The scene of Abilio Sacca’s murder was already crawling with reporters. Goncalves wisely kept his lip buttoned until all four of them were within the perimeter of crime-scene tape and away from attentive ears.
“The landlady is a widow,” he said then. “Lives alone, works nights in a hospital. Over there”-he pointed toward the home of the closest neighbor-“we’ve got an old lady. She hasn’t been out of her place in two days, but didn’t see anything, and she didn’t hear anything.”
“Where’s the body?” Silva asked.
“This way.”
Goncalves led them down an alley. Sacca’s place was a tiny freestanding building in the rear of his landlady’s home.
“Built for a maid,” Goncalves said. “There’s just the one room and a bathroom.”
“What’s the landlady’s story?”
“Around ten thirty this morning she went to collect the rent. The door was ajar. He was stretched out in a pool of blood. She didn’t panic. Like I said, she works in a hospital.
Says she’s seen a lot of bodies in her time. She checked his vital signs before she called it in, told the attending officer the paramedics didn’t need to hurry. He’d been dead for hours, she said. The
ME confirms that the death was sometime between 1:00 A.M. and 4:00 A.M. ”
“He’s already here?”
“The ME? It’s a she. Gilda Caropreso. Inside.”
Arnaldo glanced at Hector. “You and your girlfriend have to stop meeting like this,” he said. “People will talk.”
“How about Janus Prado?” Silva asked.
“He’s off today, but they always keep him posted on stuff like this. He called me, asked me if you were coming. When I told him you were, he said to have fun and…”
“And what?”
“And to tell Arnaldo Nunes he’s so ugly that when he walks by toilets, they flush.”
Goncalves seemed pleased to be passing the message along.
Gilda Caropreso, very much at ease in a room crowded with men, was wearing yellow jeans and a pale blue blouse. The only concessions to her profession were latex gloves and a pair of plastic booties. She circulated among the newcomers, collecting kisses on her cheeks and giving Hector one on the mouth. Then they all went over and looked down at the body.
Abilio Sacca was a mess.
“I don’t think he got anywhere near his attacker,” Gilda said. “I’ll have a closer look under a microscope, but there doesn’t appear to be anything under his fingernails except dirt. There is, by the way, a lot of that. And the rest of his personal hygiene doesn’t have much to say for it either.”
Silva knelt. Gilda hadn’t been exaggerating when she spoke of Sacca’s hygiene. Close-up, and under the steely smell of blood, the corpse gave a whole new definition to the term “body odor.” He squinted through the plastic bags to have a closer look at the victim’s hands.
“Ouch,” he said.
“Indeed,” she said. “Whatever the killer was using, Sacca was trying to fend it off.”
“So ‘it’ didn’t get left behind?”
“No. Hector tells me you have a theory this killer might be the Arriaga boy’s father.”
“Not everyone ascribes to it, but I do.”
“Poor man.”
“Crazy man. If it’s him, he’s killed a lot of innocent people.”
“A man like that belongs in a mental institution, not in a jail.”
“That’s for the courts to decide,” Silva said.
“Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately.”
“Could the weapon used to beat him have been a baseball bat?” Hector asked with a flash of inspiration.
Silva stood and Gilda knelt for another look. After a while, she said, “Maybe. I’ll check for wood fragments in the wounds. What kind of wood do they use for baseball bats?”
“Ash,” Hector said. “The same wood the English use for cricket bats.”
“How the hell do you know what the English use for cricket bats?” Arnaldo said.
“He comes up with that kind of stuff all the time,” Gilda said. “He’s a repository of totally useless information.”
“And occasionally amazing instances of insight,” Silva said.
“Once the killer got past the hands,” Gilda said, “he concentrated on the head. There’s considerable damage to the forehead, temples, cheekbones, nose, and jaw. There’s also a second and very damaging blow to the crown. That one was probably postmortem, a final whack to make sure he was dead. And before you ask, yes, he was shot. Once. In the lower abdomen.”