The Siya Rajput Crime Thrillers Books 1-3 (Where Are They Now / Finding Her / The Bones Are Calling)

by UD Yasha

  Radha and Rahul came downstairs when I looked up from the table. We spoke a bit about the case but I wanted a change of topic. It was easy to get sucked into an echo chamber. At the same time, none of the things I wanted to follow up were time sensitive. The Warden at Yerwada Jail would only let me in after eleven in the morning, which was still an hour and a half away.

  I said to them, ‘I know this may not be the best time to bring this up. But we need to start making a list of all the remaining chores to do for your wedding. It’s just six months away.’

  Radha and Rahul started laughing. Radha said, ‘I wouldn’t have imagined you to speak about it at this time.’

  ‘I know. It’s just that I feel some time away from a problem can often give a fresh perspective. Just sleeping well got me thinking clearly.’

  We laughed some more, and then we made a list of all the things we needed to buy and plan before the big date in June. Maa was also up shortly, and for just a little while, we were not talking about murders and blood, but about love and a life of togetherness.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  An emergency call was made to the CID helpline almost at the same time that Rathod stepped into ACP Shukla’s office.

  A young attendant answered the phone call. She knew the protocol that had to be initiated after what she was told. Even though she was young and had only six months of experience, she had answered at least eleven calls where a murder had been reported. Each of those times, the person across the line was shocked and hysterical. In a strange, almost ironic way, it reassured her faith in humans. Like communal hatred and jealously inspired rage, at least murder was not a commonality, yet.

  She took down the details like who was killed and where the murder had been committed. She also noted the person who was calling, the time of day and similar facts that could be useful later in the investigation. The attendant felt this call was less messy than others. The short story was that the house help had not got a response after she had rang the bell several times. She had spoken to the neighbours, at whose house she worked as well. The neighbours had a spare key. They opened the door of Rakesh Patil and his wife’s house. Smiles and an offer to have chai didn’t greet them this time. It was death and murder instead.

  The alert generated by the attendant was triggered in ACP Shukla’s office. At that moment, Rathod walked into his office as well.

  A small beep went off in the ACP’s office when a new murder was reported. He automatically got a printout with its details.

  Both ACP and Rathod knew what the small beeping meant. Shukla tore off the printed message. Seeing the name of the person who had been murdered piqued his curiosity right away.

  ‘This can’t be true,’ Shukla said.

  Rathod walked closer to Shukla’s desk and leaned in.

  ‘No way. It’s Rakesh Patil.’ Shukla looked up from the paper at Rathod. He has been killed,’ Shukla said, his voice fading out.

  Rathod knew Patil. He was a cop who had had a long career with the Pune Police. Rathod was about to ask what happened when Shukla said, ‘He was killed last night. His wife as well. Somebody went into their house and killed them.’

  Rathod knew Patil and Shukla used to get along well. They had a bunch of common cop friends as well. ‘I’m sorry,’ Rathod said.

  Seeing the expressions on Shukla’s face, Rathod felt he looked surprised, more than hurt. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said.

  ‘Patil was one of the main cops on the Ahuja murder case,’ Shukla said. ‘It cannot be a coincidence that he died the very day we got new evidence about it.’

  ‘Who were the other cops investigating it?’ Rathod said.

  ‘Amongst the other senior ones, let me remember,’ Shukla said. He had a copy of the case file on his desk.

  That was the first time that day Rathod got a good look at Shukla. He was looking dead tired. His eyes were red and puffy. His shirt was crumpled. His pants were creased. Shukla had not gone home. He had been at the office, going through everything to see if he could make sense of the events. Rathod also realized that two people had been shot within six months at the CID office. The first time, a suspect who was actually innocent, and now Sonia. Also an innocent woman. The CID had been under attack and it must have been a stressful night for Shukla. Looking around the room, Rathod saw three cups and an empty takeaway box on the side table.

  Referring to the case file, Shukla said, ‘The three cops were Shantanu Dutta, Milind Kamble and Rakesh Patil.’

  ‘Can we contact the other two and tell them to stay alert?’ Rathod said.

  ‘We can’t,’ Shukla said. ‘They are both dead. Dutta died from a heart attack sometime last year. He was almost eighty years old then. Kamble died in a car accident several years back. I have been to both their funerals.’

  Silence.

  Shukla said, ‘I remember then how hard we all worked on trying to find who killed Kabir Ahuja. I can’t imagine that what we didn’t find then is coming back to haunt all of us. The entire police force had left no stone unturned.’

  Rathod offered his boss some water. Shukla muttered a thanks and then got up.

  After another spell of silence, Rathod said, ‘I'm sorry to bring this up. But it feels extremely convenient that all cops investigating Sheena Ahuja’s murder are dead. The timing of Patil’s murder makes it seem like the others were also murdered.’

  Shukla said nothing. He simply got up from his desk and said, ‘We need to go to the crime scene. The media gag order stays. We have to follow protocol and get to the bottom of this right away.’

  Rathod nodded and exited Shukla’s office. By then, every officer present on the first floor knew about Patil’s murder. Rathod went to his desk, wondering why the police officers investigating the Ahuja murders were killed. Did they know something more than what they put in the report? There was no way to know now.

