Chapter Six

Detective Bonita and the Unexpected Death of a Very Important Man

The story so far: Detective Inspector Rita Bonita and Agent Eduardo Carlos Demario of the São Paulo Department for Homicide are investigating the gruesome discovery of two dead bodies found floating in the Pinheiros River. Who are the men and are their deaths connected? We rejoin the story shortly after Detective Bonita concludes a disastrous interview on the live Cidade Alerta! crime show and takes a difficult call from her boss …

18h30
Several million Brazilians had switched on their TV’s to watch the Cidade Alerta! crime show broadcast live at six o’clock on New Year’s Day. In a country which has one of the highest homicide rates in the world and where more than fifty thousand people are killed every year, the fact that two bodies had been recovered by firemen from the Pinheiros River would not normally warrant any media attention other than a listing in the Cotidiano crime section of the Folha de São Paulo. But TV reporter Tatiana Nunes had been shadowing the bombeiros as they pursued their grim duties on New Year’s Eve, and when two of the corpses turned up wearing suits, instinct told her she was on to a story. She had phoned her good friend Captain Antônio Lourenço Limeira, a senior and influential officer in the São Paulo Homicide Department, and asked him who would be dealing with the two deaths. He had, without a moment’s hesitation, given her the name of his most capable – and loyal – delegada Rita Bonita. At seven a.m. the next morning he assigned the task to Detective Bonita, informing her that she and her deputy Eduardo Carlos had until six o’clock to prepare to give a statement on Cidade Alerta!

Seconds after the broadcast had finished, Detective Bonita caught sight of Captain Lourenço’s name flashing on her phone. She knew why he was calling. She had snapped at the journalist live on air because she hadn’t liked her reckless speculating and now her boss would want to know why. Turning your back on difficult to answer questions was like walking away from a snarling dog and expecting it not to attack. Police men and women these days who wanted a successful career in law enforcement were supposed to be media savvy. She had looked a fool.
‘Rita?’ His tone was inauspicious. ‘Tell me how you think it went.’ His words, at least, were conciliatory. What could she say?
‘I…I…it’s difficult to know, sir,’ she said, wiping unexpected tears from her face with the back of a shaking hand as the Cidade Alerta helicopter lifted Tatiana Nunes and her crew away.
‘Well then I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘You were an aperitivo, Detective. For Tatiana’s millions of fans. A taste of what is to come. She is an amazing woman, you must agree.’ Detective Bonita was unable to respond so Capt. Lourenço continued: ‘I love to see her in action,’ he said, warming to his theme. ‘She gets her viewers excited and they want more. More answers and more of her. It’s why she is so successful.’
‘But the stuff about a serial killer – it was speculation, sir,’ insisted Detective Bonita. ‘Dangerous speculation. For a start, there are only two bodies. And –’ she gasped for breath ‘- whilst it is possible that their deaths are connected, two possibly linked murders don’t give us a serial killer, sir. That’s just –’ what was it, she wondered, ‘– that’s just movie hype.’
‘She wanted the headline slot and she got it! So from her point of view it was worth it. But, escuta Rita,’ pressed Captain Lourenço, ‘escuta bem. Tatiana’s job is to expose the truth as she sees it but it is also to entertain. You’re the one who has to find the evidence. Don’t let her distract you but don’t dismiss her theories without testing them first. She will use extreme language, of course she will, to ramp up her story, but you must accept the possibility that the victims met their deaths at the hands of the same killer. Prioritise your facts and, next time, advise Ms Nunes in advance that you won’t be taking any questions. Otherwise she’ll be offering her viewers the main course which will be you, my darling, served up like blackened chicken hearts on a rodízio spear. What I suppose I am saying is that she made a fool of you and you mustn’t let it happen again. Now, tell me what you know so far.’

