Bhendi Bazaar (19 page)

“Who killed him?”

“How long will the police sit and keep polishing their bangles?”

In Mumbai, as in India, bangles carried the connotation of unmanliness. With this investigation headed by a woman, it was a direct assault. The media pillory had begun. The hyenas just loved to sink their teeth in the police flesh. And much as the police would have preferred to keep this one as a separate murder investigation, the scribes, on their own, conjectured it was the job of the serial killer: “
He had struck again.
”

The police just weren't releasing any information. They weren’t attempting to hide facts; they just didn’t want to stand at the podium answering needless questions at this point.

The entire media fraternity had one question on their lips; the answer to which they would have preferred in a
yes
or a
no
. Was it a serial killer? Yes or no? To their dismay, the Commissioner of Mumbai Police, on the advice of Joshi, issued a short statement:

"We shall only release information of exoteric nature when we can. We cannot put the investigation in jeopardy."

In sixty years since Independence, no one had ever dared to challenge a statement from Commissioner of Mumbai Police. In any event, most had definitely gained a new word in their vocabulary:
exoteric
.

There was a possibility that Al Khan would have more information regarding the location of the number he had called to source the girl for Martin. The plan concocted was to make Khan call the unknown call-forwarding number in police presence to check where the phone got picked up. Then trace it back to the location, if possible. If the killer didn't know about how far the police had got to, he might — just might — be caught unawares. For the plan to progress, it needed contrivance. The police would have to provide the killer with false info that they were looking somewhere else. If the maniac had killed again, it was only logical to assume he'd need the gratification of being in the media.
Omnia Vanitas
: vanity, thy games are strange.

NEWS of the DAY was eager to oblige. It was, to them, setting a trap for the police.

Anita Raizada was called in for the briefing at Crawford Market. Jatin and Anita sat exchanging pleasantries in Rita's office when the hostess returned to her desk.

Anita was raffish, but smartly attired. White shirt tucked in, grey skirt. Delicate and feminine. It wasn’t difficult to comprehend why Jatin liked the girl. They made a good- looking pair. The image of their togetherness filled Rita’s mind. If they ever bred, they’d produce beautiful kids. She pulled her mind back from the unproductive thoughts on reproduction and briefed Anita. 'We're really grateful for this, Miss Raizada—'

'You don't have to be so formal, everyone calls me Anita.'

Rita looked at Jatin. 'I think you should take Anita out for dinner, at state expense, and drop her back to her office. We owe her this much at least.'

Jatin obviously required no persuasion.

Anita broke down when they finished dinner and on Jatin's insistence narrated the sordid episode that had occurred in Narang's office. Of course, it was unforced, but it wasn't voluntary nonetheless. If she wanted the job, she needed to give in to Narang's seduction. She didn't have any prior experience as a journalist, had no work references whatsoever, and Narang was exploiting her inadequacies shamelessly. Narang had, in his own words, given her a prized assignment and required her to pay him in this way.

Scoundrel, Jatin thought, but couldn't fathom how he should approach the issue. As a police officer, he could only intervene if Anita made a formal complaint. As a friend, though, he could help her out of the ugly situation. How?

'If you could come up to the office today, rather than dropping me there, it might help.'

'How would that help?'

'I mean he won't attempt doing anything stupid with you around.'

'You want me to hang around in your office while you finish this news item?' She nodded.

'This is gross.'

'This is life.'

'Would it help if you introduce me as your boyfriend?'

'Do you want to be my boyfriend?'

'I meant —'

'I know you mean well, but I wouldn't want to tarnish your reputation by linking your name with me. You're a nice man, Jatin.'

'Why would you say that? You're a pretty girl, don't let an instance of rape…abuse scar you Anita.'

'It wasn't that one instance.'

'What else is there?'

'There were others. I don't want you to get involved.'

'Your parents know about this?'

'I live alone, my parents are no more.'

'Sorry.'

'Why should you be sorry for their death?'

Jatin parked the jeep in the building compound. Not many vehicles were around at 9 p.m. They got down, took the elevator to the seventeenth floor.

Narang was still in his office. He had had a few vodkas in anticipation of seducing Anita at his desk. What possible excuse could she have to decline his advances tonight?

'Hi Amit,' Anita yelled from her desk when he saw his head pop out of his office. 'Meet Inspector Jatin Singh from Crime Branch.'

What the fuck, Narang wanted to yell, but he smiled, walked up to Anita's desk and proffered his hand. His gaze was lecherous. 'Nice to see you've come to our humble office to oversee if we're doing our jobs diligently.'

'Just in case something changes, the duty officer would relay the message to me.'

