Buried Strangers (6 page)
BOCETA HAD MORE TO offer, but as usual, he was going to make them work for it. If people didn’t listen to him around the watercooler, they sure as hell had to sit still when they asked him for an opinion—no matter how long it took. He settled back in his chair.
“Remember Villasboas?” he said.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, here we go again,” Arnaldo said.
Boceta took off his glasses. “You are becoming tiresome, Agente.”
“Me? Tiresome? You should have to listen—”
Silva put a hand on Arnaldo’s arm and squeezed. “Villasboas,” he said. “I was working in São Paulo then. I remember, but I’m a little foggy on the details.”
“Who the hell is Villasboas?” Arnaldo said.
“Not who,” Boceta said, taking his usual satisfaction at the opportunity to correct someone. “Your question should have been
what.
Villasboas is a what. More specifically, it’s a town in Pará.”
Pará was the state that embraced the mouth of the Amazon River, a huge area, much of it remote jungle.
“Alright,” Arnaldo said, letting out a long sigh of defeat. “You got me. I’ll bite. What happened in Villasboas?”
Boceta’s smile was more like a smirk. He took his time about answering. “Some bodies were found,” he finally said, “probably only a small percentage of the victims, but enough to excite interest. They were all young, all male, and all of them had their genitals removed. One of the perpetrators confessed. He was a medical doctor. The other people he implicated, another doctor, a few lawyers, some prominent local businessmen, denied involvement. It appears that he and his coreligionists all signed an oath in their own blood: lifelong obedience, secrecy about the rituals—”
Arnaldo tried to hurry things along. “Coreligionists? So they were members of some kind of cult?”
Boceta, running true to form, refused to be hurried. “Can you imagine any other reason why I might call them coreli-gionists?”
Arnaldo sighed. “No,” he said.
“Of course you can’t,” Boceta said. “Yes, it was a cult, a satanic cult. They believed that the devil wanted anyone with certain characteristics . . .” He paused and looked at the ceiling.
“What’s the matter?” Silva said.
“I forgot some of the characteristics. I’ll go to my office and look them up.”
He started to rise. Arnaldo put the heels of his hands over his eyes.
Silva motioned the profiler back into his chair. “That won’t be necessary, Godo. Look them up later. Put them in your written report.”
“Ah, yes, my written report. Alright. Where was I?”
“The devil wanted everyone with certain characteristics . . .” Silva prompted.
“To die. And the members of the cult were to be his instrument. To reward them for their obedience, he’d send a spaceship to rescue them from the destruction of the earth.”
“And they truly believed that crap?” Arnaldo asked.
“Enough to murder at least fourteen people,” Boceta said.
CLOSING IN ON RIBEIRO had been far simpler than Tanaka had dared to hope. In addition to the address, Ricardo had supplied the man’s telephone number.
Tanaka’s call was answered by a sleepy male voice.
He hung up and immediately called for backup. An hour later, he and Detective Danilo Coimbra rousted Ribeiro out of bed in his surprisingly neat and clean two-room flat. Overriding his protestations of innocence, they cuffed him and hauled him off to Tanaka’s delegacia.
In the early stages of his interrogation, Ribeiro demon-strated a self-confidence that bordered on arrogance.
“Hey, Delegado, you didn’t have to drag me all the way down here. I woulda taken care of you, and that partner of yours, too, without going to all of this trouble. I mean, time is money, right?”
“Is it? Is time money? Are you trying to bribe me, Ribeiro?”
“I got a good friend on the force. Maybe you know him. Lieutenant Soares?”
“Yeah, I know Soares,” Tanaka said.
It was true. Tanaka
did
know Soares—and so did every-one else in the policia civil. Soares was the brother-in-law of Adolfo Mendes, the secretary for public safety, and Mendes was the top law-enforcement official in the state’s government.
Soares was a man who’d made a fortune by being a cop. It was said that most of his earnings went to his brother-in-law and the governor, but Soares did very well with what was left for him. He drove a Lexus, and the parties at his beach house in Guarujá were said to be fantastic, although Tanaka couldn’t confirm that from personal experience. Even though he was only a lieutenant himself, Soares would never think of invit-ing a mere delegado titular
.
Soares wouldn’t invite a lowlife like Ribeiro either, but he
would
help him get out of jail, for a price.
“Why don’t you just call the lieutenant?” Ribeiro said. “He’ll vouch for me. I’m sure he will.”
“I’m sure he will, too,” Tanaka said. “But maybe we don’t have to do that.”
Ribeiro smiled. “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Means there’s more to go around.”
“More of what?”
“Come on, Delegado. You know what I’m talking about.”
“Money?”
“Yeah, money.”
