Buried Strangers (9 page)
YOSHIRO TANAKA’S TELEPHONE RANG. He leaned to his left to look through the open door. Sergeant Lucas, who should have been screening incoming calls, wasn’t at his desk. Tanaka cursed and grabbed the receiver.
“Tanaka,” he said sharply.
“Delegado
?
”
“Who’s this?”
“Sergeant Corvo.”
Corvo was in charge of the police garage, the building the cops called the Beehive because of its tapering, circular shape.
“What is it, Sergeant?”
“Uh, Delegado, I think you’d better come over here.”
“Why?”
“Well, uh . . . they broke into your car.”
“Broke into my . . . right in the middle of your goddamned garage?”
“
Sim
,
Senhor. Smashed the front window on the passen-ger’s side. The radio and CD player are still there, though. Bastard must have gotten interrupted before he could get them out.”
“Interrupted, but not caught, right?”
“Hey, Delegado, this is a big place, and I’ve only got three—”
“Save it for your annual evaluation meeting, Sergeant. You’re going to need it. I’m on my way. Meet me out in front.”
* * *
AN UNHAPPY-LOOKING Sergeant Corvo was waiting for Tanaka at the base of the ramp. They started climbing it together. A shift change was under way, and Corvo had to raise his voice to be heard over the sound of the ascending and descending vehicles.
“Detective Vieira came in a few minutes ago,” he said. “His slot is right next to yours. He saw the damage and clued us in. It had to have happened here because there’s broken glass all over the floor, not just on the front seat.”
“Bastards,” Tanaka said, wrinkling his nose, as he always did, at the smell of the place. Gasoline exhaust, he figured, was even more toxic than tobacco smoke. They reached the second floor and came in sight of his car. The front window on the passenger’s side had been smashed.
“One thing I can’t figure out,” Sergeant Corvo said.
“What?”
“That package you left on the front seat? They didn’t take it.”
“Package?”
“And there’s no glass on top of it. It’s like someone brushed it off after they smashed the window. I mean, no-body would have broken the window and then put it there, right? People break into cars to take stuff out, not to put stuff in.”
They were only a few meters away from Tanaka’s four-year-old Volkswagen Gol. The delegado stopped dead in his tracks. Sergeant Corvo stopped, too, and studied Tanaka’s face.
“Hey, Delegado, what’s wrong with you? You look like you’re gonna be sick.”
“HERE HE comes,” Roberto Ribeiro said.
Claudia Andrade tossed her newspaper into the backseat.
“Finally,” she said.
There was a uniformed sergeant waiting for Tanaka at the base of the ramp.
“Now,” Claudia said, as the two cops disappeared inside the oddly shaped building.
Ribeiro pushed the button on the stopwatch. Claudia had taken the same stopwatch onto the ramp and timed the walking distance to Tanaka’s car. His legs were shorter than hers. She’d calculated it would take Tanaka twenty-two sec-onds to get there.
“They’re not walking fast,” Roberto said. “I think we should give it a couple of extra seconds.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“I just—”
“Give me that,” Claudia snapped.
She reached out and snatched the watch. Plastic explo-sive was powerful stuff. A small error either way wasn’t going to make much of a difference. The stopwatch was a digital one, counting off the seconds in racing-red numbers. Twenty-one, two . . . Claudia pushed the spring-loaded switch, the one marked “rudder,” on the radio-frequency transmitter. Above her, in the garage, the receiver picked up the signal and activated the solenoid. The contact points closed and electricity flowed from the battery to the detona-tor— all in a fraction of a second. A ball of flame spouted out of the open gallery on the second floor. The shock wave hit them a second later, rocking her car as if something heavy had bounced off the hood.
“Jesus Christ,” Ribeiro said, scrubbing both ears. “I shoulda used earplugs.”
Thick, black smoke roiled out of the building. There was a flash and a boom as a fuel tank exploded.
The place was an inferno.
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN the personalities of the women he chose, or the fact that he liked them young, or the fact that he looked more like a sympathetic priest than a hard-nosed cop, thereby awakening in his partners a need for confession. But whatever it was, it had been Babyface Gonçalves’s expe-rience that many women did exactly the same thing after their first sexual encounter with him: they reached for a cig-arette, propped themselves up in bed, and started bitching about their mothers.
Miranda Cavalcante was different.
She started bitching about her father.
“It was hell growing up with him,” she said. “Sheer hell. He doesn’t care about anybody below the age of twenty. He doesn’t like babies, doesn’t like young kids, doesn’t even like dogs and cats. He only shows an interest in people who are capable of some kind of verbal exchange.”
