by UD Yasha
We took the stairs because if anyone was waiting for us, the lift was the easiest way to kill us. I followed Rathod’s lead. We stuck close to the walls and went up the stairs. The first floor was clear. We climbed up with feline caution. Turned at the break of the stairs. The second floor was clear. Rathod motioned me to wait at the stairwell of the third floor. He turned right and stepped into the corridor.
He emerged five seconds later and said, ‘It’s clear. Come up.’
Rathod was staring at the door of apartment 301 when I joined him at his right elbow.
‘It's locked from the inside,' he said.
I rang the bell. Rathod still had his gun up high. We stayed clear of the peep hole. We did not want a bullet smashing into our eye sockets and brains.
I pressed the bell again.
Still no answer.
Something was not right. I turned to my right and saw Rathod backing up.
‘Move away from the door,’ he said.
I expected him to back up and slam open the door by kicking it down. Instead, he reached his pocket, pulled out a lock pick and began fidgeting with the lock.
I held my gun chest high. A finger on the trigger, ready to fire. The lock gave in and the door swung open inside.
The apartment was pitch black. Rathod found a switch inside and flipped it on to reveal the living room.
The first thing we saw was a medal of valour on the passage wall right in front of us. It had been awarded to Mule by the President of India in 1995 for his work in the anti-terrorism squad of Maharashtra in the aftermath of the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts.
The second thing we saw was complete and utter chaos. The apartment had been turned upside down. Someone had been inside. They were looking for something.
Rathod held out a hand and beckoned me to wait where I was. He thought someone could still be in the apartment. He went inside. The air in the apartment was dead still. I counted the seconds in my mind. There was no sound, which I took as a good sign. I waited. I wondered where Sitaram Mule was. Just then, Rathod ducked back into the passage and asked me to come in.
Every object in the living room had been tossed over. It once had a wooden TV cabinet that was now smashed to bits. Its drawers has been pulled out. The TV lay on the floor, its screen scattered all over the living room. If this was anything to go by, I knew the people who had ransacked this place were looking for something small enough to fit inside a flat screen TV or small cabinet drawers. Even the couch cushions had been ripped open.
We walked with our backs to each other, taking everything in. The apartment had two rooms. Both were to our right. Their doors were closed. Rathod pointed to the room on the right-side while he himself moved to the left.
‘On three,' he mouthed and began a countdown with his fingers.
I put my hand on the doorknob when Rathod finished the countdown. I turned the knob and pushed the door.
It was dark inside.
I flipped a switch. The room had a desk, a cupboard and a chair. All had been knocked off from their original places. They lay on the ground, broken in many pieces. Hundreds of sheets of paper lay scattered on the ground. I picked a few up. They were all blank letter heads of Sitaram Mule. They read: Sitaram Mule, Consultant – Secure Point. I had not heard of a company called Secure Point. I moved in, my gun still held in position. My eyes stopped on another door inside. It was probably the bathroom.
I pushed it open just as Rathod yelled, ‘Clear!'
Come here,’ I said not able to believe what I was looking at.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Silence resounded.
My eyes bulged out and my body stiffened.
Sitaram Mule lay dead on the bathroom floor in a pool of his own blood in front of me. He had been shot in the head. Streams of his blood had trickled into the drain.
I dropped a knee to the ground to check for a pulse. I could feel nothing. Mule was dead. But he was still warm. He had been killed very recently.
‘What the hell,’ Rathod said under his breath as he came from the other room.
I looked up at him. ‘The killer has to be nearby. He was killed a few minutes back.’
‘Should I call it in?’
‘Hold on, we don’t know who’s involved.’
‘No one knew we were coming here.’
‘Maybe they thought Manohar had told us about Mule and what has been happening. I was with him for at least half a minute. That could have made them suspicious.’
Rathod shook his head. ‘We were late by a few minutes.’
‘The sniper could have easily made it here right after he took the shot.’
‘That means we are getting closer. We are on the right track.’
I pulled out my phone and called Rahul. I told them to be careful after what we had found. I avoided stepping on the blood and got close enough to Mule to check his pockets. I slid a hand over them. They were empty.
‘Was the other room also searched?’ I said.
‘Yes. That was the bedroom. The bed has been smashed like everything else in the room. Whoever searched the place had come prepared with bats and hammers.’
We stepped back outside into the study. I had not got a chance to look at it properly. I realized two more small cupboards had been ripped out from the wall. There was also a computer and what looked like a couple of laptops on the floor.
I examined the laptops. Their screens were broken. But that was not what got me intrigued. The laptops had been opened and their hard drives had been removed. Someone was looking for something very specific. It hit me that the information in question could have been stored digitally. A flash drive could fit almost any small crevice. That made sense as well, given the way Mule’s house had been torn apart.
‘This computer is missing its hard drive as well,’ Rathod said, examining the desktop.
We got up and looked around the room.
