1

  Still sitting on the living room floor, Daros rested his elbows on his knees and interlaced his hands, which he placed between his nose and mouth. Anyone watching from outside would think he was praying. But to Greta he didn't seem the religious type.

  "All right. So it's not your husband. But the pursuit started either the same night you left home or the night after. So there's some link to the escape we're not seeing. He has a mistress, you said. Do you know her name?"

  "I would use plural for that. Want the names in alphabetical order?"

  Daros didn't laugh. He just massaged his temples, frustrated.

  "Right. And it wouldn't even make sense for a mistress to send someone after you. She should be happy to have her rival out of the way."

  Greta nodded. Since she said nothing, he continued.

  "We rule out family too. If Valério didn't want exposure, his family would have the same position. I don't think we should keep insisting on him right now."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "We have to think about you. You're the key, not him. I was sitting here thinking about your account. You took personal belongings and money. If you got married with shared assets, the money is yours too. Unless it wasn't his. You mentioned you grabbed a plastic bag too. Did you get around to counting how much was in there?"

  "No, I didn't even stop to think about it. I'll go get it upstairs."

  While waiting, Daros pulled his phone from the coffee table when he heard the message alert. It was a link sent by Inácio. Daros just typed: "One moment, I'll read it later."

  And he focused his attention on the woman disappearing at the top of the stairs.

  2

  In the hotel room, the executor paced back and forth like a hungry lion in a cage. He was waiting for a call. The phone vibrated in his pants pocket; he answered before the ring sounded.

  "I'm almost certain our guy went to the bus station," he said into the phone, his eyes fixed on the camera images.

  "It doesn't matter anymore, Isaías," Pablo responded with a disinterested tone. "The client put the mission on hold. There have been developments, we have to wait for new directions."

  "But if we can track the guy on the bus station cameras…"

  "You listen to me, kid," Pablo interrupted. "Orders are orders. When I started in this business, you were nothing but a drop of sperm in your father's saggy sack. Relax for a while. Go have a chocolate milk, chat about video games with the driver, whatever. Just don't try my fucking patience."

  Isaías mumbled a goodbye and hung up. Frustration soon transformed into fury. His fingers kept scrolling across the keyboard, advancing frame by frame through the recordings. That useless Pablo might have given up, but for him this had become personal. Nobody threw him off the trail like that and got away with it.

  He reflected for a moment: was he giving in to pride? He quickly discarded the idea. It was a chance to shine, to earn his place in the sun, above all those lazy and incompetent men in the battalion. If he had to act alone for that, so be it. And if he wasn't paid for putting the guy to sleep, so be it. A man also needs leisure.

  Not surprisingly, the suspect had chosen a busy time to be in public. Late afternoon was when people left work or went to pick up their kids from school. Not to mention the university students running back and forth to get to class on time. The same happened at the bus station. As in all major centers, many workers lived in satellite cities and would be heading home. Therefore, looking at the bus station's general cameras would require hours of observation.

  Unless a hypothesis eliminated some areas of the ticket counters. His previous hunch helped with this task. So he decided to focus only on the counters that offered tickets to the places the woman had already been. Only one direction remained: south. That's where he focused his attention, looking for the prince yearning to return to his damsel in distress.

  3

  Greta moved the laptop out of the way to rummage through the suitcase freely. She pushed clothing and stacks of money aside until she reached the black plastic. Now that she paid more attention to the volume, the contents didn't resemble bills: it was more solid, much more compact. It contained what looked like a small collection of items, and Greta doubted they were Legos. She decided not to go any further: it was better to hand the package over to Daros.

  She hurried down the stairs to the cabin's ground floor. She didn't want to be alone with that package for another second. Her eyes scanned the living room for Daros, but he wasn't in sight. She felt her chest begin to heave. The kettle's whistle diverted her attention to the kitchen. Daros was standing in front of the stove, placing tea bags in two cups. Good. She needed that.

  Daros flashed one of his economical smiles when he turned and saw the woman settling on the larger sofa. The smile dissolved when he noticed the anguished expression on her face.

