Blood of the Wicked Read Online Free PDF Page A

“They raped her.”
    “They what ?”
    “Raped her.”
    “Sergeant Mancuso, my mother is fifty-three years old. She’s overweight, she’s diabetic—”
    “They wanted your father to stand there and watch it,” Mancuso said, talking faster now, eager to get it over with. “He wouldn’t have it. He went after the guy who was holding her down. The other guy shot him twice in the head. It was quick. He didn’t suffer, didn’t live long enough to see what they did to her.”
    Silva put his hands over his eyes and started to cry.
    Mancuso stood and put a hand on his shoulder. “But your mother’s okay. You hear me? She’s okay. They took the car. We’re looking for it. It’s one of those big Ford Galaxies, right?”
    Silva nodded.
    “There aren’t too many of them,” Mancuso said, “so they’re easy to spot. If they hold on to it for any time at all, we’re going to nail them.”
    At that moment, Silva couldn’t have cared less about the two punks. “And . . . my mother. What happened then?”
    “When they were . . . done, she managed to get herself back to the main road.”
    “She walked?”
    “Crawled is more like it,” the cherub said.
    “Shut up, Paulo,” Mancuso said. “There’s not much traffic up there after nine or ten at night and she was . . . well, she was bleeding, so she just didn’t have it in her to go any further. She propped herself up under a streetlight and started waving at the cars that went by. After a while, somebody had the guts to stop.”
    “Who?”
    “We don’t know. He called it in from a phone booth, left her by the side of the road, told us where to find her, said he didn’t want to get involved. It happens. At least he stopped for a look. Not everybody would have.”
    DR. SILVA’S Galaxy was found later that morning abandoned on a suburban back street. The killers had removed the tires. They’d also taken the radio. If there were any latent fingerprints, the cops didn’t find them. The truth of the matter was they hardly tried.
    Silva’s parents weren’t particularly prominent people. The incident drew no bold headlines. São Paulo was one of the major murder capitals of the world, and the municipal police had other priorities.
    Silva was told that such things are solved within the first 48 hours or not at all. It was something he refused to accept. If the cops wouldn’t do anything about it, Silva was bound and determined that he would. He questioned his mother again and again. There were some things she couldn’t bring herself to talk about, others that her son couldn’t bring himself to ask, but a few salient facts emerged: both men were mulattos, in their twenties, clean-shaven, curly haired. Both had distinctive accents. They were from the northeast, Bahia perhaps, or one of the neighboring states. One of them had a tattoo, a snake that started on his chest, wrapped once around his neck, and ended in a protruding tongue that pointed at the lobe of his left ear. The other one, a man missing a couple of his front teeth, had done the shooting.
    The cops’ initial questioning hadn’t brought out the details about the snake or the teeth. Silva thought they were important clues. The investigators didn’t.
    “It’d be different if we had something to cross-reference,” a detective named Valdez told him, “like a list of all the punks with tattoos, or all the punks with dental problems. But we don’t. And we sure as hell don’t have the manpower to put people on the street trying to find somebody who knows somebody with a tattoo like that. Best thing for your mother to do is to put it all behind her, put the whole thing out of her mind. Jesus Christ! It’s been three weeks already, and that’s much too long. Let me level with you, Senhor Silva, we haven’t got one chance in a million of catching these guys, and it’s not going to do her any good to keep dwelling on what happened to her.”
    Detective Valdez was right. It didn’t do Carla Silva