by UD Yasha
I followed the SWAT team. There were six of them, including Harshvardhan Kuhad, the guy who had come with us to Stan Mills.
Vivek Saxena’s house was uphill at the end of a narrow road. There were other houses along the same road. We walked close to their compound walls. Once we were outside his house, Kuhad went through an elaborate process to check for a booby trap. He gave us a thumbs up when he cleared it. Without making a sound, we stepped inside the compound of Vivek’s house.
The front door had a big padlock on it. As per the layout of the house, it had only one entrance. There was one room on the ground floor and two more on the first floor. Kuhad once again stepped towards the door and began checking it.
One more ‘thumbs up’.
Another member of the SWAT team used a lock pick and we were inside the house within the next minute.
Rathod and Bhalerao along with four members of the SWAT team, stepped away and started searching the house. One in the team stayed outside at the main gate to alert his colleagues in case of a threat.
As I stepped into the house, the first thing that hit me was the mess inside. Someone had turned the place upside down. They were looking for something and had not found it. Kuhad waited with me in the living room. I looked around. From where I was standing, I could see the kitchen and a part of the room as its door was open. The living room had the usual furniture and TV set. The TV unit, however, had been opened up. All its drawers had been pulled and things from inside them had been tossed on the floor. A hookah pot had broken on the floor next to the TV. The kitchen trolleys had also been pulled out.
I heard cries of ‘Clear’ from different members of the SWAT team. Five minutes later. Rathod came downstairs.
‘The house is empty but it has been searched,’ he told me. ‘We found some interesting stuff in Vivek’s study though.’
We went upstairs as the SWAT team divided themselves between guarding the ground floor and the main door. I followed Rathod through a small corridor that had rooms on either side and a bathroom at the end.
‘This way,’ Rathod said, entering the room on the right.
We entered a massive study room. It had a regal looking desk. But again, everything in the room had been tossed over. Bhalerao was going through the large spread of assorted items on the floor.
‘Even the other room was searched,’ Rathod said, walking to the desk. ‘Ignore the mess. Look at this.’
He picked up a paper from the floor and handed it to me. The paper had a diagram of the internal structure of a lock. I knew that the most basic lock just had one cylinder. In the diagram I was looking at, I could see multiple cylinders, dials, screws and wires running inside. Next to it was a hand drawn illustration of how the key would go inside once the electric lock was neutralized.
‘This is just one of the at least hundred angles of the lock,’ Rathod said, handing me one more paper. ‘It has the—’
‘Name of the lock manufacturer,’ I said, reading the small inscription on the base of the lock lodged in a safe. Sure Locked. ‘Vivek told your CI that he was excited as he was working on picking the most challenging safe he had picked. I’m sure this was it. This was the lock. He was clearly obsessed with picking it. He was studying it like his life depended on, just the way artists work towards completing their work.’
‘Some call that kind of obsession insanity,’ Rathod said.
‘It’s usually the work of the insane ones that’s lauded the most,’ I said and had an idea. ‘If Sure Locked made the most challenging lock Vivek had ever picked, I’m sure it was expensive. Very few places would be able to afford it. I don’t think there would be more than three or four.’
‘We can track it down,’ Rathod said.
‘Call up Sure Locked and get a list of their customers from Pune,’ I said
We went through the remaining rooms but found nothing else, so we left Vivek Saxena’s house. Rathod and ACP Shukla had decided not to share the details of Vivek’s house with anyone else, including CID’s replacement Medical Examiner, a guy named Murali Murthy.
There was a nervous excitement in the car as we drove back home to Baner. We knew that a safe meant something valuable was being stored. We all had one question. Was it the evidence, because of which so much blood was spilled, that was kept in that safe?
As we got closer to my house, Bhalerao said, ‘Sure Locked is sending me a list of its customers in Pune in some time. I’ve given them your email address too so you’ll get it directly.’
I said, ‘Are we going to check the places out?’
Rathod slowed the car down as we approached my house and said, ‘We’ll decide once we get the names.’
The moment I opened the main gate, Radha came running towards me, calling out my name. Even if I had not seen her jump so ecstatically, I would have known she was excited from her voice.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
Radha said, ‘I have found evidence that the cops who arrested Mukund Dhar were corrupt.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Radha was almost jumping as we went to the garage.
‘I remembered you had told me once that corrupt cops are not corrupt just once. They are corrupt over and over again. I thought about it and it made sense, my sister,’ Radha said and chuckled. ‘It’s an addictive behaviour and I’m guessing the cops gain confidence from not being caught, leading them to catch bigger fish. I thought that if the cops investigating Kabir Ahuja’s murder had framed Dhar by planting evidence at his house, then there’s a good chance that they would have done it before as well.’ Radha swivelled in her chair and said, ‘I wanted Rathod’s login credentials to look up the other cases that those same cops had handled.’
‘Did you find a pattern?’ I said.