Well fibbed Inspector. Anita smiled. It, nevertheless, had busted Narang's conniving plot. He had wasted three hours in the office, waiting for a fuck. 'Is it okay if I leave? I've got to meet someone. I hope you don't mind.'

'Not at all,' Jatin assured.

Narang shook hands with Jatin and Anita. His slight glowering, as he looked into Anita's eyes, didn't go undetected by Jatin. It conveyed Anita's despair and he decided to raise the issue with Rita; a woman might understand such issues better, know how to handle this more delicately

As Jatin sat on the next desk and saw Anita typing apace, he noticed Narang locking his office. 'Good night,' he uttered before stamping out.

Anita finished typing by 10:40 p.m. She printed two copies and the duo read the text for exactness: the killer hadn't left anything to chance; the police were clueless besides two Dubai numbers. Mumbai Police had agreed — in light of so many speculations — that it was the same killer that had killed two respected citizens in the previous month. The hunt was on, an appeal was made to the public to be vigilant, stay alert and report anything suspicious to their local police station immediately. The whole chapter and verse on finding a new number that could, potentially, lead to Malti, Julie or someone was prevented from going public. In fact, that was something the police had kept back even from NEWS of the DAY.

Anita signed the final text and e-mailed the Word and PDF files to the publishing press for the morning's paper. As instructed by Rita, a one-page summary of the same story was faxed to Press Bureau of India to circulate to other news desks.

'You can't imagine what you've done for me tonight. I would have been here for, at least, another thirty minutes.' Anita carefully dodged saying what she would have been made to do for the additional half-hour; the unmentionable was comprehensible for Jatin.

'Let me drop you home now.'

'It's OK, I'll call a taxi.'

'It's on my way. Come on.'

NINETEEN
2007

It hadn't stopped pouring the entire night. The rain had been teeming down, without any break, on the tarmac and asphalt with ferocity. Water strokes on the ledges made the window frames vibrate. Even pet cats, that usually preferred nocturnal outdoors, were domesticated to avoid getting their furs wet. But no one objected; it was monsoonal, not untimely, and July usually had always been the wettest month in Mumbai.

Rita had let the window open for the whiff of the moist air, but the showers outside had started squalling, and the noise impelled her to leave the bed sometime after midnight to close it. Raindrops caught in beams of streetlights coruscated like shards of rainbow. She saw the plainclothes policeman, sitting in his unmarked car, on duty outside the apartment; she turned, took a sip of water from the carafe she kept at her bedside and glanced at the clock.

12:12 a.m. If anything, she thought, the killer would think twice before stepping out on a night like this; it was easy to leave a wet footprint behind, or drop a wet hair. The thought of the murderer unwittingly propelled her brain into wakefulness. How long would they have to wait till this undeviatingly accurate killer made any mistakes? Five more murders? Ten? A hundred? It was turning into a career-destroying case if all the police could do was to wait for the killer to make an error. And what were the odds he would make a mistake if he had successfully avoided making one thus far? Except for precedence and theory that everyone eventually made an error, there was nothing. She reckoned she was going around in circles — or curlicues — and that never got anyone out of a maze.

The debunking of leaving the brassiere at the murder site pointed her mind towards the possibility of a female killer once again. Why was the killer determined to lead them astray? Or was he… she giving them some clue? People were strange; the more one delved into human nature, the more weirdness one discovered. What if the killer was trying to draw the police's attention to something? Helping police catch him. Or her? Suddenly, Rita wasn't sure of the gender. Ash could have been correct when he said that the killer was hoodwinking to save his skin, but how certain could Ash have been? It was a mere supposition. Rita's guts and official stats were, once again, at war:

It had to be a female; why would whoremongers go willingly with a man? It couldn't be a female; females didn't indulge in torturous killings.

She looked at the clock again and did the maths; it would still be around 8 p.m. in the UK. It wasn't late to call, but a thought crossed her mind: Joshi had only introduced Ash as a consultant; there wasn't any formal arrangement between Mumbai Crime Branch and a random criminal profiler from the UK. It might be crossing the confidentiality line. Could she trust him as a friend?

She did.

'Keeping you awake, am I?' Ash had the knack of being upbeat every hour of the day. 'You're correct, I can't sleep. But it has more reasons than just you.'

'At least I am one of the many. What else is keeping my baby up?'

'Since when did I become your baby?'

'Figure of speech, dear girl, figure of speech.'

Ash's travel plans had firmed up. He would be in Mumbai in four days. Rita updated on the latest murder, but did not divulge on any calls traced back to Al Khan. She decided to seek advice and not share the investigation.

