“Give me another explanation then.”
“It’s like I just told these guys, I don’t want to speculate. I’ve got an examiner up there now. Go have some coffee. Come back in half an hour.”
The cops went to a nearby padaria and took their cups to a table.
“Miranda was there when it happened,” Hector said.
“That’s confirmed, is it?” Silva asked.
“He got home at around ten-thirty last night. He never left.”
“That based on surveillance tapes?”
Hector nodded. “Time-coded. Security is, if anything, even tighter than at his office.”
Silva drained his coffee. “Run me through it.”
“To start with, Miranda’s elevator goes directly to his penthouse.”
“ Went directly to his penthouse,” Arnaldo said. “That elevator doesn’t go anywhere anymore.”
“Went, then,” Hector said. “The point is, no stops along the way. You could get on, or off, either from the garage or the penthouse, no other options.”
“Stairwell?” Silva asked.
“Sealed with a grate and rigged with an alarm. The grate is on the floor below, steel, hinged, triple-locked and set into a steel frame. The frame is embedded in the wall. Godoy’s examiner couldn’t open the locks, so she had to cut her way through it.”
“She? A woman?”
“Either that, or a guy with long hair, a high voice and breasts,” Arnaldo said.
Silva ignored him.
“Only the one elevator?”
“There are two others,” Hector said, “social and service, running upwards from the garage, but programmed not to go any further than the floor below Miranda’s. And to make damned sure they didn’t, steel girders were welded across the shafts.”
“He’d be good and stuck, wouldn’t he, if there was a power failure.”
“He had a generator in his apartment.”
“Big enough to power the elevator?”
“So I’m told.”
“Security cameras?”
“The building runs one on every entrance, including the garage. Miranda had two more of his own, one in the stairwell, one in the elevator.”
“The recorders for those two?”
“Upstairs, in the apartment.”
Silva glanced upward at the smoldering ruin.
“So they’re toast?” he said.
“They’re toast,” Hector confirmed.
“Guards?”
“Two in the apartment, one in the garage. The guy in the garage survived.”
“Other fatalities?”
“Miranda’s wife and two kids.”
Silva narrowed his eyes. “Kids? There were kids?”
“Third wife. Eight and six, both girls.”
Nothing affected Silva so much as the murder of children.
“You figure this is business related?” Hector said, breaking a short silence. “Some rival trying to take over Miranda’s bank?”
“Maybe,” Silva said. “But…”
Arnaldo caught his meaning and shook his head. “A job like this,” he said, “takes time to set up, lots more time than just a few hours. Besides, who knew Miranda was going to talk to us?”
“Cintia Tadesco,” Silva said. “Cintia Tadesco knew Miranda was going to talk to us.”
“She couldn’t have done it on her own. She would have needed help.”
“Five million dollars buys a lot of help. How about access to the garage from the outside?”
“Two sets of gates, on tracks, motor controlled. You go down the ramp and honk your horn. They check you out on the TV camera and open the first gate. Then they close it behind you before they open the second.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
The doormen in the lobby.”
“Is that the only switch?”
“It is.”
“Can both gates be opened at once?”
Goncalves shook his head.
“Do they issue remote controls to the residents?”
“No, and they don’t open the gates to anyone but them-or people they authorize-in person.”
“Other entrances?”
“The social entrance faces the street. The service entrance faces a parking lot in the rear. Access to the lot is via a driveway that runs along the side of the building.”
“The tapes?”
“I looked at the ones of the front door and the service entrance. I haven’t had time yet for the garage.”
“Anything suspicious?”
“Not yet. The images are lousy. The recorders are VHS devices, older than my grandmother. They run on a twentyfour hour loop. I shut the system down as soon as I got here, but by then it was hours after the explosion.”
Silva glanced at his watch. “It’s time. Let’s go back and hear what that fire examiner has to say.”
Elisabeth Correia had a smudged face and looked to be in her mid-thirties. Her heavy yellow coat was two sizes too big. When she took off her helmet, spiky black hair protruded in all directions.
“A bomb,” she said. “Almost certainly.”
“What kind?” Silva asked.
“I can’t tell you without chemical analysis. You want a guess?”
“Please.”
“Ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, or maybe kerosene.”
“A fertilizer bomb?”
“Yes. The fruitcake’s weapon of choice. They’re bulky, but they’re oh-so-easy to make. The detonator would have been the most sophisticated part of the package. If I’m lucky, I’ll find some trace of it.”
“In that mess? Seriously?”
“Seriously. Something else: they used an accelerant, probably gasoline. Liters and liters of the stuff. They poured it all over the place.”
“Did you find the children?”
“Yes.”
“Were they-”
She put up a hand, as if to fend him off. “Please, Chief Inspector,” she said. “I’m a mother, and I’m very close to losing it, and if I talk about what I just saw, I will lose it. That wouldn’t do either one of us any good, now would it?”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” She was looking up at the building.
“Believe me, I do. I once had a son.”
She met his eyes. He could see, now, that she had tears in hers.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Commiseration or apology, Silva wasn’t sure which.
“Any idea how they got the bomb into the penthouse?” he asked.
“They didn’t get it into the penthouse.”
