Private India Read online

  Chapter 53

  THE THICK GREEN strip that separated most of Mumbai’s coastline from the Arabian Sea was almost entirely submerged at high tide. It was only when the waters receded that the band of vegetation would become visible. Clusters of densely packed trees criss-crossed by slender creeks constituted Mumbai’s natural defense barrier against floods—the mangroves.

  A small fishing boat dropped anchor near the trees with their dark, waxy leaves and finger-like aerial roots. Two men jumped off the boat into the knee-deep water and began wading toward land, holding a basket between them. To any casual observer they would have resembled fishermen hauling their catch back to shore. Their actual purpose was a lot more sinister.

  Once safely on land, they were greeted by a third, delicate and gaunt-looking man who had been patiently awaiting their arrival. “As-salam alaykum,” said the waiting man to the two boatmen.

  “Wa alaykumu s-salam,” they replied, carefully lowering the basket onto dry ground.

  “Do you have the entire consignment with you?” asked the waiting Mujahideen man.

  “Thirty kilos. Have a look,” said one of the boatmen as he pulled off the plastic sheet that covered the basket. Inside it were several small wrapped parcels containing a white crystalline solid. It was not a drug-smuggling operation that was underway in the mangroves of Mumbai. The cargo was far more deadly: a consignment of a nitramine commonly known as RDX.

  The three men quickly lifted the basket and hauled it over to the waiting vehicle. “Are you sure you will not be stopped by the cops?” asked one of the boatmen.

  The Mujahideen man raised his hands to the heavens. “Insha Allah, there should be no problems. We’re hoping to rid the world of a satanic organization that prevents us from achieving our holy and pure aims. With Allah on our side, how can there be any obstacles in the way?”

  “Is your access in place?” asked one of the boatmen.

  “He is ready and willing. He hates the Americans more than we do,” said the thin man, getting into the driver’s seat of the vehicle.

  The two boatmen took their leave and waded back into the water. The small craft would help them reach a fishing trawler anchored in the Arabian Sea. The trawler would take them back to their point of origin—Karachi, Pakistan.

  Chapter 54

  THE HOUSE BELONGING to Ragini Sharma, the Honorable MLA from Alibaug constituency, was a hive of activity. A company of armed police had been deployed around the perimeter in order to keep her political supporters at a distance. Unfortunately rumors of her death had leaked out and a mob of Sharma’s constituents stood shouting slogans of support near the gate.

  Within the bungalow grounds were parked several police vehicles, some marked and some unmarked. All the staff, including security personnel, gardeners, cook, and maid, had been assembled by Rupesh’s subordinates and were being questioned. The bungalow had been cordoned off with security tape and a further roll of police tape had been unfurled outside Ragini Sharma’s bedroom door.

  Inside lay the corpse of the politician, her bed sheets showing clear signs of a struggle. Ragini Sharma had fought back, it seemed. Like many middle-aged women in India, she slept in the blouse and petticoat of her saree, finding these inner garments much more comfortable than nightclothes. Around her neck was the now-familiar yellow garrote embedded within a bluish band of discolored skin.

  Santosh looked around the room. “Did we find any surveillance equipment?”

  “Negative,” replied Hari as he continued checking the room. “The Alibaug region has erratic power supply. It would not have been possible to run sensitive cameras and data recorders. The killer possibly knew that this house did not have an electronic security system in place.”

  “Any luck with trace evidence?” asked Santosh. He walked over to Mubeen, who was busy swabbing Ragini Sharma’s face. Nisha watched from the sidelines, staring intently at the victim’s face.

  Noticing her concentration, Santosh said, “What’s the matter? Seen something?”

  Nisha remained quiet. Where had she seen this woman before? Was it simple familiarity with the face of a public figure or was it a faded memory? The harder she tried, the more her memory seemed to fail her. Her thoughts were interrupted by Mubeen.

  “The killer spat on the school principal’s face,” he announced. “I’m checking to see if there has been a repeat performance here.”

