Buried Strangers (2 page)
“WHAT’S THIS CRAP ANA handed me?”
Nelson Sampaio raised his jaw and looked pugnaciously at Mario Silva. Sampaio was the director of the Brazilian Federal Police. Ana was his long-suffering personal assistant. What he was referring to as crap was a request for two round-trip airline tickets, Brasilia/São Paulo/Brasilia.
Ana had served five directors in succession, one more than Silva, and averred that Nelson Sampaio was the worst of the lot. The director was a pink-faced, prematurely balding man with suspicious blue eyes. Mostly, his eyes were enlarged by spectacles, but this morning he was trying out a new set of contact lenses. He kept blinking at Silva, while his hand remained splayed over the form in front of him. The two men, Silva and Sampaio, were on opposite sides of Sampaio’s desk in his spacious office in Brasilia, the nation’s capital.
Everything in the room had been chosen with an eye to making a statement: The national flag demonstrated Sampaio’s patriotism; the portrait of the president bespoke party loyalty; the photographs around the walls assured visi-tors that they were in the presence of a man who rubbed elbows with Brazil’s movers and shakers; the triptych on his desk (his wife flanked by his two daughters) showed that he was a good family man; the sports trophies (Silva suspected that at least some of them were bogus) revealed that he’d been an athlete in his youth; the awards for public service attested to his social conscience; a couple of knickknacks (fashioned by schoolchildren) indicated that Sampaio hadn’t lost the common touch; and the two (Brazilian) paintings established his artistic sensitivity. Even the view made a statement: The window behind him overlooked the Ministry of Culture.
“You mind telling me what’s so important that you have to take a couple of days out of your schedule and go galli-vanting off to São Paulo when there’s so much to do right here?” Sampaio continued.
“It’s all there on the form,” Silva said, patiently. “And, with respect, Director, it’s not gallivanting.”
“Oh? What is it then?”
“You’ve seen today’s newspapers?”
“Of course, I’ve seen today’s newspapers,” Sampaio snapped. “I read three of them every morning. So what?”
Nelson Sampaio had been a successful attorney before he entered government service. A political appointee, whose ambitions went far beyond his current post, he was a man who’d never been to a crime scene and had never smelled a corpse. When he spoke of reading three newspapers, Sampaio meant the front pages, the editorial pages, and the social columns. The majority of the articles that attracted his attention were those dealing with the Machiavellian world of Brazilian national politics. They were unlikely to be the same ones that interested Mario Silva.
“Then perhaps you read about that clandestine cemetery in the Serra da Cantareira?” Silva said, making the state-ment a question.
“What about it?” the director said, neither confirming nor denying his awareness of the article in question.
“There were children in some of those graves,” Silva said, plunging on in the face of his boss’s apparent lack of interest. Silva, childless after the death of his son from leukemia at the age of eight, could get particularly passionate about the murder of children.
“Kids, adults, what’s the difference?” Sampaio said. “I asked you a simple question: What’s so important? Don’t you think you have enough on your plate right here in Brasilia?”
“I wasn’t aware that I had—”
“Not aware?
Not aware?
Mario, for God’s sake, what about Romeu Pluma?”
Romeu Pluma was a former journalist and the current press secretary for the minister of justice, Sampaio’s immedi-ate superior. Pluma and Sampaio loathed each other.
“I told you, Director, we haven’t been able to find any-thing in Pluma’s background to suggest—”
“And I told
you
to keep digging. Everybody has
something
to hide. You, him, even me. I want to know what Pluma’s hiding. Is that so much to ask?”
Sampaio was a believer in using the powers of his office to forward what he considered to be good causes, and foremost among all good causes was the continued advancement of Nelson Sampaio.
Romeu Pluma had the ear of the minister. He’d been whispering into it, questioning Sampaio’s competence and criticizing his effectiveness. And, even worse, he’d been ex-pressing those same opinions to the press. Pluma was quoted as being an “unnamed government source,” but that didn’t fool Sampaio. He always knew who was out to get him. He desperately wanted something to hold over the press secre-tary’s head, and he expected Silva to get it for him.
“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.
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.”
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.”
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 São 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.”
