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characteristics . . .” He paused and looked at the ceiling.
    “What’s the matter?” Silva said.
    “I forgot some of the characteristics. I’ll go to my office and look them up.”
    He started to rise. Arnaldo put the heels of his hands over his eyes.
    Silva motioned the profiler back into his chair. “That won’t be necessary, Godo. Look them up later. Put them in your written report.”
    “Ah, yes, my written report. Alright. Where was I?”
    “The devil wanted everyone with certain characteristics . . .” Silva prompted.
    “To die. And the members of the cult were to be his instrument. To reward them for their obedience, he’d send a spaceship to rescue them from the destruction of the earth.”
    “And they truly believed that crap?” Arnaldo asked.
    “Enough to murder at least fourteen people,” Boceta said.

Chapter Eleven
    CLOSING IN ON RIBEIRO had been far simpler than Tanaka had dared to hope. In addition to the address, Ricardo had supplied the man’s telephone number.
    Tanaka’s call was answered by a sleepy male voice.
    He hung up and immediately called for backup. An hour later, he and Detective Danilo Coimbra rousted Ribeiro out of bed in his surprisingly neat and clean two-room flat. Overriding his protestations of innocence, they cuffed him and hauled him off to Tanaka’s delegacia.
    In the early stages of his interrogation, Ribeiro demon-strated a self-confidence that bordered on arrogance.
    “Hey, Delegado, you didn’t have to drag me all the way down here. I woulda taken care of you, and that partner of yours, too, without going to all of this trouble. I mean, time is money, right?”
    “Is it? Is time money? Are you trying to bribe me, Ribeiro?”
    “I got a good friend on the force. Maybe you know him. Lieutenant Soares?”
    “Yeah, I know Soares,” Tanaka said.
    It was true. Tanaka did know Soares—and so did every-one else in the policia civil. Soares was the brother-in-law of Adolfo Mendes, the secretary for public safety, and Mendes was the top law-enforcement official in the state’s government.
    Soares was a man who’d made a fortune by being a cop. It was said that most of his earnings went to his brother-in-law and the governor, but Soares did very well with what was left for him. He drove a Lexus, and the parties at his beach house in Guarujá were said to be fantastic, although Tanaka couldn’t confirm that from personal experience. Even though he was only a lieutenant himself, Soares would never think of invit-ing a mere delegado titular .
    Soares wouldn’t invite a lowlife like Ribeiro either, but he would help him get out of jail, for a price.
    “Why don’t you just call the lieutenant?” Ribeiro said. “He’ll vouch for me. I’m sure he will.”
    “I’m sure he will, too,” Tanaka said. “But maybe we don’t have to do that.”
    Ribeiro smiled. “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Means there’s more to go around.”
    “More of what?”
    “Come on, Delegado. You know what I’m talking about.”
    “Money?”
    “Yeah, money.”
    “So what have you done, Ribeiro, that you feel you have to offer me a payoff?”
    “Nothing. I haven’t done anything. It’s just the . . . con-venience. Your time is valuable, right? So is mine. So let’s cut to the chase. What do you think you have on me, and how much is it gonna cost to make it go away?”
    That was when Tanaka hit him with it. He told him he didn’t want his money. He told him he knew about the fur-niture and the Lisboas. He told him he had a canceled check from Goldman, that he had witnesses who could identify the furniture, who could put him at the scene on the day the family disappeared. He told him about the corpses down at the Instituto Médico Legal. And then he tied it all together: he accused Ribeiro of kidnapping entire families—and killing them.
    “And now,” he said, “all I need to know is why.”
    Ribeiro denied knowing anything, but from that point on he stopped