“I know. Bizarre, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Burning the corpses. You know what? I’m warming to the idea.”
“Oh, please. Was that meant to be a joke?”
“Not funny, huh?”
She shook her head.
“If they’re medical people,” he said, “and they’re burning the corpses, would they use a crematory oven?”
“I doubt it. Have you ever seen one of those things?”
“No.”
“They’re called retorts and they burn at a little over eleven hundred degrees Celsius, which means they have to be heavily insulated and need a substantial chimney. They’re huge, costly to buy and install.”
“How do you happen to know all of that?”
“I had a namorado who used to install those things.”
“I don’t think I want to hear about it.”
“About what? The retorts or the boyfriend?”
“The boyfriend.”
“Good. I don’t like talking about him. He was a creep. They also have to be licensed, retorts that is, not boyfriends, although come to think of it, that might have been a good idea in his case.”
“A namorado’s license?”
“Uh-huh. To get the license you’d have to pass a test. There’d be sections on sensitivity, reliability, honesty, and all that kind of stuff. You’d have to show a girl your license before you asked her out. My ex would have failed on all counts, particularly the fidelity part, the canalha.”
“These retort things,” he said, as if the conversation hadn’t taken a detour, “if they didn’t have one, how would they go about cremating a body?”
“There are other devices, ovens designed for the disposal of medical waste. They don’t burn as hot as retorts, so the process would take a lot longer, but they’d do the job. The advantages would be that they’re much smaller, cheaper, and more common. They wouldn’t attract attention if they were installed in a clinic, and although they require licenses, the licensing procedure is much simpler. The downside is that adult bodies wouldn’t fit inside. They’d have to be dismem-bered before cremation, and once the burning is complete, the bones would still have to be reduced to powder. That’s not a problem. There’s a machine that crematories use for grinding bone. It’s commercially available and quite small.”
Hector sat back in his chair and looked at her.
“What a mind,” he said. “We could make a good team. Professionally, I mean.”
“Sure,” she said, “professionally.”
“And, professionally, would you suggest I start checking out all the clinics that have ovens for the disposal of medical waste?”
“No, I wouldn’t. You might get lucky, but I doubt it. Unless you catch them in the act, all you’re going to do is to put them on their guard.”
“Hmm. You have another suggestion about where we go from here?”
“Let’s just get together and see how it plays out.”
“It’s a deal. Tomorrow night?”
“Eight o’clock. My place. Do you cook?”
“Not well.”
“Okay. It will be spaghetti with a meat sauce and salad. You buy the wine.”
“Chilean? A Carmeniere?”
“Too heavy.”
“A Cabernet Sauvignon?”
“Fine.”
“Getting back to the case. .”
“How about this: transplants, legal or illegal, are the last stop, the end of the line. They’re what you do when the diagnosis is certain, when there’s no other way to save a patient’s life.”
“So?”
“So you go back to the beginning. The path leading to a transplant begins with someone getting sick, going to a doc-tor, and having tests or treatment done. When it’s a heart problem, there’s going to be a cardiocath, or a radioactive stress test, probably both.The gear to do that kind of stuff is expensive. Only major hospitals have it.”
“So we find people whose tests-”
“And/or treatments.”
“-and/or treatments indicate they wouldn’t survive with-out a heart transplant.”
“Yes. And you cross-reference to the waiting lists for heart recipients. Anybody who didn’t put themselves on the list must have had access to an alternative source. Anybody who did, and is no longer there, has gotten a legal organ, or died or-”
“Has gotten one illegally?”
“You catch on fast,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-two
On the following morning, Hector called his uncle in Brasilia and told him whom he’d had dinner with and what she’d had to say.
“Your namorada may be onto something,” Silva said when he’d finished.
“She’s not my namorada, just a friend.”
“And even if she isn’t onto something,” Silva continued as if he hadn’t heard Hector’s interjection, “it’s a line of investigation we should have been exploring from the very beginning. Godo suggested it.”
“Transplants? Godo suggested transplants?”
“No. He just said the motive might be rooted in what he called a ‘utilitarian purpose.’ We went from there to cults without considering the more obvious alternative.”
“Are you going to tell Godo he might have been right after all?”
Silva sighed. “I suppose it’s the correct thing to do. And if your namorada is right-”
“She’s not my namorada.”
“-Godo will wind up finding out about it anyway. It’s going to make him even more insufferable.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“I’m not sure you’re wrong.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Put Danusa and Rosa on it.”
Danusa Marcus and Rosa Amorim were a study in contrasts.
Danusa was in her early thirties, shapely, and darkly beau-tiful, the only child of a rabbi, a woman who’d spent all of her teenage vacations working on a kibbutz. After gradua-tion, she’d returned to Israel and become an officer in the defense forces. She’d been happy there, might never have come home, if a group of Muslim terrorists hadn’t bombed her father’s synagogue. Both of her parents had perished in the explosion, as had thirty-four other people from Sao Paulo’s Jewish community.
Danusa was what her father had once referred to as an eye-for-an-eye person, a believer in a vengeful God of many rules and little mercy. She’d joined the federal police in the expec-tation that the techniques she’d learn, and the contacts she’d make, would lead her to the murderers of her parents. She still hoped to find them, and if she did, she intended to kill them.
In the meantime, she fervently believed she was doing God’s work by cutting a broad swath through Brazil’s crimi-nal underworld. She had an extensive private collection of automatic and semiautomatic weapons and didn’t hesitate to use them when circumstances demanded-and sometimes when they didn’t.
Rosa Amorim, on the other hand, was an agent in her midforties and the mother of three, two teenage boys and a daughter of nine. People meeting her for the first time often took her for an innocuous housewife. She was anything but.
Rosa had black belts in three martial arts and a degree in criminal justice from the University of Sao Paulo. For years, Silva had been trying to get her to stand for the examination for delegado, and for years she’d been refusing. Her husband was a successful businessman. Money wasn’t an object for Rosa. Putting bad guys behind bars was. She kept telling Silva she wasn’t “management material.”
Rosa and Danusa were specialists in “street work,” the canvassing process that most agents found tedious, but at which both of them excelled.
Hector briefed them at ten o’clock in the morning. They were already waiting, with a preliminary report, when he got back from lunch.
Danusa kicked it off: “It seems logical that if there’s any substance to the theory of that namorada of yours-”
“She’s not my namorada, just a friend.”
“-we can limit our search to just a few hospitals and pri-vate clinics, all of them within a radius of about fifty kilo-meters from the Praca da Se.”
The Praca da Se is a square in the heart of Sao Paulo. The zero kilometer post, from which distances on all of the state’s highways are measured, stands in the center of that square.