“About what?”
“Everything. My job, my love life, my friends, my religion.”
“Religion? You’re not Catholic?”
Smoke was making her eyes water. She waved her ciga-rette back and forth to disperse it.
“No,” she said. “I’m not. I’m a Wiccan.”
“No kidding?” Babyface said, propping himself up on his pillow.
She looked at him in surprise. “You know what a Wiccan is?”
“Sure,” he said. “The Rede, the Ardanes, the Virtues, the Law of Threefold Return.”
That was enough to set her off.
* * *
Pleading an early-morning staff meeting at the broker-age house where he’d said he worked, Babyface left Miranda Cavalcante’s apartment at 6:30 am. He went home to his place in Vila Madelena, showered, and set the alarm for nine fifteen. After two hours’ sleep, and two strong cups of coffee, he called Silva at his office in Brasilia.
“We’re barking up the wrong tree,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“She’s not a bad-looking girl. Thin, with small tits, but she has a nice-”
“I didn’t ask you for a critique, I asked you to find out about this Wicca business.”
“Okay. Well, first of all, your hypothesis about her old man is right. He is trying to protect her.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because she told me flat out, said her father called her up and told her that if she and her friends were killing people they had to stop it right away because the cops were on their trail.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. She treated it as a joke. Said that if her father knew anything about her religion at all, he would have known they weren’t hurting anyone, much less killing them. A couple of years ago, she tried to tell him about the Wiccan Rede, but he obviously wasn’t listening, so she gave it up.”
“Wiccan Rede?”
“I thought you said you looked all this up on the Internet.”
“I did, but I must have missed that one. What is it?”
“It’s a sort of maxim. The basic idea is that if you do no harm to anyone, you can do anything else you damn well please. When she was talking to her dad, she stressed the not doing harm part. Wiccans, she told him, use magic for things that are positive and good. She’s a touchy-feely kind of per-son. Has four cats, a poodle, a cage full of birds, and a pair of sugar gliders named Romeo and Juliet. We had to lock the cats and the poodle outside of her bedroom so we could get it on. The damn poodle kept scratching at the door and the cats-”
“Get back to the point, Babyface.”
“The point is, this girl isn’t killing people. No way. And the fact that her father thinks she’d be remotely capable of it just goes to show what an unfeeling blowhard he is. He apparently didn’t listen to a word she said.”
“Unfeeling blowhard?”
“Well. . yeah, in a matter of speaking.”
“You liked her, didn’t you?”
A pause. Then Babyface said, “Yeah, I kinda did.”
“Going to see her again?”
“Uh. . maybe.”
“Fine. Your private life is none of my business. But don’t let me catch you bitching the next time I need you for an undercover assignment.”
Silva had no sooner hung up with Goncalves when Sampaio stuck his head through the doorway to his office.
“Any news on the Pluma investigation?” he asked, com-pletely ignoring the presence of Arnaldo.
“No, Director. Nothing yet.”
“Stick with it, Mario. There’s got to be something there. There always is.”
Sampaio wandered off.
Arnaldo lifted his eyebrows. “So now it’s the Pluma Investigation, is it? Makes it sound like something impor-tant. Who’ve you got working on it?”
“It’s a highly confidential inquiry.”
“Meaning you’re supposed to be working on it yourself?”
“Exactly.”
“And are you? Working on it, I mean?”
Silva shook his head. “Of course not. Pluma continues to bad-mouth Sampaio to the minister, and the way I figure it, that’s God’s work.”
“Amen,” Arnaldo said.
Less than ten minutes later, Hector called from Sao Paulo.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said.
“I have seen many wonderful things in my long life, Nephew. You’d be surprised at what I’d believe. Try me.”
“You’re hanging around a lot with Arnaldo, aren’t you?”
“As a matter of fact I am. Why?”
“Because you’re beginning to sound like him, except you’ve got a bigger vocabulary.”
“Fuck you, Hector,” Arnaldo said.
“I neglected to mention,” Silva said, “that you’re on the speakerphone. So what did you think I’m going to have a hard time believing?”
“Fuck you, too, Arnaldo. Remember that Jap delegado, Tanaka?”
“What about him?”
“He’s dead. Blown up by a bomb somebody put in his car. It could be entirely unrelated to our investigation, but. .”
“You’re going to check it out.”
“His delegacia, first stop. I’ll keep you posted.”
Chapter Twenty
“Ugliest damned thing I ever saw,” Hector said, speaking of the shocking-pink holding cell in Tanaka’s delegacia.
“Uglier, even, than the director’s wife?” Arnaldo said.
The director’s wife, Neidy Sampaio, had been no beauty to begin with, but she’d let herself go after marriage. Her pic-ture, the one in the center of the triptych on her husband’s desk, was at least fifteen years old and bore no relationship to the current article. These days, Neidy had a problem with facial hair and was at least forty kilos heavier than when the photograph was taken.
And if her appearance fell short of attractive, her person-ality was worse. She was a surly woman who seldom had a good word for anyone, including her husband. Silva had often asked himself why his boss remained married to her until he found out she was the sole heiress to a considerable fortune.
So, although there was truth in Arnaldo’s comparison between the holding cell and the wife of the head of the fed-eral police, the bold comment still stopped Hector short. But only for one reason: “Didn’t you guys tell me I was on the speakerphone?” he said.
“You are. But it’s just the two of us here,” Silva said. “Besides, the door is closed and our fearless leader is at lunch.”
Silva and Arnaldo were in a conference room at federal police headquarters in Brasilia. Hector was calling from beyond closed doors in Tanaka’s office.
“Okay, then,” Hector said. “The answer is yes, even uglier than Senhora Sampaio. That cell is bizarre. I don’t care if it’s just for females. There are certain things that shouldn’t be pink. What’s next? Pink handcuffs? A pink pistol for female agents?”
“I take your point,” Silva said.
“There’s a sergeant here, a guy by the name of Lucas. He told me it was Tanaka’s idea, some kind of publicity stunt. He let the prisoners choose the color. There’s a clipping about it on the wall of his office, interviews with Tanaka’s boss and the state secretary of security. Both of them loved it. Or said they did.”
“No accounting for taste.”
“Yeah,” Arnaldo said. “Look at Sampaio.”
“So what did you find out?” Silva said.
“I had a long chat with Sergeant Lucas. He didn’t know, until I told him, any of the details about the cemetery in the Serra. Tanaka never bothered to fill him in. Or anybody else, as far as I can determine.”
“And this guy Lucas doesn’t read newspapers?”
“Sports pages, maybe. Probably not much more than that. When I mentioned there were cases of children buried with their parents, he put two and two together. He thinks he knows what Tanaka might have been up to.”
Arnaldo leaned closer to the speakerphone. Silva sat up straighter in his chair.
“Tell me more,” he said.
“There’s this favela called Jardim Tonato. According to Lucas, Tanaka never gave much of a damn about what hap-pened there. He used to say that if they wanted to kill each other, it was fine with him. The vast majority of the people who lived there were felons anyway, and he wasn’t going to waste manpower trying to intervene, because most deaths went to reducing the number of crooks in his district. Then this family, some stonemason, his wife, and two daughters, goes missing. It’s brought to his attention on the afternoon of the very day he promised to get back to us about entire families.”