The Games Read online

  We followed General da Silva’s directions to a residential street on a hillside that had a view of the beach and the ocean. Da Silva was waiting for us by a police barrier along with Lieutenant Bruno Acosta. There was a fire truck up the street, and firemen reeling in hoses. The air was tainted with a sickly smoke.

  “Media hasn’t gotten word of it,” Tavia said.

  “Yet,” da Silva said, not happy.

  “We meet again,” Lieutenant Acosta said to me. “You find those missing girls?”

  “No.”

  “Ransom note?”

  “Not yet,” Tavia said a little too quickly. “At least, we haven’t heard about one.”

  “Let’s focus on what’s going on right here, okay?” the general said.

  Acosta studied Tavia and me a beat and then motioned us through the barrier and down the road. The smell became more ungodly the closer we got to the driveway of a single-family home set behind lush hedges.

  We came around the corner of the hedge and saw a tropical garden in front of a beautiful Mediterranean-style two-story home. The only thing that marred the idyllic setting was an incinerated car with the silhouette of a charred corpse in the driver’s seat; puddles of water surrounded the vehicle.

  “The water’s unfortunate,” Tavia said. “Probably compromised evidence of whoever—”

  “Get out of my way!” someone yelled behind us. I looked over my shoulder, saw a fit man in his late thirties wearing a business suit and no tie running up the street toward us. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Senhor Santos. Antonio,” da Silva said, trying to stop him. “You don’t want to see this.”

  “See what?” Antonio Santos cried, and he dodged around him, went to the end of the driveway, and halted.

  His jaw sagged open and his eyes got hazy with disbelief. Then the corner of his lower lip began to quiver, and he sank slowly to his knees.

  “Luna!” he howled. “Oh God. Oh…”

  He retched and then fell over and curled up into a fetal position. We waited until the spasms that racked his body eased and then helped him to his feet.

  “Can we talk to you inside?” da Silva asked.

  Antonio Santos nodded numbly. Then he stole another glance at the horror, said, “Did they…was she…burned alive?”

  The medical examiner, a big-bellied man named Cardoso who’d been studying the body, joined us, and the general looked to him. Cardoso shook his head. “Gunshot wound to the back of the skull. She probably died instantly and long before the fire.”

  Santos stifled a sob, turned away from the car and the ME, and walked unsteadily to the front door. He fumbled for his keys, dropped them. He let Tavia pick them up and open the door.

  It was as beautiful inside as it was outside, and spotless, nothing out of place. Santos did not seem to know where to go. Da Silva motioned him to a seat in the living area, where he began to corroborate much of what we already knew.

  The victim’s husband worked for the Rio Olympic organizing committee and was a liaison to the governments of Rio and Brazil. Santos was charged with cutting through red tape and seeing that projects were completed on time. He’d done much the same job in the years leading up to the World Cup in 2014.

  Santos said he’d been working insane hours the past month or two and had hardly seen his wife. He’d had a late dinner with Luna two nights before but had not been home in a week and had been sleeping on a couch in his office.

  “Your wife have enemies?” Tavia asked.

  “Luna? No. She loved everyone and everyone loved her.”

  “You have enemies?” I asked.

  “You mean people who hate me enough to kill Luna? No. No, I don’t think so.”

  “Where were you last night?” da Silva asked.

  “I worked until two a.m. and then fell asleep on my office couch.”

  “Can witnesses put you there?”

  “I’m sure the security records will show I didn’t leave the building.”

  “When was your last contact with your wife?” I asked.

  “Last night,” he said. “Around nine. I called to tell her I couldn’t make it home again. She said she was going to a movie.”

  “What movie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How’d she seem? Happy? Sad?”

  “She wasn’t happy…she was pissed at me…” Santos broke down. “Maybe if I’d come home she’d still be alive!”

  Chapter 35

  WHEN SANTOS GOT control of himself again, Tavia gave him water, said, “Luna wasn’t happy.”

