Buried Strangers Read online

  “With all due respect, Director, the children in that ceme-tery deserve—”

  “There you go again,” the director said, cutting him off. “You remind me of Vulcano.”

  The director owned a fazenda where he raised cattle. He didn’t do it for the money. It was more in the nature of a hobby, and it was an activity that interested him far more than apprehending criminals. Vulcano was his prize bull. Comparing Vulcano to Silva was as close as Sampaio ever got to paying him a compliment.

  “Just like you,” Sampaio explained, “Vulcano is always charging off whenever he gets wind of something he thinks is threatening his territory. But you’re not a street cop any-more, damn it! You’re my chief inspector for criminal mat-ters. You’ve got people to do the legwork.”

  “But—”

  The director held up a hand. “What’s more important? That damned cemetery or your investigation into the back-ground of that filho da puta Pluma?”

  Silva looked at his lap.

  “Exactly,” Sampaio continued, as if he’d successfully made his point. “The corpses will wait. Pluma won’t. The bastard makes me look bad every chance he gets. If he has his way, I’ll be out of this job right after the election and that, as I don’t have to remind you, is less than two months away.” Sampaio glanced at the huge desktop calendar where he’d penciled in a countdown to election day. “In fact, it’s only fifty-two days. Forget the cemetery. Or let your buddy Arnaldo handle it.”

  “I need—”

  “Or get that hotshot nephew of yours, whatshisname?”

  “Hector Costa.”

  “Yeah, him. Get him to work on it.”

  “He’s already working on it, Director, but he needs all the help he can get.”

  Sampaio showed no sign of having heard him.

  “Pluma is an ex-journalist for God’s sake. All those guys smoked marijuana or used cocaine at one time or another.”

  “I hate to be insistent—”

  “Which you’re being.”

  “—but I feel that we have to go. How about if we leave tonight and we’re back in the office on Monday morning? Will that suit you?”

  The director stared at Silva for a while.

  Silva didn’t blink.

  Finally, Sampaio said, “That’s two round-trip tickets plus hotels, plus per diem. It’s gonna cost at least three thousand Reais. Don’t you think we have better things to spend our money on?”

  “We can economize on the hotels,” Silva said. “I’ll stay with my sister. Arnaldo has family in São Paulo. He can stay with them.”

  “And you can take the midnight flight. It’s cheaper.”

  “Alright. We’ll take the midnight flight.”

  “Deal,” the director said, and reached for his pen.

  Chapter Three

  AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK ON the following morning the pre-vailing smells in the corridor of the São Paulo morgue were of formaldehyde, tobacco smoke, and putrefying flesh, mostly putrefying flesh.

  “They’re in here,” Dr. Gilda Caropreso said, stopping at a heavy metal door, “and so is Yoshiro Tanaka. He’s been wait-ing for you gentlemen.”

  “Who’s Tanaka?” Hector asked before Arnaldo or Silva could.

  “The delegado titular of the precinct in which the bodies were found.”

  “How come he showed up himself? How come he didn’t just send one of his homicide detectives?”

  “I’m told that he takes a personal interest in the murders that occur in his district,” she said, assessing Hector out of a pair of gray-green eyes.

  Considering the years she would have needed to get a medical degree, and the postgraduate work required to qualify as a pathologist, Dr. Caropreso had to be—Hector did the calculation in his head—almost as old as he was. But she sure as hell didn’t look it. If he’d passed her on the street, he might have taken her for a teenager, twenty or twenty-one at the most. He dropped his eyes to her left hand. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

  “You’re going to find it a little warm down here,” she said. “I’m afraid the lack of air-conditioning only makes it worse.”

  She wrinkled her nose—and a most attractive little nose it was, Hector thought.

  The “it” she was referring to was the smell. On a stainless-steel table next to the door, there was a jar of what appeared to be petroleum jelly. Dr. Caropreso picked it up, took a dab of the contents on her right forefinger, and spread it above her upper lip.

  “May I?” she said, removing another dab and pausing in front of Hector.

  “Please,” Hector said.

