Buried Strangers

by Leighton Gage

  Before being appointed to his present lofty post, the min-ister had spent nineteen years as head of the (twenty-thou-sand-member strong) Restaurateur’s and Hotel Owner’s Association, a position that gave him access to many of Brazil’s movers and shakers. He was seen as an expert on the hospitality business, which, in fact, he was not. But in Brasilia, appearance beats substance every time, and appear-ance was something the minister had in spades. He always dressed well, was carefully groomed, appeared comfortable at the podium, kept his mouth shut at cabinet meetings, and carefully concealed his true nature from the public. His appointment was regarded favorably by almost everyone in the president’s political party.

  He sat now on the couch in Sampaio’s office. The director hovered over him with an open humidor of cigars in one hand and a cutter in the other. Sampaio, who kept the humi-dor on the credenza behind his desk, liked to smoke a Montecristo Number 2 after lunch, but he never offered one to Silva.

  “Sit down,” the director said when his chief inspector appeared on the threshold. He nodded to a chair that faced the couch from the other side of a low coffee table.

  The minister chose one of the cigars, clipped off the end, and held it out for a light. Sampaio put down the humidor, performed the service with a long wooden match, took a seat at the other end of the couch, and busied himself with preparing a cigar. Once he had it lit, the two of them sat there, puffing away, looking at Silva through the smoke. The smell of aromatic tobacco filled the office.

  The minister withdrew the Montecristo from his mouth and gazed upon it affectionately, giving it a look that most men of his age reserved for their grandchildren. “You know, the Americans ban the importation of these things?” he said.

  “It’s those so-called exiles in Miami,” Sampaio said. “Exiles,” he snorted, “like they’re planning on leaving America and going back.”

  “More power to them,” Cavalcante said. “Let the Americans smoke that Dominican crap. Keeps the price of the good stuff down. Supply and demand and all that.”

  They smoked awhile in silence.

  Silva waited.

  “You’ve met Minister Cavalcante?” Sampaio asked, finally getting down to business.

  “Never had the pleasure,” Silva said.

  The minister took the cigar out of his mouth and extended a hand. Silva had to rise from his chair to take it. Cavalcante’s hand was soft and dry. He applied just the right amount of pressure. Not so weak as to demonstrate frailty, nor so strong as to imply he was a bully. Silva immediately recognized that he was in the presence of a master hand-shaker. The guy could have earned money by giving lessons to young politicians.

  “The minister, as you know, is from São Paulo.”

  Silva didn’t know any such thing, but he nodded and resumed his seat.

  “The subject of that cemetery in the Serra da Cantareira came up at lunch. The minister expressed concern.”

  Silva opened his mouth to say something, but a look from Sampaio caused him to shut it again.

  “I told him,” the director went on, “that I share his con-cern, that I had dispatched you and Arnaldo to São Paulo, that I had already assigned our profiler to the case. Minister Cavalcante had some time before his next appointment, so he came back here with me to read Boceta’s report and dis-cuss the issue.”

  Before Silva could formulate a polite way of asking why the hell the minister of tourism was sticking his nose into a murder investigation, Cavalcante took his cigar out of his mouth and leaned forward.

  “This Boceta guy,” he said, “I think he’s full of shit.”

  He returned the cigar to his mouth and leaned back on the couch.

  “Could you elaborate on that?” Silva asked.

  Sampaio responded for his guest. “The minister feels there’s no substantiation for Boceta’s speculations.”

  “About a satanic cult?”

  “Exactly. He feels, as I do, that there could be all sorts of other explanations for that cemetery. In the old days, for example, they used to have private cemeteries on the big estates. It could be one of those.”

  “There were no tombstones, Director.”

  “Who’s to say they used tombstones? Anyway, that’s just a hypothetical example. Remember that big flu pandemic after the First World War? There were millions of deaths world-wide. Whole families were wiped out. Something like that fits right in.”

  “No, Director, it doesn’t. The forensics indicate that the graves weren’t that old.”

  “But they weren’t from last week, or last month, or last year either,” Sampaio insisted. “You could almost call them ancient.”

  “I don’t think I’d go quite as far as that, Director.”

  “So how far would you go?”

  “Dr. Couto, the medical examiner in São Paulo, estimates that the graves are between three and seven years old.”

  Again, the minister leaned forward and took the cigar out of his mouth. “Let’s not quibble about how long those people have been in the ground,” he said. “When I say this guy . . .”

  “Boceta,” the director filled in.

  “ . . . is full of shit, I mean that there’s no justification for him to assume, as he does in his report, that the deaths are linked to a satanic cult.”

  “Not necessarily, no,” Silva said.

  The minister leaned back and nodded.

  “The minister,” Sampaio said, “is concerned about the repercussions of the satanic-cult theory.”

  “Repercussions?”

  Cavalcante saw the puzzled look on Silva’s face. “Let me explain it to him, Nelson. You can’t expect him to see the big picture unless we show it to him, right?”

  “Right,” Sampaio said.

