Buried Strangers

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.

Chapter Eleven

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 Guaruja 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 Medico 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.

Chapter Twelve

“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 Para or Amazonas may be networking with a cult in Sao 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.