Buried Strangers cims-2

by Leighton Gage

  The bastard must have drugged him. But why? What the hell was going on?

  He started to get up, but movement made his head spin and he sank back onto the sheets, sheets only, no cover, no pillow, a thin mattress. He put his aching head in his hands and looked down. The floor was concrete, the metal bed frame fas-tened to it with bolts, bolts with large hexagonal heads.

  The music went on. Something classical. It might have been an overture, the way it slipped from melody to melody. And the volume was turned up far too high. The sound was driving daggers into his head.

  He stuck his fingers in his ears, lifted his head, and let his eyes sweep around the room.

  There was a toilet in the corner, a stainless steel toilet without a seat. Next to it, bolted to the wall, was a sink, also stainless steel, with a single tap. No shower. No other furni-ture, only the bed. No windows. No indication whether it was day or night.

  The music changed. A woman began to sing, but not in Portuguese.

  It sounded to Arnaldo like some fucking German opera.

  * * *

  The indian baby’s heart wasn’t much larger than one of his tiny fists. Cutting it out was a delicate business, and it took Bittler longer than usual. When he’d finished, he told Teobaldo to go upstairs and anesthetize Raul Oliveira.

  Three hours later, Raul, too, was dead.

  Bittler’s surgical mask concealed his nose and mouth, but not his anger. Claudia could read it in his eyes. He looked at the dead child as if it had displeased him and was deserving of punishment.

  “Shock him again,” he said.

  “It’s no use,” she said. “He’s gone.”

  “Shock him, I say.”

  So she did. The little heart contracted once. But only once.

  “Damn,” Bittler said.

  “His parents are outside,” Claudia said.

  “You think I don’t know that?” Bittler replied testily. “Go out there and lie to them.”

  “What?”

  “Tell them we’re finished. Tell them the operation was a success. Tell them he’ll be in intensive care for the next twenty-four hours, and that we never allow family or friends into intensive care.”

  “They won’t believe it.”

  “Why shouldn’t they?”

  “We’ve only been in here for the last two and a half hours. They must know that a successful procedure takes-”

  “They don’t know a damned thing,” he snapped.

  Teobaldo’s eyes were twinkling above his mask. It was a rare thing for Bittler to lose his temper, and the anesthesiol-ogist seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. Bittler glanced at Teobaldo, noted his amusement, and flushed. Then he took a deep breath and went on in a calmer voice.

  “They’ll believe you because they’ll want to believe you. Tell them to go home and get some rest. Tell them we’ll call them just as soon as his condition stabilizes. Come to me as soon as they’ve left.”

  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 th
e 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.

  Chapter Forty-four

  “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.”

  “I already told you,” Hector said. “She’s not my namor-

  Whatever,” Rosa Amorim said. “Have you got a few minutes?”

  Hector studied the two women who’d burst into his office without as much as a courteous rap on the door.

  “For you two?” he said. “Always. Sit down.”

  Rosa sank into a seat.

  Danusa remained standing, leaned over, opened the Estado de Sao Paulo she was carrying, and spread the news-paper out on Hector’s desk. She tapped a manicured finger on the headline of an article: COUPLE FOUND DEAD IN APARTMENT.

  “I saw this on the way to work this morning,” she said. “The murdered couple are the Oliveiras, Clovis and Ana Carmen. Their names rang a bell. They were on our list of people to interview, but we hadn’t gotten to them yet.”

  Hector took a moment to scan the article.

  “Suspicion of poison, huh?”

  “What it doesn’t say,” Danusa continued, “is that they had a baby boy, and that the kid needed a heart transplant. I spoke to one of the homicide guys assigned to the case. He told me Senhora Oliveira’s mother had a key to their apart-ment. She was accustomed to talking to her daughter by tele-phone at least twice a day. Last night, after no contact since early morning, she went over there and let herself in. They were in the dining alcove, pitched over the table, dead. Her daughter was clutching her husband’s hand.”

  “You go to see the mother?”

  Danusa looked pained. “Had to, right? I didn’t enjoy it.”

  “No, I’m sure you didn’t.”

  “She lost her only daughter, and her only grandchild, and she’s a widow to boot. Her husband died not six months ago, killed in a holdup for twenty reals in cash and a thirty-real watch. Sometimes, I hate this town.”

  “Her grandchild is dead, as well?”

  “I was getting to that. Raul, his name was, born at Albert Einstein, up in Morumbi. Kid was less than two hours old when he was diagnosed with something called dilated car-diomyopathy, whatever the hell that is.”