Detective Bonita bit her lip and, swallowing her tears, set out briefly and clearly those parts of the case she knew to be certain. They had two bodies, she said. One they knew to be a French hotelier in his sixties. In addition, they had recovered two wallets from inside the abattoir. One belonged to the Frenchman, the other to a board member of a British bank who, if the body in the morgue turned out to be his, was a white man aged seventy wearing an English tailored suit. Eduardo Carlos had followed a lead from Doutor João Augosto Magalhães, the man who reported the first victim, and had been able to confirm the Fondía Abattoir as the place where one or more people had been held, possibly tortured, eventually killed, butchered and put into cold storage. She had cordoned off the area and DNA and ballistic evidence were being gathered by a forensic team right now. She had personally interviewed the wife of Monsieur Camille Bleu and was about to confirm the address of Mr John Henderson so she could visit his next of kin too.
‘But not to identify the body, sir,’ she added, hurriedly, ‘because it has no face. But it is very tall, with large feet and distinctive hair. With the DNA and remaining teeth there is enough to get a positive i.d.’
‘What about motive?’ asked Capt. Lourenço.
‘It’s difficult to know at this stage. Monsieur Bleu had complicated domestic arrangements and had recently left his wife for a much younger woman. I haven’t found out who, though, yet. It’s possible that his planned second marriage might have meant a change of inheritance…’ she trailed off to think, then added: ‘but it’s difficult to link that with the evidence uncovered here at the abattoir. It’s a truly horrific scene, sir. I can’t see his wife being involved in this type of crime. She seemed to be very –’ she hesitated again ‘– anxious but also very… fragile. She gave the impression that they were on good terms, anyway, from what she said.’ There was a pause.
‘Given the gruesome circumstances of the deaths you must have considered, then,’ suggested Capt. Lourenço, ‘that ACA are involved?’ Alto Comando Azul were a new and formidable organised crime network operating out of the jails and slums of São Paulo with the aim of gaining market share from their more established rivals. Kidnapping wealthy businessmen was a niche but lucrative source of revenue for them and torture and death a means of branding their activities to give them an edge in an over-crowded market.
‘That would be an intelligent assumption to make, sir,’ said Detective Bonita, in a way she knew would please her boss. ‘The crimes bear many of the hallmarks of ACA involvement but there are inconsistencies. The freezing of the bodies suggests planning and forethought. That’s not something I would normally associate with ACA.’
‘Fair enough. Well, Detective, it’s been nice talking to you but I must go. I have a sensitive kidnapping to deal with and Liliane and I have the Mayor’s Masked Ball tonight at the Copacabana Palace. But I’ll be heading up to São Paulo first thing tomorrow to welcome our new recruit.’ Detective Bonita sighed. She had forgotten about her new trainee.
‘Consider carefully what I have said,’ said Capt Lourenço before adding: ‘oh, and Rita – had you considered putting Eduardo Carlos in front of the camera?’ Detective Bonita was shocked.
‘No, sir,’ she said quickly, marshalling her composure. ‘He’s not ready to go in front of the cameras.’
‘I beg to differ. He’s more than a match for Tatiana. Which it seems you are not, Detective. Look, he’s young and punchy and sexy. He’d be good in front of a camera.’ Detective Bonita nearly choked.
‘It would be very risky, sir.’
‘Not at all. Anyway, I like risk. Let him have a go. He couldn’t be worse than you. Keep me informed of developments please, Detective and tchau – you’re doing well.’

19h00
Detective Bonita had a very strong urge to light a cigarette, but it was teeming down, so she walked back inside the abattoir and pulled out a fresh packet of Fortuna. Pedro Maciel, the forensic technician, was dismantling some equipment and reminded her that, as she was standing inside the cordon, smoking a cigarette there would corrupt the scene. Detective Bonita sighed. She couldn’t leave the scene because the Bombeiros had disappeared, she would later discover, to deal with a pregnant woman who had thrown herself into the water upstream. Tears were flowing freely down her face now and she was soaked to the bone. She planned to phone Eduardo Carlos to find out the extent of the confidential information she suspected he had given to Tatiana Nunes but hesitated. She would leave the call until she was less emotional and do something useful. She would take a look around the back of the abattoir; she couldn’t possibly get any wetter, after all.

The first thing to catch her eye as she approached the rear entrance was how easy it was to access the site from the Rua José Lopes, a dirt track which led in one direction past the barbed wire perimeters of a range of electronic goods manufacturers, the threadbare shacks at the edge of the São Bernardo slum and the high metal enclosure of a hypermarket car park and in the other to a small wooded park known locally as the trading floor of the São Paulo drug exchange and the outer wall of a minor football stadium. The area between the abattoir, the slum and the various buildings comprised rough scrub criss-crossed by deep tyre tracks and littered with the sort of debris – beer cans, burnt out abandoned cars, syringes, condoms and tissues – you would expect to find in a space used for joy-riding, drug-taking, prostitution and other nocturnal pursuits common in this part of the city. The building itself was overlooked only from the front and only by residents such as Dr Magalhães and visitors to the towering, glass-clad hotels on the east side of the river. But all this rubbish strewn at the back meant that there had to be traffic passing along the road here, too, she thought. There was a high, chain-link fence around the Fondía premises but the gate had been pulled off its hinges leaving the whole site completely unsecured. Some of the vehicle tracks came right up to the back door of the abattoir. There were footprints, too. The surface mud was very soft but she would ask Pedro to take impressions. As she approached the building she saw that a padlock, bracket and chain had been forced off a wooden door which now stood ajar. She pushed it carefully and noted an unpleasant smell – was it cooked food? – coming from inside. Leaning further inside she nearly collapsed with shock as a huge rat bolted over her foot and down an open drain a few feet away. The interior was quite dark but she could see that the rat had been feeding on the bones of a discarded fried chicken meal; not only that, the place was strewn with human waste and a filthy blanket showed someone had been sleeping there.