  He called Siya and told her about Patil’s murder and how the other cops were also dead, presumably not murdered.

  ‘I have an idea,’ Siya said. ‘I was planning to visit Kabir Ahuja’s killer in Yerwada today. I will also see if I can get hold of the medical examiner on the case. Maybe the Judge who heard the case as well. I’ll try to get their perspectives. They both ruled that Mukund Dhar was the killer, but it doesn’t hurt to see what led them, especially the Judge, to that conclusion.’

  ‘I’ll process an access pass for you that will allow you to go and talk to Mukund Dhar in the Yerwada Jail,’ Rathod said and paused. ‘Siya, you’ve to be careful. Someone is on a cleanup mission and we’re breathing right down their necks. We’ll be on their radar too.’

  ‘I’m going everywhere in my bulletproof vest and carrying my firearm.’

  ‘Tell Radha, Rahul and your mother to be careful as well.’

  ‘I will. You take care as well.’

  ‘I’ll set up the meeting with Motilal Ahuja and his wife and tell you once it's confirmed. I haven’t spoken to ACP Shukla about it. But after Patil’s murder, I don’t think he’s going to have a problem with granting me permission to do everything I can to investigate this matter,’ Rathod said and hung up.

  He ran to the CID van waiting outside to go to the crime scene. Something told Rathod that he was not going to find much except for knowing that Patil and his wife were killed by a professional hitman.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I knew it would take time for Rathod to get me the access required to meet Mukund Dhar in jail. It was a bureaucratic process and Rathod would also be tied up at the crime scene. Radha and Rahul were still sifting through the papers that Rathod had given us yesterday.

  I decided to go through the case files on Kabir and Sheena Ahuja’s murders in detail. It was a thick file and I was going to take time to read it. I wanted to get a more detailed idea about the various stages of the investigation, the logic of the investigating officers, what the witnesses had said and what the forensic evidence proved.

  I started by looking more closely into
the murder of Kabir Ahuja.

  A major part of his murder investigation was handled by the Pune Police. Dhar was already in police custody by the time it was officially declared a joint investigation.

  On 20th November, Sheena got worried when Kabir repeatedly did not answer the landline phone at his farmhouse. His mobile phone was out of range as far as Sheena and Kabir’s parents could remember. Back then, cell phones weren’t popular because of how expensive they were, so everyone preferred landlines. In the evening on the same day, Sheena raised a complaint on the central line of the Pune Police Station.

  I listened to the call recording. Sheena sounded scared and desperate. I found that odd. Not that Sheena was worried about her husband, but that she was worried so fast. It could very well had been that Kabir was somewhere outside and that’s why he couldn’t answer the call. His cellphone might not have had a signal. That Sheena got worried the same day at six in the evening, after trying Kabir’s phone for about seven hours, got me thinking if she knew Kabir was in any kind of danger.

  I tried to picture myself in a situation where Radha or Rahul did not answer my calls. I would not get worried enough to lodge a police complaint even if they didn’t respond to me for twelve hours. At least under usual circumstances. But now, when I knew that there was danger, and people associated with this investigation were being killed, I would be worried even if they didn’t answer my calls for an hour.

  Kabir had got a lot of death threats throughout his career. Had Kabir taken one of them seriously and had shared his concern with his wife?

  Did Sheena know that something bad was about to go down? Was that also why she had gone to a random hotel two days later to hide?

  If that was the reason, she must have felt threatened. Maybe Kabir had told her something, or vice versa. Husbands and wives shared almost everything with each other.

  At the same time, another thought entered my mind. Why were so many people associated with the investigation being killed? Surely, something had to be hidden. Maybe all these people knew something was up. Or they had been dragged into whatever was being hidden. That a husband and wife were killed one right after the other further flamed my suspicion. I became more confident in my theory that people were being killed to keep something hidden.

  If that was the case, and an eighteen-year-old murder was the start, I began to wonder what triggered the scars of the Ahuja murders to be reopened now? Given the evidence we had, the first spate of murders this time around was when Jane Doe killed the Jathars and John Doe.

  If Niyati Jathar had performed the plastic surgeries on Jane Doe, she had been a living and breathing witness to who Jane Doe was earlier. Did that push Jane Doe over the edge to kill the Jathars? Maybe John Doe was collateral damage, I thought for a beat before scratching it out. John Doe seemed too odd to be present with the Jathars for no specific reason.

  After killing them, Jane Doe had called me. If what I remembered from before my blackout was correct, she herself had told me that. Had she called me to kill me or was it to save me? I was leaning towards her wanting to kill me because I was still alive and someone else had killed her even before she could get to me. But she also had a chance to finish me when she was giving me directions. Maybe Jane Doe didn’t want to kill me. I tapped the desk in the garage out of frustration. All of it seemed bizarre when I thought back to it. I let the matter rest. I hoped I would remember what had happened. If that wasn’t happening anytime soon, then I needed to divert my attention to matters where I could make some headway.