  “Fatal?”

  “Without a heart transplant, yes.”

  “And?”

  “And Ana Carmen, that’s the baby’s mother, told her mother that they’d arranged for one, and that it was supposed to take place the day before yesterday. She also said there was something irregular about it, which precluded her from giv-ing any more details. Irregular, that’s the word she used.”

  “The plot thickens.”

  “Goddamned right it does. Now, get this: we can’t be ab-solutely sure the kid’s dead, but it seems like a safe assumption. We can’t find any trace of him. We’ve called every single hospital and clinic known to be able to perform heart trans-plants. Nobody admitted to performing one on a kid called Raul Oliveira.”

  “Merda. How about the people at Einstein? What did they have to say?”

  This time it was Rosa who spoke up.

  “I talked to the cardio who did the diagnosis, a guy by the name of Jacob Levy. He says he put the baby’s name on the list to receive a heart, but he has no idea where the case went from there. I think he’s lying.”

  “Why?”

  “Nothing I can put my finger on. Just a feeling. Call it a mother’s intuition. My sons try it on all the time.”

  “I’ve learned to trust your intuition. You think this Levy is involved in the murder of the parents or the disappearance of the kid?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I talked to a number of other peo-ple at the hospital, did a little background check. Levy is competent and well liked. Compassionate is a word that came up often. I think he might have suggested a way for the Oliveiras to work around the waiting list and get a heart for their son. But there’s no way he’s going to admit that. If he did, he’d lose his license in a flash.”

  “Yeah, he would. Sweat him anyway. In the meantime, keep digging.”

  “We intend to,” Danusa said. “So, like I said in the begin-ning, it looks like your namorada was right. Oh, sorry, she’s not your namorada, is she?”

  “No, she sure as hell isn’t. We’re friends, that’s all. Who the hell is this Sylvie woman?”

  “Told you. She’s a friend of Gilda Caropreso’s. . and something a little more than that when it comes to Babyface Goncalves.”

  “Well, she’s misinformed.”

  “If you say so,” Danusa said.

  Rosa didn’t say anything at all, but she looked at Hector as if he were one of her teenage sons, and she could see right through him.

  Chapter Forty-five

  Paraguay is a country about the size of California, ruled by dictators during most of its existence. Officially, the economy depends on agriculture and the exportation of iron ore and manganese. Unofficially, it depends on money laun-dering, smuggling, drug trafficking, and providing a safe haven for tax dodgers, criminals, and Islamic militants.

  It was, therefore, an ideal choice of destination for Roberto Ribeiro.

  His flight to Asuncion, the TAM 8033, was scheduled to depart from Guarulhos at 10:30 AM. They arrived at the air-port at 8:30 and Roberto checked in.
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br />   “I’ll wait here until I see you pass the checkpoint,” his mother said.

  “It’s only gonna make me nervous. Go home. I’ll call you when I get settled.”

  “Don’t be stupid. When they find out who I am, they’ll tap my phone. Call your aunt Dolores. Here, I’ve made a note of her number.”

  She passed him a piece of paper. Dolores, not truly his aunt, was a close friend of his mother’s. They’d turned tricks together all through their teenage years and right up until Dolores’s marriage to a naive accountant she’d met at a Sunday-morning mass.

  “What do I tell her?”

  “Just give her a number and a time to call. I’ll get in touch.” Roberto pocketed the paper without looking at it. “Okay,” he said. “Go.”

  She kissed him, held on for a while, and finally walked off, turning to wave several times before going out the door. He glanced at his watch. There was still time for a quick tele-phone call.

  “Where the hell are you?” Bittler asked.

  He was angry. Had to be. It was the first time Roberto had ever heard him use profanity. “None of your goddamned business,” he said.

  It felt good to talk to the old bastard like that. He’d been eating shit for far too long.

  There was a shocked silence at the other end of the line. Then, “What’s happened?”

  “The federal cops are what happened. They’re onto me.

  How?”

  “I got no idea. But you better get your place cleaned up before they show up on your doorstep.”

  “What did you tell them, you fool?”

  “Fool, my ass, you sack of shit! I didn’t tell ’em a thing. But that’s only because they didn’t catch me. If they do, I’ll sing like a canary.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I wanted to hear you squirm. You been treating me like a lowlife for years. Now the shoe’s on the other foot.”

  Bittler started cursing. Roberto hung up on him. He hadn’t been totally frank with the old bastard. He’d had another rea-son for calling. If Bittler got a chance to do some housecleaning before the federal cops showed up, the less evidence there’d be.