  Even before her finger got anywhere near his nose, he took in the strong smell of camphor. She applied the jelly, focusing on his upper lip. His eyes watered. He blinked—and could have sworn she blinked back.

  Arnaldo reached over, took a dab of the jelly and applied it with the practiced gesture of someone who’d done it a hundred times before. And if it was taking the young doctor a lot longer to perform the service for him, which it was, Hector wasn’t about to complain. When she finally finished, he glanced at his uncle, a man who didn’t miss much, and flushed.

  Silva was looking back and forth between the two of them. Without missing a beat, Dr. Caropreso met the older man’s eyes and offered him the jar.

  “Perhaps you’d better apply it yourself, Chief Inspector. Your mustache . . .”

  She left the rest of her sentence unfinished and pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of the pocket of her white coat.

  Silva smeared some of the jelly between his nostrils, care-fully avoiding his mustache. He was a tall man, who gave the impression of being even taller because he held himself erect, as if he were trying to maintain contact between his neck and the back of his collar. That day, as on every other workday, he was dressed in a gray suit. Despite the lack of sar-torial variety, Silva invariably looked dapper, as if he were expecting to have his picture taken, which—as he was Brazil’s top cop—it often was. His most striking feature was his eyes. They were jet black, just like Hector’s.

  Dr. Caropreso finished putting on her gloves and depressed the steel lever, opening the rubber seal on the door. The stuff under Hector’s nose was supposed to over-power the smell of death, but it didn’t. Some of the corpses in the room were far too ripe for that. He’d need a bath after this. They all would. A short man with oriental features looked up from one of the coffins that covered the floor and came toward them with an outstretched hand. He offered it first to Silva.

  “Your reputation precedes you, Chief Inspector. I’m Tanaka, Policia Civil.”

  Silva shook his hand and introduced Arnaldo and Hector. “This is Agente Arnaldo Nunes, temporarily attached to our headquarters in Brasilia.”

  Tanaka nodded at Arnaldo.

  “And this is Delegado Costa, from our São Paulo field office.”

  “Ah, yes. Your nephew,” Tanaka said.

  Hector hated it when people brought that up. The impli-cation was that he owed his position to nepotism. The truth was that his uncle had never wanted him to be a cop in the first place and was more demanding of him than he was of anyone else on the force. But he could hardly hope to explain that to Tanaka or to anyone else.

  As if she sensed his embarrassment, Dr. Caropreso deftly intervened: “We’d prefer to use the floor space for only the most desiccated of bodies—or not at all—because that would keep the smell down, but it doesn’t usually work out that way. This place was built thirty years ago, for the needs of thirty years ago. The number of cases has more than tripled since then. We never have enough space in the lockers.”

  Hector nodded, as if it were the first time anyone had told him that.

  “The bodies you came to see are these.” Gilda swept her hand over a long row of plastic coffins, all of them open. “Not much point to refrigerating them. There’s hardly any flesh left at all.”

  It wasn’t as horrific a sight as Hector had been expecting. Most of the bodies were no more than skeletons, piles of
bones crowned by grinning skulls.

  After they’d given each of the remains a token inspection, Gilda knelt down and stroked one of the smaller skulls with her forefinger. She did it gently, as if she were caressing a cat.

  “The victims are of both sexes and varying ages,” she said. “Children, like this one, were never buried alone. Sometimes they were interred with one adult, sometimes with two. When it was one, the adult was always a female. When it was two, there was one of each sex.”

  “Family groups?” Silva said. “Mothers with their children? Mothers and fathers with their children?”

  “That would seem to be a logical conclusion, but you know how my boss—”

  “Hates speculation. Yes, I know.”

  “We’re doing DNA testing.”

  “Good. What else can you tell us?”

  Gilda rose and, as she did so, moved closer to Hector. So close, in fact, that he imagined he could feel the warmth of her body. She responded to his uncle without answering the question he’d posed.

  “Let’s go across the street to Dr. Couto’s office,” she said. “He’s waiting for us.”

