Blood of the Wicked by Leighton Gage Read Free Book Online

to Hector.
    Hector had already noticed that Ferraz had a slight wheeze when he talked. Probably, he thought, because he inhales the damned things. He wasn’t looking forward to the colonel lighting up that cheroot.
    The colonel seemed to sense it. He licked the cigar to moisten it and rolled it back and forth between his palms, staring at Hector all the while.
    Hector had made inquiries about Colonel Emerson Ferraz before leaving São Paulo: Politically connected and close to retirement , a friend at the State Police had told him. W asn’t born rich, didn’t marry into money , but drives some kind of fancy imported car, owns a really big fazenda, and takes vacations in Miami.
    What Hector’s friend hadn’t told him was that Colonel Ferraz, in addition to almost certainly being a crook, was also a nasty son of a bitch.
    Ferraz bit a piece from the end of his cigar and spit it across his desk, narrowly missing the chair to Hector’s right.
    “What do you want to know?” he asked.
    “Do you have any leads?”
    “Not a one,” the colonel said contentedly. He removed a box of long wooden matches from his breast pocket, lit up, and blew some smoke in Hector’s direction. The cigar was Bahian and the smell was everything Hector had feared it would be. He started breathing through his mouth, a trick he’d taught himself after being exposed to too many rotting corpses.
    “Speed it up,” the colonel said. “You’ve got four minutes and forty seconds.”
    “Where did the shots come from?” Hector asked.
    “The north tower of the new church.”
    “How can you be sure?”
    “We found the murder weapon.”
    Ferraz opened the drawer of his desk.
    Hector sniffed. A telltale smell filled his nostrils. A photo. Recently processed. Hector was blessed, sometimes cursed, with an extraordinary sense of smell, a sense so acute that he could have made a living as a perfumer or a wine taster. He’d already found the stale sweat and the cheap cigar smoke hard to bear. Now, despite the trick of breathing through his mouth, there was the dominant top note of a photographic print hardly dry.
    Ferraz handed it over. The paper was still damp.
    The image was of a firearm, a rifle with a telescopic sight and a leather sling. It had been photographed against a white background, perhaps a Formica table.
    “Looks like a Sako Classic with a Leupold scope,” Hector said.
    Ferraz tipped some ash into an ashtray. “It is,” he said, a reluctant note of admiration creeping into his voice.
    “What was he firing?”
    “Nosler ballistic tips,” the colonel said, and then, glancing at his watch, “three minutes and twenty seconds.”
    Hector kept staring at the photograph. In Brazil, the rifle and ammunition were unusual—sniper stuff—but these days, you could buy just about any firearm you wanted in the fave-las of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The drug gangs smuggled them in from Paraguay or bought them from corrupt quartermasters in Brazil’s armed services. The crooks were as well armed as the police and often better.
    “Latent prints?”
    The colonel put the cigar back into his mouth, held it firmly between his teeth, and tipped it up at a jaunty angle. “Not one. Wiped clean,” he said through clenched teeth.
    “My people are going to want to inspect the rifle.”
    “Be my guest. It’s in the evidence locker downstairs.”
    “And no one saw anyone going in or out of the tower?”
    “Nope.”
    Ferraz took the cigar out of his mouth and bared his teeth, more of a grimace than a smile. The teeth were tobacco-stained and as crooked as the tombstones in an old cemetery. “Have you sealed off the tower?”
    “Of course I have. What do you take me for?”
    An ugly, unpleasant son of a bitch. But Hector didn’t say it. He took a shallow breath and let it out slowly. “Any theories about the motive?”
    “Seven, to be exact.”
    “ Seven? ”
    “Seven. The reception committee. They’re all landowners and each and every one