Ash was convinced that the killer was a male, despite Rita's hunch. 'Let me rethink.

Let's catch up when I'm in Mumbai.'

'Sure.'

Jatin gave a rundown on Anita's squalid incident to Rita. He was careful to update her when she was alone. It wasn't a great experience to share; especially about Anita who he cared for, whether she acknowledged it or not. Rita could feel the pain, the hurt, and was of the same opinion as Jatin that Anita should stand for herself and make a complaint. It was beyond sexual harassment, it was almost rape. 'Why is she taking it?'

'Fear. Fear of job loss, lack of experience to get another one... Narang, you know, is connected and is quite capable of destroying her career.'

'That's preposterous. I can bring Narang here for rape and see to it that he never fucking uses his filthy dick again.' Rita lost it. 'Ask her to lodge an FIR, a formal complaint, and not tolerate any such thing again, please. And tell her to feel free to talk to me whenever she wants.'

'I didn’t tell her I'll have a word with you, so it will be great if you don’t mention it till I speak with her please.'

'As you say. Are you romantically involved with her?'

'Inclined, I would say.'

'Pretty girl, I hadn't seen her from close up earlier, but when we met the other day, I noticed a pinch of sadness in her eyes. She didn't seem okay, is she well?’

'Why do you ask that ma'am?'

'She looked very pale. Is she anaemic? Ask her to get her haemoglobin count checked.'

Al Khan arrived in Mumbai in the evening, two days after Martin's murder. His flight arrived at 6:25 p.m., but his mobile phone was out of juice. That prevented AirMobile to trace his movements till he arrived at his residence, but by then it was too late.

Khan, in his fifties, lived in Chembur — one of the sites where refugee camps were set up to settle immigrants after India’s partition with Pakistan. Khan's parents, despite being Muslims, had chosen India as their country because of business interests. The business, however, went down in the decade following Independence. Khan spent his childhood in a
chawl
— one of the many derelict Mumbai tenements where humans housed like insects grew up with other unfortunates and lowlifes and lived a life of penury. Khan’s father left him a small photo studio, which he had expanded to a studio and photo-developing lab and made more money in a year than what his father made in his entire lifetime. Or so it seemed.

Khan paid the taxi driver, got into his apartment and before he switched on the lights, he sensed an outline of someone present. 'Who the fuck —?' was all he managed to utter before the bullet hit him between his brows. One shot through the muffler-fitted nozzle of a Glock.

AirMobile received the first signals from Khan's mobile at 10:31 p.m. and then they disappeared from the radar. They located the phone in Chembur area and provided the exact coordinates to Jatin at Crawford Market.

Rita drove to the address, which turned out to be Khan's studio. The phone had apparently been plugged in briefly before being disconnected from the wall plug and put into a glass full of chemicals used for developing film photography.

The studio was in a mess. Someone had ransacked the place, like they had searched the place for something. What? Well, that wasn't challenging to figure out. Under the semblance of portrait photography for aspiring women keen to try their luck in modelling, Khan wasn't exactly running a salubrious outfit. The cameras fitted in changing rooms, and the photographs of girls in various stages of undress corroborated that he was, unmistakably, taking indecent photographs of wannabe models without their permission and knowledge. To be used for blackmailing. If some girl became a model, she'd fund Khan's lifestyle all her life; if an unlucky one didn't make it, she could be made to peddle her ass whenever ordered. Khan was a winner either way.

Whoever had rummaged through the studio was after something that could potentially have been damaging for him. Or for someone he knew. It was impossible to know if the person found what he had come looking for. There was no way to establish if something had gone missing. At least not on the spot.

Khan's stiff was found a kilometre away at his residence. Shot at point-blank. The gun, manifestly, wore a muffler if no one around had heard the shot. So someone had killed him at his residence, then broken into his studio and left his mobile phone there?

'Quite a coincidence,' Jatin expressed to Rita and Vikram. 'That Khan was killed for some indecent photographs, just when he was crucial to our enquiry.'

Was Jatin really so credulous? Rita almost said. Instead, she heard her voice saying, 'You think so?'

'This is no coincidence, I agree ma'am.' Vikram understood the point and Rita's inflection in the question. 'If all the killer wanted were some photographs, and he knew Khan was not in town, he only needed to break into the studio, which he eventually did, albeit he used Khan's keys. Why kill him?'

