A Vine in the Blood (13 page)

While she’d been unconscious, they’d changed her clothes, taken off her urine-stained nightgown and dressed her in a track suit. It pinched at the waist, in the armpits, in the crotch. They could have abused her when she was naked, but they hadn’t.

Maybe
, she thought,
because I still stink of piss.

She’d wanted to use some of the water to clean herself, but she was so thirsty, and there was so little of it, that she’d drunk it all.

There was a chain around her ankle, loosely fastened with a small padlock. Another padlock linked the chain to an eye bolt set into the wall. The loop around her ankle was beginning to chafe her skin.

Her cell was square, the walls about four meters apart. In the middle of the ceiling, a bare bulb hung from a wire. What they’d referred to as a bed was, in reality, no more than a mattress on the floor, no frame, no spring, no sheets. The air was warm and stale. The only source of fresh air was a single aluminum vent set into the top of the door.

There was no radio, no television, but they’d left her a stack of old magazines. She was grateful for that.

Her captors were two, one tall and broad-shouldered, one of less than average height and girth for a man, but average on both counts if the captor was a woman. Their outfits were identical: blue coveralls, a hood made of blue cloth, black tennis shoes and vinyl gloves.

They rotated, first one, then the other, never coming into her cell together, never speaking.

Except once.

That time, they
had
come in together. The big one had handed her a newspaper, and told her how to hold it, while the smaller one took a photograph.

That incident happened shortly after she awoke. The flash had made her headache worse. They’d taken the newspaper with them when they’d left.

Were they people she knew?

The thought disturbed her.

Something else disturbed her, too.

Back in her bedroom, before the big oaf put the needle in her arm, she’d heard two sharp reports.

In the
favela
of her childhood, such sounds were everyday events, background noise, like birdsong in the countryside, or surf on a beach. She’d heard them many hundreds of times.

Gunshots.

Chapter Sixteen

I
RENE ASKED HIM WHEN
he’d be coming home.

“We talked about that yesterday,” Silva said, and then regretted it. It would pain her to know she’d been so drunk she couldn’t remember.

“I … I miss you,” she said, in a small voice, slurring her speech. He took it for what it was—a drunken attempt to apologize.

“And I miss you, Irene. Now, let me talk to Maria de Lourdes.”

Silva no longer felt comfortable about leaving his wife alone, not since the day, almost three months ago, when he’d come home to find her in a stupor on the kitchen floor. She’d hit a corner of the table on the way down, and the gash had bled profusely. He thought, at first, that she’d been shot, there was so much blood on the tiles.

He’d promptly hired Maria de Lourdes Krups, their former cleaning woman, as Irene’s full-time companion.

Despite her somewhat Teutonic surname, Maria de Lourdes was a
mulata
from Paraná, fiercely loyal to Silva and infinitely patient with his alcoholic wife. The loyalty stemmed from a favor he’d done her once, an affair linked to her only son, like Silva’s, now dead.

“Senhor?” Maria de Lourdes said.

“I should have called earlier, shouldn’t I?”

“I’m sure you’ve been busy, Senhor.”

“It’s early in the day for her to be that far along. Has she had any more than usual?”

“No, Senhor. Sometimes it’s just….”

“I understand. Call me on my cell phone when she’s gone to bed.”

“
Sí
, Senhor.”

Silva hung up. Mara stopped typing on her laptop. Arnaldo put down his pencil.

“How is she?” Arnaldo said.

“The usual. Hasn’t had a fall, though, for almost a month.” “Because Maria de Lourdes follows her around like a mother hen.”

“Maybe. She’s a jewel, that woman.”

“Why don’t you just cut her off?” Mara asked. “Stop buying it for her. Don’t give her any money.”

“Doesn’t work,” Silva said. “You can’t force a cure on an alcoholic. They have to
want
to get cured.”

“Irene doesn’t want to get cured?”

“Not yet.” Silva changed the subject. “That call you took while I was talking to her? Was it about the keys? The ones you picked up at the Artist’s place?”

“It was. They fit. No useful prints other than those of Cintia and the Artist.”

“And Cintia Tadesco’s skin?”

“Perfect. The bitch.”

“Bitch is right,” Arnaldo said. “I do
so
hope she’s mixed up in this. If she is, I want to be the one to cuff her.”

“Get in line, Nunes,” Mara said. “Ladies first.”

“What was in the syringe?” Silva asked.

“We don’t know,” Mara said. “Not yet.”

“Hurry the lab along.”

“I’m on it.”

“Ballistics?”

“The bullets that killed both maids were fired from the same weapon.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Arnaldo said, and would have said more, but just then, they heard footsteps approaching in the corridor, a woman’s high heels, moving fast. They all looked at the door.

Celeste, one of the Mara’s people, bustled into the room. She was clearly excited.

“A tip,” she said. “There’s a warehouse in Bom Retiro—”

“That neighborhood is nothing
but
warehouses.”

“Let her talk, Nunes,” Mara snapped. “Go on, Celeste.”

“This particular warehouse has been abandoned for ages. Then, yesterday, at about seven in the morning, a truck pulled up in front. Two men got out, unloaded a packing crate, and carried it inside.”

“Big crate?”

“Big enough to contain a human being. The truck drove off. The men stayed. They’ve been there ever since.”

“Who called it in?”

“A neighbor, a widow lady, name of …”—Celeste consulted the paper she was holding—“Garcia.”

