Bankerupt (Ravi Subramanian) (28 page)

52

3rd June 2008, night

Boston

It was a long night for the Raisinghanias. The documents in Richard’s locker were nothing short of dynamite. Safe inside the envelope was the entire raw data of Deahl’s research. The complete set of questionnaires of the interviews arranged by the prisons, it contained the names of people interviewed, along with the date, time and contact details. The interviewers’ names and signatures were there on every questionnaire. The material was good enough to recreate a chunk of the qualitative part of Deahl’s research. Data pertaining to another leg of the research conducted in Chicago and a few other cities was there too.

Cirisha was curious about the interviews conducted at the Boston prison. She hurriedly sifted through the papers till she found them: twenty-three of them, in a separate set labelled ‘Boston state prison’. When Aditya saw the way the documents had been arranged and labelled, he knew what Cirisha meant when she said that Richard was one of the most organized souls she had ever met.

‘See.’ When Aditya looked up, Cirisha waved a set of papers at him. ‘This says that twenty-three inmates of the Boston state prison were interviewed. It also has their names and the dates of the interviews. According to these questionnaires, Aditya, Boston prison inmates were interviewed in August last year. It’s the prison in Windle’s precinct. He is clueless!’ Cirisha passed on the papers to Aditya, who looked at them and agreed with her.

‘I will talk to him tomorrow morning. Let’s see what he has to say,’ she said. After a moment’s thought, she added, ‘I’ll go and meet him tomorrow.’

‘Why don’t you call? It will be easier,’ Aditya reasoned.

‘It is better to meet him in person. His body language speaks more than him.’

‘Don’t go alone, then. I will come with you.’

‘It’s OK, Aditya. He may not open up if you are there.’ Looking at the concern in his eyes, she added, ‘I will be careful, Aditya. I am not going into a war zone. Don’t worry.’

Cirisha got down to tabulating the interviews done at the prisons. Once done, she intended to compare them against what was mentioned in
Staring Down the Barrel.

She did not have the time or the tools to validate the complex regressions and detailed analyses. Consequently her focus was entirely on the basic data and tables. That too only the ones pertaining to the main question—whether the felons would have committed the crimes if the guns had not been available. A quick analysis would do, at least for the time being. Any error identified here would call for a more detailed investigation.

She started tabulating the data from the prisons into a simple table.

Prison by prison, the two of them started comparing what they found with the data in
Staring Down the Barrel.
The data from the questionnaires tallied with what was there in the book. ‘I told you this is a red herring,’ Aditya commented three hours into the exercise, inviting a deadly stare from Cirisha.

‘I will get some coffee,’ said Cirisha and got up to go to the kitchen. ‘We have eight locations still to go.’

‘Yes. I wouldn’t mind a strong dose of filter coffee,’ Aditya agreed. ‘If we find that the remaining eight are in order, we will go to sleep. OK?’

Cirisha smiled and walked to the kitchen. She took a short detour to wash her face and freshen up. It was going to be a long night. She took some clothes out from the drier and put in another set waiting to be washed. Then she headed to the kitchen. Hardly had she poured water into the coffee percolator when she heard Aditya call out. ‘Ciri! Come here fast! Quick!’

She put the glass down and rushed to the living room. ‘What happened?’

‘Look at this.’ Aditya gave her a piece of paper. ‘Vermont.’

Cirisha looked at it. Aditya had quickly tabulated the information collected from the prison in Vermont. ‘Shit!’ she whispered. Her hand instinctively came up to her mouth. She was very particular about her language. ‘We have the first one.’

Aditya nodded. ‘Vermont. According to the data in the questionnaires, 80 per cent of the inmates said that they would have hesitated and probably not committed the crimes they did had the guns not been easily available.’

‘And James’s book says just the opposite. Eighty per cent of inmates say that they would have committed the crime they did even if guns were not available. This is clearly a misrepresentation.’

‘It could be an honest mistake,’ Aditya tried to reason. ‘Somebody could just have messed up the columns while capturing the data. Human error.’

‘Unlikely. But before we start jumping to conclusions let’s see the remaining seven locations too.’

By the time they were done with all the prisons, it was clear. There was a problem. Intentional or not, they couldn’t say. The data tallied for every single prison except three: Vermont, Florida and Phoenix. In all the three cities, the original data was contravening Deahl’s thesis in
Staring Down the Barrel
. Why didn’t the data for these three prisons tally with the book, especially when it tallied for every other prison?

She looked at the questionnaires for these three cities carefully. She recognized the handwriting. It was Richard’s. ‘There’s no way he could have made a mistake,’ she said to herself. That’s when it struck her. She hurriedly picked up the paper on which they had formulated the table. One didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out a weird correlation.