  “She hasn’t been happy with me in a long time,” Santos said. “She always said I was married to my job more than I was to her. But the World Cup and the Olympics. The biggest things to happen in Brazil in my lifetime. I was desperate to be a part of it. I was determined to make both events succeed, and now…I’ve lost her for…”

  Tavia said, “Did she have a lover?”

  Santos cocked his head and shrugged. “Everyone in Rio has lovers. She had appetites and I…I wasn’t around. So, yes, I assume so.”

  “Any idea of who the lover might be?” I asked.

  He shook his head bitterly. “I’ve never gone looking for anything like that.”

  “And you, Antonio?” the general asked. “Extramarital relationships?”

  Santos hesitated, but then said, “Last year for a few months, with an American journalist.”

  “She the angry type?” Tavia asked.

  “No,” Santos said. “She’s the faraway type.”

  “Luna usually have a phone with her?” I asked.

  “Always, like it was Velcroed to her hand.”

  “We haven’t found it yet,” Lieutenant Acosta said. “Do you know her account passwords for her telephone and whatever text-messaging system she used?”

  “I don’t know them, but she kept a file in her office.”

  “Show us,” Tavia said.

  Santos got up and trudged to the door of his wife’s home office, from which she’d run a successful business renting short-term, high-end apartments in Rio. There were pictures of various outrageous flats on Ipanema Beach, all decorated in an over-the-top style, with a Post-it note on each photo declaring the asking price during the Olympic Games. Eight, nine, ten thousand reais a night.

  I gestured at several of them. “Who are her clients? Russians? Arabs?”

  “And Chinese,” Santos said. “They’re the only ones who can afford to pay these kinds of prices. The few she got from New York and London wanted places that were less…I don’t know.”

  “Gaudy?” Tavia said.

  Santos shrugged, went to a cabinet, and retrieved a file. With da Silva’s and Santos’s permission, Tavia got onto a laptop and into the victim’s telephone and texting accounts.

  Luna Santos had more than twenty text messages waiting for her. Tavia didn’t bother opening any, but she quickly determined that Santos’s late wife texted roughly ninety times a day. In the past year she’d texted more than thirty-seven thousand times.

  “I’ll send the passwords to our analysts and they’ll start digging through these,” Tavia said to Santos. “With your consent, of course.”

  “Whatever you think will help.”

  Tavia sent an e-mail with the necessary information to Private Rio’s lab, and then she opened up Luna Santos’s cell-phone account. She wormed her way into the Cloud copy of calls to and from Luna’s number.

  “Any way you can tell the position of the phones?” Lieutenant Acosta asked.

  “I think so,” Tavia said, and she gave the computer and the website another order.

  The screen blinked and then showed a map of Rio with a yellow pin at the address of the Rio Olympic organizing committee in Barra and another pin in Lapa.

  Santos came over, and his face fell.

  “You know that address?” Lieutenant Acosta asked. “Where your wife was when you called?”

  Santos nodded morosely. “That’s down the
street from her favorite club. It’s where she likes to go samba.”

  “And perhaps to meet her lover?” da Silva asked. “And maybe her killer?”

  Luna’s husband nodded again, hung his head, and cried.

  Chapter 36

  DR. CASTRO HAD watched much of it through binoculars from well up the jungle hillside above Luna and Antonio Santos’s house. At a quarter to five that morning he saw Luna’s car go up in flames and with it all evidence that he’d put her there.

  The car had burned furiously thanks to the two gallons of gas and denatured alcohol he’d dumped inside it. The flames had swept through the car by the time the doctor had crossed the street and started climbing. He was high above the house when the gas tank ruptured and blew a fireball into the sky.

  Ten minutes later, the firemen came, and then the police. An hour after that, the head of Olympic security himself, General da Silva, showed up. Castro recognized him from television. Twenty minutes later, those same two Private operators he’d seen at the Copacabana Palace the night before the World Cup final crossed the police lines.

  Jack Morgan. Octavia Reynaldo. He’d looked them up.