“Um-hm,” Babyface said, hating the cigarette smoke, but not wanting to complain about it. Complaining might cause her to clam up.
“It’s not like he’s any kind of intellectual,” she went on. “He doesn’t care about art, or history, or any of that kind of stuff. He doesn’t even care about
futebol,
unless it’s the World Cup.”
That went without saying. You couldn’t be in Brazil dur-ing the World Cup and not care about soccer. Even the American tourists got caught up in it, and most of them didn’t give a shit about the sport. Not caring about the World Cup, Gonçalves mused with the part of his mind that wasn’t listening to Miranda’s rant, was impossible. Like being in two places at the same time, like a serial killer being soft hearted.
“All he really cares about is himself, and politics.”
Babyface thought that sounded like someone else he knew: Nelson Sampaio, the head of the federal police. “Sounds a little cold,” he said.
What he almost said was, sounds like a cold-hearted bas-tard, but that was motivated more by thoughts of Sampaio than Randi Cavalcante’s statements about her father.
“Cold is right,” she said. “I doubt he ever talked to me for more than a minute at a time in all the years I was growing up. And when he did, it was to tell me to do this or that or
not
to do this or that. He never asked me to tell him what I thought, what I felt, anything like that. He likes bossing people around, but he hates listening to their problems.”
Babyface made a noncommittal grunt.
“I had a baby brother,” she said, stubbing her cigarette out in the big glass ashtray next to her bed and immediately light-ing another. “He passed away when I was thirteen. He was only four months old when he died of SIDS. Ever heard of it?”
“Sudden infant death syndrome.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, sounding surprised that he knew. She exhaled another cloud of smoke, this time taking care to blow it toward the window and not at her latest lover. “My parents got up one morning and he was cold in his crib. He slept right there in the same room with them. My father hated that, him sleeping in the same room I mean, but my mother insisted. One of the only times I ever saw her put her foot down. Told my father that if he’d get up to feed him she’d move him into another room, but otherwise he was going to stay right there. The poor little tyke died and never made a sound. My mother was devastated. We all were, except for my father. I didn’t see him shed a tear, not that morning, not at the funeral, not ever. The baby was named after him, too. Little Caio.”
“Jesus,” Babyface said.
“But now, now that he’s getting old, and I’m not little any-more, and my mother is dead, he’s changed. Now he’s getting worried about who’s going to take care of him when he gets frail and who’s going to cry at his funeral. He’s got the rest of my brothers and sisters under his thumb. At least he
thinks
he has them under his thumb. He has no idea what they really think about him, and they’re all too shit scared to tell him. They all work at the same place, and his influence keeps them there, and that’s one of the things they resent most of all, but he just doesn’t get it.”
She took another puff, let the smoke drift out of her mouth as she continued.
“Me? I wouldn’t have it. I wouldn’t take his fucking job. I never let him get his hooks into me. I went out and made it on my own. He respects that, in a way, but he hates it, too. Now he’s on a whole campaign, sending me stuff I don’t need or want, calling me almost every day. He’s driving me nuts.”
“About what?”
“Everything. My job, my love life, my friends, my religion.”
“Religion? You’re not Catholic?”
Smoke was making her eyes water. She waved her ciga-rette back and forth to disperse it.
“No,” she said. “I’m not. I’m a Wiccan.”
“No kidding?” Babyface said, propping himself up on his pillow.
She looked at him in surprise. “You know what a Wiccan is?”
“Sure,” he said. “The Rede, the Ardanes, the Virtues, the Law of Threefold Return.”
That was enough to set her off.
* * *
PLEADING AN early-morning staff meeting at the broker-age house where he’d said he worked, Babyface left Miranda Cavalcante’s apartment at 6:30 am. He went home to his place in Vila Madelena, showered, and set the alarm for nine fifteen. After two hours’ sleep, and two strong cups of coffee, he called Silva at his office in Brasilia.
“We’re barking up the wrong tree,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“She’s not a bad-looking girl. Thin, with small tits, but she has a nice—”
“I didn’t ask you for a critique, I asked you to find out about this Wicca business.”
“Okay. Well, first of all, your hypothesis about her old man is right. He
is
trying to protect her.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because she told me flat out, said her father called her up and told her that if she and her friends were killing people they had to stop it right away because the cops were on their trail.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. She treated it as a joke. Said that if her father knew anything about her religion at all, he would have known they weren’t hurting anyone, much less killing them. A couple of years ago, she tried to tell him about the Wiccan Rede, but he obviously wasn’t listening, so she gave it up.”
