Leighton Gage: Buried Strangers

“Yeah, I picked up his leash and went out to look for him.”

“But not right away?”

“No. I told you. I had lunch first. A man’s got to eat, doesn’t he? Didn’t take long. Maybe twenty minutes, that’s all.”

“Go on.”

“So there I am, walking around, walking around, for the next four hours or so, and then, just before dark, I hear him barking.”

“And you knew it was your dog because. .”

“It’s not my dog. It’s Senhor Manfredo’s dog. And I knew it was The Mop because The Mop’s bark is different. You heard it. He sounds like he’s hoarse or something. Like some guy who just walked out of a stadium, somebody who screamed so much he lost his voice.”

Tanaka smiled politely, as if it were the first time Hans had made the comparison.

It wasn’t.

“So, like I said, I followed the sound, found the path, came into this field, and found him chewing on that bone. He only let me take it out of his mouth because he thought I was gonna throw it for him.”

“So then you. .”

“Took one look at the skull, put the leash on him, got the hell out of here, and called you guys.”

Tanaka nodded and addressed Gilda.

“I decided to leave it until morning,” he said. “Can you imagine trying to find this place in the dark?”

Gilda shook her head and stood.

“We’re on a incline,” she said. “The grave wasn’t deep. She was probably uncovered by erosion.”

“She?” Tanaka sounded surprised. “A woman?”

“Probably.”

Gilda pointed to the black hair still clinging to the skull. It was long, unlikely to be a man’s.

“She’s been here for quite some time,” she said. “Hardly any flesh left at all.”

“The dog, maybe?” Tanaka said.

“Not the dog. Decomposition and insects. Most of the bones appear to be in place, but I’ll only be able to verify that once we get her back to the IML.”

The IML, the Instituto Medico Legal, was the headquar-ters of Sao Paulo’s chief medical examiner and the place where Gilda spent most of her time. She was a slim brunette, who looked too young to be a full-fledged pathologist. When she neglected to pin on her name tag, visitors to the morgue often took her for a secretary or a medical student.

She was about to kneel down again when the sun crept over the encircling rim of forest. Long shadows fell across the field, emphasizing irregularities in the carpet of green. In the altered light, row upon row of rectangular mounds suddenly became visible.

Gilda saw them first and narrowly avoided putting one of her latex-gloved hands over her lips. Han’s mouth dropped open. Fernando and Geraldo looked at each other. Tanaka just stared.

Graves. Tens of graves, lined up row-on-row.

Herbert, The Mop, hadn’t just found himself one corpse to play with. He’d found himself an entire cemetery.

“What’s this crap Ana handed me?”

Nelson Sampaio raised his jaw and looked pugnaciously at Mario Silva. Sampaio was the director of the Brazilian Federal Police. Ana was his long-suffering personal assistant. What he was referring to as crap was a request for two round-trip airline tickets, Brasilia/Sao Paulo/Brasilia.

Ana had served five directors in succession, one more than Silva, and averred that Nelson Sampaio was the worst of the lot. The director was a pink-faced, prematurely balding man with suspicious blue eyes. Mostly, his eyes were enlarged by spectacles, but this morning he was trying out a new set of contact lenses. He kept blinking at Silva, while his hand remained splayed over the form in front of him. The two men, Silva and Sampaio, were on opposite sides of Sampaio’s desk in his spacious office in Brasilia, the nation’s capital.

Everything in the room had been chosen with an eye to making a statement: The national flag demonstrated Sampaio’s patriotism; the portrait of the president bespoke party loyalty; the photographs around the walls assured visi-tors that they were in the presence of a man who rubbed elbows with Brazil’s movers and shakers; the triptych on his desk (his wife flanked by his two daughters) showed that he was a good family man; the sports trophies (Silva suspected that at least some of them were bogus) revealed that he’d been an athlete in his youth; the awards for public service attested to his social conscience; a couple of knickknacks (fashioned by schoolchildren) indicated that Sampaio hadn’t lost the common touch; and the two (Brazilian) paintings established his artistic sensitivity. Even the view made a statement: The window behind him overlooked the Ministry of Culture.

“You mind telling me what’s so important that you have to take a couple of days out of your schedule and go galli-vanting off to Sao Paulo when there’s so much to do right here?” Sampaio continued.

“It’s all there on the form,” Silva said, patiently. “And, with respect, Director, it’s not gallivanting.”

“Oh? What is it then?”

“You’ve seen today’s newspapers?”

“Of course, I’ve seen today’s newspapers,” Sampaio snapped. “I read three of them every morning. So what?”

Nelson Sampaio had been a successful attorney before he entered government service. A political appointee, whose ambitions went far beyond his current post, he was a man who’d never been to a crime scene and had never smelled a corpse. When he spoke of reading three newspapers, Sampaio meant the front pages, the editorial pages, and the social columns. The majority of the articles that attracted his attention were those dealing with the Machiavellian world of Brazilian national politics. They were unlikely to be the same ones that interested Mario Silva.

“Then perhaps you read about that clandestine cemetery in the Serra da Cantareira?” Silva said, making the state-ment a question.

“What about it?” the director said, neither confirming nor denying his awareness of the article in question.

“There were children in some of those graves,” Silva said, plunging on in the face of his boss’s apparent lack of interest. Silva, childless after the death of his son from leukemia at the age of eight, could get particularly passionate about the murder of children.

“Kids, adults, what’s the difference?” Sampaio said. “I asked you a simple question: What’s so important? Don’t you think you have enough on your plate right here in Brasilia?”

“I wasn’t aware that I had-”

“Not aware? Not aware? Mario, for God’s sake, what about Romeu Pluma?”

Romeu Pluma was a former journalist and the current press secretary for the minister of justice, Sampaio’s immedi-ate superior. Pluma and Sampaio loathed each other.

“I told you, Director, we haven’t been able to find any-thing in Pluma’s background to suggest-”

“And I told you to keep digging. Everybody has something to hide. You, him, even me. I want to know what Pluma’s hiding. Is that so much to ask?”

Sampaio was a believer in using the powers of his office to forward what he considered to be good causes, and foremost among all good causes was the continued advancement of Nelson Sampaio.

Romeu Pluma had the ear of the minister. He’d been whispering into it, questioning Sampaio’s competence and criticizing his effectiveness. And, even worse, he’d been ex-pressing those same opinions to the press. Pluma was quoted as being an “unnamed government source,” but that didn’t fool Sampaio. He always knew who was out to get him. He desperately wanted something to hold over the press secre-tary’s head, and he expected Silva to get it for him.

“With all due respect, Director, the children in that ceme-tery deserve-”

“There you go again,” the director said, cutting him off. “You remind me of Vulcano.”