Seducing the Evidence

I didn’t sleep last night. Not because of the heat, though Rio in January is a wet mouth breathing down your neck. Not because of the neighbors either, with their samba and their crying babies and their televisions tuned to three different stations at once. I didn’t sleep because my brother’s blood is on my hands, and I haven’t washed them yet.

Lucas called me at midnight. That was seventy-two hours ago. Three days since I heard his voice, scratchy and low, like he’d been smoking a pack of cigarettes just to keep his throat from closing up. “Val,” he said. “I did something stupid.”

I was still in my uniform then. Still a cop. Still someone who believed the law was a thing you could hold onto, like a railing on a rocking boat. “What kind of stupid?”

“The kind that gets you killed.”

He told me about the businessman. The one with the penthouse at the Copacabana Palace, the one whose name shows up in court documents and then disappears, like a stain scrubbed off a white shirt. Lucas had been his driver. Had seen things. Had recorded things. Had thought, for one brilliant, idiotic moment, that he could turn those recordings into a ticket out of this city.

Now he’s gone. And I’m sitting in my empty apartment with a blank notebook and a clock that won’t stop ticking.

The notebook is supposed to be my evidence log. Standard issue from the department, before they took my badge. Before they told me I was “too emotionally compromised” to carry a gun. The pages are white and smooth and completely useless. They don’t know anything yet. But they will.

I pull on jeans that don’t fit right anymore. A black tank top that shows the scar on my shoulder, the one from the shooting in Lapa. I don’t bother with makeup. Nobody in Copacabana at eight in the morning is looking at a woman’s face. They’re looking at her tits or her wallet or the way she walks, and I walk like someone who knows where she’s going even when she doesn’t.

The air outside is wet and hot. It sticks to my skin like a second layer. The pavement steams from last night’s rain, and the smell of fried dough and cheap coffee pours out of every corner bar. I walk past the newsstand, past the old man who sells sunglasses he definitely stole, past the woman walking her dog in a tracksuit that costs more than my rent.

The beach is already full. By nine in the morning, Copacabana is a grid of towels and umbrellas and bodies oiled up like they’re being basted for a barbecue. I don’t go to the sand. I go to the kiosk at the far end, the one with the blue awning and the cracked plastic chairs.

She’s there. The girlfriend. The mistress. Whatever you call a woman who’s been sleeping with a married man for three years and still hasn’t figured out she’s a transaction.

Her name is Raquel. She’s twenty-four, maybe twenty-five, with hair pulled back so tight it looks like it hurts. She’s counting money at a table in the back, bills spread out like she’s playing solitaire. Her hands are shaking.

I sit down across from her. She doesn’t look up.

“I know who you are,” she says.

“Then you know why I’m here.”

She keeps counting. Five hundred. Six hundred. Eight. “Your brother was an idiot.”

“He was my brother.”

“That doesn’t make him less of an idiot.”

I let that sit. Let the silence do what silence does, which is make people nervous enough to fill it with the truth. I’ve learned this trick from interrogations. From the men who thought they could stare me down, who thought a woman in a uniform was just a decoration. I let them talk. And talk. And talk.

Raquel stacks the bills and puts them in her purse. “I don’t know where he is.”

“I didn’t ask.”

She looks at me now. Really looks. Her eyes are red at the edges, like she’s been crying or smoking something that makes your eyes red. “Then what do you want?”

“I want to know what he had on your boyfriend.”

She laughs. It’s a dry sound, like paper tearing. “You think I know? You think he tells me anything? I’m just the girl he fucks when his wife is sleeping.”

“You’re the girl who has a key to his room.”

Her face goes still. I can see the calculation happening behind her eyes, the math of risk and reward. She’s not stupid. She’s just desperate, and desperate people are predictable.

“I don’t have it anymore,” she says.

“Bullshit.”

“He changed the locks. After Lucas. After everything.”

I reach into my pocket and pull out the cash. A thousand reais. It’s everything I have left after the rent, after the bills, after the thousand small expenses of being a woman who used to have a job. I put it on the table between us.

She looks at it. Looks at me.

“There’s a spare,” she says. “Under the mat in the service elevator. Room 1204.”

I leave the money on the table. Don’t pick it up. Don’t look back. I can feel her watching me as I walk away, and I know she’s already counting the bills again, already figuring out what she’ll buy with them. Something temporary. Something that won’t fix the hole in her chest.

The hotel is four blocks away. I walk fast, past the tourists with their cameras and their sunburns, past the vendors selling caipirinhas at ten in the morning. The Copacabana Palace is white and grand and looks like a wedding cake that forgot to be humble. I don’t go through the front. I go around the side, past the dumpsters and the delivery trucks, to the service entrance.

The elevator smells like bleach and old food. I ride it to the twelfth floor, and when the doors open, I’m in a hallway so quiet I can hear the hum of the air conditioning. The carpet is thick and blue. The lights are dim.

I find the mat. I find the key.

And I find the door to Room 1204 standing open, just a crack, like someone left in a hurry.

I don’t draw my weapon because I don’t have one anymore. I push the door open with my fingertips and step inside.

The room is empty. But the bed is unmade, and the window is open, and on the nightstand there’s a phone. Not a hotel phone. A cheap smartphone with a cracked screen, the kind Lucas could afford.

I pick it up. It’s still warm.

And that’s when I hear the footsteps behind me.