“So what have you done, Ribeiro, that you feel you have to offer me a payoff?”
“Nothing. I haven’t done anything. It’s just the . . . con-venience. Your time is valuable, right? So is mine. So let’s cut to the chase. What do you think you have on me, and how much is it gonna cost to make it go away?”
That was when Tanaka hit him with it. He told him he didn’t want his money. He told him he knew about the fur-niture and the Lisboas. He told him he had a canceled check from Goldman, that he had witnesses who could identify the furniture, who could put him at the scene on the day the family disappeared. He told him about the corpses down at the Instituto Médico Legal. And then he tied it all together: he accused Ribeiro of kidnapping entire families—and killing them.
“And now,” he said, “all I need to know is why.”
Ribeiro denied knowing anything, but from that point on he stopped talking and started avoiding Tanaka’s eyes.
That was what he was doing now, five minutes into what had become a hostile interrogation. He sat with his shoul-ders slumped, staring at his hands. They were pudgy hands, like big, brown gloves, and they were splayed palm down-ward on the surface of the steel table. When Ribeiro moved them, they left spots of moisture on the cold metal. The air-conditioning in the interrogation room was cranked up high, but it didn’t dispel the pungent odor of sweat generated by years of interrogations like this one.
Ribeiro was on the point of cracking. Tanaka knew this, because he’d known hundreds of men like Ribeiro. But then Tanaka did something that surprised Ribeiro: he stood and abruptly terminated the interview. He could see incompre-hension written all over the carioca’s face, but only because he was looking for it. Almost immediately, incomprehension was replaced by a crafty expression. Ribeiro, the stupid bas-tard, was thinking that he’d actually pulled it off, that his stonewalling had brought Tanaka to a screeching halt. It would never have occurred to him that Tanaka didn’t
want
a confession. All he’d wanted to know was where Ribeiro worked and for whom. Now he did. The delegado waved at the one-way mirror on the wall. The door opened, and a uni-formed guard entered.
“Bring me the tapes of this interrogation,” Tanaka said, “both the audio and the video. As for Senhor Ribeiro here . . .” he paused, relishing the look of optimism on his prisoner’s face, “take him back to his cell and lock him up.”
Ribeiro’s face fell as the realization hit him that there was more, and probably worse, to come. His forehead was still creased in a frown, partly fear, partly confusion, when the guard pushed him into the corridor.
“BOCETA’S CONCLUSIONS,” SILVA SAID, pushing a thin document toward Arnaldo’s side of the desk.
It was the afternoon after their meeting with the profiler. They were alone in Silva’s office.
Arnaldo picked up the report and hefted it.
“One of his usual weighty tomes,” he said.
Silva nodded.
“Four pages,” he said. “Took me less than five minutes to read it.”
Boceta was known for talking long, but writing short. He loved the sound of his own voice, but found composing reports an onerous task.
“I had enough of him to last me a month,” Arnaldo said. “Why don’t you summarize?”
“He speculates that a cult or cults from Pará or Amazonas may be networking with a cult in São Paulo.”
“And?”
“And nothing. The rest is a detailed account of what hap-pened in Villasboas. He didn’t add a damned thing to what he said yesterday.”
Arnaldo grunted and shook his head in disgust. He was still shaking it when the telephone rang.
As it continued to ring, Silva got up and opened the door to his office. His new secretary, Camila, wasn’t at her post. He returned to his desk, punched the appropriate button, and picked up the instrument.
“Silva.”
“Answering our own phone, are we?”
Silva recognized the voice: Ana, Nelson Sampaio’s secretary.
“I think Camila found another boyfriend in the building,” he said.
“She did. This time, it’s that tax accountant down on the second floor, the cute one with the blue eyes.”
“Maybe she’ll get married and leave me.”
“You can always hope.”
“Not to interrupt the pleasant chat, but why are you calling?”
“He wants to see you.”
“Now?”
“Now. He’s got the minister of tourism with him.”
“The minister of—”
“Where the hell is he?” Sampaio said from somewhere in the background.
“On his way, Director,” Ana said sweetly. And hung up.
BRAZIL’S POOR had put the current president into office and then sent him back for a second term. An ex-union leader, he spent much of his time attending to their needs. The reduction of poverty had accordingly become his first priority. His second priority was extending Brazil’s influence throughout South America. His third priority was making Brazil a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Tourism came near the bottom of the president’s concerns, somewhere below ribbon-cutting and baby-kissing.
That left Caio Cavalcante, the minister of tourism, with little to do and a tiny budget. He was the smallest cog in the wheel and everyone in Brasilia knew it. But he was a minis-ter. He had the ear of the president. And possessing even a tiny piece of the president’s ear was enough to cause Nelson Sampaio to treat Caio Cavalcante with deference. Sampaio firmly believed that if you aspired to be a minister, you had to be seen to associate with ministers.
