Emerson Ferraz, the colonel in charge of Cascatas do Pontal's State Police Battalion, had clumps of hair protruding from his nostrils, pockmarked skin, a forehead about two fingers high and a personality as ugly as the rest of him.
When Hector Costa, after a thirty-minute wait, was admitted to his presence, Ferraz didn't even look up. For a good minute-and-a-half Hector stood in front of the colonel's desk like a schoolboy called up for disciplinary action. All the while, Ferraz scratched away on a yellow legal pad with a Mont Blanc fountain pen. The pen, dwarfed by his pudgy fingers, looked out of place in the hands of a man earning the salary of a cop.
The office stank of sweat and cigar smoke, both of them stale. Topping the clutter on Ferraz's desk was the business card Hector had handed to the uniformed policewomanno beauty herself-who functioned as Ferraz's secretary.
Tiring of being ignored, Hector sank, uninvited, into one of the two chairs in front of the colonel's desk.
"Sure. That's right. Just make yourself comfortable," the colonel said, putting down his pen and raising his head. He stared at Hector out of a pair of porcine brown eyes and then screwed up his face as if his visitor had just passed gas. "I've heard about you," he said. Ferraz emphasized his words by jabbing at Hector's card with a pudgy forefinger.
Hector groaned inwardly. He knew what was coming.
"Your boss is Mario Silva, who just happens to be your uncle, am I right?"
Hector hated it when people brought that up.
"Yeah, I thought so." Ferraz said, responding to Hector's nod, as if he'd just wrung a confession from some criminal he particularly disliked. "Well, let me tell you something. I don't need your help." He picked up Hector's card, ripped it in half, and dropped the pieces into a wastebasket. "And I don't need your uncle, either." He made the word "uncle" sound as if it was some kind of epithet.
Hector was tempted to tell him that neither he, nor his uncle, needed, or wanted, Ferraz or his damned case either, but the colonel wasn't finished.
"Something else. I don't talk to messenger boys. If that uncle of yours wants anything from me, tell him to come himself."
Ferraz picked up his pen and went back to doing whatever he'd been doing when Hector arrived. For some time the only sound in the office was the constant whir and clank of heavy construction machinery drifting in through the closed windows and the scratching of the colonel's pen on paper. Hector waited him out, saying nothing.
After a while, Ferraz looked up and blinked theatrically. "Still here?" he said.
"He is coming himself," Hector said, picking up where Ferraz had left off, "but he had to clear his schedule. He'll be here tomorrow morning."
"Here?"
"Here. In Cascatas."
"The almighty inspector-general himself?"
"His title, Colonel, is Chief Inspector for Criminal Matters."
"No shit? Chief inspector, eh? Well, don't expect me to be waiting at the airport with a brass band. And tell him that if he wants to come here"-Ferraz stabbed the desktop with the same forefinger he'd used to jab the card-"he'd better call for an appointment."
As if emphasizing what the colonel said, someone on the floor above flushed a toilet.
Hector crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair."Do both of us a favor, Colonel," he said, choosing his words carefully, but letting his irritation show. "Answer my questions. It'll save you time in the long run."
Ferraz didn't appear to be ruffled by the absence of cordiality. In fact, he seemed to welcome it. "Okay," he said. "How about I give you five minutes of my time. Starting…" he glanced at his watch ". .. now."
He took a box of thin cigars from the drawer of his desk, chose one, and replaced the box without offering it to Hector.
Hector had already noticed that Ferraz had a slight wheeze when he talked. Probably, he thought, because he inhales the damned things. He wasn't looking forward to the colonel lighting up that cheroot.
The colonel seemed to sense it. He licked the cigar to moisten it and rolled it back and forth between his palms, staring at Hector all the while.
Hector had made inquiries about Colonel Emerson Ferraz before leaving Sao Paulo: Politically connected and close to retirement, a friend at the State Police had told him. Wasn't born rich, didn't marry into money, but drives some kind of fancy imported car, owns a really big fazenda, and takes vacations in Miami.
What Hector's friend hadn't told him was that Colonel Ferraz, in addition to almost certainly being a crook, was also a nasty son of a bitch.
Ferraz bit a piece from the end of his cigar and spit it across his desk, narrowly missing the chair to Hector's right.
"What do you want to know?" he asked.
"Do you have any leads?"
"Not a one," the colonel said contentedly. He removed a box of long wooden matches from his breast pocket, lit up, and blew some smoke in Hector's direction. The cigar was Bahian and the smell was everything Hector had feared it would be. He started breathing through his mouth, a trick he'd taught himself after being exposed to too many rotting corpses.
"Speed it up," the colonel said. "You've got four minutes and forty seconds."
"Where did the shots come from?" Hector asked.
"The north tower of the new church."
"How can you be sure?"
"We found the murder weapon."
Ferraz opened the drawer of his desk.