  “You never told me that you found saliva on Elina Xavier,” reprimanded Santosh, his usual contemplative expression turning into a scowl.

  “In addition to the usual strand of hair,” replied Mubeen. “The saliva sample was infinitesimally small so I wasn’t sure if it would lead to anything. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that it actually belonged to the killer. Someone had tried to clean it off with bleach but missed an exceedingly small trace that landed on one eyebrow. The chances of finding the killer’s DNA here are much greater. This victim fought back, so there’s a chance we may find interesting evidence under her fingernails. Hello, what have we here?”

  “What have you found?” asked Santosh, forgetting his irritation.

  Mubeen bent down to look at the pillow with a magnifying glass. Pulling out a pair of forensic forceps, he placed his find into a small specimen bag. Holding it up proudly to Santosh, he said, “We now have something that could help us. We have a strand of hair!”

  “Big deal,” retorted Santosh. “We’ve found the same goddamn hair at all the murder sites.”

  “Yes, but I can see that this one seems to be almost complete. I think that some part of the root is intact,” said Mubeen.

  Santosh took the bag from him and looked carefully at the hair inside. It was short and black with nothing unique to mark it out. Turning his gaze toward the pillow and pointing with his cane to a piece of paper sticking out from underneath, he asked, “What is that under there?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to examine it closely because the victim’s head is still on the pillow,” said Mubeen, “but it seems to be a page from a wall calendar.”

  “Pull it out,” instructed Santosh. “I need to see it.”

  Even though Mubeen would have preferred to wait and carry out each task in scientific sequence, he did not wish to aggravate his boss, who already looked irritable and impatient. Mubeen took a photograph of the position of Ragini Sharma’s head on the pillow and then gently lifted it. Reaching out with his other hand, he pulled out what Santosh wanted. He handed it over wordlessly to his boss, who took hold of it in his rubber-gloved hands.

  Santosh stared at the paper. It was indeed a wall calendar—a cheap one that had no glossy photographs or aesthetic value. It simply set aside a page for each month. Working days were shown in black numerals and weekends and national holidays in red. The calendar had been left with the pages turned to the month of July.

  Rupesh appeared behind Santosh and looked over his shoulder. “What have you found?” he asked. It had been a tough decision to allow Private India back into the investigation but pragmatism had won, for the moment at least. The clincher had been Munna’s phone call: “Get them back into the investigation. Don’t ask me why.”

  “It’s a wall calendar,” replied Santosh. “It was left under her pillow with the pages turned to the month of July. If you notice, the days starting from July twenty-third have been circled.”

  Why these dates? thought Santosh. Why July, not January or June? And why the twenty-third in particular? His mind went into overdrive as he attempted to figure out the answer to the riddle. Rupesh took the calendar from him and looked carefully at the circled dates.

  Santosh suddenly spoke up. It was as though a light bulb had gone on inside his head. “I’m willing to bet that all the dates in the next month up to the twenty-second of August are also marked like that,” he said, leaning on his walking stick to ease the strain on his injured leg.

  Rupesh flipped the page of the calendar and saw that Santosh was right, as usual. All the dates up to and includin
g August 22 were circled.

  “What is the significance of these dates?” he asked in frustration. “They have nothing to do with the dates of our murders. It’s currently October.”

  “Ah, but these dates have everything to do with this particular murder,” replied Santosh. “They are the IAU boundaries within the tropical zodiac.”

  “IAU?” asked Nisha.

  “International Astronomical Union,” replied Santosh, “the internationally recognized authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies.” He found nothing strange about the fact that he was aware of that particular obscure piece of information.

  “Zodiac?” asked Rupesh incredulously. “This nut job is killing according to astrologically auspicious dates?”

  “No,” replied Santosh, exasperated by Rupesh’s lack of intellect. “The period from July twenty-third to August twenty-second constitutes the tropical zodiac of Leo. What is the symbol for Leo? The lion! This is the killer’s sixth victim. The sixth manifestation of Durga is Katyayani and she is always depicted seated on a lion!”