The director of the federal police had targeted Cavalcante because, as the least important man in the president’s cabi-net, he should have been the most accessible.
That much was true. Cavalcante had little official busi-ness to occupy his time, but the two men had no common interests, no mutual friends, no long-term history. And even the Least Important Man In The Cabinet had a myriad of people vying for his attention. Cavalcante chose his lunches with care, limiting them to men of potential and men who were in a position to tell him things he wished to know.
Nelson Sampaio was twice blessed. He was marked as a man on the rise, and he always prepared an interesting story or two with which to regale the minister prior to picking up the tab. Generally,
just
prior to picking up the tab, because Cavalcante tended to abandon his loquaciousness only when he got well into the Macieira, the Portuguese brandy he con-sumed to crown his repasts.
Before being appointed to his present lofty post, the min-ister had spent nineteen years as head of the (twenty-thou-sand-member strong) Restaurateur’s and Hotel Owner’s Association, a position that gave him access to many of Brazil’s movers and shakers. He was seen as an expert on the hospitality business, which, in fact, he was not. But in Brasilia, appearance beats substance every time, and appear-ance was something the minister had in spades. He always dressed well, was carefully groomed, appeared comfortable at the podium, kept his mouth shut at cabinet meetings, and carefully concealed his true nature from the public. His appointment was regarded favorably by almost everyone in the president’s political party.
He sat now on the couch in Sampaio’s office. The director hovered over him with an open humidor of cigars in one hand and a cutter in the other. Sampaio, who kept the humi-dor on the credenza behind his desk, liked to smoke a Montecristo Number 2 after lunch, but he never offered one to Silva.
“Sit down,” the director said when his chief inspector appeared on the threshold. He nodded to a chair that faced the couch from the other side of a low coffee table.
The minister chose one of the cigars, clipped off the end, and held it out for a light. Sampaio put down the humidor, performed the service with a long wooden match, took a seat at the other end of the couch, and busied himself with preparing a cigar. Once he had it lit, the two of them sat there, puffing away, looking at Silva through the smoke. The smell of aromatic tobacco filled the office.
The minister withdrew the Montecristo from his mouth and gazed upon it affectionately, giving it a look that most men of his age reserved for their grandchildren. “You know, the Americans ban the importation of these things?” he said.
“It’s those so-called exiles in Miami,” Sampaio said. “Exiles,” he snorted, “like they’re planning on leaving America and going back.”
“More power to them,” Cavalcante said. “Let the Americans smoke that Dominican crap. Keeps the price of the good stuff down. Supply and demand and all that.”
They smoked awhile in silence.
Silva waited.
“You’ve met Minister Cavalcante?” Sampaio asked, finally getting down to business.
“Never had the pleasure,” Silva said.
The minister took the cigar out of his mouth and extended a hand. Silva had to rise from his chair to take it. Cavalcante’s hand was soft and dry. He applied just the right amount of pressure. Not so weak as to demonstrate frailty, nor so strong as to imply he was a bully. Silva immediately recognized that he was in the presence of a master hand-shaker. The guy could have earned money by giving lessons to young politicians.
“The minister, as you know, is from São Paulo.”
Silva didn’t know any such thing, but he nodded and resumed his seat.
“The subject of that cemetery in the Serra da Cantareira came up at lunch. The minister expressed concern.”
Silva opened his mouth to say something, but a look from Sampaio caused him to shut it again.
“I told him,” the director went on, “that I share his con-cern, that I had dispatched you and Arnaldo to São Paulo, that I had already assigned our profiler to the case. Minister Cavalcante had some time before his next appointment, so he came back here with me to read Boceta’s report and dis-cuss the issue.”
Before Silva could formulate a polite way of asking why the hell the minister of tourism was sticking his nose into a murder investigation, Cavalcante took his cigar out of his mouth and leaned forward.
“This Boceta guy,” he said, “I think he’s full of shit.”
He returned the cigar to his mouth and leaned back on the couch.
“Could you elaborate on that?” Silva asked.
Sampaio responded for his guest. “The minister feels there’s no substantiation for Boceta’s speculations.”
“About a satanic cult?”
“Exactly. He feels, as I do, that there could be all sorts of other explanations for that cemetery. In the old days, for example, they used to have private cemeteries on the big estates. It could be one of those.”
“There were no tombstones, Director.”
“Who’s to say they used tombstones? Anyway, that’s just a hypothetical example. Remember that big flu pandemic after the First World War? There were millions of deaths world-wide. Whole families were wiped out. Something like that fits right in.”
“No, Director, it doesn’t. The forensics indicate that the graves weren’t that old.”
