Buried Strangers by Leighton Gage Page A

expect me to extract . . . uh, confidential information? How about expenses?”
    “What about them?” Silva said.
    “The girl’s the daughter of a minister, right? So she must be accustomed to the good things in life. I might have to buy her champagne, treat her to dinner in a fancy restaurant, that kind of stuff.”
    “Shower her with presents,” Arnaldo said, “take her on a cruise.”
    “No jewelry, no cruises,” Silva said. “I’ll be going through your expense reports with a magnifying glass. You’d better be able to justify every damned item.”
    “I look forward to the opportunity,” Gonçalves said.

Chapter Sixteen
    “LIEUTENANT SOARES,” SERGEANT BLESSA said, approaching his side of the service window, “How’s that CD player? Still working okay?”
    “Working fine,” Soares said.
    “And what can I do for you this time?”
    Soares rested his briefcase on the counter and regarded Blessa through vertical bars evocative of a theater’s box office.
    “You can start,” he said, “by letting me in there.”
    Sergeant Blessa slipped him a clipboard. Soares signed in, picked up his briefcase, and walked over to the steel door. There was a rattling of keys and the door swung open, squeaking on hinges long devoid of oil. Blessa motioned Soares inside and locked the door behind him.
    Directly ahead, a long, dimly lit corridor stretched into darkness. There were parallel corridors to the right and left. Lining them, up to ceiling height, were metal cupboards. Each cupboard bore a number, a heavy steel hasp, and a pad-lock. The two men were standing in the evidence locker, sit-uated in the basement of the delegacia central, headquarters of São Paulo’s policia civil.
    Orestes Blessa, the man who ran the operation, had a skin bleached by the sunless light in which he spent his days. He had virtually no neck, a wide mouth, and bulbous eyes, all reminiscent of a toad, an albino toad in a police uniform.
    With concrete walls, a steel door, and only one entrance, the evidence locker gave every appearance of being secure.
    It wasn’t.
    Blessa had been working there for fifteen years and for most of that time he’d been running the place like a shop.
    “What’s your pleasure?” Blessa asked, sounding, as he usu-ally did, more like a merchant than a cop.
    “I want to be alone with that”—Soares pointed to Blessa’s computer—“and I want access to the cupboards.”
    Blessa nodded agreeably.
    “Okay, Lieutenant, but remember, if whatever you need is something that might attract attention—”
    “It won’t. You won’t even miss it. And it’s small. I’ll be taking it away in this.”
    Soares hefted his briefcase.
    “I run a special for cases that require, uh . . . a certain degree of discretion,” Blessa said. “Five hundred reais and no questions asked.”
    “ Fiv e hundred?”
    Five hundred was nothing. The deal Soares had negotiated with Claudia Andrade was for ten thousand, but it was against the lieutenant’s principles to accept the first price he was offered. He lifted an eyebrow and waited for Blessa to crumble.
    And after a few seconds, Blessa did. He was, after all, only a sergeant. Soares was a lieutenant and the brother-in-law of the secretary of public safety, to boot.
    “Normally, yeah,” Blessa said, “five hundred, but for you, being a special customer and all, four fifty. A twenty percent discount.”
    “I’ll take it.”
    Blessa opened a drawer in his desk, took out a brass ring holding a single key, and went over to pull down a shade over the service window.
    “Fifteen minutes?” he said, offering Soares the ring.
    “Twenty,” Soares said, taking it. “This is the master key?”
    “Yeah,” Blessa said. “Fits all the padlocks.”
    Blessa might have been a crook, but he was an efficient and extremely well-organized crook. Items in his cupboards were always in their proper place and meticulously listed in his database. The computer allowed searches by name (of