“Who took the call?”

“Marlene. She says Garcia sounds like an old biddy, a selfappointed watchdog of the neighborhood.”

“Nothing terribly suspicious in what you’ve told us up to know,” Silva said. “There must have been more, something that prompted the Garcia woman to pick up her phone”

“There was,” Celeste said.

“What?”

“She heard a woman scream.”

L
ESS THAN
an hour later, a hostage rescue team headed by Gloria Sarmento had taken up positions around the warehouse. Gloria, dressed in gray coveralls, wearing a headset, and carrying an H&K MP-5, was peeking out through a gap in Senhora Garcia’s curtains. From the old lady’s living room, she had a clear view of the warehouse’s front door.

Hector was on Senhora Garcia’s roof with three of Gloria’s snipers. Gloria’s number two, Raul Franco, and three other members of the team, were on a parallel street, covering the rear exit.

Silva studied the lady who’d called in the tip. She looked like a friendly grandmother, appeared to be about eighty, had watery eyes and thick eyeglasses.

“It was more than one scream,” she said. “It was a whole lot of shrieking. I called right away, but your answering system put me on hold for almost fifteen minutes.” She stuck an accusing finger in Silva’s face. “That screeching, Chief Inspector, was almost an hour and a half ago. It sounded like they were torturing the poor woman. God knows what they’ve done to her by now.”

“We’re short-staffed, Senhora Garcia. Sometimes it creates problems.”

“If you ask me, the law enforcement in this country is getting worse and worse. You can say what you like about the dictatorship, but if you called the police in those days, they showed up right away.”

“Really?” Arnaldo said. “Did you have occasion to call them often?”

“What are you?” she snorted. “A goddamned pinko?”

“Tell us about the packing crate,” Silva said.

“It was wood,” she said, “and plenty big enough for a person.”

“Painted?”

“No, and nothing written on it either. What are you standing around talking to me for? Why don’t you just go in there, grab those bastards and kick the shit out of them?”

“Will you be my grandma?” Arnaldo said.

“How would you like my cane shoved up your ass?”

“What do you remember about the men who were carrying the box?” Silva said.

“Did I tell you they were men?”

“You told the lady who took your call.”

“They were men. I’m just keeping you on your toes.”

“How were they dressed?”

“The shorter one was wearing a coverall like Superwoman’s over there, except hers is gray and his was blue.”

“Who are you calling Superwoman?” Gloria said, fingering the trigger on her machine pistol and looking as if she’d like to use it. She’d been in the room with Senhora Garcia longer than any of the others.

Senhora Garcia ignored her question.

“I couldn’t see his face very well,” she said. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be, and by the time I’d fetched my binoculars from the windowsill upstairs he’d gone inside.”

“And the other man? What was he wearing?”

“Slacks and a blue shirt. Short sleeves.”

“You haven’t seen either one of them since they went in there?”

“Did I say that? Did I say I hadn’t seen either one of them since they went in there?”

Silva sighed.

“No, Senhora Garcia, you didn’t.”

“You’re damned right, I didn’t. The one with the blue shirt has been out of there three times. The first time was just after he went in. He was away for about ten minutes and came back with a box of bottled water, Minalba, the one with the red label, the one without gas. The second time, he went down to the
padaria
on the corner. He came back carrying a paper bag.”

Senhora Garcia’s vision might not have been quite as sharp as she would have liked, but it wasn’t all that bad either. And there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with her memory.

“What about the third time?” Silva asked.

“He came back with a couple of plastic bags, looked like they were from the supermarket around the corner on Rua Francesco Bellini.”

“Did you see either one of them with a gun?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“What do you think, Gloria?” Silva said, turning to the head of the hostage rescue team.

“We checked with the power company,” she said. “They haven’t got electricity in there. If anyone comes out, we pounce on him. If not, we wait until five in the morning and go in with night-vision scopes.”

“You’re the expert,” Silva said, “but I really hate the idea of waiting that long.”

“Hate it, but you’re going to do it, eh?” Senhora Garcia said. “Bunch of goddamned pussies.”

I
N THE
end, they didn’t have to wait at all. Fifteen minutes after adopting Gloria’s strategy, the man in the blue shirt walked out the front door of the building.

Her people grabbed him as soon as he’d rounded the corner. Minutes later, he was shackled to a metal table in the RV that the team was using as a mobile command post.

Silva kicked off the interrogation: “What’s your name?”

“Tulio Santiago, Senhor.”

Santiago was scared, short, and hunger thin. His brown eyes, big behind steel-rimmed glasses, kept oscillating from the MP5 in Gloria’s hands to the Glock on Arnaldo’s belt.

“Who else is in that warehouse, Tulio?”

The prisoner squirmed. “Just my
companheiro
Elvis, Senhor.”

“Elvis, is it? Elvis what?”

“Pinheiro, Senhor.”

“You weren’t armed. Is Elvis?”

“Armed, Senhor?”

“Is he carrying a gun? Or a knife?”

“Oh, no, Senhor. We never carry those kinds of things.”

“If you don’t carry weapons, Tulio, how do you control your victims?”

“Victims, Senhor?”

“Stop beating around the goddamned bush, Tulio. The game is up. Someone heard her scream. So save us the trouble of roughing you up. Tell us what we’ll find in there when we break down the door.”

Santiago hung his head and sighed. He was ready to cooperate.

“Did you torture her?”

Santiago’s head snapped up.