Buried Strangers

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