undoubtedly linked, he would be alive today instead of-”
Click.
Silva put down the remote control. “I give him fifteen minutes,” he said.
Hector scratched his head. “Who?” he said. “Who do you give fifteen minutes?”
Nelson Sampaio was on the line in less than ten.
“Did you see Roberto Malan’s interview on Rede Mundo?” His voice was higher-pitched than usual. He sounded, Silva thought, like someone was squeezing his scrotum.
“Yes, Director, I did. Grandstanding, I think they call it.” Sampaio, who was prone to doing quite a bit of grandstanding himself, glossed over Silva’s critique.
“Why, Mario? Why would he go and do a thing like that?”
“I assume,” Silva said, “the deputado has become impatient with us in general and with me in particular. I’ve kept him waiting for news about his granddaughter. He can’t go public with that, so he chose another opportunity to make us the whipping boy. He knows the escape of the Andrade woman still galls us. He knows it would be painful to reopen the wound. What he doesn’t know is it’s all connected: the death of Father Vitorio, the disappearance of his granddaughter, Claudia Andrade, they’re all tied together.”
“Claudia Andrade? She’s involved?”
Sampaio was silent for a moment. Silva thought the director was going to insist on more details.
But he didn’t.
“Shouldn’t we tell Malan what we already know?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“The only way to appease him is to tell him something concrete about the whereabouts of his granddaughter. I’m not yet in a position to do that.”
Just before lunchtime, Lefkowitz came to call. He settled into a chair in Silva’s suite, and while he mopped his brow Hector went to fetch him a guarana from the little refrigerator.
“I didn’t want to use the telephone,” Lefkowitz said, removing his glasses and wiping off sweat with his handkerchief. “The chief has a tap on it. I know that for a fact, because I’m the one who put it there. He’s also instructed that all contact with you guys is to go through him. He’s going to be pissed if he finds out I was here.”
“If he does, it won’t be from us,” Arnaldo said. “We’re giving the chief the mushroom treatment.”
“Keeping him in the dark and feeding him a lot of shit, huh?”
“You know them all, don’t you, Lefkowitz?”
“Just the really old ones. Has he told you about the prints?” “Not a word,” Silva said.
“I figured as much.”
“Was I right?”
“Yes, Chief Inspector, you were. That Andrade woman left her prints all over the house.”
He took a long draught of his guarana.
“Anything else?”
Lefkowitz smacked his lips and nodded.
“There were three cars on the street near Carla’s, sorry, Claudia’s place. One was registered to a lowlife by the name of Delfin Figueiredo. Soon as you left, the chief and his buddies were all over it.”
“You and your people weren’t invited to participate?”
“Nope. The story’s going around there was money found. They split it among themselves. Lion’s share for the chief, of course.”
“Of course,” Silva said. “You see him do it?”
Lefkowitz shook his head.
“And nobody else would be willing to testify they did. The chief scares people. Now as to the blood, it’s gonna take a while to get the DNA results.”
“So you can’t tell us how many victims there were?”
“Not yet, but I can make an educated guess.”
“So, guess.”
“At least a dozen.”
The package arrived about an hour after Lefkowitz left. It was wrapped in brown paper, bore no stamps, no return address. Silva’s name was on the front, neatly written with a felt-tipped marker.
“Dropped off at reception by some kid,” Arnaldo said. “Desk clerk never saw him before.”
The package contained a single VHS tape, no note, no label.
The hotel’s convention center had a VCR, but it was broken. In the end, Arnaldo had to go out and buy one. It was almost six in the evening before they had it hooked up. The tape opened with a close-up of Claudia Andrade and maintained that visual all the way to the end. The composition was so tight that her pores were prominent, so tight that no clue to her surroundings was visible. The recording could have been made anywhere. The camera captured her head-on, foreshortening her prominent nose. There was a smile on her face. She looked quite attractive.
“Sorry I missed you,” she said. She paused to let the significance of the remark sink in. Missed killing them, she meant. “It’s so difficult to hire decent help these days.”
Her smile faded and her eyes turned hard. “Your attentions are getting tiresome. You need something else to worry about, so I’ve arranged it. Deputado Roberto Malan is going to get a little package. After what I saw on Rede Mundo, I’d hazard a guess that he dislikes you almost as much as I do. What I’ve sent him is going to make him dislike you even more.”
The screen went black.
“Bitch scored another goal.” Arnaldo said, his face grim.
“Game’s not over,” Silva said, hitting the stop button.
Hector looked from one to the other. “What the hell was she talking about?”
“She killed Marta,” Silva said. “She killed her, made a video of it, and mailed the damned thing to Marta’s grandfather.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Bento Rosario screwed off the cap and took a tiny sip of water. It loosened his tongue from the roof of his mouth, but did nothing to assuage the dryness in his throat. Still, he had to conserve the little he had. There was less than a centimeter left in the bottle, barely enough for a healthy swallow.
If Silva doesn’t show up sometime soon, he thought, I’m gonna have to decide between thirst and a bullet.
Just then, a mosquito bit him behind the right ear. He reacted instinctively.
Slap.
A mistake. One of the taxi drivers heard the noise and looked toward the bushes where he was hiding. Bento forced himself to lie perfectly still. After a while, the taxi driver went back to his newspaper.
A tour group, headed by a woman with a name tag pinned to the lapel of her bush shirt, came out of the Hotel Tropical. She passed between two taxis and led her charges toward the pier, where the excursion boats were docked.
He wiped his forehead. Partly, it was because of the heat, but he would have been sweating even if the day had been cooler. Bento Rosario was scared to death.
The turnaround in Bento’s life had come with dizzying speed. It was his own fault. It would never have happened if he’d followed his uncle Tarcio’s advice.
“Working for the city is like being in the army,” Tarcio had said.
Bento had never been in the army. He’d escaped compulsory military service because of his flat feet. He had to ask Tarcio for clarification.
“You keep your head down,” Tarcio had explained, “do what you’re told to do, never take initiatives, and
