Graveyard Samba (Devil Barnett Detective Series Book 4) Read online

  “Mr. Barnett . . . Mr. Marcus Barnett,” a female voice woke me as a woman entered the room behind Chief Detective Passador. I sat up in the bed still dazed from my dream.

  Passador’s expression was strained and the look on the woman’s face was determined. Whatever it was, this woman’s attitude reflected her having the upper hand. She obviously had the chief of detectives by the balls and wasn’t letting go until she got what she wanted.

  “Either you find a way to let him walk or I’ll write a story that will make trouble for you and your bosses. The kind neither of you can afford. Maybe a headline like Rio cops hold American tourist on trumped up charge to cover up incompetent police work. I’m sure the American embassy as well as the entire tourist trade industry in Rio would like that,” she threatened.

  “But, we did find body parts in his room, didn’t we?” Passador said, trying to show that his position was at least as strong as hers.

  “But you know he didn’t send them to himself and you also know whoever let you know about them was a paid snitch. You knew the man’s background, so you thought you would try to make it easy for your department. A frame up pure and simple,” she said.

  I had never laid eyes on this woman before but I liked her already.

  “Listen I’m just going by the procedure, I know you’re right, he doesn’t have anything to do with the body parts, but we just can’t let him walk out until we at least have a report back from forensics, and send the lab guys over to his room.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “To get everything back, maybe a day maybe two. We’re very short of staff.”

  “In the meantime?”

  “In the meantime, well I don’t know. I guess, he’ll be a guest of the city. Maybe we will get him a different hotel or something.”

  “Or something . . . You mean a prisoner, don’t you? I have another suggestion,” she said and then turned to me for the first time. She was about thirty-five, slender with brown curly shoulder length hair, copper skin and dark eyes. I was wide awake by now.

  “Mr. Barnett, my name is Ilva Almeida, I’m a crime journalist. I happened to hear that they were holding you here illegally and I decided to come over and see if I could help.”

  “Thank you,” I said and meant it.

  “Mr. Barnett, I have a friend who might be able to help you. If you don’t mind I would like you to talk to her.”

  “Sure”, I said.

  Just then a policeman brought in my bags from the hotel and placed them next to the bed. Still no Vargas.

  “Can you give me a few minutes to freshen up and change?” I asked her.

  “Sure, take your time, I’ll be just outside,” Ilva said.

  Passador and the woman left the room and I opened my bags and then went into the private bathroom and turned on the shower.

  As the tepid water washed over me I thought about my dream. What I had dreamed had really happened in Washington D.C. just three years before. It wasn’t anything special, just another assignment. I had dreamt about assignments before, that part didn’t bother me, but what did was the image of the young Latino boy. The impression of him was so strong, it was almost as if I expected to see him sitting by my bed when I woke.

  I was escorted into another room by one of the Brazilian policemen.

  “Mr. Barnett, this is my friend, Rosa Fonseca,” Ilva said as I approached a bench where Ilva and another woman sat.

  Rosa Fonseca looked about forty, slim, blue eyes, suntanned, with plain features, short blond hair, and wearing what looked to be very expensive, well-fitting clothes.

  “Hello,” Rosa said quickly, glancing at my face and then immediately looking down into her lap.

  Ilva stood up and led me and her friend from the main room where the policemen sat at their desks to a smaller, more secluded area where our conversation could not be easily overheard.

  “Mr. Barnett,” Ilva began, “Rosa comes from a very powerful political family. Her father is an important politician in Rio, and her husband is a well-known judge. She is willing to arrange for you to be released into her custody in order to obtain your immediate release.” I looked at Rosa, who was looking into her lap again.

  “She has kind of a unique problem I think you might be able to help her with. If you agree, she will use her influence to get your passport back and within a few days you’ll be on a plane headed back to New York,” said Ilva.

  “Me, I’m just a tourist. An American tourist who owns a bar in Harlem New York. Why do you think I can help?”

  “Come on, Mr. Barnett, let’s be honest. We know not only who you are, but what you are. When I was told that you were in custody I was also told that you had been looking for the body of Duncan Lamont, and that you had made contact with a man named Ramón.”

  She was feeding me drop by drop, letting me get a good taste of the bait.

  “Ramón, yes, I got the feeling that it was most likely his body parts that had been delivered to my room,” I admitted.

  “Yes, Passador told me about them,” she said.

  “So who told you about me?” I was more curious now that she had mentioned Lamont.

  “At certain levels, information travels very quickly. But how I found out about you is much less important than my ability to help you walk out of here, unless you think otherwise?”

  “No, we’re on the same wavelength,” I assured her.

  “I’ll tell you more as we go along, but right now let’s get you released and then let Rosa tell you what she needs you to do,” Ilva said.

  I agreed, not because I wanted to, but because this tough-talking woman was my only door to freedom.

  After a few more quick conversations between Ilva, Rosa, Passador, and the signing of some papers, I walked out of the police station no longer a prisoner of the police department but a servant to whatever needs Rosa Fonseca had in store for me. Ilva showed me to a late model Mercedes and Rosa climbed in behind the wheel.

