum permitted by law. You don’t need any more than that. By the time it gets out of range of this baby, you’re gonna need binoculars to see whatever you’re flying.”
“That should do it then.”
“Absolutely. Aileron control here, rudder control here, and elevator control here,” he said, stabbing at the front panel of the remote control designed for model aircraft.
“Receiver and motors?”
“In the box. Everything you need is in the box. Instructions, too. What’s the wingspan by the way?”
Claudia knew nothing of aircraft models. She gave him the first number that popped into her head.
“One meter sixty-two.”
It was her height.
The owner whistled. “That big, huh? Jesus, you don’t fool around, do you? I can see why you’d be afraid of losing it. You’re gonna need a set of batteries. They’re not included.”
“Okay.”
He selected some batteries from a shelf behind him, turned back to the register, and started hitting buttons.
“The whole business,” he said, “comes to eight fifty seven and sixty centavos. Let’s call it eight fifty seven even, okay?
“Fine.”
Claudia opened her purse and took out her wallet.
“Cash or credit?”
“Cash.”
“I don’t get many women in here,” the shop owner said, taking her money and giving her three reais in change.
“It was my uncle’s hobby,” Claudia lied. “He taught me.”
In fact, the things her uncle Ugo had taught her were more in the nature of what an erect penis looked like, and how she’d better keep her mouth shut about what he did to her with it.
The shop owner closed the drawer of the register, brought out a plastic bag from under the counter, and filled it with her purchases.
“You got any questions, just call,” he said.
BRAZIL ABOLISHED SLAVERY IN 1888.
The imperial family and the majority of the people were in favor of the act.
The great landowners were appalled. Who’d pick their cotton? Cut their sugarcane? Harvest their coffee?
In desperation, they turned from Africa to the Orient, solving their labor problem by importing tens of thousands of Japanese peasants to work as indentured servants. And work they did, for the five years it took them to fulfill their con-tractual obligations. Then they gravitated to the great cities, struck out on their own, and worked even harder. So hard, in fact, that many of the new immigrants made modest fortunes.
By the end of the twentieth century, Brazilians of Japanese descent were doctors, lawyers, politicians, and university professors. They were businessmen, firemen, and policemen like Yoshiro Tanaka. And they’d transformed São Paulo into a city that boasted more ethnic Japanese than any place out-side of the home islands.
Liberdade, the heart of the Oriental district, had become fully as large, and equally as colorful, as San Francisco’s Chinatown.
It was there, in Liberdade, under a red Shinto arch that marks the entrance to the neighborhood that Gilda and Hector agreed to meet. Hector arrived fifteen minutes early. Gilda was spot on time. He took her arm and led her to a little restaurant that was patronized almost exclusively by the locals. It was a narrow, but very deep establishment, wedged between a grocery smelling of dried seaweed and a shop displaying a suit of samurai armor. They were guided to the sole unoccu-pied table.
Two hours later, four customers remained: Gilda, Hector, a man in a blue suit, and a woman in a kimono. The woman was seated Japanese-fashion, perched high on her chair, calves doubled under thighs, her white-crowned head only a few centimeters from that of the man in the suit. He looked to be less than half her age, possibly her son, perhaps her grandson. They were murmuring softly in Japanese.
Gilda put down her chopsticks, picked up her rectangular box of cold sake, and managed to sip from it without drib-bling anything on her chin, a trick that Hector, for all the time he’d spent in establishments like this one, had yet to master.
The waiter came to take Gilda’s plate, noticed there were still two pieces of tuna on it, and asked if she was finished. Gilda shook her head.
“Not quite,” she said.
“I think he wants to close,” Hector said, when the waiter was gone.
“Close?” Gilda blinked and looked at her watch. “
Nossa,
” she said. “Five to three already? I have to get back.”
She popped another piece of
sashimi
into her mouth, put down her chopsticks, and reached for her purse.
Hector realized, with something of a shock, that they hadn’t gotten around to discussing the findings of the med-ical examiner’s office. And that, ostensibly, was the reason for the lunch.
“I sent the report to your office,” she said, as if she could read his mind. “It’ll probably be waiting for you when you get back.”
“It’s finished?”
“It’s finished.”
“That was quick.”
“I haven’t slept much over the last couple of days.”
That explained the dark circles under her eyes, circles that hadn’t been there the first time he’d met her.
“When I was excavating the bodies,” she said, “long before we had DNA results, I just
knew
I was looking at par-ents buried with their children. And I
knew
it was murder. It revolts me. I want to see whoever did this put into a cage.”
“I sometimes wish we had a death penalty in this country.”
“I don’t.”
He would have liked to debate that one. He picked up his box of sake, paused with it halfway to his lips, decided he’d done too much dribbling for one day, and put it down.
“So the DNA results are in?” he said.
She bobbed her head, fidgeted in her chair, looked again at her watch.
“All part of the report,” she said. “The corpses interred in common graves were blood related: mothers or fathers, sometimes both, buried with their children.”
