Dr. Paulo Couto, Gilda’s boss and an old friend of Silva’s, was Sao 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 Sao 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.”
Paulo Couto was also a man who didn’t miss much.
Five minutes later, the meeting broke up, Gilda remaining with Dr. Couto, the four cops heading for the street, Silva leading the way.
He paused in the reception area just inside the front door. “Taken on a yearly basis, how many people are reported missing in this city?” he asked Tanaka.
“I don’t know,” Tanaka said. “I’ll find out and call you.”
“Just give me a rough estimate.”
Tanaka took out his notepad and started making calcula-tions. He spoke aloud while he was doing it. “If I multiply the total number of delegacias . . by the figures for my own. . I come up with. . something like. . thirty-two thousand cases. Mind you, those would be reported cases. Lots of them turn out to be false alarms. Girl runs away from home, for example; par-ents report her missing; she comes back. Sometimes, they don’t bother to inform us. We haven’t got the staff to keep doing fol-low-ups, so we just keep her on the books.”
“What if we make an assumption?” Silva said.
“We don’t do assumptions in this building,” Arnaldo said in a pretty good imitation of Dr. Couto’s gravelly voice.
Silva ignored him. “Let’s assume the DNA verifies the sus-picion that we’re dealing with family groups.”
Tanaka nodded.
“I get your drift. If we go after individuals reported miss-ing, we’d have thousands of cases to deal with, but if we limit ourselves to families there’d be damned few. I’ve never had a case like that myself. If I did, I would have remembered.”
“And so, I think, would everyone else. Can you go back seven years? Get all the reports filed up until three years ago?” Tanaka shook his head.
“Recently, we’ve been managing to get everything into a centralized computer system, but three years ago that wasn’t the case. All those reports are going to be buried in paper archives. Different archives, in different delegacias. It could take us months to find them all.”
“But, as you said, you would have remembered. I’m will-ing to bet any other delegado would, too. You could talk to those men personally. Anybody who’s retired, dead, or oth-erwise unavailable, you talk to their deputy.”
“That I can do. Give me a week.”
“Tell us more about the graves,” Hector said. “How is it possible they went undiscovered for so long?”
“You know anything about the Serra da Cantareira?”
“Only that it’s a park.”
“Most of it. Not all. They call it the world’s largest urban forest. Read that as rain forest, which really means jungle.”
“Thick jungle?”
“I’ll give you an example: a small plane on its final ap-proach to Congonhas Airport went down back in 1963. Three people on board. They knew it was somewhere in the Serra. They drew a reverse vector from the end of the runway, spent almost a month searching for two kilometers to either side of that line. They sent in men and dogs, used a helicopter for four days straight. No dice. A biologist doing a study on monkeys finally stumbled across the wreckage in 1986, twenty-three years later. The pilot and both passengers, what was left of them, were still in the fuselage. People get lost in the Serra all the time. Nowadays, most people who venture off the paths carry a radio. You’re crazy if you don’t.”
“You said most of the place was a park, but not all. What else is up there?”
“A few houses, a few condominiums, all of them pretty iso-lated. It’s the kind of place that appeals to people who have to work in Sao Paulo, but who’d rather be living in the Amazon. So they went out and bought themselves pieces of the park.”
Hector was the only one who looked surprised. He often affected cynicism, but he was still young, still learning. “They bought pieces of a city park?”
“So what else is new? You can buy just about anything in this town if you’ve got the money.”
“Yeah, but Jesus, a city park.”
“Same thing with the graveyard,” Tanaka said.
“Wait a minute,” Silva said, narrowing his eyes. “You mean to tell me those graves were on private property?”
“Uh-huh. Surrounded by park on all sides. The law would have given the owner access through the park if he’d asked for it. He never did.”
“And who is this owner?”
“Was, not is. His name was Eduardo Noronha, and he conveniently died not fifteen days after he got title to the land. He willed it to a niece who’s somewhere in Europe. His lawyers claim they’re still looking for her.”
“How long ago did this Noronha die?”
“Eleven years last January.”
“Eleven years! And the land hasn’t reverted to the city?”
“Nope.”
“Who’s paying the taxes?”
“A bank account is being held in escrow for the niece. It also feeds the lawyers and gives them power of attorney to resolve taxes and assessments.”
“Sounds like a setup.”
“Sounds like indeed.”
“You speak to the lawyers?”
“I did. Got nowhere. I don’t think they’re being obstruc-tive. They just don’t know anything.”
“This. . cemetery? How isolated is it exactly?”
“Pretty isolated. The closest homes are six kilometers away, but you only get to drive five of those six. Then you have to cut through the rain forest. Ferns taller than you are, leaves a meter across, parrots, monkeys, snakes, beetles the size of your hand, the whole business. Once the jungle swallows you up, you feel like you’re in the middle of the fucking Amazon.”
“And people build houses in the middle of that?”
“Hell, no. Not in the middle of that. The houses are in a closed condominium. And the condominium is surrounded by a wall three meters high. You get inside that wall and you could be anywhere. Big green lawns, landscaped gardens, swimming pools, it looks like Alphaville.”
Alphaville was a series of luxury condominiums, num-bered 1 through 14, stretching from the suburb of Barueri to the suburb of Santana do Parnaiba. The walls that surrounded each project, and the guards stationed at their gates, guaran-teed a degree of isolation from the otherwise harsh realities of the city.
Alphaville and the other closed condominiums were like small towns in the United States, an ersatz paradise only a few Paulistas could afford.
No crimes ever occurred in closed condominiums, at least no crimes that any of the home owners would be willing to talk about.
“And that’s where that caseiro lives, the guy who was searching for the dog? In a closed condominium?”
Tanaka bobbed his head.
“It’s called Granja das Acacias. There are thirteen houses. We talked to nine of the owners and at least one employee from every house. They’ve got drivers, gardeners, caseiros, maids, all of them live-in because there’s no city bus line that gets anywhere near the place. Nobody recalled any sus-picious activity. None of the owners would admit it if they did. Property values, you know. It gets around that there’s criminal activity in the neighborhood, the prices plummet. Those people are scared to death of that, almost more than they are of the crooks. And they’re so cut off from the world that they could as well be living on Mars. They only come out from behind their walls to work, or to shop, or to go to a restaurant or a show. Otherwise they sit around their pools and talk about their servants, or whatever else it is that rich folks talk about.”
“So no help there,” Arnaldo said. He sighed. “I guess we’re going to have to talk to the buceta.”
Tanaka looked mystified at this use of the vulgar term for the female genitalia.
“Talk to the what?”
“A nickname,” Silva said. “Godofredo Boceta is our pro-filer. He’s going to want photos of the corpses in situ and of the site overall.”
“Some nickname,” Tanaka said. “I’ll bet it pisses him off. Photos shouldn’t be a problem. Dr. Caropreso’s assistant must have taken a hundred of them. I’ll ask her to send you copies.”
“I could take care of that,” Hector said, “call her directly, save you the trouble.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Tanaka said. “I have quite a bit on my plate at the moment.” He glanced at his watch. “Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me, I have to get back to my del-egacia. I’ll keep in touch. You can count on it.” He shook hands with them, turned on his heel, and hurried away.
Silva watched his retreating back for a moment, then turned and looked at his nephew.
“Your professional zeal is praiseworthy,” he said.
“What?” Hector asked, innocently.
“Your generous offer to unburden Delegado Tanaka of the onerous task of calling Dr. Caropreso.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hector said.
But of course he did.