  Chapter 55

  THE STRETCH OF the city from Bhendi Bazaar to Mohammed Ali Road was entirely illuminated each night during the holy Islamic festival of Ramadan. Food lanes were doing brisk business at the end of the day’s fasting. They would continue turning out copious quantities of their wares throughout the night.

  In a small workshop a few yards away a blacksmith was firing up his acetylene torch, the tip glowing incandescent as the old man welded metal tubes back in place. Standing watch over the process was the thin man from the Indian Mujahideen and his partner.

  “I still cannot understand why you need the sealed ends of the tubes to be openable,” said the blacksmith, clamping the tube with tongs over his anvil in order to strike it.

  “I’m not paying you to fucking ask me stupid questions,” said the Mujahideen angrily. “Just get the job done so that we can get out of here.” He winked at his partner, who seemed overly nervous.

  “This is not going to happen quickly,” the blacksmith retaliated. “It can take multiple rounds of heating and reheating. I suggest you come back in a day or two. Leave the material here with me.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” said the Mujahideen. “Just keep hammering away. We’ll sit here and watch.”

  “I can’t afford to hammer when the metal’s cold. It will end up creating a cold shunt that weakens the work,” argued the blacksmith earnestly. The Mujahideen man exhaled in exasperation. Why the fuck did the best workmen always turn out to be a pain in the ass? Why was this old man asking questions that would put him in danger of being killed? The thin man counted slowly in his head, forcing himself to calm down. His first priority was getting this stuff fabricated. He would decide how to deal with the blacksmith later.

  He glanced at his partner, who was fidgeting nervously. These educated types were the worst of the lot. No guts, no glory. Just lots of jittery arguments and spineless behavior.

  As the two men watched the blacksmith they fell into a sort of trance. There was a Zen-like beauty to hammering hot metal into shape. It was evident that the blacksmith was a perfectionist, hammering, heating, and polishing until he achieved a perfect factory finish. Every few minutes he would clean the anvil and unclutter his surroundings before going back to his painstaking work.

  “Take your time,” said the Mujahideen. “We can’t afford mistakes.”

  “There are no mistakes in my profession, sir,” replied the blacksmith, sweat trickling down his face. “Unlike a piece of wood which can turn out too short when you cut it, if a piece of metal is botched, we simply wait, reheat, and give it another go. There are always second chances—both in metal and in men.”

  Chapter 56

  “WHERE ARE YOU, Jack?” asked Santosh over the phone. “I have been trying to reach you all morning.”

  “I’m at the Willingdon Club,” Jack replied. “Enjoying a glass of beer after playing eighteen holes of golf.”

  “You never play golf,” said Santosh suspiciously.

  “I figured that I needed to start,” shot back Jack. “Especially given the fact that an old friend invited me over.”

  “How many old friends do you have in Mumbai?” asked Santosh, persisting with his interrogation of his boss.

  “What did you want to talk to me about?” asked Jack, changing the subject smoothly.

  “Do you have your cell phone scrambler with you?” asked Santosh.

  “Yes. Give me a sec,” said Jack, plugging the unit into the USB port of his phone. All employees of the Private organization globally used the encryption tool. Governments and agencies around the world were snooping on every form of communication and they could ill afford the possible consequences of any leak.

  “A sixth victim has been discovered,” began Santosh, and detailed the findings for him.

  “The killer is working quickly,” Jack observed grimly.

  “True,” replied Santosh. “Dr. Kanya Jaiyen was killed on Sunday night, Bhavna Choksi on Monday morning, Priyanka Talati on Monday night, the school principal—Elina Xavier—on Wednesday night, Lara Omprakash on Thursday afternoon, and the MLA, Ragini Sharma, last night—Friday.”

  “Why the hurry, I wonder?” said Jack.

  “The Festival of Navratri is a celebration of nine nights. The murderer clearly hopes to be done before the end of that period,” replied Santosh. Jack could detect a note of worry in the normally imperturbable voice of his India bureau chief.

