Джеймс Паттерсон - The Games

Santos stifled a sob, turned away from the car and the ME, and walked unsteadily to the front door. He fumbled for his keys, dropped them. He let Tavia pick them up and open the door.

It was as beautiful inside as it was outside, and spotless, nothing out of place. Santos did not seem to know where to go. Da Silva motioned him to a seat in the living area, where he began to corroborate much of what we already knew.

The victim’s husband worked for the Rio Olympic organizing committee and was a liaison to the governments of Rio and Brazil. Santos was charged with cutting through red tape and seeing that projects were completed on time. He’d done much the same job in the years leading up to the World Cup in 2014.

Santos said he’d been working insane hours the past month or two and had hardly seen his wife. He’d had a late dinner with Luna two nights before but had not been home in a week and had been sleeping on a couch in his office.

“Your wife have enemies?” Tavia asked.

“Luna? No. She loved everyone and everyone loved her.”

“ You have enemies?” I asked.

“You mean people who hate me enough to kill Luna? No. No, I don’t think so.”

“Where were you last night?” da Silva asked.

“I worked until two a.m. and then fell asleep on my office couch.”

“Can witnesses put you there?”

“I’m sure the security records will show I didn’t leave the building.”

“When was your last contact with your wife?” I asked.

“Last night,” he said. “Around nine. I called to tell her I couldn’t make it home again. She said she was going to a movie.”

“What movie?”

“I don’t know.”

“How’d she seem? Happy? Sad?”

“She wasn’t happy... she was pissed at me...” Santos broke down. “Maybe if I’d come home she’d still be alive!”

When Santos got control of himself again, Tavia gave him water, said, “Luna wasn’t happy.”

“She hasn’t been happy with me in a long time,” Santos said. “She always said I was married to my job more than I was to her. But the World Cup and the Olympics. The biggest things to happen in Brazil in my lifetime. I was desperate to be a part of it. I was determined to make both events succeed, and now... I’ve lost her for...”

Tavia said, “Did she have a lover?”

Santos cocked his head and shrugged. “Everyone in Rio has lovers. She had appetites and I... I wasn’t around. So, yes, I assume so.”

“Any idea of who the lover might be?” I asked.

He shook his head bitterly. “I’ve never gone looking for anything like that.”

“And you, Antonio?” the general asked. “Extramarital relationships?”

Santos hesitated, but then said, “Last year for a few months, with an American journalist.”

“She the angry type?” Tavia asked.

“No,” Santos said. “She’s the faraway type.”

“Luna usually have a phone with her?” I asked.

“Always, like it was Velcroed to her hand.”

“We haven’t found it yet,” Lieutenant Acosta said. “Do you know her account passwords for her telephone and whatever text-messaging system she used?”

“I don’t know them, but she kept a file in her office.”

“Show us,” Tavia said.

Santos got up and trudged to the door of his wife’s home office, from which she’d run a successful business renting short-term, high-end apartments in Rio. There were pictures of various outrageous flats on Ipanema Beach, all decorated in an over-the-top style, with a Post-it note on each photo declaring the asking price during the Olympic Games. Eight, nine, ten thousand reais a night.

I gestured at several of them. “Who are her clients? Russians? Arabs?”

“And Chinese,” Santos said. “They’re the only ones who can afford to pay these kinds of prices. The few she got from New York and London wanted places that were less... I don’t know.”

“Gaudy?” Tavia said.

Santos shrugged, went to a cabinet, and retrieved a file. With da Silva’s and Santos’s permission, Tavia got onto a laptop and into the victim’s telephone and texting accounts.

Luna Santos had more than twenty text messages waiting for her. Tavia didn’t bother opening any, but she quickly determined that Santos’s late wife texted roughly ninety times a day. In the past year she’d texted more than thirty-seven thousand times.

“I’ll send the passwords to our analysts and they’ll start digging through these,” Tavia said to Santos. “With your consent, of course.”

“Whatever you think will help.”

Tavia sent an e-mail with the necessary information to Private Rio’s lab, and then she opened up Luna Santos’s cell-phone account. She wormed her way into the Cloud copy of calls to and from Luna’s number.

“Any way you can tell the position of the phones?” Lieutenant Acosta asked.

“I think so,” Tavia said, and she gave the computer and the website another order.

The screen blinked and then showed a map of Rio with a yellow pin at the address of the Rio Olympic organizing committee in Barra and another pin in Lapa.

Santos came over, and his face fell.

“You know that address?” Lieutenant Acosta asked. “Where your wife was when you called?”

Santos nodded morosely. “That’s down the street from her favorite club. It’s where she likes to go samba.”

“And perhaps to meet her lover?” da Silva asked. “And maybe her killer?”

Luna’s husband nodded again, hung his head, and cried.

Dr. Castro had watched much of it through binoculars from well up the jungle hillside above Luna and Antonio Santos’s house. At a quarter to five that morning he saw Luna’s car go up in flames and with it all evidence that he’d put her there.

The car had burned furiously thanks to the two gallons of gas and denatured alcohol he’d dumped inside it. The flames had swept through the car by the time the doctor had crossed the street and started climbing. He was high above the house when the gas tank ruptured and blew a fireball into the sky.

Ten minutes later, the firemen came, and then the police. An hour after that, the head of Olympic security himself, General da Silva, showed up. Castro recognized him from television. Twenty minutes later, those same two Private operators he’d seen at the Copacabana Palace the night before the World Cup final crossed the police lines.

Jack Morgan. Octavia Reynaldo. He’d looked them up.

For several moments, Castro got anxious. Private’s investigators were among the best trained in the world. And those two down there were the best of the best.

The doctor wondered if he’d gone too far by targeting Luna. She’d offered him both an excellent, healthy subject for his experiment and a way to take some personal revenge, but should he have just gone for somebody anonymous? A street person? Someone unlikely to be missed?

Then Antonio Santos had shown up, running down the street, stopping in heartbreak in the driveway, and collapsing in an agony of grief. It had been worth the risk, Castro decided instantly. It had been worth the wait.

Antonio knew the guts-ripped-out-of-you feeling now. Let him wallow in it.

The doctor fed on that idea long after da Silva, Morgan, and Reynaldo had gone into the house and forensic techs had arrived on the scene. He stayed up there in the jungle, ignoring the building heat, ignoring the bugs that whined and bit at his flesh.

An hour passed. The techs removed the body and put a tarp over the burned-out car. Autopsy next, the doctor thought. But maybe not. The Rio system was backed up as it was. With a bullet through the back of the head and a burned corpse, why bother?