Buried Strangers

Yoshiro Tanaka’s telephone rang. He leaned to his left to look through the open door. Sergeant Lucas, who should have been screening incoming calls, wasn’t at his desk. Tanaka cursed and grabbed the receiver.

“Tanaka,” he said sharply.

“Delegado?”

“Who’s this?”

“Sergeant Corvo.”

Corvo was in charge of the police garage, the building the cops called the Beehive because of its tapering, circular shape.

“What is it, Sergeant?”

“Uh, Delegado, I think you’d better come over here.”

“Why?”

“Well, uh. . they broke into your car.”

“Broke into my. . right in the middle of your goddamned garage?”

“Sim, Senhor. Smashed the front window on the passen-ger’s side. The radio and CD player are still there, though. Bastard must have gotten interrupted before he could get them out.”

“Interrupted, but not caught, right?”

“Hey, Delegado, this is a big place, and I’ve only got three-”

“Save it for your annual evaluation meeting, Sergeant. You’re going to need it. I’m on my way. Meet me out in front.”

* * *

An unhappy-looking Sergeant Corvo was waiting for Tanaka at the base of the ramp. They started climbing it together. A shift change was under way, and Corvo had to raise his voice to be heard over the sound of the ascending and descending vehicles.

“Detective Vieira came in a few minutes ago,” he said. “His slot is right next to yours. He saw the damage and clued us in. It had to have happened here because there’s broken glass all over the floor, not just on the front seat.”

“Bastards,” Tanaka said, wrinkling his nose, as he always did, at the smell of the place. Gasoline exhaust, he figured, was even more toxic than tobacco smoke. They reached the second floor and came in sight of his car. The front window on the passenger’s side had been smashed.

“One thing I can’t figure out,” Sergeant Corvo said.

“What?”

“That package you left on the front seat? They didn’t take it.”

“Package?”

“And there’s no glass on top of it. It’s like someone brushed it off after they smashed the window. I mean, no-body would have broken the window and then put it there, right? People break into cars to take stuff out, not to put stuff in.”

They were only a few meters away from Tanaka’s four-year-old Volkswagen Gol. The delegado stopped dead in his tracks. Sergeant Corvo stopped, too, and studied Tanaka’s face.

“Hey, Delegado, what’s wrong with you? You look like you’re gonna be sick.”

“Here he comes,” Roberto Ribeiro said.

Claudia Andrade tossed her newspaper into the backseat.

“Finally,” she said.

There was a uniformed sergeant waiting for Tanaka at the base of the ramp.

“Now,” Claudia said, as the two cops disappeared inside the oddly shaped building.

Ribeiro pushed the button on the stopwatch. Claudia had taken the same stopwatch onto the ramp and timed the walking distance to Tanaka’s car. His legs were shorter than hers. She’d calculated it would take Tanaka twenty-two sec-onds to get there.

“They’re not walking fast,” Roberto said. “I think we should give it a couple of extra seconds.”

“Oh, you do, do you?”

“I just-”

“Give me that,” Claudia snapped.

She reached out and snatched the watch. Plastic explo-sive was powerful stuff. A small error either way wasn’t going to make much of a difference. The stopwatch was a digital one, counting off the seconds in racing-red numbers. Twenty-one, two. . Claudia pushed the spring-loaded switch, the one marked “rudder,” on the radio- frequency transmitter. Above her, in the garage, the receiver picked up the signal and activated the solenoid. The contact points closed and electricity flowed from the battery to the detona-tor- all in a fraction of a second. A ball of flame spouted out of the open gallery on the second floor. The shock wave hit them a second later, rocking her car as if something heavy had bounced off the hood.

“Jesus Christ,” Ribeiro said, scrubbing both ears. “I shoulda used earplugs.”

Thick, black smoke roiled out of the building. There was a flash and a boom as a fuel tank exploded.

The place was an inferno.

Chapter Nineteen

It might have been the personalities of the women he chose, or the fact that he liked them young, or the fact that he looked more like a sympathetic priest than a hard-nosed cop, thereby awakening in his partners a need for confession. But whatever it was, it had been Babyface Goncalves’s expe-rience that many women did exactly the same thing after their first sexual encounter with him: they reached for a cig-arette, propped themselves up in bed, and started bitching about their mothers.

Miranda Cavalcante was different.

She started bitching about her father.

“It was hell growing up with him,” she said. “Sheer hell. He doesn’t care about anybody below the age of twenty. He doesn’t like babies, doesn’t like young kids, doesn’t even like dogs and cats. He only shows an interest in people who are capable of some kind of verbal exchange.”

“Um-hm,” Babyface said, hating the cigarette smoke, but not wanting to complain about it. Complaining might cause her to clam up.

“It’s not like he’s any kind of intellectual,” she went on. “He doesn’t care about art, or history, or any of that kind of stuff. He doesn’t even care about futebol, unless it’s the World Cup.”

That went without saying. You couldn’t be in Brazil dur-ing the World Cup and not care about soccer. Even the American tourists got caught up in it, and most of them didn’t give a shit about the sport. Not caring about the World Cup, Goncalves mused with the part of his mind that wasn’t listening to Miranda’s rant, was impossible. Like being in two places at the same time, like a serial killer being soft hearted.

“All he really cares about is himself, and politics.”

Babyface thought that sounded like someone else he knew: Nelson Sampaio, the head of the federal police. “Sounds a little cold,” he said.

What he almost said was, sounds like a cold-hearted bas-tard, but that was motivated more by thoughts of Sampaio than Randi Cavalcante’s statements about her father.

“Cold is right,” she said. “I doubt he ever talked to me for more than a minute at a time in all the years I was growing up. And when he did, it was to tell me to do this or that or not to do this or that. He never asked me to tell him what I thought, what I felt, anything like that. He likes bossing people around, but he hates listening to their problems.”

Babyface made a noncommittal grunt.

“I had a baby brother,” she said, stubbing her cigarette out in the big glass ashtray next to her bed and immediately light-ing another. “He passed away when I was thirteen. He was only four months old when he died of SIDS. Ever heard of it?”