Leighton Gage - Buried Strangers

Ten minutes later, Claudia found her employer in his office. She came in with a sour expression on her face. Bittler took it in with a certain degree of satisfaction.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” he said smugly. “They believed every word.”

“They’re gone for the moment,” she admitted grudgingly. She closed the door and leaned against it. “But it doesn’t solve anything. We’ve won a few hours, nothing more. We can’t keep them in the dark forever.”

“A few hours is long enough,” Bittler said. “Stick your head outside and tell Gretchen to summon Roberto.”

Claudia shook her head.

“He’s not here.”

“Not here?”

“I wanted him to incinerate the remains of the Indian brat. When I couldn’t find him, I asked Gretchen if she knew where he was. She said he didn’t come in yesterday, and he isn’t here today. She’s called his cell phone re-peatedly. She keeps getting his voice mail, and he doesn’t call back.”

Bittler frowned.

“There’s no time to waste. We can’t just sit around and wait for him to turn up. You’ll have to do it yourself.”

“Incinerate the Indian brat?”

“No. Teobaldo can attend to that.”

“Then what?”

“Kill the Oliveiras.”

* * *

“Dr. Andrade, ” Ana Carmen said when Claudia showed up at the apartment unannounced. “Oh, my God, is there anything wrong?”

The chain was on the door, reducing the opening to just a few centimeters. Claudia could see little more than one of Ana Carmen’s eyes. The eye was blue-and huge with fear.

“Raul’s fine,” Claudia reassured her. “Your place is on my way home. I’d thought I’d stop by and give you a progress report.”

Claudia heard Ana Carmen breathe out a long breath and realized, only then, that she’d been holding it in. The eye was returning to normal size, but the woman still wasn’t quite over her shock.

“May I come in?” Claudia asked.

“Oh, of course. Forgive me.”

Ana Carmen fumbled with the chain and opened the door. She was wearing a bathrobe over a nightgown. Behind her, the corridor was unlit. In the dim light the smudges under her eyes looked like badly applied makeup.

Claudia crossed the threshold. Ana Carmen locked and chained the door. It was Sao Paulo, after all. One had to take precautions.

“Where’s your husband?” Claudia asked.

“In the bedroom,” Ana Carmen said, “trying to get some rest. Please, come this way.”

Claudia followed her down a hallway lined with Indian artifacts: bead necklaces, feather headdresses, bows, arrows, spears, wooden knives, and some other objects she didn’t recognize.

The hallway opened onto a small living room. Two arm-chairs, a sofa, and a coffee table crowded the narrow space. Watery sunlight spilled through the blinds and illuminated a painting on the opposite wall, a watercolor of some baroque church. Claudia approached the work, as if she were admiring it.

“Very nice,” she said.

Beyond kitsch, she thought.

“We bought it on our honeymoon. The church is in Ouro Preto. You’ve been to Ouro Preto?”

Ouro Preto was deep in the mountains of Minas Gerais, a jewel of eighteenth-century colonial architecture.

“Yes,” Claudia said.

“But you’re not here to talk about travel or art,” Ana Carmen said, obviously anxious to get to the subject of her son.

A good thing, too, Claudia thought, because Ouro Preto is a boring backwater and that piece of trash is anything but art.

“My husband and I are immensely in your debt,” the baby’s mother went on, “yours and Dr. Bittler’s.”

“And we’re immensely pleased that we were able to save Raul,” Claudia lied, going through the motions.

“I have to tell you, though, that the doctor’s attitude toward the other children, the Indian babies, was something my husband and I found. . well. . shocking.”

“I hope you haven’t been talking about that, about where we got the heart for Raul.”

“No, no, of course not,” Ana Carmen said, wringing her hands. “Not even to my mother. Clovis wouldn’t permit it.

Wise,” Claudia said.

“You can trust us. We’ll never tell.”

Not until you find out your son is dead, Claudia thought.

There was a door in one corner of the living room. It opened and Clovis came in. He caught sight of Claudia and his face turned pale.

“No,” Ana Carmen said quickly. “He’s fine. Doctor Andrade stopped by on her way home. She’s going to give us a progress report.”

Clovis’s color returned, and some of the stiffness seemed to go out of his body. He looked down at his feet. He was wearing a tattered pair of his wife’s slippers. One of them had the remnants of a pink bow.

Claudia saw it and smiled.

He caught her look and forced a smile of his own. “Yeah,” he said. “Pretty ridiculous, huh? But we don’t have a carpet in the bedroom.”

As if that explained it.

Ana Carmen put a hand on Claudia’s arm. “I’m being such a bad hostess,” she said. “How about some coffee? You will drink some coffee.”

“Coffee would be nice,” Claudia said.

Clovis pointed at one of the four chairs in the tiny dining alcove.

“Why don’t we sit there?”

Claudia reached into her bag and removed a metal box that had once held English chocolates. “I brought some cookies. They’re to die for,” she said, and almost smiled.

Clovis pulled out one of the chairs for her and took one on the opposite side of the table. A vase of wilting flowers stood between them. He moved it aside.

“I’m glad you came,” he said. “I find it easier to talk to you than I do to Dr. Bittler.”

“Many people do. He’s a shy man. Sometimes it comes across as arrogance.”

“Yes,” he said. He picked up a dead petal from the table and distractedly rolled it between a thumb and forefinger. “The two of you have been doing this for a long time, haven’t you?”

“Doing what?”

“Stealing organs.”

Claudia crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair.

“Wherever did you get an idea like that?”

“I don’t know. I just. . I. . well, frankly Dr. Andrade, I’m finding it very difficult to live with what I’ve done.”

“Pangs of conscience?”

“Call it whatever you like, but now that Raul’s procedure has been successful. .” His words drifted off.

“Surely, you’re not thinking of going to the authorities?”

“No, of course not,” he said, his voice totally lacking in conviction, “but I’m not inclined to help you with any fur-ther kidnappings out of the Xingu reservation.”

“You do recognize that Dr. Bittler only wants those Indians so he can save other lives?”

“I. . I’ve been discussing the issue with my wife. .”

“And?”

“You needn’t look at me like that. I know I agreed to the scheme, but I feel differently now.” He gave her what Claudia interpreted as a sly look. “I’d find it a lot easier to keep quiet if we just forgot about any future plans for the Indians.”

Claudia removed the lid from the metal box, and pushed the cookies across the table to rest in front of Clovis. “We should discuss that in more detail,” she said, “as soon as your wife comes back with the coffee.”

There was a chance that one, or both of them, would refuse a cookie. Claudia was prepared for that. She had a 6.35 mm Beretta semiautomatic pistol in her purse.

The weapon proved unnecessary.

“We got a break, ” Danusa Marcus said. “No line on anyone we can bust, not yet anyway, but there’s some indi-cation that your namorada’s hypothesis is correct.”