  "Something wrong?"

  She shuddered at hearing the question, so immersed was she in thought.

  "Not yet."

  "What do you mean?" he wanted to know, placing the cups of tea on the table in front of them.

  "I think it was Erico Verissimo who wrote something interesting once. He said the most difficult moment in life is when we climb a step toward truth, and we don't know if it's for better or worse. And I'm certain that, in this case, it's for worse. I'm not going to like what we find in this plastic bag."

  His expression assumed icy contours. However, now that she knew him better, Greta speculated that coldness might not be the right word. His humanity button switched off whenever the situation required calculation and analysis. No, it wasn't coldness. It was as if a sophisticated machine wore a human mask.

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  "I understand. We're not going to find grandma's cake recipe or anything like that. But it's necessary, Greta. We need to find out what we're defending ourselves against. We have to know how to attack."

  She agreed with a gesture, trading the plastic bag for one of the cups on the table. The relief was immediate at getting rid of the burden of the unknown threat.

  Daros grabbed the package right away. He stared at the woman before him, waiting for the green light to open the wrapping. She closed her eyes and slowly shook her head. "We need to"... That was the message stamped on her face.

  Opening the package, he turned the contents onto the coffee table. There were half a dozen flash drives, but he focused on the photos, gathering all the snapshots into a low pile and examining each item carefully. His furrowed brow was different from his usual mechanical expression. It indicated he knew the information before his eyes well, just didn't know how to process the data yet.

  The photos portrayed young women in the company of a gray-haired man. Three or four of them. The man was clearly at ease, with the air of a hunter posing for posterity with his foot on the slain beast, usually a bear or a lion, with the rifle still in hand. However, there was no dead animal in those records. Just one young woman at a time, wearing little clothing and, sometimes, none at all. The pleasure displayed by the man wasn't reflected in their faces. There were very different emotions on those young women's faces, more similar to embarrassment, humiliation, and shame. It was hard to know who they were without first determining the man's identity, but to Daros they didn't seem like prostitutes or escorts. Sex workers tend to be more uninhibited, more accustomed to dealing with different situations and profiles. For those girls, whatever was happening at the moment of the photo seemed new. And it seemed bad.

  He selected one photo in particular and placed the stack of others on the table, face down. In the image, the elegant gentleman smiled while a girl with her back to the camera focused on a very specific area below his bare waist. Covering the girl's part with his hand, he turned the image toward Greta:

  "Recognize this guy?"

  She tilted her head sideways like a dog straining to decipher a command. It didn't take long to answer, although her tone was incredulous.

  "Yes. He's the dean of the university where my husband and I work. Is he naked?"

  Daros didn't answer that. He put the photo back in the pile and took some to the kitchen counter. He ran to the bedroom where he'd settled, at the back of the cabin, and returned hurriedly with the laptop under his arm. On the kitchen table, he opened the device with agility. While the equipment started up, he grabbed his phone from his pocket, selected Inácio's number, and clicked the green icon to initiate the call.

  "Hi," he greeted.

  "Did you read the link I sent?"

  "No, I left it for later and forgot about it."

  "Jesus Christ, Daros… Are you in love with her?"

  "This isn't the right time for that question."

  "So the answer is yes."

  "Why?"

  "Because if it weren't, you'd say 'of course not.'"

  "What was in the link?"

  "She's being indicted for theft and is a suspect in her husband's disappearance case. There must be a bunch of people on both your trails right now. Get out of there. Yesterday."

  "Right, but it's not that simple."

  "It never is. What's going on?"

  Ignoring the question, Daros moved the phone away from his mouth and asked Greta what her house's internet provider was. Greta mechanically informed the operator's name. Bringing the device closer to his face, Daros resumed the conversation.

  "First, I need direct access to her house phone. I want Wi-Fi network access to locate the husband. The provider is Claro. Then I can intercept the voice packets coming out of the VoIP adapter or even hack into his computer."

  "No way," Inácio spat. "I remember very well what happened the first and last time you asked me for this. It was a massacre."