Hector reflected on the many corpses she must have seen, thought again how it must take a strong stomach to be a medical examiner. He’d been exposed to no more than thirty murder victims in the course of his career, and the image of every one was burned into his brain. He could seldom face lunch or dinner after visiting a murder scene.
“Let me ask you something else,” he said.
“Ask away, but be quick about it. I told Paulo we’d be lunching together. He says I’m allowed to answer all your questions.”
“Including what you were starting to say when he cut you off?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What was it?”
Gilda raised a hand, caught the waiter’s attention, and made a gesture as if she were writing on a pad. He hurried over to their table.
“Coffee?” he said. “Dessert? I’ve got a nice sweet made from beans.”
Both shook their heads.
“Just the check,” Hector said.
The waiter smiled in satisfaction, gave a little bow, and hurried off. Gilda watched his retreating back for a moment, and then fixed her gray-green eyes on Hector.
“Every corpse had a split sternum,” she said.
“A split what?”
“Sternum. Breastbone. Cut through from top to bottom. Like this.”
She reached across the tiny table and traced a vertical line on his chest, dividing his ribs. It was a strangely intimate ges-ture. He had a sudden attack of gooseflesh and couldn’t be sure what was causing it, her words or her touch.
“Paulo cut me off because we weren’t sure, then, that the sternum-cutting applied to all of the corpses. It would have been premature to suggest that it did.”
“What reason could anyone have for doing something like that?”
“Only one I can think of: to obtain access to something behind the ribs.”
“The heart, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
Hector recalled a woodcut he’d once seen of a victim bent backward over an altar while an Aztec priest ripped the heart out of his chest.
“Seems to reinforce the idea of ritual killing,” he said.
She hesitated for a moment. “Possibly,” she said. “But, if you really want me to make a wild and unsubstantiated guess . . .”
“Live dangerously.”
“A doctor did it.”
“A doctor?”
“I’ll rephrase that. Not just a doctor. A surgeon. He or she did a clean job of it, and he or she used a saw.”
“A
saw?
”
“A sternal saw. It’s a device with an electric motor and a blade that moves like this,”—she waved a finger up and down in the air—“a medical instrument that has only one purpose, to open the chest cavity.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Sternal saws have a unique signature. Under a micro-scope, the serrations stick out like a Caucasian in this neigh-borhood. They’re unmistakable.”
The waiter appeared with the check. Hector took out a credit card and slipped it into the leather cover embossed with the name of the restaurant. “So, if it’s not a cult thing,” he said when the waiter was gone, “if it’s not some kind of ritual murder, what else could it be?”
“We don’t—”
“Speculate. Yeah, I know.”
“How did you know what I was going to say?”
“You started with a
we.
That’s the medical examiner’s office talking.”
She sighed.
“Look,” she said, “you may not like it, but I think Paulo’s right. We’re supposed to deal in facts. If we start speculating, there’d be no end to it. Experience has taught us it’s better if we just tell you guys what we know, and
you
come up with a hypothesis to explain it.”
The waiter came back. Hector scrutinized the bill and the accompanying credit card slip.
“Service included?”
“
Sim,
Senhor.”
Hector scrawled his signature. The waiter thanked him, detached the customer’s copy of the slip, and wished them both a pleasant afternoon.
“Mind you,” she said, when they were alone again, “I don’t think you can rule out ritual murder just because the killers used a saw. The cult thing remains a distinct possibil-ity; I’m not saying it isn’t, but . . .”
“But you have another theory?”
“Yes.”
“How about sharing? Not the cop and the medical exam-iner, just a young couple having a romantic lunch?”
“Romantic lunch, huh? What would your
namorada
have to say about that?”
“Was there a question behind that question?”
“Absolutely.”
“If it was what I think it was, the answer is no. I haven’t got a namorada.”
“It was what you think it was. You’re not gay?”
“No.”
“So?” She made that writing gesture again.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out his notebook, and handed her a pen. She jotted down her address and tele-phone number.
“It’s the building on the corner with Rua Aracajú,” she said. “Fourth floor.”
“Thursday night?”
“Friday’s better.”
“Eight o’clock?”
“Fine.”
She’d released her purse, left it on her lap. Now, she picked it up again and stood.
He remained glued to his chair.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” he said.
“Maybe on Friday. It will give you something to look for-ward to.”
“I already have something to look forward to.”
“Which is?”
“Seeing you.”
“There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? You
do
know how to flatter a girl. You were just holding it in.”
“I wasn’t holding it in.”
“And you can wipe the hurt puppy expression off your face. It’s not going to help. I’m not telling you what my the-ory is, not today at any rate.”
“Why not?”
“I need a second opinion. I have a girlfriend, a specialist. She’s in a position to give me one.”
“What do you need a second opinion for?”
“Someone has to tell me I’m not crazy.”
And before he could ask her what she meant by that, Gilda had turned her back on him and was heading for the door.