At eleven o’clock on the following morning the pre-vailing smells in the corridor of the Sao 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 Sao 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.”