  I used the ‘Find’ function on the computer and searched for dad’s name in the case files. He was not a part of the investigating team. He wasn’t even mentioned once in the entire investigation. I thought, if the Ahuja investigation was central to all that had been happening, then how had dad gotten himself involved in it when he wasn’t even on the case? Once again, I was starting to go down a dead end.

  I shifted my focus back to the objective facts. Kabir Ahuja’s murder.

  Kabir’s body had been discovered the same night that Sheena had made the complaint. He was found dead in his farmhouse. It seemed like there was a struggle the way the things in the study room had been disturbed.

  I saw the pictures.

  The study room had two entrances. One through the house and the other into the backyard of the farmhouse. It was huge and had a beautiful light brown wooden desk at one end and a large book rack at the other. The rack was filled with all kinds of books. There was also a small dressing table with a mirror next to the rack. It was awkwardly placed but the close-up photos revealed it was well stacked. The desk had one of those old-fashioned personal computers with a large CPU and monitor. Kabir’s body was on the floor next to the desk.

  The farmhouse door was unlocked and open when the cops reached the place. There was no security guard at the front and back gates. Large open yards surrounded it in every direction. The farmhouse, itself, was away from Pune city in an area called Loni. Even in 2020, Loni was far away from the city, and its population was sparser compared to the city. Back in 2002, the nearest place of human habitation from the farmhouse was at least ten minutes away, and that too if you “drove at a crazy speed” according to the cop who had typed out the report.

  In short, the farmhouse was the perfect place to commit a murder and get away with it.

  How then had Mukund Dhar got caught?

  I began going through the case against Mukund Dhar.

  The most damning piece of evidence against Dhar was a partial fingerprint that he had left behind at the crime scene. It was found on the floor next to Kabir’s body. The police had actually found a palm print, not a fingerprint, which was as unique and damning. The police had a theory that Dhar was wearing gloves. But in his struggle with Kabir, his glove might have slipped and that’s how the edge of Dhar’s palm got exposed and touched the floor. I knew there was no way to know what had happened.

  In his defense, Dhar had said that he was innocent and there was no way his prints could have ended up at the crime scene because he was nowhere near it. He was at his house, forty kilometres away, in Bavdhan, the other end of Pune City. No one could confirm Dhar’s statement as he lived alone. I didn’t completely agree with the prosecutor’s argument of how Dhar’s palm print had been found on the crime scene.

  The second piece of evidence was the bloody clothes found at Dhar’s house. The clothes were his. Dhar admitted that, but he didn’t know how Kabir’s blood had got on it. The clothes were discovered behind Dhar’s cupboard.

  At this point, I became suspicious for the first time. Very few murderers, and especially contract killers, would keep their clothes soaked in their victim’s blood in their own house. They would throw them some place where they would not be found, or simply burn them where no one would see them burning something shady.

  I shelved the suspicion for the time being.

  The cops investigating the murder had also found a suitcase full of cash at Dhar’s house. A total of twenty lakh rupees, a big amount even in 2020. The cops believed it to be the money Dhar got for the hit. That was my second problem with the case.

  The money was, at best, circumstantial evidence. Dhar was also a suspected hitman in other cases, mainly due to his connection with some local dons. The money could have very well come from any of the other hits, some other illegal activity or, quite simply, a legitimate job. There was no tracer or marker in the money that could give away its origin.

  That’s why Mukund Dhar was arrested within a week of killing Kabir. The police had looked at all the stuff that Kabir had written about in the past year and had ruled out the people he had criticized. They had also looked at the articles that were in progress but had not found anything scathing enough to warrant a murder in them.

  I wondered if Kabir’s career had a role to play in his murder. He had angered lots of people. I started going through Kabir’s email and phone records to see if I could get something from it. The police had already anal
ysed them but had not found anything.

  I also started looking at the other cases where Dhar was the suspected hitman. There were a total of four such cases. Each time, a different gun was used. Once, the person was stabbed, not shot. If all the suspicions were true, Kabir was Dhar’s fifth known murder victim.

  I didn’t believe Dhar was guilty in the rest of the cases, simply because the court had not found him guilty. But it baffled me how Dhar was careless enough to leave bloody clothes at his house when he knew he had been a murder suspect before. An ordinary killer would not commit a rookie mistake like that, let alone someone like Dhar who had been a suspect in four murders.

  The other four cases were similar to Kabir’s murder in two ways. Firstly, Dhar didn’t have an alibi for any of them. And secondly, Dhar denied being involved in the crime. The evidence presented in those cases was again circumstantial. In each, witnesses had placed Dhar at the crime scene around the time of the murder, or they had seen Dhar speak to the victim a few days or hours before the murder.

  On each occasion, the judge had ruled that the evidence to implicate Dhar wasn’t enough. For the court to punish any guilty man or woman, the Judge had to be sure beyond a reasonable doubt.

  The most interesting part about looking up Dhar’s suspected criminal history was realizing that the same cops investigated his cases each time. Which got me wondering if the cops were trying to get Dhar behind bars. As a criminal defense lawyer, I know there are times when the police just know that someone is guilty. The suspect has passed several comments or bragged about something. It can’t be used in the court of law, but as policemen you can get as close to being convinced about it as possible.