Chapter Twenty
“Ugliest damned thing I ever saw,” Hector said, speaking of the shocking-pink holding cell in Tanaka’s delegacia.
“Uglier, even, than the director’s wife?” Arnaldo said.
The director’s wife, Neidy Sampaio, had been no beauty to begin with, but she’d let herself go after marriage. Her pic-ture, the one in the center of the triptych on her husband’s desk, was at least fifteen years old and bore no relationship to the current article. These days, Neidy had a problem with facial hair and was at least forty kilos heavier than when the photograph was taken.
And if her appearance fell short of attractive, her person-ality was worse. She was a surly woman who seldom had a good word for anyone, including her husband. Silva had often asked himself why his boss remained married to her until he found out she was the sole heiress to a considerable fortune.
So, although there was truth in Arnaldo’s comparison between the holding cell and the wife of the head of the fed-eral police, the bold comment still stopped Hector short. But only for one reason: “Didn’t you guys tell me I was on the speakerphone?” he said.
“You are. But it’s just the two of us here,” Silva said. “Besides, the door is closed and our fearless leader is at lunch.”
Silva and Arnaldo were in a conference room at federal police headquarters in Brasilia. Hector was calling from beyond closed doors in Tanaka’s office.
“Okay, then,” Hector said. “The answer is yes, even uglier than Senhora Sampaio. That cell is bizarre. I don’t care if it’s just for females. There are certain things that shouldn’t be pink. What’s next? Pink handcuffs? A pink pistol for female agents?”
“I take your point,” Silva said.
“There’s a sergeant here, a guy by the name of Lucas. He told me it was Tanaka’s idea, some kind of publicity stunt. He let the prisoners choose the color. There’s a clipping about it on the wall of his office, interviews with Tanaka’s boss and the state secretary of security. Both of them loved it. Or said they did.”
“No accounting for taste.”
“Yeah,” Arnaldo said. “Look at Sampaio.”
“So what did you find out?” Silva said.
“I had a long chat with Sergeant Lucas. He didn’t know, until I told him, any of the details about the cemetery in the Serra. Tanaka never bothered to fill him in. Or anybody else, as far as I can determine.”
“And this guy Lucas doesn’t read newspapers?”
“Sports pages, maybe. Probably not much more than that. When I mentioned there were cases of children buried with their parents, he put two and two together. He thinks he knows what Tanaka might have been up to.”
Arnaldo leaned closer to the speakerphone. Silva sat up straighter in his chair.
“Tell me more,” he said.
“There’s this favela called Jardim Tonato. According to Lucas, Tanaka never gave much of a damn about what hap-pened there. He used to say that if they wanted to kill each other, it was fine with him. The vast majority of the people who lived there were felons anyway, and he wasn’t going to waste manpower trying to intervene, because most deaths went to reducing the number of crooks in his district. Then this family, some stonemason, his wife, and two daughters, goes missing. It’s brought to his attention on the afternoon of the very day he promised to get back to us about entire families.”
“And he took a sudden interest.”
“Uh-huh. He insisted on interviewing the couple who made the complaint. He did it in his office, the one I’m call-ing from right now. And he did it from behind a closed door. Then he came out and told Lucas to get him a car. Usually, Tanaka wants to be driven and Lucas does the driving. Not that day. That day, he takes the couple with him and disap-pears. Lucas goes home, but later he finds out that Tanaka calls up and wants to talk to a detective named Danilo.”
“That place is a hotbed of intrigue.”
“Just like federal police headquarters,” Hector agreed. “Anyway, Danilo meets Tanaka, and a while later they’re back with some thug. Tanaka tells Danilo that he doesn’t need him anymore and takes the thug into an interrogation room. They’re in there for almost an hour. Then he has the thug thrown in a holding cell and takes off for places unknown.”
“Did they make any tapes during the interrogation?”
“They did. And here’s where it really gets interesting. Tanaka takes the tapes, both the video and the audio. He never brings them back and, get this, the arrest report and the original complaint are both missing.”
“As is the thug?”
“Tanaka released him and there’s no record, no record at all, of who he was.”
“Tanaka was onto something,” Arnaldo said.
“Impressive deduction,” Hector said. “You ought to be a detective.”
“I
“Some people question that.”
“Those that do had better be very big and very strong,” Arnaldo said.
“Anyway,” Hector said, “we did have one stroke of luck. Lucas took down the original complaint in longhand. He’s still got it. The name of the missing couple is Lisboa, Edmar and Augusta. Two daughters, named Mariana and Julia.”
“And the complainants?”
“Portella. Ernesto and Clarice. We’ve got their address, such as it is.”
“What do you mean
“Favela,
“But Lucas knows how to find their shack?”
“He does.”
“Go for it. Call me when you know more.”
Hector called back three hours later. Silva told him to wait and went down the hall to where Arnaldo was working a telephone, calling cops at delegacias within a five-hundred-kilometer radius of the little town of Villasboas, trying to garner more information on anything that might remotely have been construed as ritual murder.
Before Silva could ask, he said, “Nothing about corpses with their sternums sawn through. Not yet, anyway.”
“Hector’s on the line,” Silva said. “Come back and listen.”
“Sergeant Lucas took me to the Portellas’ house,” Hector said a minute or two later. “No luck. Nobody home.”
“The neighbors?”
“Here’s how it works: you got people who’re at home dur-ing the day and people who’re at home during the night. Most of the people at home during the day are lowlifes who’re sleeping off a drunk or a hard night of breaking and entering or drug dealing. The folks who are at home during the night are mostly hard-working types. The Portellas, by all accounts, are in that category.”
“So somebody has to go back at night.”
“Right.”
“Not nice. Days are bad enough in those places, but nights. . Well, it can’t be helped. Somebody has to do it. Send Babyface. And tell him to bring a gun.”
“I don’t think I’ll have to tell him,” Hector said.
