“Senhora Porto, if she-or anyone else claiming to be from the airline-gets in touch with you again, don’t let her in. Lock the door and call us immediately. Call me personally. Here’s my card.”
Silva took one out of his case and handed it to her. She looked at it and then looked back at him. For the first time, he saw alarm in her eyes.
“Don’t you think,” she said, “it’s time you told me what this is all about?”
“Yes, Senhora,” Silva said. “I do.”
And he did.
Chapter Fifteen
The following morning, at half past seven, Hector called Goncalves. Goncalves picked up on the fifth ring.
“Who’s this?”
“It’s Hector. What are you up to?”
“What the hell do you think I’m up to at this time of the morning?” Goncalves said testily.
“Kindly drag your tail out of bed,” Hector said. “I’ve got an assignment for you.”
Hector told him about Bruna Nascimento “A stewardess, huh?” Goncalves said, sounding more awake.
“These days, they’re called flight attendants.”
“And is this flight attendant of the attractive sort?”
“Spoken like a true professional. She’s a real looker.”
“You wouldn’t be misleading me, would you?” Goncalves asked.
“Not at all. I saw her photograph. The woman is gorgeous.”
“That being the case, why haven’t you taken this plum assignment for yourself?”
“You have a suspicious nature.”
“I do. It comes from being a cop. Answer the question.”
“I am happily affianced.”
“A fact of which I am aware. But I am also aware that you are not immune to the attractions of the fair sex. Could it be you fear Gilda’s sharp scalpels?”
Gilda Caropreso, Hector’s fiancee, was an assistant medical examiner.
“I do not fear Gilda,” Hector said. “I love her. It’s constancy that motivates me, not fear.”
“Constancy? What’s that?” the Federal Police’s Lothario said.
An hour later, he was at Bruna’s hotel. As he entered the air-conditioned comfort of the lobby, a team of paramedics was pushing a gurney toward the elevators. At the reception desk, a man with a badge was taking a statement. The cop tried to wave him off, but Goncalves flashed his Federal Police ID.
“What’s up?” he said.
“Simple homicide,” the cop said, “nothing that would interest the Federal Police.”
“Maybe not. Man or woman?”
“Woman.”
“Flight attendant?”
The cop raised his eyebrows. “Yeah.”
“Bruna Nascimento?”
“How the hell did you know that?”
“Just a bad feeling I had. And now it does interest the Federal Police.”
According to the time stamp on her registration, Bruna Nascimento had checked in at six twenty-seven in the morning of the previous day. The reception clerk remembered her well; remembered, too, that she’d sent her luggage upstairs. Then she and her companion, another flight attendant, had headed off in the direction of the coffee shop.
The homicide cop let the clerk finish his story and then filled Goncalves in on the other things he knew. The two women had taken a table near the door and ordered hot chocolate and croissants. They’d been joined by a man in uniform. The waiter, no expert on airline uniforms, was unable to say whether he was a flight attendant or a pilot. The airline guy left before the women did.
There’d been a DO NOT DISTURB sign on her door all day long. That wasn’t unusual. Sometimes the people on flight crews liked to laze their time away in their rooms.
The next day, when the sign was still there, a chambermaid had knocked. There’d been no answer, so she’d let herself in. And left screaming.
That had been just over an hour ago. The captain and the copilot had already been located. The captain hadn’t slept in the hotel at all. He had family in town. The copilot said he’d been in the coffee shop on the previous morning, but, since then, he’d had no further contact with the women.
The homicide cop went off in search of other people to interview. Goncalves went upstairs.
The assistant medical examiner was already there.
“How’s it going, Babyface?” the AME said. It was Plinio Setubal, a friend of Gilda Caropreso’s. Goncalves had met him once, at a party.
“Haraldo,” Goncalves said. “Haraldo, not Babyface.”
Setubal looked puzzled. “I thought everybody called you Babyface.”
“Only a few ballbusters,” Goncalves said, “and I don’t like it.”
Setubal shrugged and changed the subject. “You ever see anything like that?” He pointed at Bruna’s body. The once-beautiful girl was a frightful mess.
“Was she, by any chance, also shot?” Goncalves asked.
Setubal did a double take. “Once. In the lower abdomen. How did you know?”
“She’s not the first,” Goncalves said. “You already take the body temp?”
Setubal shook his head.
“Can’t. Not until Janus Prado gets here. He gets antsy if we start messing with the bodies before he’s had a look. I can tell you a couple of things, though.”
“What?”
“Rigor is diminishing, so she’s probably been dead for at least twenty-four hours. And some of those wounds are postmortem. The guy who did it just went on beating her and beating her.”
“After she was dead?”
“You have another definition of postmortem?” Setubal said.
Twenty minutes later, just when Goncalves was concluding that there was nothing to be learned by hanging around any longer, Bruna’s friend showed up. Her name was Lina Godoy.
They put her in a vacant room, and Goncalves went to talk to her. He knew Janus Prado wouldn’t like his questioning her alone, but Prado, Sao Paulo’s head of homicide, was one of those people who’d been spreading the “Babyface” nickname around. Goncalves delighted in irritating him.
Lina was sitting on one of the beds, staring at the wall and clutching a handkerchief. She looked up when he opened the door, started talking even before he’d introduced himself.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I can’t believe she’s dead.”
Lina was pretty, a brunette, his type. But then, most women were Goncalves’s type.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and told her he was a cop.
“Who did it?” she said. Her eyes were a grayish green.
“We don’t know. Not yet.”
“Was she… raped?”
“We don’t know that either. I’ll have to ask you some questions.”
“Anything. Anything I can do to help.”
He took a chair from in front of the desk, placed it against the wall, and sat down. There wasn’t much room on that side of the bed. Their knees were only centimeters apart, which suited Goncalves just fine. He took in a deep breath of her perfume. Something floral.
In a few short minutes, she took him through the events of her last morning with Bruna: the coffee shop, the