  For several moments, Castro got anxious. Private’s investigators were among the best trained in the world. And those two down there were the best of the best.

  The doctor wondered if he’d gone too far by targeting Luna. She’d offered him both an excellent, healthy subject for his experiment and a way to take some personal revenge, but should he have just gone for somebody anonymous? A street person? Someone unlikely to be missed?

  Then Antonio Santos had shown up, running down the street, stopping in heartbreak in the driveway, and collapsing in an agony of grief. It had been worth the risk, Castro decided instantly. It had been worth the wait.

  Antonio knew the guts-ripped-out-of-you feeling now. Let him wallow in it.

  The doctor fed on that idea long after da Silva, Morgan, and Reynaldo had gone into the house and forensic techs had arrived on the scene. He stayed up there in the jungle, ignoring the building heat, ignoring the bugs that whined and bit at his flesh.

  An hour passed. The techs removed the body and put a tarp over the burned-out car. Autopsy next, the doctor thought. But maybe not. The Rio system was backed up as it was. With a bullet through the back of the head and a burned corpse, why bother?

  Four news trucks were parked down the street now. There were cameras aimed at his handiwork. Dr. Castro was feeling pleased when the front door of the house opened and da Silva, the other cop, the two from Private, and Antonio Santos exited.

  Through the binoculars, he studied the slumped shoulders and the expression of shock and bewilderment on the new widower’s face. That posture and state of being were bitterly familiar to Castro.

  Grief. Loss. Disbelief.

  Seeing Santos suffer like this made the doctor smile.

  He hoped that the tearing to pieces of Antonio Santos’s heart would continue for many, many years to come.

  Chapter 37

  Saturday, July 30, 2016

  11:02 p.m.

  THE JAMMED STREETS around Lapa throbbed with music and happiness. There were thousands of men and women, young and old, all of them dressed for mystery, provocation, and celebration. Some sang lustily. Some danced lustily. Others hooted and clapped encouragement. Caught up in the good time of a pre-Olympic warm-up party Rio-style, all of them had smiles on their faces in addition to their masks.

  All of them, that is, except the Wises, who moved deliberately and without masks ahead of Tavia and me through the joyous throng. The crowd was in constant flux, masses of people shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, which made the job of staying close to the Wises but unobserved that much more difficult.

  Andy Wise had gotten a text message around nine that evening telling him to be in Lapa in two hours. He was to walk specific streets until someone made contact and gave him the ransom instructions.

  I didn’t like the situation. Neither did Tavia. Cherie Wise had insisted on accompanying her husband and walked with her arm crooked through his, her purse over her right shoulder. The Wises were a tall couple and stood out, so we weren’t worried about losing sight of them. But we had no idea who the masked, anonymous people swirling around them were.

  They reached an intersection, and Andy paused.

  “Go left,” Tavia said into her lapel microphone. I heard her over my radio earpiece.

  They were a good thirty yards ahead of us and entering one of the most choked spots in the entertainment district, a scene of controlled mayhem and unbridled fun, people drinking and singing and howling at the pitch-dark sky. The Wises disappeared around the corner.

  “Pick up the pace,” I said into my lapel mike, and I turned my shoulders angular and narrow, tried to squeeze my way forward to cut the gap between us.

  Fifteen feet from the corner, we heard a chant go up. Boys, ten or eleven of them, masked street urchins, were shouting and waving sticks in the faces of the partyers, who all surged back.

  If you have ever been in a mob being turned, you know it can be a claustrophobic, tense, and frightening experience. The crowd pressed against us, pushed us hard to our left. Tables and chairs of sidewalk cafés began to tumble, and people started shouting in anger and alarm.

  I fought against the wave of humanity, got around the corner, and saw the Wises being swept ahead of us down a wider street. We were still thirty yards apart, but the mob pressure was easing. Several of the boys with the sticks squirmed through the crowd like greased pigs and got past me.

  “What the hell is going on, Tavia?” I said. “Who are those kids?”

