Private India: (Private 8) Read online

He had woken in hospital to the news that his son was dead, and after that no therapy in the world could keep him and his wife together. The guilt they had both felt at living while their son had died. It had been too much for them. Until finally they’d divorced and Mubeen had yearned to return home to India.

  Thanks to Jack Morgan he’d gotten his wish. A murder case had brought Mubeen into contact with Jack, who had offered him a job at Private India’s new office in Mumbai. On his first day at Private he’d met Santosh Wagh, and the eyes of his new boss were the same eyes he saw in the mirror each morning. They had never spoken about their losses, but the sense of a kindred spirit was shared.

  He looked up now as Santosh approached.

  “Anything for me?” asked Santosh and Mubeen pulled away from the microscope.

  “Nisha recovered a strand of hair from the bathroom floor,” he replied, and Santosh nodded. “I have compared it against a sample from the victim. It’s different.”

  “So it should be possible to get DNA from the hair?”

  Mubeen sighed. Forensic analysis of DNA was the most overhyped and misrepresented collection method. Santosh was making the same mistake most people made. They simply assumed that hair samples made ideal material for DNA testing.

  “Unfortunately the successful extraction of DNA from a hair sample depends on the part of the hair that is discovered,” replied Mubeen with a grim expression.

  “Enlighten me,” said Santosh, taking another bite of his apple.

  “Hair is mainly composed of a fibrous protein known as keratin. This protein is also the primary constituent of skin, animal hooves, and nails. The hair root lies below the scalp and is enclosed in a follicle. This is connected to the bloodstream via the dermal papilla. The hair shaft does not contain DNA, which is only to be found in the root.”

  “So what exactly is the problem here?” asked Santosh.

  “This strand of hair has been sliced through cleanly. There is no root available for analysis.”

  “So this was a cut strand of hair?” said Santosh.

  Mubeen scratched at his unkempt beard. “It would appear so. Attached to someone’s clothes, perhaps?”

  “Yes, unless our killer stopped to give his hair a trim,” said Santosh, thinking, then added, “Or perhaps it merely belongs to a former guest. I remember reading somewhere that in a small number of hair samples, forensic scientists are able to extract nuclear DNA from cut or shed hairs.”

  Mubeen nodded. His boss always managed to spring a surprise on him whenever his knowledge was called into question. “The presence of biologically dead cells or keratinocytes in their last stage of differentiation may make it possible to extract a profile derived from nuclear DNA,” he replied. “It will take me some time to tell you whether that’s possible or not in this case. It’s highly probable that DNA will be absent.”

  “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” said Santosh. “Let me know if anything new emerges.”

  Chapter 10

  SANTOSH LEFT MUBEEN’S lab and walked into Hari’s office. At thirty-five the youngest member of the team, Hari Padhi was Private’s technology geek. If you needed a cell tracing, you went to Hari. If you needed to know the precise speed and trajectory of a naked corpse falling from the twenty-first floor of a building, then you went to Hari.

  He looked somewhat like a wrestler. His chest bulged out of his shirt and his arms were thick and muscular. It was evident that he spent a substantial amount of his free time working out at the gym. His gray matter was also in peak form.

  He was seated at his desk, closely examining the video feed from the hotel’s camera. His workspace was fitted out with high-capacity microprocessors, surveillance equipment, GPS trackers, signal jammers, bug-sweep equipment, password-decryption software, and wiretap-detection systems. Also available to Hari was a full suite of ballistics equipment including microscopes with digital imaging capability, sensitive measuring equipment, and instrumentation to check and record surface temperature, projectile velocity, internal gun pressures, trigger characteristics, and lock time.

  He was using an ultra-high-resolution monitor and a high-density time-lapse deck with a built-in time base corrector to forensically examine the video feed from the hotel.

  “Any news for me?” asked Santosh.

  “We checked the room for fingerprints. Most of them were of the victim or assorted members of hotel staff. I’ve also been looking at the CCTV, and we have a guy going in and out of the room.”

  “Excellent,” said Santosh. “Let’s see him.”