  “I’ll find a safe place for you to stay, but first we’ll go to Rosa’s and have lunch and then she can tell you what she needs you to do,” Ilva said.

  I was all ears.

  The drive took about fifty minutes to a posh neighbourhood in Rio called Barra Da Tijuca. The layout of the neighbourhood with their private security services and manicured lawns told me that only rich people lived here. On the way we passed through a few neighbourhoods that reminded me of roads leading to the Hollywood Hills.

  Rosa lived in a large ranch style house close to the beach behind a huge electronic gate with a large garage and a heart-shaped swimming pool.

  Lunch was already prepared and was ready to be served by the two servants that stood on the patio. We got through the meal without a word about what she thought I could do for her. Instead we talked about the unusually hot weather for September, shopping in New York and a few other subjects with no bearing on what I was really there for.

  After lunch was over, Rosa dismissed the servants and walked Ilva and myself down a marble stone pathway leading to a huge back garden filled with flowers and a glass table with four chairs. When the three of us were seated at the table, a middle-aged man walked out to join us. Ilva introduced him to me as Silvio Fonseca, Rosa’s husband. He was short with a fat stomach, a receding hairline and alert grey eyes.

  He was used to taking charge and jumped right in.

  “Mr. Barnett, my wife and I are not able to have children naturally, so we decided to adopt. Seven years ago we adopted a beautiful newborn baby boy named José. Normal in every way. And up until the past eight months everything was fine. But about eight months ago, he started to act a little weird.

  “We couldn’t quite explain it but we would come into the room and find him talking to himself or he would refuse to eat unless we also prepared the table for an imaginary friend he had acquired. We went to more than one doctor. The first few said that there was nothing to worry about and that he would grow out of it, but that is not what happened. As time went on José became more and more withdrawn into his own world.”

  Rosa Fonseca was pressing her lips together as tears rolled silently down her face.

  The judge sighed then continued, “Unfortunately, now we can’t reach him at all. It got to the point he just stopped communicating altogether, so we placed him in a hospital where we hoped he could be helped. We were very desperate, so my wife went to see a man who would be known in America as a shaman. I don’t know if you know much about Brazilian culture, Mr. Barnett, but we have a long tradition of African religious belief involving what the world knows as witchcraft which is practiced right alongside Catholicism. We call it Camdomble. The African slaves brought it with them when they were first brought from Angola to Brazil to work the sugar plantations in the 16th century. Anyway, because we were at our wits’ end, we decided to turn to other sources for answers. We visited a woman, a Candomble priestess who looked at our son and told us something that both surprised and baffled us. She said that our son’s spirit was being interfered with by his sibling, a boy. The strange thing is when we adopted him, we were never told that he had any brothers or sisters.”

  “Weren’t there birth records, when you adopted him?” I asked.

  “Yes, we actually checked, but it seems that the agency only knew what they were told when they got him from a Catholic orphanage, so in all probability the adoption records had been forged. Anyway, this Candomble priestess told us that the only way we would be able to reach our son again was to find his brother and bring them together.”

  “Is that what you believe?” I asked.

  The man looked at me and then over at his wife who was looking sadly into her lap again and still crying.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe. For my wife an
d son’s sake I’m going to do whatever it takes to bring us back together as a family. Money is not an issue. I can afford to pay very well,” Silvio said.

  “So you want me to find your son’s brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why can’t you just hire a local guy and go through the adoption agency and trace backwards? Even if the agency forged the papers, there must be someone who kept the real records or knew the facts,” I answered.

  Ilva moved her chair closer to mine and planted her eyes into mine.

  “What you need to understand, Mr. Barnett, is that though Rosa and Silvio didn’t know it, José could have been one of many children who had been previously sold or kidnapped. As you might have heard, there are groups of unscrupulous people here in Brazil who have made a business of systematically exploiting children. Some for the purposes of sex and some to kill them and sell their vital organs, or some for the purposes of selling them to wealthy couples like Rosa and Silvio who can’t have children of their own. We suspect that José might well have come from this kind of situation.” She sighed then continued. “This is the kind of story Duncan Lamont was investigating when he disappeared. Another thing, Silvio is in a very sensitive political position, if it came out that he had gotten his son through illegal or dubious means it would bring scandal not only on him but maybe to the government as well. Silvio can’t afford to have anyone local looking into this. That would make him too susceptible to his local enemies and maybe put him in a position to be blackmailed.”

  “And you think I can help, in a country I know nothing about?” I said.

  “I was told that you have a certain experience in foreign countries as well as a talent for finding things, and that you also have an interest in finding out how Duncan was killed,” Ilva said.

  I let my mind mull over her last words. All of what she said was true, but that wasn’t what really bothered me. The major problem was I had told myself I wasn’t going back into the business of putting myself in a position where I might have to kill again. I had caged the evil ghosts and monsters from my past and was determined that they should remained incarcerated within that other part of my life.