  Chapter Four

  DR. PAULO COUTO, GILDA’S boss and an old friend of Silva’s, was São Paulo’s chief medical examiner. He had his lair in the bowels of an ancient redbrick building that also housed the Municipal Revenue Service. The union of the two in a single location had given rise to the cops’ nickname for the place: Death and Taxes.

  Most meetings in Brazil begin with a cup of coffee, and most offices have their copeiro, a man whose principal duty it is to prepare and serve that coffee. Dr. Couto’s office was no exception.

  “With sugar,” Silva said.

  The copeiro picked up the pot containing the presweet-ened mixture and filled the last cup on his tray.

  “Water, Senhor?”

  Silva nodded. The tiny cup of coffee and a tumbler of water were placed in front of him. The copeiro left Dr. Couto’s office, balancing his heavy tray. Silva reached out for the cup, but a touch told him it was too hot. He withdrew his hand.

  “Ouch,” he said.

  “I’ve been telling you for years, Mario,” Dr. Couto said, brandishing an enormous mug, “you should drink it my way.”

  Few people called Chief Inspector Silva by his first name, but Dr. Couto was someone who did. Their fathers had gone to medical school together. Their mothers had been close friends. Dr. Couto, as a little boy in knee pants, had fre-quented Silva’s childhood home.

  In his youth, the chief medical examiner had spent a year at Harvard. Ever since then he’d drunk his coffee as weak as the Americans did, lacing it with vast quantities of cold milk. His mug, too, was American. I Don’t Do Mornings was emblazoned on the side that faced the federal cops, red let-ters on white porcelain.

  Dr. Couto took a mouthful of his lukewarm beverage and smacked his lips.

  “Your way ruins the taste,” Silva grumbled.

  “And your way ruins the lining of your stomach.”

  It was an old debate. They rattled off their words without passion, as if it were a ritual, which in a way it was.

  To look at Dr. Couto, one would never guess he spent his days cutting up corpses. He looked more like a clown with-out greasepaint, without humor, a rotund man who seldom smiled. When puzzled about something, or lost in thought, Couto would fix his eyes on the wall of his office where three of his five grandchildren, serious as their grandfather, stared at visitors out of a silver frame. Silva saw him doing it now, but it didn’t last long. With no apparent effort, he suddenly broke his reverie and glanced at his watch, a cheap Japanese model that he wore with the clasp turned outward, the face on the inside of his wrist.

  “There’s a gentleman,” he said, “waiting for me across the street with what appears to be a bullet hole in his head. I’ve promised to give one of Delegado Tanaka’s colleagues some answers by two o’clock this afternoon. Let’s get down to business, shall we?”

  There were nods and murmurs of assent.

  Dr. Couto swiveled around in his chair and took a file from his credenza. “The magnitude of this horror far outweighs a single shooting, of course, but Delegado Tanaka’s colleague has expressed a certain degree of urgency in the other case.”

  “Who is this colleague?” Tanaka asked.

  “Delegado Marto from the twenty-seventh.”

  “Marto is a pain in the ass,” Tanaka said. “Let him wait.”

  Dr. Couto cleared his throat, but didn’t disagree with Tanaka’s assessment of Delegado Marto. He ran his index fin-ger down the first page of the report, verifying the numbers.

  “In total, there were thirty-seven corpses,” he said, “some of them interred in common graves.” The finger moved on. “Only thirteen were adults.”

  “Twenty-four were kids?” Hector said, looking back and forth between Dr. Couto and Gilda, but mostly at Gilda.

  “I’m glad at least one member of your family knows how to count,” Dr. Couto said, glancing at Silva. When his friend didn’t rise to the bait he continued, “The youngest, a female, was no more than six when she died, the oldest child, anoth-er female, was about fourteen.”

  “Sick fuck,” Arnaldo said. “Killing kids.”

  Arnaldo had two teenage sons, one of whom had just turned fourteen, both of whom he deeply loved.

  “Sick fuck or fucks,” Dr. Couto agreed. “I see no reason to exclude multiple perpetrators.”

  “Desaparecidos?” Silva asked.

