Buried Strangers

victims side by side, indicating he doesn’t give particular importance to any one victim; sometimes he buries them in a mass grave, adults and kids all heaped in together, not taking any care to arrange them, just disposing of the corpses. My conclusion is that he doesn’t attach any aesthetic value to what he’s doing, that he isn’t milking it for a vicarious thrill, that he is, in short, not acting out of any inner compulsion. He’s not your stan-dard serial killer. I say he, but only to avoid repetition. I don’t want to waste your time.”

“Perish the thought,” Arnaldo said.

Boceta narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth to reply, but Silva deftly cut him off. “So we could be dealing with a her, or a them, instead of a him?”

Boceta kept looking at Arnaldo. He looked so long that Silva was arriving at the conclusion that he’d have to repeat his question. But then the profiler said, “Exactly.”

It was probably the most succinct answer that Godofredo Boceta had ever given to anyone.

Silva pressed his advantage. “Okay, but I’m not sure I get it. What you’re saying is-”

“I’m saying that I sense some utilitarian purpose here.”

“Utilitarian purpose? What do you mean by a utilitarian purpose?”

“Well. . genocide, for example.”

“Genocide? You call genocide a utilitarian purpose?”

“In the mind of the perpetrator, or perpetrators? Of course it is. Haven’t you heard the term ethnic cleansing? The people who practice it actually believe that they’re making a posi- tive contribution to their societies. Think of the Turks and the Albanians, the Hausa and the Ibo, the Bosnians and the Serbs, the Nazis and the-”

“Enough. I take your point.”

“In all the cases I’ve cited, and many more that I could cite, the killers attached no great significance to the dispos-al of the bodies. Burning, dissolving in acid, burying, tossing into rivers, it was all the same to them, a simple problem of disposal where ritual played no role. There are consistencies between what they did and the behavior we see here.”

“So you’d rule out ritual killings?”

Boceta waved a finger in Silva’s face. “I never said that. Don’t put words in my mouth. I merely suggested a hypoth-esis. There are, of course, other explanations.”

“Ones in which ritual might be involved?”

“Of course.”

“Give me an example.”

Boceta thought for a moment. Then he said, “A use for body parts, perhaps.”

“Like what?”

“Some believe that the eating of human flesh conveys benefits. That, by consuming another human being, you take on some of their life force.”

“Now we got cannibals in Sao Paulo?” Arnaldo said. “Fat chance.”

“I wasn’t talking to you, Agente. Whether cannibals are active in Sao Paulo or not is no concern of mine.”

“No? So why are you suggesting it?”

Boceta shot Arnaldo a beady-eyed stare before turning back to Silva.

“You might want to inquire, Chief Inspector, if the skele-tal structures of the victims were intact.”

“Why?”

“In ritual killings, the murderers often go after specific bones or body parts containing those bones. If the skeletal structures are incomplete, that could tell you something. Mind you, it would only be significant if the same mutilation took place in every case.”

Arnaldo turned to Silva. “Remember when Dr. Couto cut that assistant of his short? Maybe she was gonna say some-thing about missing parts.”

“Maybe,” Silva said. “And I’m sure Hector would be de-lighted to call her up and ask her.”

Chapter Nine

Sergeant Lucas knew Tanaka was not a man to be moved by the disappearance of a family of nobodies from a favela. There had to be something else driving him, and in Lucas’s experience, one of Tanaka’s principal motivators was money. Lucas, too, was not averse to earning a few reais on the side. If he hung around and kept a close eye on his boss, he hoped some of the crumbs might fall to him.

When he heard Tanaka’s door open, he kept his head down, picked up a pile of paperwork, and dropped it on top of the newspaper he was reading.

“Sergeant?”

Lucas looked up. “As ordens, Delegado.”

“Get me a car.”

Lucas repressed a smile. Tanaka drove himself to and from the office. On all other occasions, he took advantage of his seniority and had himself driven. The person who normally did the driving was Sergeant Lucas.

Lucas stood up. “Right away, Delegado.”

Tanaka looked at the surface of Lucas’s desk. The paper-work didn’t quite cover the sports pages of the Diario Popular.

“And since your hands are so full this morning,” he said dryly, “I’ll dispense with your services and drive myself.”

The shop was on a crowded street in Bom Retiro, a place of broken and narrow sidewalks, rumbling trucks, and crum-bling facades. Once, years ago, it had been a residential neighborhood, lower-middle class even then, going downhill ever since. The shop’s proprietor had moved a number of his bulkier and cheaper pieces into the open air, completely blocking the space between the shop and the curb. Tanaka had no doubt that the man was slipping a few reais to the cops on the beat to get away with occupying so much of a public thoroughfare.

He parked in front of the hardware store next door. The guy arranging a display in the window gave the police car an apprehensive glance. He looked relieved when the people who got out of it started walking toward his neighbor’s establishment.

Next to one of the rolled-up metal doors was a sign, black letters on enameled metal, identifying Avri Cohen as the proprietor.

“Dead these two years,” a balding man with a paunch told Tanaka as the delegado stood there, making a note of it. “I own the place now. Name’s Goldman.”

Tanaka produced his policeman’s identity card.

“Hang on a second,” Goldman said. He took out a pair of reading glasses, gave the card a careful inspection, and then said, “What can I do for you, Delegado?”

He didn’t strike Tanaka as being nervous.

“For the moment,” Tanaka said, “you can just follow along. Lead the way Senhora Portella.”

Clarice navigated her way through the warren of furniture and stopped in front of a cupboard. Stained a walnut brown, with two latticework panels for ventilation, the triangular cupboard had been designed to fit into the corner of a room.

“This one,” she said. “And that’s the dining set over there.” She frowned and looked around. “I don’t see the bedside tables. They were right there, between the sofa and the wall.”

“Formica tops?” Goldman asked.

“Formica tops,” she confirmed.

“I sold them. What’s this about?”

Tanaka turned a cold eye on the merchant.

“Stolen goods,” he said.

Senhor Goldman held up his hands, palms outward, as if he were pushing something away from him.