“And as soon as the techs get here,” Silva continued, “I suggest we follow these.” He pointed down to the other set of retreating footprints.
“Not very large impressions,” Prado said. “He isn’t a particularly big guy. I think the time has come for you guys to share the things you know and that I still don’t.”
“Why don’t we follow these first?” Silva said, pointing at the footprints. “Then we’ll go get some coffee?”
“No, Mario, no coffee. Information.”
“We’ve unearthed quite a lot. Don’t you want to go somewhere and sit down?”
“What I want is for you to come clean. One hand washes the other in this business. You, of all people, should know that.”
“As you wish,” Silva said.
Fifteen minutes later, when Silva finished talking, Prado said, “All right, let me see if I’ve got this straight. All the victims were on that flight, and killed with the same MO, except for two: the kid, Julio, was on the flight, but he was killed with a different MO; the thug, Girotti wasn’t on the flight, but he still got shot in the lower abdomen and was beaten to a pulp. And the only apparent connection between Girotti and the others is that he shared a cell with the kid.”
“So it appears,” Silva said.
“Something happened during that flight,” Prado said, thinking aloud. “Something the murderer did, or said, and wanted to keep secret. The kid was a witness. He told Girotti what it was, so Girotti had to be killed as well.”
“Someone else has expressed that opinion,” Hector said.
“Yeah? Who?” Prado asked.
“Goncalves.”
“Babyface? I’m glad you mentioned that name. I got something I want to say about him.”
“Which is?”
“I’ll come back to that in a minute. You know who I like for this?”
“Who?” Silva said.
“The last guy you mentioned, the eleventh passenger.”
“Motta?”
“Motta. The stewardess saw him slinking around the cabin, right?”
“Correct.”
“So he’s the one who had something to hide. He’s a man with a secret.”
“Maybe he had a secret,” Silva said, “but it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s the killer. I’m not excluding Julio Arriaga, or Clancy, or Kloppers. Arnaldo has gone to Holambra to talk to Kloppers’s parents, and I have people working on the other two.”
“Arriaga is a long shot. You don’t even know if he’s here in Brazil.”
“My boss, Sampaio, agrees with you. He thinks it’s a long shot too.”
“That idiot? Then maybe I should reevaluate.”
“What did you want to come back to?”
“Your boy over there”-Prado pointed at Goncalves, who was climbing the hill again-“went ahead and questioned Lina Godoy before I got to her. They told him I was coming, but he didn’t have the courtesy to wait until I got there. That pisses me off.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, Janus,” Silva said. “He’s young and inexperienced.”
“Don’t try that one on me, Mario. I know he looks like he’s about twenty, but I also know for a fact that he’s well over thirty.”
“An ugly rumor,” Silva said. “I can’t imagine who could have started it.”
Goncalves had been unable to follow the trail of the high heels. The marks from the tennis shoes, they soon discovered, began and ended at a set of tire tracks. The car, quite a small one by the look of it, had been parked for a number of minutes or even hours. The crime techs couldn’t be sure how long, but they did assure Prado it had been removed before dawn, before the sun began to bake the ground. When the driver left the scene, he’d steered into a U-turn. Within three hundred meters, the dirt turned to asphalt and the tracks vanished.
The area around the chalets was almost entirely paved and provided no further clues. The gardening-supply shop and the furniture factory had both been closed at the time of the murder. Neither one had a night watchman.
It had been a weeknight, and most of the motel’s guests had already checked out, but not the pair inhabiting the chalet closest to Mansur’s. That particular couple had remained in their room, avoiding the cops and reporters, apparently waiting for an opportunity to leave without being questioned. But the investigation continued, and the reporters stayed on. Eventually, the couple hazarded a discreet departure. At that point, they were detained.
The woman was wearing stylish clothing. She neither looked nor sounded like a prostitute. Silva also thought she was too old to be a high-class call girl. The man, also welldressed, was driving an Audi. Their national identity cards confirmed that they were who they said they were. They gave the cops separate addresses, both in very good neighborhoods. Reluctant to be questioned, and terse in their responses, they claimed to have heard nothing, seen nothing. The woman kept glancing at her Rolex.
A husband at home, Silva concluded. And that thought triggered another one. He drew Janus Prado aside.
“Has anyone spoken to Mansur’s wife?”
“I sent a man out there about two hours ago,” Prado said. “Should be hearing from him any time now.”
“Where’s ‘out there’?”
“Alphaville.”
Alphaville, a series of upper-middle-class residential communities spanning two municipalities, was some twenty kilometers outside the city of Sao Paulo.
“The guy I sent was Manoel Dias,” Prado said. “Old Dias isn’t the brightest bulb in my chandelier. Matter of fact, he’s downright lousy at clearing cases. I don’t even let him ask questions any more. They’re always the wrong questions, and he never gets any useful answers.”
“So why do you keep him on?”
“Because Dias has one thing he does better than anyone else: he’s everybody’s favorite grandfather, a master at breaking bad news. And in this town, I’ve got a lot of bad news to break.”
Just then, Prado’s cell phone rang. He held up a palm, put his hand over the microphone, and mouthed the word “Dias.”
He uh-huhed his man three or four times, then said, “Check with the guys at the gate on your way out. They’ll have records. If she left during the night, call me. I want to talk to her personally. Tell her she can expect a visit in about an hour.”
He flipped his phone closed and said to Silva, “Dias. Calling from Mansur’s house. I’m going out there.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Dias is prepared for the usual tears and hysteria. He puts one hand on the package of paper handkerchiefs he keeps in his pocket, keeps the other hand ready to break her fall in case she faints. Then he hits her with the news. She looks at him for a couple of seconds and then, instead of turning on the waterworks, all she says is, ‘Where did they find the bastard?’”
“Hard,” Silva said.
“Harder, even, than my mother-in-law,” Prado agreed. “Want to come along?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Where the waitress from the windmill had told them to expect a road, they found a rutted track, half-hidden behind a stand of bamboo.
“You think?” Arnaldo said.
“Take it,” Samantha said. “We can always come back.”
They bounced along through potholes, coating the car with red dust. Farther on, a sprinkler system was irrigating green shoots. Drops peppered the windshield. Arnaldo switched on the wipers and caught his first glimpse of the house through streaks of red mud.
No faux-Dutch architecture here. The place looked like most other farmhouses in the state, whitewashed walls surmounted by a roof of red tiles. The windows and doors were trimmed in blue.
Arnaldo parked between a tractor and a dusty pickup truck.
“Somebody’s coming,” Samantha said.
Arnaldo turned his head and saw a man emerging from a little outbuilding. He was tall, in his late fifties or maybe early sixties. When he saw them looking toward him, he doffed his broad-brimmed hat in a curiously old-fashioned gesture. His smile of welcome showed good teeth.
Samantha rolled down the window.
“We’re looking for Hans Kloppers,” she said.