The Paradise Prophecy

by Robert Browne

  Except for the chaos.

  It was apparent the moment she stepped off the plane that word of Gabriela Zuada’s death had finally been unleashed. Television screens in the lobby flashed video of Gabriela’s latest tour, along with a montage of interviews with her devastated fans. And every headline in the airport newsstands seemed to scream her name.

  Callahan wasn’t surprised. The death of a superstar is not the kind of information that can be easily controlled or contained, and there would undoubtedly be a dozen different harebrained theories surrounding this one, most of them postulated by self-aggrandizing cable TV pundits.

  Callahan had learned long ago that what you saw on television news was little more than cheap soap opera theatrics, good old-fashioned storytelling designed to keep the viewers watching and the advertisers paying. Its relationship to the truth was often nonexistent and, depending on which network you chose, slanted to appeal to a specific demographic.

  Callahan’s approach was to always, without exception, treat such news as complete and utter bullshit and, when necessary, try to ferret out the truth for herself.

  Assuming that was even possible.

  But then her own job was all about deception, wasn’t it? The veracity of the intelligence community wasn’t exactly beyond reproach. And while she was often forced to compromise her beliefs, she was smart enough to know that the world was built on compromise, along with heavy doses of rationalization and deceit. Very little would ever get done without them.

  Of course, looking at the sudden rise in unrest over the last several months had Callahan wondering if they were still working. While Section had always been an agency that played under the radar, priding itself in its ability to clean up the messes that politicians and the more visible intelligence agencies managed to create around the world, lately there was a sense within the community that there might well be too many fires to put out. Not that they all gathered around the water cooler and talked about it. But people did talk, and despite her relative isolation, Callahan knew that the concern they felt was quickly turning into panic-and that couldn’t be good for anyone.

  Despite this, the world kept turning, as it always had. But she had to wonder how much of it would be left in a few years.

  The Sao Paulo airport was even busier than she remembered it, and navigating her way through the crowd took a seasoned agility that came only with years of traveling experience.

  The customs lines were a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam. The heightened feeling of unrest around the globe was no doubt putting security personnel on full alert, looking for any possible contraband, and more people than ever were being pulled out of line and seeing their baggage X-rayed and carefully searched.

  Not all of them appreciated the gesture and tempers were heated.

  It was times like this that traveling under State Department cover came in handy. With a flash of her credentials and passport, Callahan was able to bypass the line and head straight for the lobby.

  When she traveled by air-which was about 90 percent of the time-Callahan rarely carried more than a backpack and a small airplane-friendly overnight bag. All she needed were a few toiletries, some comfortable underwear, and half a dozen changes of clothes. Any additional wardrobe or luggage (or weapons, for that matter) were procured locally by Section and waiting for her in her hotel room, depending on the needs of the particular assignment at hand. The life Callahan led was often complicated, and traveling light was one of the best ways she knew to alleviate the stress of the job.

  Not that this had been working lately. The panic attacks, the tremors, and the inability to sleep put the lie to that particular belief. And after years of back-to-back assignments, maybe what she needed was a vacation.

  As she crossed the lobby toward the exit to the street, she noticed a young dark-haired girl sitting at a nearby bench, surrounded by luggage. The girl was sobbing uncontrollably, a newspaper clutched in her hands, Gabriela’s face staring up at her from the front page.

  This girl, she thought, was a live version of what was playing on the lobby television screens, her tears a palpable manifestation of a very real pain. By her reaction, you would think her sister had just died, yet it was unlikely she had known Gabriela beyond the carefully manufactured image that was projected on those screens.

  For just a moment, their gazes met, and Callahan tried to show her a bit of sympathy, although she doubted it would matter. The poor thing was beyond consoling at this point.

  But in that moment, Callahan was hurled backwards to her own childhood, to a time shortly after her father killed himself. She had been very young when it happened, and she was devastated. Partly because he was everything to her, and partly because he’d left her behind with her stepmother, who was, quite possibly, the biggest stone-cold bitch on the face of the planet.

  Leaving the girl to her tears-and her memories to the crowded lobby-Callahan carried her bag through the sliding glass doors and went outside, immediately struck by a stifling humidity that made her regret wearing a blazer. She went straight toward the curb, where she hoped to grab an air-conditioned cab.

  The street was crowded with them, from small white Fiats to brightly colored VW vans, but before she could hail one, a teenage boy stepped into her path, said something unintelligible, then thrust a flyer into her free hand.

  Callahan was about to tell him that unless he was handing her a portable swamp cooler, to kindly fuck off, when he gave her a big toothy grin, then turned and headed toward his next victim.

  Another messenger from Section?

  No, she thought, not this time. He was a little too young to be a Section operative, and was more than likely just a kid trying to make a living.

  Still, her gaze drifted to the flyer. It featured a photograph of a gaudily painted tour van rolling through what looked like a Brazilian shantytown. The text read, in English:

  FAVELA TOURS

  Experience true adventure! Explore the Wild West of South

  America in Sao Paolo’s Favela Paraisopolis!