  The generals who’d run the country during the most recent dictatorship had been hard on almost everyone whose political persuasion was to the left of Attila the Hun. They’d labeled such people Communists, arrested them wholesale, and made them disappear. Hence the term, desaparecidos, disappeared ones. One thing they’d never been known to do, however, was to kill children.

  “Definitely not desaparecidos,” Dr. Couto said.

  Silva leaned forward in his chair. He was accustomed to hearing Dr. Couto qualify his remarks with words like “pos-sibly” and “maybe.” “Definitely” was a word seldom used by São Paulo’s chief medical examiner.

  “The bodies hadn’t been in the ground long enough,” Dr. Couto continued. “Our estimates range from seven years, maximum, to three years, minimum, definitely not three decades or more. Couldn’t have been desaparecidos. No way. Something else, too: the children were invariably buried in common graves with adults. Sometimes there was only one adult, other times there were two.”

  “Gilda mentioned that,” Hector said.

  Dr. Couto raised a critical eyebrow, but if it was because his assistant had offered the information without consulting him or because the youngest of the cops had referred to her as Gilda, and not Dr. Caropreso, wasn’t clear. After a short pause, he continued: “It’s also worth mentioning that corpses in common graves were always encountered in exactly the same state of decomposition.”

  “Meaning they were buried at the same time?” Silva asked.

  “Meaning exactly that,” Dr. Couto said, and took anoth-er sip of his coffee.

  As he considered the implications of what his old friend had just said, Silva felt a chill on the back of his neck. He turned around and looked for a vent that might have been expelling cold air. There wasn’t one.

  Tanaka stroked his chin. “Are you suggesting, Doctor, that someone might have been murdering entire families?”

  Dr. Couto looked at him over the rim of his mug. “I am suggesting nothing of the kind. I have no basis for such spec-ulation. Whether the victims are related or not will be resolved by DNA testing. That testing is already under way.”

  “But they were murdered?”

  Dr. Couto took another sip of his coffee. “I can’t think of any other explanation,” he said. “We appear to be dealing with one of Brazil’s all-time great serial killers, or perhaps a gang of them.”

  Silva picked up his coffee, tossed it off in one gulp—and grimaced.

  “I hope that expression on your
face,” Dr. Couto said, “is not reflective of the quality of our coffee.”

  “The director is going to go ballistic,” Silva said.

  “Would you care to elaborate on that?”

  “No,” Silva said.

  “I’ve never met Director Sampaio,” Dr. Couto said, “but I’ve heard he’s somewhat of a publicity hound.”

  “There are those who say that,” Silva admitted.

  Dr. Couto had hit the nail squarely on the head. With a crime as high-profile as this one, Sampaio would be sure to regard anything other than a rapid solution and a quick arrest as bad publicity. And one thing he hated even more than Romeu Pluma was bad publicity.

  “What else have you got?” Silva asked, breaking the lengthening silence.

  The medical examiner shook his head.

  “Not a hell of a lot. Doctor Caropreso”—he stressed her title, looking at Hector while he did it—“and her people excavated to a depth of thirty centimeters under each body. All of the victims were buried without a stitch of clothing. We found no bullets, no foreign objects. There was hardly any flesh to test for toxins and no trace, either, of anything lethal in the hair. Now, we’re starting on the skeletons.”

  “What causes of death can we rule out?” Silva asked.

  Dr. Couto took another sip of his coffee.

  “We haven’t run across any fractures of the hyoid bones, so I think we can rule out strangulation, but not suffocation. The skulls seem to be in good shape, so it’s unlikely to be blunt trauma.”

  Gilda leaned forward. “There is one curious—”

  Dr. Couto raised a hand to cut her off. “And it would be premature,” he said, “to elaborate any further at this time. Give us a few more days, and we may have something to add.”

  Silva shot his look back and forth between Gilda and Couto—and then focused on Couto.

  “Come on, Paulo,” he said. “I need it now. Out with it.”

  Dr. Couto shook his head. “You’re going to have to wait for it, Mario.” He gave Hector a significant look. “And don’t try leaning on my assistant in the meantime. You’ll be wast-ing your time. Her social life is her own, but her profession-al loyalties belong to me.”