‘It looks like whoever searched this place did not find what they were looking for,’ Rathod said. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t have continued to look. One of the rooms or corners of the house would have been clean.’
‘That means whatever they were looking for is still in this house or hidden somewhere else,’ I said.
Silence.
I said, ‘Sitaram Mule was a trained cop. A former Police Chief.’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘Why would he run to the bathroom when an assassin has entered his house? It’s the last place you would go to if you want to get away. I checked the window inside as well. It’s too small for a man of Mule’s size to get out from.’
‘Maybe he was taking a leak?’
‘He had his pants on.’
‘Maybe he had just finished,’ Rathod said and smiled.
I gave Rathod a look.
‘What are you trying to say?’ Rathod asked.
‘He went to the bathroom for a reason,’ I said and started for it.
The bathroom itself was average sized. Its door opened inside. The commode was to the right while the shower and wash basin were to the left. Mule lay dead face down on the left side. What was he doing here?
I had checked his pockets. They were already empty. His fists were closed tight. Could he be holding something in them? Opening them would be easy as rigor mortis was yet to set in. I bent down and straightened the fingers of his left hand.
Nothing was inside the fist.
I stretched over him to open the fist of his right hand.
Nothing again.
As I got up, I noticed something else on the bathroom wall. A stain. Or rather the lack of one.
Water flowing over and over the same area leaves a light stain because of the minerals present in it. Especially if the water is coming from a borewell. I was sure I would find one in the premises of the building if I went looking for it. Nowadays, most residential buildings had one because of on-going water scarcity. The leaking water from the shower had left faint vertical marks running down from its base. The marks should h
ave been constant and uninterrupted lines of the same colour.
But they were not.
The lines passing over one particular tile of the bathroom wall about four feet from the ground were fainter. I also noticed a slight discolouration there. The tile was cleaner. Like it had been put there later. Not enough water had passed over it yet.
I got up and tapped the tile. A hollow sound echoed softly, like there was a cavity on the other side. Was I onto something? I tapped a different tile. This time the sound was solid.
‘What’s the matter?’ Rathod said, standing in the bathroom doorway.
‘There appears to be a chamber behind this one tile in the bathroom,’ I said.
Rathod joined me in front of the shower. His eyes narrowed as he saw the break in the marks left behind by the leaking water. He went outside and came back with a knife. He slid it into the side of the tile and yanked it forward.
It moved.
Very slightly, but enough to tell us that there was something behind it.
Rathod yanked it further. The square tile came out like it was a drawer. It rolled out when Rathod applied more power. There must have been some kind of a suction mechanism to keep water from flowing in, making opening the hidden drawer hard.
‘There’s stuff inside it,’ Rathod said in a soft voice. ‘This is why his house was ransacked.’
Rathod stepped aside to let me check the drawer.
It was filled with files of three colours. Blue, Red and Yellow. There were more than a dozen files of each colour. I picked out a blue file at random. The cover had the name and logo of a company. It was called Secure Point and the logo was a globe with a circular pattern around it that resembled a pulse.
I opened the file and saw numbers that seemed to be random. I turn to the next page. The same thing. Numbers, line after line, at times with spaces in between. I wonder if it was an encrypted message. I picked out another blue file. Opened it. There were similar numbers inside.
I picked a yellow file. This one did not have random numbers but had records of hundreds of financial transactions. The figures in question were big. In excess of five lakh rupees. The entire file was filled with information from different accounts. The accounts did not have numbers but some sort of an alpha numeric code.
I picked a red file. It was again different from the other colours. This one had names of different people with a unique number against each of them. The names were filed alphabetically. Each page had a hundred names. There were twenty pages in one file. So, each file had about two thousand names. There were fifteen yellow files. That made it thirty thousand names in total.
What was Sitaram Mule doing?
‘We need to take them all,’ I said to Rathod.
‘There’s more stuff deeper inside,’ I said, pulling it out. My hands found another file. This one was black.
I opened the black file first and began glancing through it.
The papers inside had four columns. The first was for names. The list seemed to be of policemen as the second column had police ranks. The third was titled ‘Money Given’, while the fourth had a date.
‘What the hell is this?’ I said under my breath.
I flipped through some pages. The earlier ones had yellowed. The date written against the first cop on the list was 12th February 2001. The last date was 25th February 2019. The same week as the disappearance of the Gills and also when Manohar had first visited the place off the Pune-Solapur highway.
Rathod looked over my shoulder into the file.
‘This seems like an elaborate database of bribes given out to cops,’ Rathod said. Rathod pointed at a name. Vinod Gadgil. ‘Like for example, this man here. I know he took a bribe of ten lakh rupees in 2004. He was sacked because of it. This file has at least a thousand names. I don’t think those many cops have been caught while taking a bribe.’
‘How did he compile all of this? And why didn’t he report it?’
‘There are some battles that are not worth it. Or you know about the bribe but there’s no evidence to prove it.’
I flipped through the pages. My stomach sank on seeing one name. My hands started shaking.