  Hari scooted to the place on the tape and they watched as a man first entered and then, forwarding the tape, left.

  He wore a baseball cap, jeans, his hands thrust in the pockets of a jacket. Conscious of the cameras, his head down.

  “Not much help, is it?” said Hari with a pained face.

  Santosh looked at him. “Everything’s a help,” he said. He looked back at the screen where the man was freeze-framed as he left room 1121, certain he was looking at the killer.

  Hari looked up and wordlessly scanned the footage to the point at which the baseball-cap-wearing visitor had been recorded leaving the room. “See this? The time stamp shows two minutes past nine on Sunday evening.”

  “So?” asked Santosh.

  “Now let’s scan back further to see when he went in,” said Hari and pressed the deck’s rewind button to take the footage back by eleven minutes. “Ah, here we are. See this? Eight fifty-one p.m.”

  “Yes.”

  “Nisha spoke to receptionists and the doormen. Nobody remembers seeing anyone matching this description enter or leave, nor does he turn up on any of the reception CCTV.”

  “So he used a back entrance?” said Santosh.

  “Sort of. There’s a separate entrance from the bar at the rear of the hotel. There’s no doorman, the reception area is set back, there’s far less chance of being seen. But … they do have CCTV.”

  With a showman’s flourish Hari clicked on his laptop’s desktop and a new picture appeared. Once again it showed the same figure, baseball cap on, head down, hands in pockets. Once again there was no hint of any identifying features.

  “He certainly knew what he was doing,” hissed Santosh. “He must have known the location of every single camera in the place.”

  “It’s frustrating, isn’t it?” agreed Hari. “Except. The image from the rear entrance is a slightly higher resolution and something caught my eye. Here …” He clicked again. “Look at the shoes.”

  Santosh peered at the screen, in particular at the shoes. Expensive-looking, polished black shoes with a distinctive buckle at the sides, they were incongruous set against the baseball cap and jacket.

  He straightened, nodding with satisfaction. His phone was ringing and he delved in his jacket pocket for it, gesturing from Hari to the image on the screen.

  “Find those shoes,” he said, his finger hovering over the call-accept button. It was Rupesh. “Find where they’re sold and who’s bought a pair.”

  Hari nodded and looked pleased with himself as Santosh answered the call. “Yes?”

  “There’s been another murder,” said Rupesh. “And guess what? The victim has a yellow scarf around her neck.”

  Chapter 11

  THANE, A NORTHEASTERN suburb of Mumbai, was home to several large housing cooperatives. The second body had been discovered in an apartment that was part of a gated community there.

  Nisha drove past the security gate and down a long winding road surrounded by well-maintained lawns until the car reached the block that Rupesh had indicated. There were several police vehicles parked outside. Santosh, Nisha, and Mubeen got out of the car, picked up their equipment, and headed for the stairs. The police had already cordoned off the entrance to the third-floor apartment.

  Rupesh was waiting for them at the doorway. “Her name is Bhavna Choksi, aged approximately thirty-seven. A journalist who worked for a tabloid—the Afternoon Mirror,” he explai
ned as he led them to the bedroom where her body had been discovered.

  The apartment was a compact one-bedroom unit. It was quite obvious that Bhavna Choksi was single but financially sound. The furnishings were simple yet elegant and the apartment was well organized and clean.

  The body was suspended from a ceiling fan in the center of the bedroom. The room was completely still but for the barely noticeable pendulum-like movement of the corpse. Nisha shuddered.

  Santosh sniffed, detecting the odor of urine. He looked down at the floor and noticed a puddle by the base of the bed. “She was strangled there,” he said. “She peed involuntarily as she was being choked. Urination or defecation are known body reactions that can be triggered by strangulation. Yes, triggered by strangulation.”

  Unlike the first victim, who had been in her nightdress, the second was fully dressed in work clothes—cotton slacks and linen top—ideally suited to a journalist on the prowl in Mumbai’s hot and humid weather. The slacks were damp with urine. Around her neck was an unmistakable yellow scarf to which a rope had been attached in order to suspend her from the fan. Both her hands had string tied around them. In one hand the victim had been made to hold rosary beads, and in the other a plastic toy bucket—the sort that kids use to build sandcastles on the beach—containing a couple of inches of water.