She must act quickly and request Pedro Maciel gather all available evidence. But how could she track this person down? She immediately called Central Resources to request a twenty-four hour discreet surveillance. She’d be lucky, said the desk sergeant in charge of resource allocation, had she forgotten it was New Year’s Day? No, said Detective Bonita. But had the desk sergeant seen the Cidade Alerta broadcast that night? He laughed – of course, he watched it every night! That’s my investigation, said Detective Bonita. Tatiana Nunes and the abattoir killings? asked the desk sergeant. The same, said Detective Bonita. I’ll send a man over right away, said the desk sergeant. Send two, said Detective Bonita, happy to exploit what she would come to know as the ‘Tatiana Effect’. It’s pretty grim here at night and there’s no escape now the bridge is down. Tell them to book a crossing with the bombeiros.

19h30
Detective Bonita did not want to leave the site until the surveillance team arrived. She couldn’t, anyway. Whilst helping Pedro Maciel to strap a plastic cordon tape to a series of aluminium pins around a twenty metre square behind the abattoir, she had admitted out loud that, after all the police and media activity of the last few hours, the person living rough at the back of the premises was unlikely to return.
‘But that doesn’t mean we don’t try to find them,’ she said, using her teeth to cut the tape and knot it around the thin pole. ‘He could be a vital witness.’
‘If he’s the one who found the bodies, why didn’t he come forward before now?’ asked Pedro Maciel dropping a blackened, broken crack pipe into a plastic bag.
‘He’s a drug user, maybe a dealer. He’s got a place to stay out of the rain. He doesn’t trust the police so he shunts the bodies into the river. He may be involved,’ replied Detective Bonita.
‘I’d say he’s definitely involved,’ said Pedro Maciel. ‘I might even go on to say he’s potentially your killer, Detective.’
‘Then you’d need to find me a gun, or a knife or matching DNA, or a scalpel or a plastic tag or something that would link this individual with the activity at the front of the building,’ said Detective Bonita, a headache starting in the back of her neck.
‘No, Pedro,’ she said, sighing. ‘If a drug user kills someone, it’s rarely pre-meditated. Anyway, the surveillance team sound like they have arrived.’ The chug of an outboard motor could be heard through the rain. ‘I have to go and get some dry clothes and I’ll have to find Mr Henderson’s family before I finish tonight.’
The surveillance team had indeed arrived and Detective Bonita asked if the two bombeiros would mind waiting until she had de-briefed the officers to transfer her back to the east bank. They would not, but said they had hoped they would be able to finish soon as they had been on duty since seven that morning. Just as the dinghy was almost touching the opposite bank, the older of the two officers, whose name was Rui Santos Alves, put his hand on her shoulder to stop her climbing out.
‘Doutora Bonita,’ he said, his face folding with exhaustion. ‘Eduardo Carlos told us that one of the dead men our colleagues pulled out of the river last night was a British man called Mr Henderson.’
‘It seems he’s told everyone, then,’ she replied.
‘No,’ continued Rui Santos Alves quickly, ‘he showed us some cards inside the wallet we found at the scene earlier and asked us if we had heard of the company. We have. It’s a British bank called TWBC. There was a major security alert at their office a few weeks ago and we were called to attend.’
‘What sort of alert?’ she asked.
‘A small nail bomb in the post addressed to Mr Henderson. The bomb was diffused and no one was hurt. But the point is that Mr Henderson does not work at the bank or their head office. The bank calls him a non-executive board director. We had to visit him at his house. Well, we – Rafael here and me – didn’t personally, but we –’ the younger of the two bombeiros nodded in recognition of his involvement ‘we had to drive over with the Federal Police in case there was a security risk at the house too.’
‘And was there?’ asked Detective Bonita. Both bombeiros shook their heads.
‘Well, thank you for this information. I’ll talk to the Feds to get the address and work out if there’s a link.’ The hand on Detective Bonita’s shoulder tightened.
‘There something else,’ said Rui.
‘Yes,’ added Rafael quickly. ‘Something maybe much more important, Dra Bonita!’
‘Well?’
‘When we went to the house we were outside talking to Mr Henderson’s driver and one of the girls who worked as a maid in his house. We had to wait a long time whilst the Feds checked the house and talked to everyone. The girl brought us some coffee and pão de queijo. She was really nice. The driver and the girl were namorados – they planned to get married. Her name was Marta. I can’t remember his.’
‘Good,’ said Detective Bonita, wondering why she was being given the information.
‘But this is the main thing - the woman we pulled out of the river a couple of hours ago. The pregnant one. It was her, Marta. We took her to the municipal hospital but I don’t think they’ll be able to save the baby. She was really distressed. You need to talk to her straight away.’

© Emília Shap: Lisbon June 2007