  “My concern,” Cavalcante said, turning to Silva, “is to make this country an attractive place for tourism. That’s the mandate given to me by the president. What kind of attrac-tion is there, I ask you, in a satanic cult that murders people?” The question was rhetorical. Cavalcante had no intention of ceding the floor. He continued with hardly a pause. “Now a serial murderer is another matter entirely. Serial murderers don’t seem to have a negative effect on tourism. Look at America. Look at all the serial murderers they’ve got, and people still flock to Disney World and Las Vegas by the mil-lions. And France. And the UK. Even little Belgium for Christ’s sake. You see all of that shit that went on with those kids in Belgium?”

  Silva nodded. He kept up on international developments, particularly anything that involved crime. Cavalcante took the nod to be an agreement with his thesis. “There. You see? Madmen can sprout up anywhere. Eventually the guy is cap-tured, or dies, and that’s it. End of story. If he hasn’t been captured, and the crimes have stopped, isn’t it logical to assume that the guy who’s responsible for that cemetery in the Serra da Cantareira is dead?”

  “There have been cases when a killer goes dormant—” Silva didn’t get any further than that. The minister cut him off.

  “Now a cult, that’s something else,” he said. “A cult is lots of people. A cult doesn’t stop doing what it’s doing just because one member died. If it was a cult they’d still be at it, right?”

  “It’s possible, but—”

  “But nothing. You just got finished saying there are no recent bodies in those graves. Nothing from last week, or last month, or last year. The killer is out of business. No doubt about it. People who do things like that never stop, do they? Not as long as they’re alive. So he’s dead. That’s the only log-ical conclusion. I’ve read the books, seen the movies. The last thing the tourist industry in this country needs is for a fucking academic theorist like this . . . this . . .”

  “Boceta?”

  “ . . . to come up with some crazy theory that there’s a gang of madmen out there waiting to snatch people off the streets. The Americans would panic. They’d never come near us.”

  They aren’t coming near us now, Silva thought. But he didn’t say it. What he said was, “We can’t b
e sure there isn’t another cemetery out there someplace, one with more recent graves.”

  “Any more than we can be sure it’s a cult,” the minister said.

  “WHO THE hell does he think he is?” Arnaldo said an hour later. “Since when does the minister of tourism get involved in murder investigations?”

  “Since the director invited him in,” Silva said.

  “And what’s his problem with a line of inquiry that links them to a satanic cult?”

  “That’s what I can’t figure out.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “After Cavalcante left, Sampaio called in Boceta and had a go at him, told him he didn’t think much of his theory.”

  “Uh-huh. And how did Boceta react to that?”

  “You know of any other organization in this country that hires criminal profilers?”

  “No, just us.”

  “So how do you think Boceta reacted?”

  “The little weasel stressed it was just a theory? Said he’d give it some more thought?”

  “Uh-huh. And he asked the director to thank the minis-ter for bringing the lack of continuity, the absence of more recent murders, to his attention.”

  “I don’t know why I bothered to ask. What now?”

  “Now, Sampaio wants us to get back to what he calls the important stuff and leave the investigation of the graves to the people in São Paulo. Only he wants me to call them first and suggest that the line of investigation involving a possi-ble cult is a dead end.”

  “And by the important stuff you mean?”

  “Trying to dig up some dirt on Romeu Pluma.”

  “Okay. That’s what the director wants. But what you’re really going to do is follow the cult thread and maybe look into why Cavalcante doesn’t want to investigate it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So how are we gonna do it without Sampaio—”

  “Or Cavalcante.”

  “Or Cavalcante getting wise to what we’re up to?”

  “We’re going to tell Hector to go ahead, but to keep it out of his written reports, and I’m going to have a chat with Tarcisio Mello.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  TARCISIO MELLO WAS A private investigator who’d retired from the federal police after a thirty-year career. He’d been a vigorous fifty-five at the time, and had been casting around, trying to find something to do with the rest of his life.

  One day, after being turned down for a security job, he got a call from a childhood friend who was running for office in Tarcisio’s native state of Santa Catarina. The friend asked him to look into the background of his political rival, a long-standing federal senator. The senator was a born-again Christian, a moral pillar of the community, and an odds-on favorite for reelection.

  Mello’s investigation uncovered that he was also carrying on an affair with his personal assistant. Brazil is a tolerant place, and the senator’s love life might well have been per-fectly acceptable to the electorate, if the senator hadn’t been married and the assistant had been female.

  Mello’s friend was elected. Word got around. Mello let it be known that his services were available to others, but that he’d only accept work from one candidate for any given office. Homosexual liaisons weren’t the only things that Brasilia’s politicians wanted to hide. Some hired Mello because they hoped to repeat the success of the new senator from Santa Catarina. Others hired him out of fear, hoping to avoid the fate of the new senator’s predecessor. Within a year, Mello had opened an office in Brasilia; within five, he had a staff of sixty-three and representation in five state capitals.

  Mello received Silva in a book-lined office. Back when he was a federal cop, he’d been in the habit of bringing paperback novels along on stakeouts. Two of the shelves were lined with books of that type, their well-thumbed spines contrasting sharply with the expensive jacaranda wood. When Silva came in the door, his old friend came around his desk, gave him a firm embrace, and led him to the couch in the corner.