“Wiccan Rede?”
“I thought you said you looked all this up on the Internet.”
“I did, but I must have missed that one. What is it?”
“It’s a sort of maxim. The basic idea is that if you do no harm to anyone, you can do anything else you damn well please. When she was talking to her dad, she stressed the not doing harm part. Wiccans, she told him, use magic for things that are positive and good. She’s a touchy-feely kind of per-son. Has four cats, a poodle, a cage full of birds, and a pair of sugar gliders named Romeo and Juliet. We had to lock the cats and the poodle outside of her bedroom so we could get it on. The damn poodle kept scratching at the door and the cats—”
“Get back to the point, Babyface.”
“The point is, this girl isn’t killing people. No way. And the fact that her father thinks she’d be remotely capable of it just goes to show what an unfeeling blowhard he is. He apparently didn’t listen to a word she said.”
“Unfeeling blowhard?”
“Well . . . yeah, in a matter of speaking.”
“You liked her, didn’t you?”
A pause. Then Babyface said, “Yeah, I kinda did.”
“Going to see her again?”
“Uh . . . maybe.”
“Fine. Your private life is none of my business. But don’t let me catch you bitching the next time I need you for an undercover assignment.”
Silva had no sooner hung up with Gonçalves when Sampaio stuck his head through the doorway to his office.
“Any news on the Pluma investigation?” he asked, com-pletely ignoring the presence of Arnaldo.
“No, Director. Nothing yet.”
“Stick with it, Mario. There’s got to be something there. There always is.”
Sampaio wandered off.
Arnaldo lifted his eyebrows. “So now it’s the Pluma Investigation, is it? Makes it sound like something impor-tant. Who’ve you got working on it?”
“It’s a highly confidential inquiry.”
“Meaning you’re supposed to be working on it yourself?”
“Exactly.”
“And are you? Working on it, I mean?”
Silva shook his head. “Of course not. Pluma continues to bad-mouth Sampaio to the minister, and the way I figure it, that’s God’s work.”
“Amen,” Arnaldo said.
Less than ten minutes later, Hector called from São Paulo.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said.
“I have seen many wonderful things in my long life, Nephew. You’d be surprised at what I’d believe. Try me.”
“You’re hanging around a lot with Arnaldo, aren’t you?”
“As a matter of fact I am. Why?”
“Because you’re beginning to sound like him, except you’ve got a bigger vocabulary.”
“Fuck you, Hector,” Arnaldo said.
“I neglected to mention,” Silva said, “that you’re on the speakerphone. So what did you think I’m going to have a hard time believing?”
“Fuck you, too, Arnaldo. Remember that Jap delegado, Tanaka?”
“What about him?”
“He’s dead. Blown up by a bomb somebody put in his car. It could be entirely unrelated to our investigation, but . . .”
“You’re going to check it out.”
“His delegacia, first stop. I’ll keep you posted.”
“UGLIEST DAMNED THING I ever saw,” Hector said, speaking of the shocking-pink holding cell in Tanaka’s delegacia.
“Uglier, even, than the director’s wife?” Arnaldo said.
The director’s wife, Neidy Sampaio, had been no beauty to begin with, but she’d let herself go after marriage. Her pic-ture, the one in the center of the triptych on her husband’s desk, was at least fifteen years old and bore no relationship to the current article. These days, Neidy had a problem with facial hair and was at least forty kilos heavier than when the photograph was taken.
And if her appearance fell short of attractive, her person-ality was worse. She was a surly woman who seldom had a good word for anyone, including her husband. Silva had often asked himself why his boss remained married to her until he found out she was the sole heiress to a considerable fortune.
So, although there was truth in Arnaldo’s comparison between the holding cell and the wife of the head of the fed-eral police, the bold comment still stopped Hector short. But only for one reason: “Didn’t you guys tell me I was on the speakerphone?” he said.
“You are. But it’s just the two of us here,” Silva said. “Besides, the door is closed and our fearless leader is at lunch.”
Silva and Arnaldo were in a conference room at federal police headquarters in Brasilia. Hector was calling from beyond closed doors in Tanaka’s office.
“Okay, then,” Hector said. “The answer is yes, even uglier than Senhora Sampaio. That cell is bizarre. I don’t care if it’s just for females. There are certain things that shouldn’t be pink. What’s next? Pink handcuffs? A pink pistol for female agents?”