  “Who found her?” asked Santosh as he looked up at the hanging corpse.

  “The cleaning lady let herself in with her key at nine thirty,” answered Rupesh. “She assumed that Bhavna Choksi had already left for work, which was the case most days.”

  Santosh took advantage of the police ladder that had been placed under the fan. Handing his cane to Nisha, he climbed up several rungs so that he could look at the ligature. It was the same sort of yellow scarf as they’d found on Kanya Jaiyen. He peered into the victim’s wide-open eyes. Lifeless now, they must have been terrorized as a garrote choked the victim and deprived her lungs of air. Eyes are the windows of the soul … reveal your soul to me, woman, thought Santosh. Tell me your story, Bhavna.

  “I need to swab her eyes,” said Mubeen, pulling out two cotton buds from his satchel. Santosh snapped out of his trance and descended the ladder so that Mubeen could use it.

  He climbed up carefully and gently swabbed each of her eyes, placing the buds into specimen tubes. “Why the eye swab?” asked Rupesh, who had never seen any of his own police medical examiners do it.

  “Notice the room’s temperature?” replied Mubeen as he came down the ladder and packed away the specimen buds. “The air conditioning has been left running and it’s bloody freezing. I can’t depend on the body’s ambient temperature reading to estimate the time of death. A diagnostic machine in my lab can analyze potassium, urea, and hypoxanthine concentrations present in the vitreous humor of the eye. It provides a far more accurate estimate of time of death than basal body temperature.”

  “We saw the murderer on CCTV leaving Kanya Jaiyen’s hotel room at two minutes past nine last night,” said Santosh. “The cleaning lady discovered this victim at nine thirty this morning, leaving the murderer with a substantial window of around twelve and a half hours within which to kill a second time.” He paced the room carefully. “A window of twelve and a half hours.”

  “Unless this second murder had actually happened before the hotel incident,” argued Nisha.

  Crouching down, Nisha noticed a strand of hair on the floor exactly below the hanging corpse. She pointed it out to Mubeen, who immediately bent over to pick it up with forceps and bag it.

  “Hopefully a comparison with the first sample should tell us whether it comes from the same person,” he said to Santosh. But Santosh’s mind was elsewhere.

  “This murder scene is fresh,” he said softly, almost to himself. “Fresh, because the urine on her slacks is still wet, not dry, in spite of the air conditioning. This killing happened after the hotel murder, not before. And forget about the god-damned hair. It’s just another annoying prop!

  “Crap!” he hissed suddenly under his breath, thumping his cane on the floor and giving everyone else around him a start. What did the objects mean? What was the killer trying to tell him? Why the single strand of hair at both murder sites? Come out of your hiding place, bastard!

  “Unfortunately the CCTV system of the building was down owing to a technical glitch,” said Rupesh. “So we cannot get a visual of the murderer. No signs of forced entry either.”

  “Any idea regarding the firm that handles security surveillance of the estate?” asked Santosh.

  “Xilon Security Services,” replied Rupesh. “They were in the process of sending over an engineer to rectify the fault, but obviously it wasn’t soon enough.”

  “In all probability,” said Nisha, “the victim knew her killer and allowed the murderer access, given that there are no signs of forced entry.”

  Santosh pointed to Bhavna Choksi’s desk. “There’s a cell phone and a laptop. Get Hari to examine both of them. Let’s find out the last story that Bhavna Choksi worked on. Maybe she ruffled someone’s feathers?”

  Turning to Rupesh, Santosh asked, “Do I have your permission to take over the case, assuming that the two crimes are related?”

  “Why on earth would I have called you here if I didn’t think they were connected?” replied Rupesh, placing a rather generous pinch of premium black-market chewing tobacco in the corner of his mouth.