  Chapter 57

  “LARA OMPRAKASH, VICTIM of ligature strangulation,” said Mubeen into his microphone as he completed the autopsy with Dr. Zafar by his side. “Victim has a tattoo of a Hindu deity on her right upper arm. Her pelvis shows signs of contraction from a previous injury.

  “As regards the school principal, Mrs. Elina Xavier,” he continued, “I have been able to find trace amounts of saliva on her eyebrow. It’s possible that there may have been more on her face but that has been wiped off with bleach. I cannot use RFLP, an accurate and reliable test but one requiring a relatively large amount of DNA material. I now plan to use the PCR method, which allows for testing on very small amounts of DNA from biological samples.

  “The sixth victim—Ragini Sharma—seems to have fought back. Extraction and amplification of cellular material found under her fingernails is being carried out. It is my hope that the biological material transferred during the struggle, if any, may be adequate to genotype reportable mixtures.

  “Yellow scarves used for strangulation have been recovered from all six victims. In addition, a seventh was found in the car belonging to Nisha Gandhe and an eighth was sent to the editor of the Afternoon Mirror. All eight scarves have been passed on to Hari Padhi to conduct microscopic, stain, burn, and solvent tests, in order to be sure that all of them belong to the same fiber, dye, and manufacture family.”

  After shutting off the microphone, he and Zafar scrubbed up and placed the gurneys in the lab storage unit. Zafar headed back to Cooper Hospital while Mubeen left the lab for Hari’s office. Knowing the speed at which his colleague worked, it was quite possible that he would already have results to share, reasoned Mubeen.

  Hari’s office was empty, though, and according to the receptionist he’d stepped out half an hour earlier for a smoke in the alley. Long smoke. Back at the empty office Mubeen swept his gaze over the tangle of cables, wires, computers, and instrumentation, wondering how Hari was able to make any sense of it all. He scanned the desk to see if his colleague had typed up a report containing his forensic analysis of the yellow scarves. No luck.

  Mubeen tried the desk drawer but it was empty except for an electronic frame displaying a digital photograph of a pretty woman. Hari was unmarried. As far as Mubeen knew, there was no serious relationship either. The woman had been photographed seated casually on a couch with legs crossed, holding a coffee mug. She was wearing a black vest and a pair of faded jeans. There was something very sensual about her. Mubeen won
dered whether it was her dusky complexion or her shoulder-length curly black hair that gave such an impression.

  He put away the digital photo frame and closed the drawer. Next he opened the small cabinet beneath to check Hari’s files. On a lower shelf were specimen bags containing the eight scarves that had been given to Hari for testing. Mubeen took them out and placed them on the desktop.

  Each specimen bag had been clearly marked with the name of the victim and the date and time of the sample collection—Kanya Jaiyen, Bhavna Choksi, Priyanka Talati, Elina Xavier, Lara Omprakash, and Ragini Sharma. One more specimen bag contained the scarf that had been found tied to the steering wheel inside Nisha’s car, and yet another held the one that had been sent to the tabloid editor. Mubeen counted the bags. That was odd …

  “What are you up to?” demanded a voice behind him.

  He spun around to see Santosh in the doorway, looking suspiciously at Mubeen. “Why are you looking through Hari’s stuff?”

  Chapter 58

  MUBEEN STUTTERED, “I—I came to find Hari but he’s—he’s out.”

  “That still doesn’t answer my question,” said Santosh, continuing to stare suspiciously at him.

  “I came looking to see if he had completed his examination and analysis of the scarves. There should have been eight specimen bags in all,” replied Mubeen. “Surprisingly, there are nine.”

  Santosh crossed to the desk where the bags had been laid out, counting them for himself. Indeed there were nine bags, not eight. He put aside the bags containing the scarves that had been used for killing the six victims. He then separated the bag containing the scarf that had been found in Nisha’s car and the one sent to the newspaper editor. He stared at the ninth specimen bag. It was slightly bulkier than the others and was unmarked.