  Inácio wasn't exaggerating. Daros hadn't left a stone unturned at the hospital after deciding to investigate his father's death.

  "Please, Inácio!"

  "No is no. End of discussion."

  Daros took a deep breath. He understood his partner's reservations. In the state of alert he was in, he wouldn't be able to argue the right way. He could insist on the request later.

  "All right. I'm going to copy the contents of some flash drives I have here and send them to you. I have a feeling I won't have time to do this alone. I need names, identification. I already have a name for you." Daros did a quick internet search before continuing. "Donaldo Santana de Castro."

  "Is it who I think it is?"

  "Yup."

  The other whistled, and Daros continued:

  "Find out what you can about the women. I'll call later."

  He intended to scan the legible faces and track digital files connected to the photos, like emails exchanged between the dean and Greta's husband. Maybe he could even find some of the girls on social media. If the matter was as serious as he imagined, big people would be involved. That meant much less time to investigate. The need was for action.

  He was so focused on the next steps that he didn't even notice Greta had the remaining photos in her hands, slowly passing one image after another. He connected the flash drives in pairs to the device, saving everything directly to the cloud shared with Inácio. He checked the contents of only one of them, finding photos similar to the physical ones. He didn't have time to examine them one by one, so he assumed the others contained similar material.

  Suddenly, he felt himself falling into the old abyss of darkness that triggered his fury. This happened whenever a new target defined itself, without him taking the conscious initiative to make the decision. At these times, he was dragged back to an immensity of disconnected images at first, but which joined together forming Fernando's face. Fernando laughing with a snowflake balanced on the tip of his tongue. That bastard's car starting toward his friend. The body beginning a short flight through the air, before falling to the ground and shattering his life forever. The injustice Daros never had the chance to prevent. The world disappeared at these times, and all that remained was blind rage.

  Greta's monotone voice yanked him from the trance. At first, the words seemed disconnected. It sounded like she was reading a grocery list aloud, or rather, like she was reading the credits at the end of a movie. But then the words made sense.

  "Vanessa Pimentel, Adriana de Freitas, Michele da Silva, Vitória dos Santos."

  "You know the girls in the photos?"

  "Most by sight, but some by name."

  "Are they your students? Are they your husband's students?" Daros asked without looking at Greta, while sending the names he'd caught to Inácio's phone.

  "The names of some of the students are written on some professors' doors. They're underprivileged students from the university's scholarship program. They were selected by Valério."

  Daros suddenly stopped typing, his fingers suspended in the air. Greta's attention was no longer on the photos. Nor was it on the man paralyzed before the laptop. Her glistening eyes stared at some place invisible to him. A memory, a recollection. Daros's suspicion was something more concrete for Greta. It was a devastating certainty, a bond that united loose ends.

  Closing the device's lid, he hurried to the sofa. He gently caressed her face, laying Greta's head on his shoulder. Tears rolled silently down the woman's face. Perhaps she had no words to express the pain of what she was feeling.

  When she sniffled and her breathing normalized, Daros gently moved her away and held her reddened face before him with both hands.

  "Listen…" he said. "I'm going to take you to your room, okay? Then I'll bring you some tea. Rest a bit, all right? Try to get all this story out of your head. I'll handle this."

  "No…"

  "No what?" he spoke softly.

  "I don't want to go to my room. I don't want to be alone with these thoughts."

  "Greta, you're not…"

  The darkness in her eyes seemed greater now. It was with caution that he asked, placing a hand between hers:

  "Do you want to sleep in my room?"

  She nodded yes. He continued:

  "And do you want me to stay with you?"

  Another nod from her confirmed. He helped her stand, took her in his arms, and carried her to the bedroom. Greta curled up over her stomach as soon as she felt the mattress beneath her body. Daros sat slowly on the bed, his fingers gently running through her long brown hair until her eyelids closed and a light snoring became audible. After covering her with the sheet, he turned off the lights and equipment and returned to the bedroom, where he lay beside her.

  He crossed his hands under his head on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. Sleep was a distant dream, at least for now.