“But they weren’t from last week, or last month, or last year either,” Sampaio insisted. “You could almost call them ancient.”
“I don’t think I’d go quite as far as that, Director.”
“So how far would you go?”
“Dr. Couto, the medical examiner in São Paulo, estimates that the graves are between three and seven years old.”
Again, the minister leaned forward and took the cigar out of his mouth. “Let’s not quibble about how long those people have been in the ground,” he said. “When I say this guy . . .”
“Boceta,” the director filled in.
“ . . . is full of shit, I mean that there’s no justification for him to assume, as he does in his report, that the deaths are linked to a satanic cult.”
“Not necessarily, no,” Silva said.
The minister leaned back and nodded.
“The minister,” Sampaio said, “is concerned about the repercussions of the satanic-cult theory.”
“Repercussions?”
Cavalcante saw the puzzled look on Silva’s face. “Let me explain it to him, Nelson. You can’t expect him to see the big picture unless we show it to him, right?”
“Right,” Sampaio said.
“My concern,” Cavalcante said, turning to Silva, “is to make this country an attractive place for tourism. That’s the mandate given to me by the president. What kind of attrac-tion is there, I ask you, in a satanic cult that murders people?” The question was rhetorical. Cavalcante had no intention of ceding the floor. He continued with hardly a pause. “Now a serial murderer is another matter entirely. Serial murderers don’t seem to have a negative effect on tourism. Look at America. Look at all the serial murderers they’ve got, and people still flock to Disney World and Las Vegas by the mil-lions. And France. And the UK. Even little Belgium for Christ’s sake. You see all of that shit that went on with those kids in Belgium?”
Silva nodded. He kept up on international developments, particularly anything that involved crime. Cavalcante took the nod to be an agreement with his thesis. “There. You see? Madmen can sprout up anywhere. Eventually the guy is cap-tured, or dies, and that’s it. End of story. If he hasn’t been captured, and the crimes have stopped, isn’t it logical to assume that the guy who’s responsible for that cemetery in the Serra da Cantareira is dead?”
“There have been cases when a killer goes dormant—” Silva didn’t get any further than that. The minister cut him off.
“Now a cult, that’s something else,” he said. “A cult is lots of people. A cult doesn’t stop doing what it’s doing just because one member died. If it was a cult they’d still be at it, right?”
“It’s possible, but—”
“But nothing. You just got finished saying there are no recent bodies in those graves. Nothing from last week, or last month, or last year. The killer is out of business. No doubt about it. People who do things like that never stop, do they? Not as long as they’re alive. So he’s dead. That’s the only log-ical conclusion. I’ve read the books, seen the movies. The last thing the tourist industry in this country needs is for a fucking academic theorist like this . . . this . . .”
“Boceta?”
“ . . . to come up with some crazy theory that there’s a gang of madmen out there waiting to snatch people off the streets. The Americans would panic. They’d never come near us.”
They aren’t coming near us now,
Silva thought. But he didn’t say it. What he said was, “We can’t be sure there isn’t another cemetery out there someplace, one with more recent graves.”
“Any more than we can be sure it’s a cult,” the minister said.
“WHO THE hell does he think he is?” Arnaldo said an hour later. “Since when does the minister of tourism get involved in murder investigations?”
“Since the director invited him in,” Silva said.
“And what’s his problem with a line of inquiry that links them to a satanic cult?”
“That’s what I can’t figure out.”
“So what do we do now?”
“After Cavalcante left, Sampaio called in Boceta and had a go at him, told him he didn’t think much of his theory.”
“Uh-huh. And how did Boceta react to that?”
“You know of any other organization in this country that hires criminal profilers?”
“No, just us.”
“So how do you think Boceta reacted?”
“The little weasel stressed it was just a theory? Said he’d give it some more thought?”
“Uh-huh. And he asked the director to thank the minis-ter for bringing the lack of continuity, the absence of more recent murders, to his attention.”
“I don’t know why I bothered to ask. What now?”
“Now, Sampaio wants us to get back to what he calls the important stuff and leave the investigation of the graves to the people in São Paulo. Only he wants me to call them first and suggest that the line of investigation involving a possi-ble cult is a dead end.”
“And by the important stuff you mean?”
“Trying to dig up some dirt on Romeu Pluma.”
“Okay. That’s what the director wants. But what you’re really going to do is follow the cult thread and maybe look into why Cavalcante doesn’t want to investigate it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So how are we gonna do it without Sampaio—”
“Or Cavalcante.”
“Or Cavalcante getting wise to what we’re up to?”
“We’re going to tell Hector to go ahead, but to keep it out of his written reports, and I’m going to have a chat with Tarcisio Mello.”