‘Aditya!’ she called out. ‘There is a strange coincidence.’ Aditya, who was getting up to dump the coffee mugs into the kitchen sink, stopped. He came close and looked at the papers she held in her hands. ‘The data-gathering interviews for these three locations have been done by Richard. Someone else has done all the others. What surprises me is that these three locations are the first locations to have been researched. Look at the dates of the interviews. All the other prison interactions were done later by someone else.’

‘Does it mean that Richard was deliberately kept out of the subsequent ones?’

‘Why? Why would anyone do that? Richard was the seniormost and the most capable guy on James’s team.’

Aditya shrugged his shoulders.

‘I think I know.’ Cirisha recalled Richard’s conversation. His statement that Deahl tortured the data gatherer till he sung Deahl’s tune, resonated in her ears. ‘Richard carried out the research at Vermont, Florida and Phoenix. The results were not in line with what James wanted. He moved Richard out and got someone else to give him the data he wanted—Philip and Caroline seem to have done all the rest. And Aditya, this is only the most basic analysis we have looked at. The book has a lot more detail and more scientific analysis. It will take us days to recreate it. But if the base data is flawed, the output would be junk too.’

‘This has to be the biggest sham in the history of research not only in MIT, but probably in the entire United States of America,’ Aditya said.

‘And to think of it, the guy has almost pulled it off.’

It was about 4 a.m. by the time Aditya and Cirisha went to bed. She cuddled up to him and whispered. ‘Do you think these papers have anything to do with Richard’s death?’

‘Maybe. He was so stressed by all this that he lost his mental balance.’

‘Maybe. But then, Adi, we need to make sure these papers are safe. Do you think they are safe here? At home?’

‘Ciri, these papers are not a national secret. Just plain data. They are perfectly safe here, and so are we.’

‘I don’t know. I am worried,’ she whispered and buried her face into his chest. By that time Narayanan was in the next room snoring his way into his fourth dream sequence.

53

4th June 2008

Boston state prison

‘You’ve come all the way to meet me regarding this?’ Lieutenant Windle was surprised when Cirisha showed him the set of documents. ‘It’s always good to see you, though.’

Cirisha nodded her head and faked a smile. ‘Lieutenant Windle, this is the data the research conducted by Richard Avendon has been based on. I wanted to double check with you before I look at it with any degree of seriousness.’

Windle took the questionnaires from her and looked at them carefully. ‘Strange.’

‘I remember you saying that no one had come from MIT for this research. But now these …’ and she left the sentence hanging.

‘Put it down to my old age, young lady,’ he said with a smile. He was never perturbed by anything. Cirisha admired this trait in him. ‘Do you mind if I check on this and call you back in a while?’ he added.

‘Sure, lieutenant. Thanks for all your help. I appreciate you going out of your way to help me.’ She handed him a list of Boston prison inmates who were supposed to have been interviewed, and took back the questionnaires. She needed them. They were evidence.

‘Anything for a pretty young lady.’ Windle smiled. She liked him. Not quite like the cops back home in India.

After thanking him, she walked back to her car. This was just the first of the many checks she would have to do. She still hadn’t been able to figure out why Richard had got her involved in this entire game. If Richard had really wanted to, he could have become a bigger hero by walking out on Deahl and exposing him. Why he chose not to do that was a surprise.

She was lost in these thoughts when her phone rang. She hurriedly picked it up.

‘Ms Narayanan, I have checked all twenty-three names.’

‘Oh wow! That was quick, lieutenant.’

‘I didn’t need to do much, you see.’

‘As in?’

‘Four of them are dead. The last of them died two years ago. Seven of them were released from jail on account of good behaviour quite some time back. Their prison terms were commuted. In fact, none of the seven has been in this jail for over eighteen months. Twelve of the twenty-three are still in prison. They don’t remember having spoken to anyone regarding the research that you are mentioning. There is something fishy going on here.’

Cirisha slammed the brakes hard when she heard this. She thanked her stars that there was no vehicle close to her, else she would have been a part of a mangled lump of steel. Pulling herself together, she released the brakes slowly, moved the car to the shoulder lane and parked.

‘Are you sure, lieutenant?’

‘As sure as I can be.’

‘Can you give me the names of the people who are dead and those who have been released?’ She took down the names of the eleven convicts for her records and got back on the road. She remembered what Cardoza had once told her. There are three cardinal sins in academia: stealing from research grants, sleeping with a student and plagiarizing or fudging research results. From the looks of it, Deahl had broken the third cardinal rule. And to think that a book based on such research had been shortlisted for the Bancroft Prize! It was criminal. She would have to ask Cardoza to intervene.