“The dog, maybe?” Tanaka said.

“Not the dog. Decomposition and insects. Most of the bones appear to be in place, but I’ll only be able to verify that once we get her back to the IML.”

The IML, the Instituto Medico Legal, was the headquar-ters of Sao Paulo’s chief medical examiner and the place where Gilda spent most of her time. She was a slim brunette, who looked too young to be a full-fledged pathologist. When she neglected to pin on her name tag, visitors to the morgue often took her for a secretary or a medical student.

She was about to kneel down again when the sun crept over the encircling rim of forest. Long shadows fell across the field, emphasizing irregularities in the carpet of green. In the altered light, row upon row of rectangular mounds suddenly became visible.

Gilda saw them first and narrowly avoided putting one of her latex-gloved hands over her lips. Han’s mouth dropped open. Fernando and Geraldo looked at each other. Tanaka just stared.

Graves. Tens of graves, lined up row-on-row.

Herbert, The Mop, hadn’t just found himself one corpse to play with. He’d found himself an entire cemetery.

Chapter Two

“What’s this crap Ana handed me?”

Nelson Sampaio raised his jaw and looked pugnaciously at Mario Silva. Sampaio was the director of the Brazilian Federal Police. Ana was his long-suffering personal assistant. What he was referring to as crap was a request for two round-trip airline tickets, Brasilia/Sao Paulo/Brasilia.

Ana had served five directors in succession, one more than Silva, and averred that Nelson Sampaio was the worst of the lot. The director was a pink-faced, prematurely balding man with suspicious blue eyes. Mostly, his eyes were enlarged by spectacles, but this morning he was trying out a new set of contact lenses. He kept blinking at Silva, while his hand remained splayed over the form in front of him. The two men, Silva and Sampaio, were on opposite sides of Sampaio’s desk in his spacious office in Brasilia, the nation’s capital.