  Callahan had heard of these tours before. They were usually taken by callous idiots who had a morbid fascination with how the poor and impoverished lived. The modern-day equivalent of a freak show. The very definition of the term slumming.

  Shoving the flyer into her jacket pocket, she once again threw her hand in the air and flagged a cab.

  It struck Callahan the moment she met him that Lieutenant Manuel Martinez didn’t want her there.

  This, in itself, wasn’t an earth-shattering revelation. It doesn’t matter what profession you practice, anytime somebody new comes along, somebody hoisted on you by management or, as in this case, the governor and the police superintendent, you tend to feel a certain amount of resistance to their presence.

  But what surprised Callahan were Martinez’s efforts to disguise this with the buttery charm of a Shopping Channel pitchman, a charm carefully accented by a disarming smile and a calculated twinkle in the eyes. The only thing that ruined the picture was a faint but unmistakable trace of fear behind that twinkle. Callahan had long ago learned to read people almost instantly, and her impression of the lieutenant was that he was a conflicted, frightened man.

  What he was frightened of was anyone’s guess.

  “Agent Callahan,” he said. “So wonderful to meet you. I’m so sorry we must become acquainted under such tragic circumstances.”

  He spoke in his native tongue, but Callahan had no trouble understanding him. She was proficient in nine languages and fluent in seven, including Portuguese. Brazilian Portuguese. Which was, undoubtedly, one of the reasons she’d been given this assignment in the first place. Martinez would have received word of this in the briefing packet Section had faxed him.

  Callahan knew she had a choice here. She could play the charm card right back at him-something she was quite adept at-or she could simply play the cold, officious, no-nonsense State Department hard-ass who was here to get the job done.

  Pulling her h
and free, she went with option number two. “Why don’t we forgo the formalities and get down to business?”

  Martinez’s smile froze. “Whatever you wish.”

  They were standing in the detectives’ squad room of the Special Investigations Department of the Policia Civil do Estado de Sao Paulo. A couple of Martinez’s investigators were slumped in chairs nearby, one of them running his gaze up and down her body without apology, as if she were nothing more than what the locals called a program girl, here to service the troops.

  Had she not learned long ago to ignore such things, she might have been a bit perturbed by it. But this was Brazil, after all, in all its modern, complex, sexually liberated glory.

  “These are Detectives Santos and Rivera,” Martinez said. “They wish to express their gratitude that the superintendent has asked you to join our investigation.”

  “They do, do they?”

  For a moment Callahan was tempted to tell them that they might want to consider adjusting that “gratitude” before she adjusted it for them.

  But she was too tired to bother.

  Instead, she opted for the high road. “Shall we take a look at the victim’s body now?”

  The word body was being kind.

  Despite the crime-scene photos, Callahan was surprised by its condition, a charred mass of bones and wasted internal organs that were barely identifiable as human. What was left of Gabriela Maria Abrino Zuada lay in a heap on the medical examiner’s table, giving off a sharp, putrid smell that invaded the nostrils without mercy, making Callahan’s stomach do a sudden flip-flop the moment she walked into the crime lab.

  She managed to hold back the airline peanuts long enough for the nausea to pass, then turned to the medical examiner, a sober-looking guy named Pereira, who didn’t seem at all bothered by the smell.

  “So what can you tell me about this?” she asked.

  “Other than the obvious? Very little.”

  “Run it through for me.”

  Pereira glanced at Martinez, who stood just inside the doorway. That trace of fear she’d seen earlier had gotten more pronounced and Pereira seemed to share it.

  What the hell was going on here?

  “The victim was female,” Pereira said. “Twenty-three years old, identified through dental records as Senhorita Gabriela Zuada. The body was nearly incinerated by fire, and one of the witnesses said he smelled gasoline.” He cleared his throat. “But this is where it becomes complicated.”

  “How?”

  “There is no evidence of any gasoline.”

  “Then what kind of accelerant was used?”

  “This is the complication. If the victim doused herself, as we originally suspected, she would have breathed in fumes, and some of the residue from those fumes would, in all probability, be in her lung tissue.”

  Callahan studied the mess on the table. “Good luck with that.”

  “I managed to scrape enough samples to examine, but I didn’t find any trace of an accelerant at all.”

  It was Callahan’s turn to frown. “That’s a little hard to believe.”

  “Yes,” Pereira said. “So I checked and rechecked. No chemical residue whatsoever.”

  “So then how did she catch fire?”

  “It’s quite obvious,” Martinez said from the doorway. “If this wasn’t suicide, it was an accident. Gabriela was a former meth addict who went back to her old ways and somehow managed to torch herself.”

  Callahan looked at him and could see that he didn’t believe a word he’d just said. This was the public relations speech-a cover story-for something that couldn’t be explained.

  “That seems unlikely,” she said. “Did you find any signs of drug abuse? A pipe? Matches? Anything?”

  “We’re working on that. Perhaps one of her friends removed the evidence to protect her reputation.”

