“The customers complain when you remind them their time is up?”
“What am I telling you? You speak Portuguese?”
In fact, Silva’s Portuguese was a good deal better than Rocha’s; but all he said was, “Go on.”
“People give me lip, I don’t take it personal. I mean, there you are, humping away, and some guy knocks on the door and asks you when you’re gonna be done. I wouldn’t want it happening to me either. Kinda breaks the mood, you know what I mean?”
“I can imagine,” Silva said dryly. “What happened when you knocked?”
“No answer. I did it again. Still, no answer. I called out, said I was from the portaria, told the guy his two hours were up. Nothing.”
“And then?”
“And then I used my passkey and opened the door.”
“You do that often? Use your passkey?”
Rocha shook his head. “Hardly ever. People can get out of this place by climbing over the wall. It’s not so high, comes down to less than two meters where the ground rises out there at the back. But they can’t rent a room unless they drive in with a car, and they can’t get the car out without driving through the gate. Makes no sense to pretend they’re not in the room, so they generally don’t.”
“What do you normally expect to find?”
Rocha blinked. “Whaddya mean?”
“Just what I said. When you use your passkey, and you go in, what do you expect to find?”
“I expect to find people asleep. Sometimes I get a shot of some hot broad’s crotch. Sometimes I get an earful from her boyfriend, or client, or whatever. I never found a body before.”
“How about Eudoxia?”
“What about her?”
“Where was she?”
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
“Was the door to the bathroom closed?”
Rocha considered for a moment. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, it was.”
“But you didn’t look inside?”
“I took one look at that mess over there and ran off to call the cops. I didn’t even get halfway across the room.”
Silva turned to Prado. “Any blood in the bathroom?”
Prado shook his head. “Not a drop,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The residents of Holambra were either proud of their heritage or good at setting a tourist trap. Access to the town was through a gate three stories high. The gate was fashioned of red brick and featured Dutch-looking gables. Beyond it towered an even higher structure, a fake windmill housing a cafe on the ground floor. They went into the cafe.
“Town this small,” Arnaldo said, “everybody knows everyone else.”
“Every now and then,” Samantha said, “you say something that isn’t completely stupid. Let me do the asking. Kloppers, right? Marnix and Jan?”
“Marnix and Jan were the two on the flight. We drove out here to talk to Marnix’s parents. She’s Greetje, he’s Hans.”
“Don’t ask them a thing until I get back,” she said and headed directly for the ladies’ room. Arnaldo passed a display selling wooden shoes and took a seat at a table. A woman in pigtails, wearing a starched white cap with wings, came over with a menu.
“This thing work?” Arnaldo asked, immediately violating Samantha’s instructions and pointing upward.
The waitress shook her head. “The motor’s broken. Want to eat?”
“Just coffee, thanks. Motor? The windmill runs on a motor?”
“Ran,” she said. “For one?”
“For two.”
“Milk?”
“Separately.”
“We’ve got some nice koekjes,” the woman said, dropping the word without hesitation and with no trace of an accent in her Portuguese. “ Speculaas, they’re called, kind of like gingerbread, but crispy.”
“Bring ’em on,” Arnaldo said.
“These are really good,” Samantha said a few minutes later. She was talking about the speculaas, addressing the lady in pigtails and doing her best to exclude Arnaldo.
“Want some to go? We sell them by the box.”
“Bring two boxes and put them on the bill,” Samantha said. “This gentleman is paying.”
The waitress came back a few minutes later with a bag and the check. Samantha snagged the bag. Arnaldo took out his wallet.
“Lived here long?” Samantha asked the woman in pigtails.
“All my life.”
“I’m looking for a couple, Hans and Gretel Kloppers.”
“Greetje,” the woman corrected her.
Arnaldo rolled his eyes, but said nothing. Samantha gave him a dirty look. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. My mistake. Greetje.”
The woman took a napkin from the table and a pen from her pocket, and started making a map.
Setubal, the same assistant medical examiner who’d performed the postmortem on Bruna Nascimento, estimated that Mansur’s death had occurred between eight P.M. and midnight. He was struck by the similarity between the two corpses.
“Shot in just about the same place,” he said, “and, for my money, he used the same club.”
“Tell me more about this club,” Silva said.
“Looks to be a little over twice the diameter of a cop’s baton,” Setubal said, “and long enough for him to build up a considerable degree of momentum. An unusual weapon.”
While the crime-scene people were still giving the motel room a thorough going-over, Prado, Hector, Goncalves, and Silva left by the back door and set out to examine the grounds.
The property was roughly rectangular in shape, about three times as deep as it was wide, flanked by a furniture factory and a shop that sold gardening supplies. The rear wall was set flush with that of the buildings on either side. Standing on a little rise, turning around, and peering over the wall to the rear, Silva could see a vacant lot. Beyond it, at the bottom of a steep grade, a dirt road paralleled the highway.
The cops took Prado’s vehicle, a van that could carry eight, honked their way through the gaggle of reporters, and drove out the main gate. They weren’t followed.
Two minutes of driving took them to the dirt road. They got out and walked up the hill.
Against the outside perimeter of the motel’s wall, they found imprints of bare feet.
“Jumped,” Prado said. “Look, the first impression is deeper than the others.” He followed the footsteps for a few paces, comparing the interval between them to his own. “Running,” he said. “Running like hell.”
“Could have been Eudoxia,” Silva said.
Goncalves was dispatched to follow the footprints. The rest of them moved on. They came to a second set of footprints made by what appeared to be a pair of tennis shoes. The footprints pointed to the wall and then, a little farther on, pointed away again. The closest set was only about a meter from where the barefoot person had crossed.
“Scuff marks,” Prado said. “He clambered over the wall, and here”-he pointed at two deeper footprints pointing in the opposite direction-“he jumped down on his way out. It rained the day before yesterday. These are fresher than that.”
“And look at this,” Silva said.
On the white-painted surface of the wall, directly above the point where the retreating footprints first made contact with the soil, were some reddish-brown drops.
“Could be blood,” Prado said, leaning in for a closer look. “Could have dripped off the murder weapon.” He picked up his radio and called the chief of the crime-scene techs up at the chalet. “Get down here,” he said after telling her where he was. “We’re going to need casts of footprints, and I want some blood samples lifted. Make sure you aren’t tailed by any reporters.”
Prado was signing off when Goncalves came back up the hill, breathing hard from the climb. “Those bare footprints become women’s high heels down at the road,” he said. “Then they move off to the right, toward the city, but I lost them among tire tracks. If I keep going, maybe I can pick them up again.”
“Try it,” Silva said, not holding out much hope.
Goncalves trotted off.