the following morning, he drove from Sao Paulo to Campinas. It was a pleasant drive through verdant hills studded with small farms, and he made good progress until he reached the outskirts of the city. But then things started to go wrong.
Campinas, now numbering over three million inhabitants, had recently introduced a number of one-way streets. He was in town for more than an hour before he located the precinct housing the homicide squad.
But he’d called ahead, and when he gave his name to the desk sergeant, he was immediately directed to the office of Delegado Artur Seixas.
Seixas was a man pushing sixty. On the wall behind his desk was a small blackboard with a label. Days Until Retirement, it said. The number 27 was scrawled in white chalk.
“From today?” Hector asked.
“Including weekends,” Seixas said. “First thing I do every morning is pick up the chalk and change the number.” He stuck out a hand and Hector shook it. “It was my wife’s idea. She keeps telling me how great it’s going to be, and I go along with the game. But the truth is I hate the idea. You’d think thirty-five years would be enough, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it isn’t. Not for me. I don’t fish, I don’t hunt, I got no hobbies at all. I’m afraid I’m gonna go nuts. You want to go get some lunch?”
They sat at a counter and ate sandwiches.
“I understand you have a suspect,” Hector said when the conversation turned to the Neves case.
“You talking about Eduardo Coruja, his business partner?”
“Him.”
“Nah! That turned out to be a dead end.”
“No other suspects?”
“Nope.”
“Any forensics that might help?”
“We got the bullet and sent it to Brasilia. My understanding is you’re going to compare it to the one you took out of that Venezuelan.”
“We are. Anything else?”
“Nothing else. And our forensics people are first-class.”
“Unicamp, huh?”
Seixas opened his hands, as if the answer was obvious. And indeed it was. Unicamp, the Campinas branch of the University of Sao Paulo, trained the best criminal forensics people in the country. The professors who worked there were often called upon, nationwide, to consult on difficult cases.
“No offense,” Hector said, “but I’d still like to have a look at that apartment.”
“None taken,” Seixas said. “We can go over there right now. I brought the key.”
Neves had lived in a high-rise bordering the university’s campus. The neighborhood was packed with bars, boutiques, and trendy restaurants. The building’s security guard recognized the grizzled cop from previous visits and buzzed them through at once.
An elevator was waiting. The indicator panel skipped every other number. “Lofts,” Seixas said. “Every apartment takes up two floors.”
Victor Neves’s place was on seventeen. His front door opened onto a living area backed by windows rising two stories to the ceiling. A counter divided the living/dining area from the kitchen. An open door led to a guest bathroom. A stairway curved upward.
“Watch your feet,” Seixas said, indicating some dried bloodstains just inside the front door.
“Must have shot him right here,” Hector said.
“Uh-huh,” Seixas agreed. He pointed to a much larger bloodstain near the sofa. “And beat him to death over there.” One side of the blood pool had a straight edge. “There was a carpet,” Seixas said. “They took it for analysis.”
“And?”
“Lots of fibers and stuff. Some interesting blond hairs, so they tell me, but we’ve got nothing to compare them with, so they’re all pretty useless at this stage.”
“I take it Neves’s girlfriend is not blond.”
“You take it right. She’s a brunette.”
The downstairs area was small, the furnishings sparse. The kitchen had all of the modern conveniences, including a dishwasher, but everything in miniature. The apartment was spacious enough for a couple, but not for a couple with kids. Telltale smudges of black fingerprint powder showed on many of the surfaces.
“What’s upstairs?” Hector asked.
“A bed and a bathroom. Go ahead. Have a look. I’ll stay here. I’ve seen it already, and I have bad knees.”
Hector climbed the stairs, stood at a metal rail, and took in the view of the city. Beyond the urban sprawl, a mountain range showed bluish in the haze.
Seixas looked up at him from below. “The shades were down when Neves was found,” he said. “He’d probably closed them for the night.”
Closets with sliding doors lined the far side of the sleeping area. Next to the bed was a small table with a clock radio, a reading lamp, and a copy of a novel written by Paulo Coelho. Hector picked up the book and absently flipped through the pages. A bookmark slipped out and fell to the floor. He picked it up, looked at it, and went downstairs to show it to Seixas.
“Neves was reading Guerreiro da Luz. He left it on the nightstand next to his bed. Guess what he was using for a bookmark?”
“Tell me,” Silva said.
“A boarding pass for a flight from Miami International to Sao Paulo Guarulhos. Neves’s name was on it. He was in Miami last November.”
“And so was Rivas. Is that what you’re getting at?”
“A long shot, I know-”
“A very long shot.” Silva grabbed a ballpoint from the porcelain mug on his desk. “Date?”
“The twenty-second of November.”
“Airline?”
“TAB.”
“Flight number?”
“8101.”
“Got it. Did you get a chance to speak to Janus?”
“I did.”
Janus Prado was the head of Sao Paulo’s homicide squad.
“Did he have anything more on that thug Joao Girotti?”
“He was busted on a burglary charge, but in the end they couldn’t hold him. The witness, the only witness, recanted.”
“Bought off?”
“Or scared off. Girotti was released on the afternoon of the day he was killed. If he’d stayed in jail, he might still be alive. The term ‘protective custody’ comes to mind.”
“Don’t be a wiseass. You’re starting to sound like Arnaldo.”
“Heaven forbid.”
“What else?”
“Prado’s guys are doing no more than go through the motions. Their feeling is that whoever killed Girotti did the city a favor.”
“Did they question the people in the bar?”
“Only briefly. Girotti was there celebrating his release. He drank nonstop from about five in the afternoon until nine or nine thirty at night. Then he left. His body was discovered fifteen minutes later.”
“He left alone?”
“No. With a woman.”