  “Pickpockets,” she said an instant before one of the boys dropped his stick, accelerated, and ran by Cherie Wise, bumping her and then darting to his right.

  Cherie spun around, holding her purse strap in outrage. “My purse! He cut it off me!”

  Her husband twisted and went after the boy, who was trying to get the heck out of Dodge. But I had a better angle on him and took off, Tavia right behind me.

  The kid ran with uncanny moves, ducking, twisting, spinning off one surprised reveler after another while I bulled my way after him. He led me on a chase through a maze of streets I couldn’t name if you’d shown them to me on a map, zigzagging and using people like a skier uses slalom gates.

  He was slight and dark, built like one of those Ethiopian distance runners, but his moves were quick, fluid, and precise. It wasn’t like the kid was born to run, more like he was born to flee, and it took every bit of my wind and strength to stay near enough to track him in the thinning crowd.

  He kept looking back over his shoulder at intersections, hoping he’d shaken me, but I stayed on him, soaked with sweat. He darted to his right and up onto a brightly tiled red stair that led to another and another, a staircase that climbed steeply up the side of the hill to Santa Teresa.

  I sprinted after him, knowing where I was. The Selarón Steps was an iconic place in Rio, an urban staircase with walls and doors flanking it and virtually every square inch of it tiled, up one side and down the other. Some tiles were simple, others ornate, but all of them were unique and yet part of the whole; the thousands of shiny snapshots and miniature paintings covered the entire staircase in a collage. Lanterns lit the steps, and tourists walked and lovers embraced along them as the kid holding Cherie Wise’s purse bounced up the stairs and through the crowds like the battery bunny gone mad.

  I pounded after him and found his weakness. On the flats he was swift, but climbing slowed him, and I started to gain ground. When I was two flights behind him, nearing the top, the kid glanced back, saw me coming, looked startled, and threw the purse at me.

  It was a great throw. I mean, he hit me square in the chest with the purse, and it pulled me up short and briefly stunned me.

  He cursed me in Portuguese and sprang away, bounding up the remaining steps and onto the Santa Teresa road, where I lost sight of him. I didn’t care. I bent over, desperate for air
but happy he hadn’t gotten away with the purse.

  I found Tavia coming up the lower part of the Selarón Steps, showed her the purse, and told her what had happened. Fifteen minutes later, I handed it to a grateful Cherie Wise.

  “Oh, thank you, Jack,” she said, taking the purse and hugging it. “It’s a favorite of mine. The girls had it made for me a couple of years…”

  She looked worn out suddenly, said, “I really need to sleep. I’m getting dizzy.”

  “Make sure he didn’t take anything out while he had it, and we’ll go back to the hotel,” Wise said, and then he looked at me. “No one tried to contact us.”

  “I know,” I said, glancing back at Lapa and wondering if we should have them troll through again.

  Cherie opened the purse, took one look, and let out a soft gasp.

  “What?” Tavia asked.

  She held the purse out and showed us. Inside, on top of her things, there was an unlabeled CD-ROM in a dirty plastic case.

  “That’s not mine,” she said.

  “I would hope not,” her husband said. “That technology’s a dinosaur.”

  Chapter 38

  Sunday, July 31, 2016

  8:30 a.m.

  WE ALL GOT a good six or seven hours of sleep after finding the CD, so the Wises, Tavia, and I were looking rested and ready to go when we filed into the lab at Private Rio the next morning.

  Seymour Kloppenberg and Maureen Roth, however, had been up all night and looked it.

  “You get into the CD?” I asked.

  “It was encrypted, but yes,” Sci said, and he pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He turned to his computer keyboard and typed.

  The large screen above the workbench opened and revealed instructions in a primitive, blurry font, all capital letters.

  LOAD MONEY IN WHITE UNMARKED FORD PANEL VAN NO REAR WINDOWS.

  ANDREW WISE DRIVER, WEARS BLUE WORKMAN’S COVERALL, NO HAT, NO GLASSES.