“I take your point,” Silva said.
“There’s a sergeant here, a guy by the name of Lucas. He told me it was Tanaka’s idea, some kind of publicity stunt. He let the prisoners choose the color. There’s a clipping about it on the wall of his office, interviews with Tanaka’s boss and the state secretary of security. Both of them loved it. Or said they did.”
“No accounting for taste.”
“Yeah,” Arnaldo said. “Look at Sampaio.”
“So what did you find out?” Silva said.
“I had a long chat with Sergeant Lucas. He didn’t know, until I told him, any of the details about the cemetery in the Serra. Tanaka never bothered to fill him in. Or anybody else, as far as I can determine.”
“And this guy Lucas doesn’t read newspapers?”
“Sports pages, maybe. Probably not much more than that. When I mentioned there were cases of children buried with their parents, he put two and two together. He thinks he knows what Tanaka might have been up to.”
Arnaldo leaned closer to the speakerphone. Silva sat up straighter in his chair.
“Tell me more,” he said.
“There’s this favela called Jardim Tonato. According to Lucas, Tanaka never gave much of a damn about what hap-pened there. He used to say that if they wanted to kill each other, it was fine with him. The vast majority of the people who lived there were felons anyway, and he wasn’t going to waste manpower trying to intervene, because most deaths went to reducing the number of crooks in his district. Then this family, some stonemason, his wife, and two daughters, goes missing. It’s brought to his attention on the afternoon of the very day he promised to get back to us about entire families.”
“And he took a sudden interest.”
“Uh-huh. He insisted on interviewing the couple who made the complaint. He did it in his office, the one I’m call-ing from right now. And he did it from behind a closed door. Then he came out and told Lucas to get him a car. Usually, Tanaka wants to be driven and Lucas does the driving. Not that day. That day, he takes the couple with him and disap-pears. Lucas goes home, but later he finds out that Tanaka calls up and wants to talk to a detective named Danilo.”
“That place is a hotbed of intrigue.”
“Just like federal police headquarters,” Hector agreed. “Anyway, Danilo meets Tanaka, and a while later they’re back with some thug. Tanaka tells Danilo that he doesn’t need him anymore and takes the thug into an interrogation room. They’re in there for almost an hour. Then he has the thug thrown in a holding cell and takes off for places unknown.”
“Did they make any tapes during the interrogation?”
“They did. And here’s where it really gets interesting. Tanaka takes the tapes, both the video and the audio. He never brings them back and, get this, the arrest report and the original complaint are both missing.”
“As is the thug?”
“Tanaka released him and there’s no record, no record at all, of who he was.”
“Tanaka was onto something,” Arnaldo said.
“Impressive deduction,” Hector said. “You ought to be a detective.”
“I
am
a detective.”
“Some people question that.”
“Those that do had better be very big and very strong,” Arnaldo said.
“Anyway,” Hector said, “we did have one stroke of luck. Lucas took down the original complaint in longhand. He’s still got it. The name of the missing couple is Lisboa, Edmar and Augusta. Two daughters, named Mariana and Julia.”
“And the complainants?”
“Portella. Ernesto and Clarice. We’ve got their address, such as it is.”
“What do you mean
such as it is?
“Favela,
chefe.
No street signs, no numbers.”
“But Lucas knows how to find their shack?”
“He does.”
“Go for it. Call me when you know more.”
HECTOR CALLED back three hours later. Silva told him to wait and went down the hall to where Arnaldo was working a telephone, calling cops at delegacias within a five-hundred-kilometer radius of the little town of Villasboas, trying to garner more information on anything that might remotely have been construed as ritual murder.
Before Silva could ask, he said, “Nothing about corpses with their sternums sawn through. Not yet, anyway.”
“Hector’s on the line,” Silva said. “Come back and listen.”
“Sergeant Lucas took me to the Portellas’ house,” Hector said a minute or two later. “No luck. Nobody home.”
“The neighbors?”
“Here’s how it works: you got people who’re at home dur-ing the day and people who’re at home during the night. Most of the people at home during the day are lowlifes who’re sleeping off a drunk or a hard night of breaking and entering or drug dealing. The folks who are at home during the night are mostly hard-working types. The Portellas, by all accounts, are in that category.”
“So somebody has to go back at night.”
“Right.”
“Not nice. Days are bad enough in those places, but nights. . . . Well, it can’t be helped. Somebody has to do it. Send Babyface. And tell him to bring a gun.”
“I don’t think I’ll have to tell him,” Hector said.