  “You wouldn’t be on your own. I would work with you and tell you everything I know.”

  “Before I even consider this, I need to know something,” I said.

  “What?”

  “How did you find out about me?”

  “As I said, I am a crime journalist, so naturally I know people in both the criminal world as well as in law enforcement. Someone I have dealt with in the past, a professional informer, said he heard that you were looking for Duncan’s body over at IML. He also said that you were ex-CIA and that you were now a private detective in New York. That was last night, then this morning he called back to say that he had just heard that you had just been led out of your hotel by a policeman named Luis Vargas.”

  “A real good source,” I said.

  “He’s one of the best, otherwise he would have been dead years ago,” she answered.

  “So what about it, Mr. Barnett, will you help us?” Silvio asked.

  “Give me a few minutes to think about it,” I said as I stood up and started walking slowly towards the end of the large beautiful garden. Help them, hell I couldn’t even help myself. I told myself I would help as much as I could without getting too involved, just enough to keep everybody smiling, but even as I thought it to myself, I knew it was a lie. Getting involved, I would be taking a step in a certain direction. A step closer to what I had promised I’d never go back to. But there was also the feeling that now if I didn’t at least try, then I would be letting my friend Jim down completely. It was one thing to be on my own trying to find about a missing body and quite another to have someone who had a vested interest and who knew the lay of the land. I had pulled off lots of jobs in foreign countries with a lot less to work with. Then there was the other thing that kept pulling at me. Something I couldn’t quite articulate emotionally, but it was there and it was real. The image of the young Latino boy in my dream.

  If you had asked me a year ago about this dream I would have dismissed it, but since my ordeal with Albalita back in New York last year things had changed. I’d never fully believed in other worldliness or the power of ESP before meeting Albalita, But after she had demonstrated her supernatural powers by finding my friend Honey Lavelle as well as telling me exactly the number of men I had killed just by holding my hand, she had made a believer out of me. I figured that if Albilita was real then maybe this Condomble woman was the genuine article too. Anyway, as long as the cops had my passport, I was stuck in Brazil. So why the hell not? Besides I preferred to spend three days outside in the September sun rather than inside a jail cell, even if it was a luxury one.

  I walked back to the garden table and sat down.

  “So?” Ilva asked expectantly

  “I’m in,” I said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Barnett,” Rosa said weakly as she reached across the table and touched my hand. She looked into my face for the first time and I saw a woman who had once been beautiful but whose troubles had transformed her into a sad and tortured soul. Silvio reached down into a leather bag that was under the table and brought out a thick wad of cash.

  “I don’t expect you to do this for nothing, Mr. Barnett. There’s two thousand American dollars there, use it for expenses. When you leave I will make sure you have more cash to compensate you for your time and effort.”

  The wad was made up of twenties and hundreds. I thanked him for his confidence in me and a few minutes later Rosa and Silvio returned to the house and left me standing in the garden with Ilva.

  “I am going to take you to a place where you will be safe,” she said.

  “Safe?” I queried as she led the way to a Ford Escort parked in the driveway.

  She didn’t answer until we were in the car and driving back along the street.

  “Mr. Barnett, I don’t know how much you’ve heard about this business of exploiting children in Brazil, but the gangs involved in this kind of thing are ruthless and very dangerous and they also have influence in very high places. I mean in the government, the army and the police force. Once certain people know that you are working to find out about things people would like to keep hidden, they will become frightened because they will think that you can find out other things as well. Don’t forget, the package you received was to warn you off.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I assured her as I thought about the box of body parts and the threatening phone call again.

  “I’ve also heard about people killing newborns and taking their organs out and filling the bodies with cocaine so that women can carry the babies across the borders in their arms without suspicion. I don’t know how true that is, but I have heard stories.

  “Well, there is a saying here,” she said, “Onde tem fumaca tem fogo.”

  “Meaning where there is smoke, there is fire, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  So here I was riding along a beautiful sun filled street in Rio, on which I had never been before, yet I felt as if I were travelling a very familiar territory. A place filled with ghosts. Ghosts that could receive their nourishment from my murderous deeds.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Vianna dead? How can that be, I just spoke with him yesterday evening?” asked Carlinhos as a light nervous sweat broke out on his top lip.

  Carlinos got up from the sofa and started to pace around his small cramped apartment.

  “What did you talk about?” asked Vinicius Sangalo.

  “He asked me about a body, an American journalist named Duncan Lamont. I told him I’d get back to him, but I wasn’t able to, ‘cause there was that fire near Rochino and we got five fresh bodies I had to process. What exactly happened to him?”

  “Shot through the head. Don’t worry about it, just a risk that went with the job,” Sangalo said flatly.

  “You don’t sound like you liked him much.”

  “He was an asshole,” shrugged Sangalo, “Why should I give a damn if he lives or dies just ‘cause he was a cop. He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last.”

  “Dead,” Carlinhos repeated and shook his head as the idea continued to unsettle him.