Dr. Couto had hit the nail squarely on the head. With a crime as high-profile as this one, Sampaio would be sure to regard anything other than a rapid solution and a quick arrest as bad publicity. And one thing he hated even more than Romeu Pluma was bad publicity.
“What else have you got?” Silva asked, breaking the lengthening silence.
The medical examiner shook his head.
“Not a hell of a lot. Doctor Caropreso”-he stressed her title, looking at Hector while he did it-“and her people excavated to a depth of thirty centimeters under each body. All of the victims were buried without a stitch of clothing. We found no bullets, no foreign objects. There was hardly any flesh to test for toxins and no trace, either, of anything lethal in the hair. Now, we’re starting on the skeletons.”
“What causes of death can we rule out?” Silva asked.
Dr. Couto took another sip of his coffee.
“We haven’t run across any fractures of the hyoid bones, so I think we can rule out strangulation, but not suffocation. The skulls seem to be in good shape, so it’s unlikely to be blunt trauma.”
Gilda leaned forward. “There is one curious-”
Dr. Couto raised a hand to cut her off. “And it would be premature,” he said, “to elaborate any further at this time. Give us a few more days, and we may have something to add.”
Silva shot his look back and forth between Gilda and Couto-and then focused on Couto.
“Come on, Paulo,” he said. “I need it now. Out with it.”
Dr. Couto shook his head. “You’re going to have to wait for it, Mario.” He gave Hector a significant look. “And don’t try leaning on my assistant in the meantime. You’ll be wast-ing your time. Her social life is her own, but her profession-al loyalties belong to me.”
Paulo Couto was also a man who didn’t miss much.
Five minutes later, the meeting broke up, Gilda remaining with Dr. Couto, the four cops heading for the street, Silva leading the way.
He paused in the reception area just inside the front door. “Taken on a yearly basis, how many people are reported missing in this city?” he asked Tanaka.
“I don’t know,” Tanaka said. “I’ll find out and call you.”
“Just give me a rough estimate.”
Tanaka took out his notepad and started making calcula-tions. He spoke aloud while he was doing it. “If I multiply the total number of delegacias . . by the figures for my own. . I come up with. . something like. . thirty-two thousand cases. Mind you, those would be reported cases. Lots of them turn out to be false alarms. Girl runs away from home, for example; par-ents report her missing; she comes back. Sometimes, they don’t bother to inform us. We haven’t got the staff to keep doing fol-low-ups, so we just keep her on the books.”
“What if we make an assumption?” Silva said.
“We don’t do assumptions in this building,” Arnaldo said in a pretty good imitation of Dr. Couto’s gravelly voice.
Silva ignored him. “Let’s assume the DNA verifies the sus-picion that we’re dealing with family groups.”
Tanaka nodded.
“I get your drift. If we go after individuals reported miss-ing, we’d have thousands of cases to deal with, but if we limit ourselves to families there’d be damned few. I’ve never had a case like that myself. If I did, I would have remembered.”
“And so, I think, would everyone else. Can you go back seven years? Get all the reports filed up until three years ago?” Tanaka shook his head.
“Recently, we’ve been managing to get everything into a centralized computer system, but three years ago that wasn’t the case. All those reports are going to be buried in paper archives. Different archives, in different delegacias. It could take us months to find them all.”
“But, as you said, you would have remembered. I’m will-ing to bet any other delegado would, too. You could talk to those men personally. Anybody who’s retired, dead, or oth-erwise unavailable, you talk to their deputy.”
“That I can do. Give me a week.”
“Tell us more about the graves,” Hector said. “How is it possible they went undiscovered for so long?”
“You know anything about the Serra da Cantareira?”
“Only that it’s a park.”
“Most of it. Not all. They call it the world’s largest urban forest. Read that as rain forest, which really means jungle.”
“Thick jungle?”
“I’ll give you an example: a small plane on its final ap-proach to Congonhas Airport went down back in 1963. Three people on board. They knew it was somewhere in the Serra. They drew a reverse vector from the end of the runway, spent almost a month searching for two kilometers to either side of that line. They sent in men and dogs, used a helicopter for four days straight. No dice. A biologist doing a study on monkeys finally stumbled across the wreckage in 1986, twenty-three years later. The pilot and both passengers, what was left of them, were still in the fuselage. People get lost in the Serra all the time. Nowadays, most people who venture off the paths carry a radio. You’re crazy if you don’t.”
“You said most of the place was a park, but not all. What else is up there?”
“A few houses, a few condominiums, all of them pretty iso-lated. It’s the kind of place that appeals to people who have to work in Sao Paulo, but who’d rather be living in the Amazon. So they went out and bought themselves pieces of the park.”
Hector was the only one who looked surprised. He often affected cynicism, but he was still young, still learning. “They bought pieces of a city park?”
“So what else is new? You can buy just about anything in this town if you’ve got the money.”
“Yeah, but Jesus, a city park.”
“Same thing with the graveyard,” Tanaka said.
“Wait a minute,” Silva said, narrowing his eyes. “You mean to tell me those graves were on private property?”
“Uh-huh. Surrounded by park on all sides. The law would have given the owner access through the park if he’d asked for it. He never did.”
“And who is this owner?”
“Was, not is. His name was Eduardo Noronha, and he conveniently died not fifteen days after he got title to the land. He willed it to a niece who’s somewhere in Europe. His lawyers claim they’re still looking for her.”
“How long ago did this Noronha die?”
“Eleven years last January.”
“Eleven years! And the land hasn’t reverted to the city?”
“Nope.”
“Who’s paying the taxes?”
“A bank account is being held in escrow for the niece. It also feeds the lawyers and gives them power of attorney to resolve taxes and assessments.”
“Sounds like a setup.”
“Sounds like indeed.”
“You speak to the lawyers?”
“I did. Got nowhere. I don’t think they’re being obstruc-tive. They just don’t know anything.”
“This. . cemetery? How isolated is it exactly?”
“Pretty isolated. The closest homes are six kilometers away, but you only get to drive five of those six. Then you have to cut through the rain forest. Ferns taller than you are, leaves a meter across, parrots, monkeys, snakes, beetles the size of your hand, the whole business. Once the jungle swallows you up, you feel like you’re in the middle of the fucking Amazon.”
“And people build houses in the middle of that?”
“Hell, no. Not in the middle of that. The houses are in a closed condominium. And the condominium is surrounded by a wall three meters high. You get inside that wall and you could be anywhere. Big green lawns, landscaped gardens, swimming pools, it looks like Alphaville.”
Alphaville was a series of luxury condominiums, num-bered 1 through 14, stretching from the suburb of Barueri to the suburb of Santana do Parnaiba. The walls that surrounded each project, and the guards stationed at their gates, guaran-teed a degree of isolation from the otherwise harsh realities of the city.
Alphaville and the other closed condominiums were like small towns in the United States, an ersatz paradise only a few Paulistas could afford.