Hector sniffed. A telltale smell filled his nostrils. A photo. Recently processed. Hector was blessed, sometimes cursed, with an extraordinary sense of smell, a sense so acute that he could have made a living as a perfumer or a wine taster. He'd already found the stale sweat and the cheap cigar smoke hard to bear. Now, despite the trick of breathing through his mouth, there was the dominant top note of a photographic print hardly dry.
Ferraz handed it over. The paper was still damp.
The image was of a firearm, a rifle with a telescopic sight and a leather sling. It had been photographed against a white background, perhaps a Formica table.
"Looks like a Sako Classic with a Leupold scope," Hector said.
Ferraz tipped some ash into an ashtray. "It is," he said, a reluctant note of admiration creeping into his voice.
"What was he firing?"
"Nosier ballistic tips," the colonel said, and then, glancing at his watch, "three minutes and twenty seconds."
Hector kept staring at the photograph. In Brazil, the rifle and ammunition were unusual-sniper stuff-but these days, you could buy just about any firearm you wanted in the favelas of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The drug gangs smuggled them in from Paraguay or bought them from corrupt quartermasters in Brazil's armed services. The crooks were as well armed as the police and often better.
"Latent prints?"
The colonel put the cigar back into his mouth, held it firmly between his teeth, and tipped it up at a jaunty angle. "Not one. Wiped clean," he said through clenched teeth.
"My people are going to want to inspect the rifle."
"Be my guest. It's in the evidence locker downstairs."
"And no one saw anyone going in or out of the tower?"
"Nope."
Ferraz took the cigar out of his mouth and bared his teeth, more of a grimace than a smile. The teeth were tobaccostained and as crooked as the tombstones in an old cemetery.
"Have you sealed off the tower?"
"Of course I have. What do you take me for?"
An ugly, unpleasant son of a bitch. But Hector didn't say it. He took a shallow breath and let it out slowly. "Any theories about the motive?"
"Seven, to be exact."
"Seven?"
"Seven. The reception committee. They're all landowners and each and every one of them thinks the bullets were meant for him."
"They think the bishop was shot by mistake?"
"What did I just say?"
"Why?"
"Ever hear of the Landless Workers' League?"
"Sure."
"How about Aurelio Azevedo?"
Hector shook his head. "Aurelio who?"
"Azevedo. He was their leader around these parts, a real pain-in-the-ass. About a month ago, somebody killed him. His buddies figure it must have been a landowner and they're out for blood."
"What do you think?"
The colonel took another deep drag on his cigar. "They're wrong. The bishop was the target." He expelled the smoke and coughed. He brought up some phlegm and leaned over to spit it into the wastebasket next to his chair.
Someday, Hector thought, those cigars are going to kill him. But not soon enough to suit me. "What makes you so sure?" he said.
"When the first shot was fired the whole reception committee, all seven of them, stopped dead in their tracks. The closest one, the mayor, was still four meters away, maybe even a little more. The second shot hit the bishop just above the line between his eyes, took off the back of his head. That sound to you like the shooter didn't know what he was doing? No way. He was aiming at Dom Felipe, all right. No doubt about it."
Ferraz pulled up his cuff and ostentatiously displayed his watch. It was a gold Rolex. "You've got two minutes left."
"Tell me more about this guy Azevedo."
Ferraz took another puff. The smoke was beginning to sting Hector's eyes.
"Azevedo was a field hand out on the Fazenda da Boa Vista," he said. "No criminal record. Never made any trouble until those League people got to him. Then he started going to meetings and rallies and the next thing you know he's running around in a red shirt, waving one of those banners and organizing a group to occupy Muniz's land."
"Muniz? Orlando Muniz? The industrialist?"
"And banker, and God knows what else. He's richer than God. He owns the Boa Vista, and his son, junior, runs it."
"Tell me more about what happened to Azevedo."
Ferraz studied the ash on his cigar, twirled it, tapped it gently on the edge of a large brass ashtray, and took another puff. "Not much more to tell. He turned up one morning nailed to a tree in front of his shack. They'd cut off his cock and stuffed it in his mouth. His wife and kids were inside the house. All of them shot through the back of the head."
"No suspects?"
Ferraz shrugged. "The League people got it into their heads that it was junior, accused him of bringing in hired guns from Paraguay to do the job, but they could never prove it. You got one minute left."
"All right. Let's get back to the bishop. Despite what the mayor and those other six guys on the reception committee think, you're convinced that the bishop was the target and that the Landless Workers' League had nothing to do with it. Is that right?"
"Did I say that?" Ferraz took another puff, but offered nothing more.
"Explain," Hector said, shortly.
"Dom Felipe was new in the job. The old bishop died about six months ago, and not a minute too soon, if you ask me. Mellor was his name. Dom Augusto Mellor. He was a piece of work, the old bastard, a big supporter of the League. He had his priests out recruiting new members, showing up at their rallies, helping them to plan occupations of fazendas, all that kind of shit. He was no better than a fucking communist. Now, Dom Felipe, he was different."
A small piece of ash fell off of Ferraz's cigar and onto his gray shirt. He brushed it off with a practiced gesture.
"Different? How?"
Ferraz glanced at his watch and grinned.
"Time's up," he said.