  “How have you been, Mario?”

  Mello knew about Silva’s wife, Irene. He knew about her drinking problem, about the long-standing depression that had plagued her since the death of her only child.

  “Good, Tarcisio, good,” Silva said, knowing exactly what Mello was getting at by asking the question.

  “She’s better, then?”

  “Oh, yes, much better.”

  She wasn’t, but it was sometimes kinder to lie.

  They passed the time in chat until the coffee was served. Tarcisio had three daughters and two grandchildren, and he loved to talk about them, but he wouldn’t have brought them up if Silva hadn’t. He was a sensitive man and a kind one, unusual traits in someone who’d seen as much of the bad side of human nature as he had. His recital over, he put down his coffee cup and got down to business.

  “How can I help you, Mario?”

  Silva filled him in on the case, starting with the discovery of the graves and telling him about Boceta’s theory.

  Mello’s lip curled when he got to the part about the curi-ous meeting with the minister of tourism. “What’s Cavalcante trying to hide?”

  “That’s what I want to find out.”

  “You came to the right place.”

  There was no discussion of money or fees. Mello’s business depended entirely on the ability to access information. Often, that information was something that his former colleagues at the federal police were able to provide. He never offered to pay, since payment could have been con-strued as bribery. But he was always willing to return favors.

  “Let me see if I already have something on him,” he said, and got up to call his secretary.

  A shapely brunette soon appeared and put a dossier down on the coffee table in front of them. The brunette flashed a smile at Silva, turned, and walked out without saying a word. Mello picked up the folder, leaned back in his chair, and started scanning it. After a minute or two he looked up.

  “Cavalcante never ran for public office,” he said, “but he headed up the Restaurateur’s and Hotel Owner’s Association for almost twenty years. That’s an elected position. During his tenure, he built the association a building in the center of São Paulo, put up a training school for chambermaids and waiters, and installed a dentist and a doctor so members could get dental and medical care in exchange for their dues.”

  “Sounds like he did a good job.”

  Tarcisio scanned some more of the document and stroked his mustache. The mustache was a pygmy compared with Silva’s.

  “He played to the people who owned cantinas, roadside churrascarias, little inns in the countryside, surrounded him-self with yes-men, got to the point where he was running the joint like a fiefdom. In time, he turned into an egomaniac.”

  “Power corrupts . . .” Silva said.

  Tarcisio smiled. “And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Do you know who said that?”

  “No idea.”

  “An English lord, name of Acton. More than a hundred years ago.”

  “Not much has changed.”

  “I can attest to that. Anyway, getting back to your friend Cavalcante, a couple of years ago, the owners of some of the more elite restaurants and hotels got together and tried to topple him. They hired us.”

  “And?”

  “And we couldn’t find anything truly damaging.”

  “No sexual peccadillos? No corruption?”

  “No sexual peccadillos. Not recently, anyway. The guy’s seventy-six.”

  “Seventy-six? Jesus, he doesn’t look it.”

  “He lies about it. But so what? His health’s good for a man of his age. Nothing to impede him from doing the job he had then or the job he has now.”

  “And corruption?”

  “Not an easy thing to prove, corruption. Nepotism for sure. While he was running the association, he put his wife, all three sons, and one of his two daughters on the payroll. Various nieces and cousins as well, but the association mem-bers knew about it and nobody com
plained. He spent a lot of the association’s money flying back and forth between São Paulo and Brasilia and between São Paulo and Orlando in the American state of Florida. In the first case, he claims he was lobbying for the association—”

  “And probably himself, since he’s now the minister of tourism.”

  “And probably himself, since he’s now the minister of tourism,” Mello echoed.

  “And in the case of Orlando?”

  Mello referred again to the page he’d been reading.

  “He was going to open a branch office up there. That’s what he said, anyway. Claimed that Brazil had a lot to learn from the Americans in the hospitality area. He also just hap-pens to own a home there.”

  “Coincidence, eh?”

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “And the branch office? Did it ever happen?’’

  “Nope.”

  “But on the surface, he’s pretty clean?”

  “Cleaner than many others in this town.”

  Silva snorted, frustrated. “Nothing else?”

  Tarcisio leafed through the remaining pages of the docu-ment. Silva would have liked to do that himself, but he didn’t want to ask. His friend had already bent confiden-tiality agreements to the limit.

  “His other daughter, the one that doesn’t work for the association, is a Wiccan.”

  “A Wiccan? What the hell is that?”

  Tarcisio scratched his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE MANSION STOOD ATOP one of the high hills in the posh neighborhood of Morumbi. It had once been a wealthy family’s home, and the properties on either side of it still were. The building had come into being with a French name, a French architect, and a front gate designed by Eiffel himself.

  Back then, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, it had been called Sans Souci, French for carefree. The name might have been an apt description of the original owner’s state of spirit, and even of that of his son and grandson, but it had no longer applied to his great-grandson, who entered his adult life with many cares indeed, all of them rooted in a lack of money.