“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 am a detective.”
“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 such as it is?
“Favela, chefe. No street signs, no numbers.”
“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.
Chapter Twenty-one
Babyface Goncalves learned about the Portellas’ whereabouts the hard way-by getting hit on the head. The wound was painful, but it could have been worse. If his assailants had found his credentials, they would have killed him, that being the protocol for handling cops who stick their noses into favelas after dark.
Fortunately, the two punks who came up behind Babyface simply mistook him for an easy mark. After they’d hit him behind the left ear with a lead pipe, they limited them-selves to patting down the places where people normally carried their wallets. When they found his, they took it and made themselves scarce. They never discovered the special pocket he used for carrying his badge and police identifica-tion card. And they never found his Glock.
Unlike most cops, Babyface Goncalves didn’t carry his gun where people could see it. He carried it in a special holster in the small of his back, which is where the woman who found him put her hand when she helped him to his feet. She pulled back as if she’d been burned and took two steps away.
Babyface stood there, groggy, still tottering. For a minute, he thought she was going to run.
“I’m not one of the bad guys,” he said, when he saw that her eyes had assumed the dimensions of saucers. “I’m a cop.”
“Sweet Jesus,” she said.
Other than the yellow glimmer of kerosene lamps shining through cracks around ill-fitting doors, the street seemed to be devoid of human presence. She sighed and seemed to come to a reluctant conclusion. “Alright, damn it. Come with me,” she said, her voice angry now, but scarcely more than a whisper.
She led him through the mud and stopped at a hovel not twenty meters from where she’d found him. Like the other shacks lining the unpaved street, the place was built from scraps of wood and sheet metal. She reached into her purse, removed a key, and started fumbling with a padlock. A moment later, Babyface heard the squeak of rusty hinges. She pushed him ahead of her into the dark.
Inside, it smelled of lamp oil, excrement, and urine. It was Babyface’s second visit to a favela and the first time he’d been under someone’s roof. He’d been told they seldom had electricity, almost never had indoor plumbing. The smells confirmed it.
“Wait,” the woman said.
He heard her strike a match. It flared, illuminating her face. She was black, white haired, appeared to be about sixty, not as tall as he was, but probably heavier. And she looked like she’d just taken a big swig of milk and found it sour. She lit the wick of a kerosene lantern and covered it with a glass chimney. Then she hung the smoking lamp from a hooked piece of wire suspended from the ceiling.
“Sit,” she said, indicating a pile of coffee sacks.
Babyface sank down. The contents of the sacks squeaked. He put his hand onto the jute and squeezed broken pieces of foam plastic. The jute seemed sticky.
“Watch what you’re doing with that hand,” the woman said. “Get it off my bed.”
He did as he was told and looked down. It wasn’t the jute that was sticky; it was his hand, bloody from the wound behind his ear.
“You’re one hell of a mess,” she said.
“They hit me,” he said. “Stole my wallet.”
“If you really are a cop, you’re lucky they didn’t kill you.” She picked up a cloth, moistened it with water from a plastic jug, went around behind him, and started dabbing at his wound.
“Ouch,” he said.
“Should have left you where you were,” she said. She sounded less frightened, but no less angry.
“Why?”
She stopped her dabbing and walked around to look him in the eye.
“Who do you think you’re fooling?”
“Senhora, I appreciate your helping me, I truly do, but you seem to be angry about something and honest to God, I’ve got no idea what it might-”
“No idea, huh?”
“No.”
“And never heard of the Comando Vermelho either, right?”
“Comando Vermelho? Sure. They’re a drug gang, in Rio.”