specialized in the transplantation of vital organs. Doutora Claudia Andrade and her associates were often able to prolong and increase the quality of life in patients wealthy enough to pay for the privilege. In that there was nothing amiss.
What was amiss was their source of organs. They harvested them from living, breathing human beings. Scores of innocent people had been murdered in the process.
And, in the end, Claudia Andrade had gotten clean away.
In an exclusive interview in the Folha de São Paulo, Sampaio spun it this way: it wasn’t the federal police who’d failed to apprehend her. No. It was one man: Mario Silva. He’d been in overall charge of the case, had been given all of the resources of the state to back him up and had failed miserably. If it hadn’t been for Silva’s ineptitude, the psychopathic lady doctor would never have been able to escape incarceration and judgment. Silva’s actions clearly required a review, and Sampaio, for one, would welcome an investigation by an independent body.
The day after Sampaio’s comments appeared, droves of reporters descended on Silva’s office. He fled down a back stairway, but others were waiting for him at home, milling around in the basement parking lot, clustered in front of the building, packing the hallway in front of his apartment. By the time he’d elbowed his way through the throng and reached his front door, all three groups had joined together into an insistent, jostling mob, shouting questions and demanding explanations.
A particularly strident young brunette—Silva took her for a newspaper reporter or someone from a radio station, because she was casually dressed in hip-hugging yellow jeans—inserted a sandal-clad shoe between his front door and the jamb and told him she was going to keep it there until he answered her questions.
Silva asked her to remove it. When she didn’t, he brought down the sole of his shoe on her exposed toes, not hard enough to break anything, but with sufficient force to discourage her. With a screech of pain and an expletive her mother never taught her, the brunette pulled back her foot. Before a hardier soul could take her place, Silva slammed the door, locked it and went to look for Irene.
He found her curled up on the sofa, breathing heavily, although it wasn’t quite four in the afternoon. An attack on the man she loved, her only anchor, was all it took to get her to break her five o’clock rule, but it took a great deal of drinking to render her unconscious. She must have been at it since early morning.
Later, after he’d tucked her into bed, he found the copy of the Folha , crumpled and folded back to the op-ed page. She’d stuffed it into the garbage compactor next to the kitchen sink. The cartoon was the first thing that caught his eye. It showed Claudia Andrade as a bird of prey, flying off into the sunset with a human heart in her beak. Down below, hanging out of a tiny, ineffectual paddy wagon, were the Keystone Kops, wearing tall hats, blowing whistles, waving billy clubs. The sergeant leading the Kops bore a striking resemblance to Silva. The accompanying editorial went on to excoriate him and those who served under him. It didn’t seem to matter that the organ-theft ring had been broken up and that all of the other members, save only Claudia, were either imprisoned or dead. What mattered, apparently, was that Doutora Claudia Andrade, one of the cardiovascular surgeons who’d plucked hearts from the healthy and poor to transplant them into the critically ill and rich, was still at large.
Physically, Claudia was an attractive woman. The photograph that circulated in the press had been shot head-on, foreshortening her rather prominent nose and thereby enhancing her features. Press and public alike were intrigued by the fact that someone who looked like that could have been directly responsible for killing tens, maybe hundreds, of innocents.
Silva survived the attack, and the ensuing independent
What was amiss was their source of organs. They harvested them from living, breathing human beings. Scores of innocent people had been murdered in the process.
And, in the end, Claudia Andrade had gotten clean away.
In an exclusive interview in the Folha de São Paulo, Sampaio spun it this way: it wasn’t the federal police who’d failed to apprehend her. No. It was one man: Mario Silva. He’d been in overall charge of the case, had been given all of the resources of the state to back him up and had failed miserably. If it hadn’t been for Silva’s ineptitude, the psychopathic lady doctor would never have been able to escape incarceration and judgment. Silva’s actions clearly required a review, and Sampaio, for one, would welcome an investigation by an independent body.
The day after Sampaio’s comments appeared, droves of reporters descended on Silva’s office. He fled down a back stairway, but others were waiting for him at home, milling around in the basement parking lot, clustered in front of the building, packing the hallway in front of his apartment. By the time he’d elbowed his way through the throng and reached his front door, all three groups had joined together into an insistent, jostling mob, shouting questions and demanding explanations.
A particularly strident young brunette—Silva took her for a newspaper reporter or someone from a radio station, because she was casually dressed in hip-hugging yellow jeans—inserted a sandal-clad shoe between his front door and the jamb and told him she was going to keep it there until he answered her questions.
Silva asked her to remove it. When she didn’t, he brought down the sole of his shoe on her exposed toes, not hard enough to break anything, but with sufficient force to discourage her. With a screech of pain and an expletive her mother never taught her, the brunette pulled back her foot. Before a hardier soul could take her place, Silva slammed the door, locked it and went to look for Irene.
He found her curled up on the sofa, breathing heavily, although it wasn’t quite four in the afternoon. An attack on the man she loved, her only anchor, was all it took to get her to break her five o’clock rule, but it took a great deal of drinking to render her unconscious. She must have been at it since early morning.
Later, after he’d tucked her into bed, he found the copy of the Folha , crumpled and folded back to the op-ed page. She’d stuffed it into the garbage compactor next to the kitchen sink. The cartoon was the first thing that caught his eye. It showed Claudia Andrade as a bird of prey, flying off into the sunset with a human heart in her beak. Down below, hanging out of a tiny, ineffectual paddy wagon, were the Keystone Kops, wearing tall hats, blowing whistles, waving billy clubs. The sergeant leading the Kops bore a striking resemblance to Silva. The accompanying editorial went on to excoriate him and those who served under him. It didn’t seem to matter that the organ-theft ring had been broken up and that all of the other members, save only Claudia, were either imprisoned or dead. What mattered, apparently, was that Doutora Claudia Andrade, one of the cardiovascular surgeons who’d plucked hearts from the healthy and poor to transplant them into the critically ill and rich, was still at large.
Physically, Claudia was an attractive woman. The photograph that circulated in the press had been shot head-on, foreshortening her rather prominent nose and thereby enhancing her features. Press and public alike were intrigued by the fact that someone who looked like that could have been directly responsible for killing tens, maybe hundreds, of innocents.
Silva survived the attack, and the ensuing independent
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