  Rupesh stared at the suspended body while chewing his tobacco. In his mind he saw a naked woman. Beaten black and blue, subsequently raped. Repeatedly humiliated and violated until she died. Death was a wonderful balm indeed … Rupesh snapped back into the present when he realized that Santosh was studying him curiously.

  “Good. It’s possible that someone may have seen the murderer enter or leave the premises. Let’s question the cooperative’s security guards, the neighbors as well as any nannies or children who may have been in the garden.”

  Chapter 12

  I CAN FEEL the smooth fabric of the garrote around my neck. I grasp both ends and gently pull. Oh, yes … I can feel the compression. A little more pressure and I’m gasping for breath. I’m about to black out as I release the garrote and allow myself to breathe once again, allowing myself back from the brink of darkness.

  How delicate is the fine line between life and death. At a given moment a person could be living, breathing, talking, and walking. At another moment she could be a cold, unmoving corpse. Of course, most people live like corpses in the humdrum grip of their prosaic and pathetic lives. Not much difference between life and death for the world’s living cadavers.

  I hold the yellow scarf in my hand and run it through my fingers lovingly. I bring it to my face and hold it under my nose. I breathe in the unique smell of death. There’s an almost orgasmic quality to asphyxiation, isn’t there? I could easily see myself getting addicted to the adrenalin rush.

  Life has no meaning without the presence of death. Life is simply the absence of death. The fools of this world labor to prevent death, unmindful of the fact that it is death that will set them free.

  I stand in front of the mirror and look at my naked body. I have shaved every inch of it. I run the scarf along my hairless arms. I feel the tingle of the fabric against my skin as I allow myself to lower the scarf to my thighs. The sensation is simply incredible.

  I pull away the scarf and hold it before me at face level. I quickly tie a knot in it and pull the ends with all my might until I see the knot morph into a tiny lump.

  Two down, but I have many more to go.

  Chapter 13

  THERE WAS A half-bottle of Scotch in his desk, but for the time being Santosh ignored its lure. He felt something. A sense that the tempo of the hunt was increasing. Give me one murder to solve and I’ll show you an enigma, he thought. Give me two, and I’ll show you a puzzle to solve. And he offered up a silent apology to the souls of the two women whose deaths made up the pieces in his puzzle, and promised to do his best to find the man responsible. />
  Two women killed within twenty-four hours of each other, both with a yellow scarf, both with trinkets attached to them, one an Indian journalist, the other a Thai doctor. Discovering what connected them, that was the key.

  They had a call scheduled with Dr. Jaiyen’s boss, a Dr. Uwwano. “Nisha,” he called from his office.

  Sitting at her desk, her head bobbed up. “Yes, boss?”

  “What time is she expecting us?”

  She glanced at her watch. “Five minutes.”

  “Join me. And bring what you have on Dr. Jaiyen.”

  As she came into the office he stood and moved to a magnet board, wrote down the two names on record cards: Bhavna Choksi and Dr. Kanya Jaiyen, placed them beside each other. Added a question mark.

  “Bhavna we know,” he said. “A journalist working for the Afternoon Mirror. But what about Dr. Kanya Jaiyen? What do we know about her?”

  Nisha pulled a face. “That she lived in Bangkok. That she was a reconstructive surgeon. More than that I can’t say.”

  Santosh nodded. “Plastic surgeon covers a multitude of sins. Plenty of people might have reason to silence a plastic surgeon.”

  “Half of Bollywood,” tried Nisha, and was rewarded for her attempt at a joke with pursed lips from Santosh. She cleared her throat. “But it wasn’t really a ‘silencing’ sort of crime, was it? What we’ve seen is more considered and ritualistic. The work of a serial killer.”

  Santosh’s eyes sparkled behind his glasses. He was pleased with his protégée. “Exactly. And yet, on the other hand, perhaps these trinkets are red herrings, designed to throw us off the scent. Either way, these women were chosen, and finding out what connects them will help us understand how and why they were chosen. We need to speak to Bhavna Choksi’s editor, find out who she’d spoken to recently. And as for Dr. Jaiyen …” He gestured to Nisha. “Do you have the number?”