'It's the same maniac killer, Jatin.' Rita was in no frame of mind to discuss something that was so obvious to the eye. 'He is intelligent enough to have realised that we would go after Khan, and hence he eliminated the chain of evidence. The reason he raided the studio was to do away with something that could incriminate him.' Rita looked at Jatin; he nodded. Whether he understood Rita's train of thought, or simply accepted his superior's logic, was unfathomable. 'Why else would he have plugged in Khan's phone to charge for a minute to send out the signal to the AirMobile tower and then destroy the phone —' Rita stopped mid- sentence. In her mind, she repeated what she had just said aloud. Her mind raced with a conjecture at the speed of light and didn't last longer than lightning. Flash, then gone. She puckered her lips, her eyes looked towards the ceiling as if she was gathering her thoughts. 'He knew our plan. The son of a bitch knew we'd come for Khan using AirMobile coordinates, and then try to reach the number Khan had called. Which means Khan knew more than Hegde, and that cost Khan dearly. The mobile phone was switched on briefly to taunt us, flag his victory again.'

'How could the killer know what we had planned?' Vikram asked as they drove to the Forensic labs.

'Don't know. Either the sick fucker is too sharp or he was tipped off yet again.'

The bullet was confirmed as a 9x19 calibre. Forensics confirmed the abrasions on the bullet to verify it came from the same gun used for the three previous murders. Same Glock Compact.

This murder, though with the same weapon, was dissimilar to the other three in more ways than one. The killer hadn't mutilated the body; Khan hadn't been drugged. And although the killer might have known Khan, the latter hadn't let the killer in himself, which was evident, as the main door lock had been picked. Fresh scuffs, slight but apparent. The killer obviously knew Khan wasn't at home when he broke into the victim's ground floor apartment, and lay in waiting for the latter to arrive. One shot, job done.

'Coffee in my office. Ask Jatin to join us.' It was more of a directive than an offer and it sounded like a superior telling her subordinate. The two had only returned to Crawford Market from the laboratory. Vikram nodded and split to get Jatin, who had come straight from Chembur to start the paper work.

Rita switched on the kettle and beckoned the two officers to sit as they came into her office. The office was quiet; the usual cacophony of office clatter was conspicuously missing at 3 a.m. 'That Khan was shot down by the same maniac killer is now beyond doubt, the most important evidence being the bullet that was shot from the same gun. Case closed.' Rita kept the three coffees at the desk and sat down. 'At this moment, only three people in this office know about this. And I want it to stay within this small group. Of course we shall let the core team know, but not a word to anyone outside the task force, not even to the uniformed police. I'll update Mr Joshi, and he'll decide if he wants to update the Commissioner.'

'Why do you think the killer changed the MO?'

'It seems this one was unplanned. My guess is Khan wasn't on his register to kill, at least not for now, so he either added Khan to the list or jumped the queue. That gave him less time to plan the murder in too much detail. And that gives me a reason to think he might have blundered...maybe,' Rita added.

The two men nodded in agreement.

'Actually, I am now beginning to wonder about the gender of this killer.' Rita recognised she was turning turtle; the theory that, so far, had pointed to the predator being male was itself being questioned.

Frowns developed on the two men’s foreheads to concentrate on what was coming Then eyebrows raised, eyes squinted; Vikram and Jatin looked at one other.

'All the four murders thus far have been done in connection with sex. Sex with prostitutes or, as the investigation in the last murder found, Khan's unscrupulous business tactics of luring women into being photographed in questionable circumstances. That shouldn't leave any ambiguity that whoever is killing is retaliating against some injustice against women, prostitution —'

'But it could be a male working on behalf of a woman,' Jatin interrupted.

'It's highly uncharacteristic of a hired killer to show such passion when doing a job. Why should he dissect bodies? As this is only a surmise, I am not sharing this with anyone but you two. The criminal profiler Mr Joshi introduced me to, a while back — Dr Mattel — is coming to town again, and I shall seek his expert opinion.' Rita kept a straight face; she had no intentions of letting her countenance reveal Ash would be staying with her on his visit. 'If he confirms what my instinct's telling me, we shall share it with others.'

Nods again.

Rita sat alone thinking that if her conjecture was correct, all bets were off; the killer, who so far had been believed to be male, could be anyone. She knew that the guys weren't getting killed arbitrarily; the murders were not as indiscriminate as they had at first appeared. This mélange too, like the chaos theory, would develop some recognisable pattern over time, as it didn’t look like complete frenzy; the killer was in complete control. He or she was picking the targets and though some similarities had emerged — in victims, situations — there were still many unknowns, and it was hard to work out the pattern.

The only silver lining was that if the expert tidings weren't disclosed to the media, the police could control some damage; there was a high probability that the media might not connect the latest murder to the previous three because of the killer's divergence from Modus Operandi.