‘What’s the matter?’ Rathod said.
I could not say anything. I felt a cold sweat gather on my forehead. This cannot be happening. I pointed at a name in the file to show it to Rathod.
At that moment, I knew my entire life had changed.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I read the name again just to be sure. How could this be possible? My eyes ached. I hoped I was reading the name incorrectly. The letters on the paper got bigger. I read them again.
Aniruddha Rajput. Senior Inspector. Rupees fifty lakhs. 22nd May 2003.
Maa had been taken in August of 2003. I could not breathe through my nose. I heaved air in and out loudly through my mouth.
Aniruddha Rajput was my father. He had gone missing on 23rd November 2003. It was three months after my mother had been abducted by a serial killer. Radha, Karan and I had been heartbroken to lose both our parents within such a short time. There had been no lead in dad's disappearance. Not a shred of a clue. Until now.
‘That’s my father,’ I somehow managed to say.
Rathod knew who he was.
‘We don’t know if the contents of the file are true,’ he said.
‘I know, but the chances of them being untrue are slim,’ I said.
We returned to the bedroom. I sat on a cracked chair.
The memories of the days immediately after dad’s disappearance came back to me. We had got by with the help of our maushi—our mother’s sister. I cried every single day in my room for the next year. I was afraid of the dark, of any harsh sound and of the phone ringing. I feared the next call I get would be from a cop, telling me my mother or father or both had been found dead in some deserted corner of this world. But that phone call had never come. People, including other cops, had doubted that dad had a role to play in maa's disappearance. I had never once believed it. In fact, that's what had driven me to take up criminal defence. I knew how much it hurts when your loved ones are accused of heinous crimes. Especially you believed they were innocent.
I had always believed in dad. Every waking second. But everyone suspected him even more when he also went missing without a trace. I could see why others thought he was guilty. The husband is often the culprit when the wife goes missing. But I was sure dad would never hurt his wife and three kids—all of whom he adored so much.
Even as the days became months and years, I kept believing in him. I fought for his innocence when people raised accusations three months back, when a new slew of murders were being committed by a killer, who had a connection with maa’s abductor.
So, when I saw his name on the list, everything I believed to be true about dad had begun to crumble. I felt terrible. My teeth were clattering. I was confused. A big part of me was in denial. This has to be a mistake. This has to mean something else. Maybe this isn’t even a list of bribes given out to cops.
Rathod put a hand on my shoulder. I held back the tears. I gulped hard once and got up. I did not have time to feel bad right now.
‘Let’s search the rest of the house,’ I said, opening the next drawer.
‘You can take a moment. I’ll look around,’ Rathod said.
‘There’s no time right now. I’ll deal with this later.’
Rathod watched me silently for a few seconds. ‘There’s more stuff inside the chamber,’ he said. ‘Wait here. I’ll get it.’
He skipped to the bathroom and came back out in twenty seconds.
‘These two maps were inside,’ Rathod said, handing them to me.
‘This one looks like the layout of a building,’ I said. ‘It’s massive. Like a warehouse, but it’s something else. More than ten percent of the space has been assigned to the generator backup. What on earth is this?’
I looked at the paper closely. The layout was of a fifty thousand square feet building. It had at least ten diff
erent rooms of two thousand square feet, five toilets, three large offices and two bathrooms. It did not hint in any way what the place was.
I turned the paper around. There was a handwritten message.
It read: 400 people = $4 million
‘What does this mean?’ I said out loud. That was ten thousand dollars or roughly seven lakh rupees per person. My mind went back to the figures I had seen in the yellow file earlier.
Rathod turned my way and looked at what I had read out. ‘What does the ‘equal to’ sign in the middle mean? How do four hundred people equate to four million dollars? Is that the price of four hundred people?’ Rathod said.
Something that I had thought about earlier came to my mind right away.
Dr. Malini Sinha was into women's fertility treatment and awareness. I had briefly thought then that perhaps Rucha’s kidnapping had something to do with child prostitution or child slavery. Was the figure an amount that someone was willing to pay for four hundred children or people?
‘That’s not it. Here’s the second map.’ He handed it to me. ‘It appears to be of the same place that is is off the Pune-Solapur highway that Manohar went to,' Rathod said, referring to the big road marked on the map that labelled as the highway. ‘I think we're looking at the right stuff, Siya. It's no coincidence that two different people have in some way mentioned the same place, especially with everything going around.'
I was intrigued. We had found two different places. Mule had the blueprint of one and an almost turn by turn map of the other.
‘We must go to the place on the map,’ I said. ‘We know where it is. It must be a crucial piece of evidence given that it was in the safe. We’ll figure out what the place in the blueprint is later.’
Rathod scratched his clean-shaven chin and said, ‘Sure, let’s go to the place on the map.’ He paused. ‘What do you want to do with Mule? We can’t just leave him here.’
‘I might know someone,' I said, thinking of an old friend.
Chapter Thirty-Four