  Pereira shook his head, apparently not willing to go along with the lie. “Without an accelerant, it wouldn’t be possible to do this kind of damage merely by lighting a pipe, even if the substance in that pipe was highly volatile. So we have no real answer to your question. Unless . . .”

  He hesitated.

  “Unless what?” Callahan asked.

  “As a man of science, my training tells me that there should be a rational explanation for the condition of this body, but in truth . . .”

  He let the words trail again.

  “What?”

  “It almost appears that the combustion was . . . well . . .” He shifted uncomfortably, glancing at Martinez, as if he were too embarrassed-or too afraid-to continue.

  “Go on,” Callahan told him, her patience growing thin.

  Pereira took a moment. Crossed himself. “That the combustion was spontaneous.”

  9

  The Spontaneous Human Combustion.

  It seemed to Callahan that the so-called science surrounding this idea was sketchy at best and downright ridiculous for the most part. But she knew this wasn’t the first unexplained death by fire to wind up on a coroner’s slab.

  Pereira went on to explain a documented phenomenon called “the wick effect,” which more or less amounted to body fat turning the victim into a human candle, burning from the inside out.

  A grisly thought if there ever was one.

  Experiments on a pig were supposed to be proof that such a thing was possible-pigs and humans shared similar fat patterns-but Callahan had her doubts.

  Judging by the videos she’d seen in the airport lobby, Gabriela Zuada didn’t have more than a thimbleful of fat on her body, and as Martinez had said, there was no real evidence of drug paraphernalia in the room.

  So unless the poor girl had somehow willed herself to catch fire, they were back to square one. And the way Callahan looked at it, there were four possibilities at work here:

  1. Suicide

  2. Accident

  3. Murder

  4. Act of God

  Since Callahan didn’t have a religious bone in her body, number four was immediately scratched off the list. Numbers one and two were still possibilities, but the preliminary forensic evidence didn’t support either of them.

  So what about number three?

  Murder.

  Callahan had briefly considered this on the plane, and maybe she should give the idea more attention. Was it possible that some crazed fan had managed to sneak backstage, snatch Gabriela away from her entourage and kill her by using some undetectable accelerant to light her on fire?

  Based on the timeline mapped out in the dossier, this seemed even less likely than the other scenarios, but witness accounts are notoriously faulty and, at this point, all bets were off. Maybe the timeline was wrong. Maybe in the panic and confusion of finding their beloved Gabriela burned to a crisp, her friends had misjudged the sequence and duration of events.

  It wouldn’t be a first.

  But the absence of any chemicals in Gabriela’s lungs continued to niggle at Callahan. People just didn’t burst into flames for no reason.

  “Check the body again,” she said to Pereira. “There’s no way she wound up like this without some kind of help.”

  Pereira sighed. “I doubt I’ll find anything.”

  “Keep trying,” she told him, then turned to Martinez. “Shall we take a look at the crime scene now?”

  Again that trace of fear flickered in the detective’s eyes and Callahan wondered what he was holding back. She could see that he wasn’t about to volunteer anything-not yet, at least-so she decided to give him some room. Let this thing play out before she got aggressive about it.

  She really did need to see the crime scene, however, and Martinez wasn’t all that anxious to move-like a child who’s reluctant to go to bed because he’s afraid the boogeyman is hiding in the closet.

  “Well? Shall we?”

  “You’re the boss,” he said quietly, then turned and walked out the door.

  Acrowd had gathered outside the concert auditorium.

  Hundreds of Gabriela’s fans s
tood shoulder to shoulder, some staring blankly, others openly weeping, still others carrying placards with her photograph, singing along with one of her songs that was piped through a portable loudspeaker.

  It struck Callahan as both circus and wake, an outpouring of true affection for a lost star, tainted only by the attention seekers and rubberneckers who came here simply because it was the thing to do.

  Wooden barriers had been placed along the entrance to the auditorium; armed state police officers watched the crowd carefully, waiting for any signs of unruliness. At their feet were dozens of bouquets and wreaths and crosses and candles and more photographs, a multicolored shrine to Santa Gabriela.

  Callahan marveled at it all. Could not quite fathom how a simple girl who sang simple pop songs could garner such attention and adulation.

  Martinez turned their squad car onto the main drive and waited for a guard to disperse a section of the crowd and wave them through. Callahan sat next to him, soaking it all in with a mix of dread and curiosity, knowing it wouldn’t take a whole lot to get this crowd worked up.

  Gabriela was dead and the details of her death were sparse and slow to surface. And the people here no doubt wanted answers. Sooner or later they’d start insisting they get some and Callahan didn’t think they’d be too friendly about it. Despite the tears, that undercurrent of anger that plagued so much of the world these days was very much in evidence here.

  Simmering. Waiting to explode.

  The guard raised a megaphone, calling for several onlookers to step aside as Martinez gunned the engine and slowly drove toward a gate to the left of the entrance. Another guard unlatched it and waved the car through, giving Martinez a quick salute as they passed.

  Martinez ignored him.

  A moment later, they pulled up next to a loading dock as the gate closed behind them. A third guard came over and opened Callahan’s door for her.