Hector nodded, as if it were the first time anyone had told him that.

“The bodies you came to see are these.” Gilda swept her hand over a long row of plastic coffins, all of them open. “Not much point to refrigerating them. There’s hardly any flesh left at all.”

It wasn’t as horrific a sight as Hector had been expecting. Most of the bodies were no more than skeletons, piles of bones crowned by grinning skulls.

After they’d given each of the remains a token inspection, Gilda knelt down and stroked one of the smaller skulls with her forefinger. She did it gently, as if she were caressing a cat.

“The victims are of both sexes and varying ages,” she said. “Children, like this one, were never buried alone. Sometimes they were interred with one adult, sometimes with two. When it was one, the adult was always a female. When it was two, there was one of each sex.”

“Family groups?” Silva said. “Mothers with their children? Mothers and fathers with their children?”

“That would seem to be a logical conclusion, but you know how my boss-”

“Hates speculation. Yes, I know.”

“We’re doing DNA testing.”

“Good. What else can you tell us?”

Gilda rose and, as she did so, moved closer to Hector. So close, in fact, that he imagined he could feel the warmth of her body. She responded to his uncle without answering the question he’d posed.

“Let’s go across the street to Dr. Couto’s office,” she said. “He’s waiting for us.”

Chapter Four

Dr. Paulo Couto, Gilda’s boss and an old friend of Silva’s, was Sao Paulo’s chief medical examiner. He had his lair in the bowels of an ancient redbrick building that also housed the Municipal Revenue Service. The union of the two in a single location had given rise to the cops’ nickname for the place: Death and Taxes.