‘Hell yes,’ Radha said. ‘Look at this.’ She turned the laptop around to show me what she had found. ‘I think that the three cops who investigated the Ahuja murders were a team of some kind. This includes the two cops who died before, and Rakesh Patil, who was killed along with his wife. The trio investigated almost all their cases together. They worked for the first time together in 1997. They continued working a lot together till 2003. In that six-year period, they were together on three hundred and sixty-seven cases. This includes everything from petty crimes to serious ones like murders. I haven’t looked at the petty crimes yet, but I found an odd trend in the murders that they investigated. Between 1997 and 2003, they were a part of thirty-two murder investigations. Three of them were in 1997. They were solved over a period of three years. In 1998, they were the lead police officers in seven cases. Out of them, four went on for many years. The remaining three were solved within eighteen months. The trend gets more obvious from here on. From 1999 to 2002, until the Ahuja murders, they investigated seven murders together. I won’t bore you with numbers. But progressively, every year, the average time for the murder investigation went down. In 2002, the trio was together on seven murder investigations. Out of them, just two lasted more than two months. At the same time, I looked at the department average closure rate. It was very rare for cases to get solved within two months. There was a lot of bureaucratic stuff and the nature of the investigation was slow moving. Even dad’s average closure time was six months. I found this very odd. That’s not it. They hardly took on any cases after they solved Kabir Ahuja’s murder in less than a month. Something happened then.
I looked at all the cases they had finished in less than four months. On almost every occasion, one piece of evidence had changed everything and that came out of nowhere.’
‘Like the bloody clothes in Mukund Dhar’s house.’
‘Exactly. There were times when the defense lawyers suddenly found evidence. There were at least six occasions between 1999 and 2002, when stuff was found missing from the crime scene. It included valuable stuff as well as stuff like kids’ toys or laptops and stuff like that. Evidence also seemed to go missing from the police vault.’
‘How did the rest of the Pun
e Police perform in all these areas?’ I said.
‘The trio was the outlier. They solved cases the fastest. They had six times the number of reported robberies from crime scenes than the rest of the police force. Same for evidence being stolen from the police vaults. I’m telling you they were up to something fishy.’
‘Were the crimes in which stuff went missing from the crime scene related to thefts? Was the killer a thief?’
‘No. The killer had a completely different motive altogether. The trio listed it themselves and it fell in line with the rest of the evidence. If you’re thinking that the killer stole from the crime scene, that’s not what happened. At least based on the evidence that I am looking at. I am ninety-nine percent convinced that these three cops were corrupt. They planted and produced evidence, they bribed defense lawyers, they stole evidence from the crime scene and the police vaults and lockers.’
‘Based on what you told me, I believe that too,’ I said. ‘That’s really useful, Radha. Great work.’
Radha was beaming. ‘I was wondering if Mukund Dhar was just playing us by telling us the tales he did. But if he was right about the bloody clothes being planted at his house, he was hinting at the cops being corrupt...’
‘In that case, he was probably right about the other stuff he said too,’ Rahul said
‘We better start looking into Kabir Ahuja’s life back then to find out who he was going to meet and what evidence he was going to get,’ Radha said.
‘Unfortunately for us, we only have access to Kabir’s emails, call records and text and IM messages with us. But that’s not bad. He was a journalist and back then, those three things were the most popular way to get in touch with anyone,’ I said.
‘Let’s get to it,’ Radha said.
The three of us opened our laptops and started sifting through the heaps of information the Mumbai Police had gathered as evidence.
I said, ‘Remember, we’re looking for any clue about who Kabir was going to meet on the day he died. Discount anyone who claimed to have a big story. We’re dealing with someone extremely careful. Look for people who wanted to fly low and not draw any attention.’
I sat hunched over my laptop. A few minutes later, my phone buzzed. It was a message from Rathod.
Sure Locked is not cooperating with us about sharing their customers in Pune. They want a court warrant. They said sharing any sensitive information without a warrant will set a worrisome precedent.
I grimaced in disappointment. A court order would take a few more hours. I decided to focus on what was in my hand and started reading the text messages that Kabir got.
Some overzealous people texted him saying they had a story that would change his life. Kabir had not even responded to them. Some people were repeat texters, saying more or less the same thing using different words. Kabir also received a lot of flak for being a journalist. He had hateful messages from the supporters of various political parties. Apart from that, there was not anything useful in them.
I looked up some of the old stuff he had written. It was not easy to find his articles as they had all been written before 2002. But I got some hits. Kabir had praised and criticized people from all walks of life. He had gone after different political parties, telling me that he did not have a bias, as should be the case for a journalist. He used numbers and hard-core evidence in all his major criticism of politicians and businessmen. Reading just eleven articles he wrote indicated his passion and ethics.
I moved to his emails. That’s when things started to get interesting. It was clear that Kabir loved to receive and send emails even in 2002. Most of his key contacts knew that as he used to receive key information and messages on email. He was most active on it.
The Mumbai Police had retrieved more than thirty thousand emails. Back then, the spam and social filters weren’t so advanced. Which meant that there was junk in those emails. I had an idea. I called Jay Parikh.
‘Hey, can you create a spam filtering system for emails from an eighteen-year-old email inbox?’ I said.
‘That’s very easy. I already have a small code for it that I had written in college. I’ll email the software link to you. Download it on your laptop. Drop the email files that you have into it and the software will filter out spam. The software will also present the emails to you like you would see on any major email provider.’
‘Thanks,’ I said and hung up.
I was glad to have found Jay last year. In less than a minute, I got the software from him. I downloaded it and followed his instructions. The software worked like a charm. It filtered out all the junk and promotional emails and left just the meat for me to examine. I gave the software to Radha and Rahul too.
Even then, I was looking at twenty thousand emails from 1999 to 2002.
To make my life easier, I started searching backwards from the time Kabir was murdered. He replied to almost all messages he got, except for the overtly enthusiastic ones. I think he had realized that talking to such people didn’t make sense as they don’t really have any good stories in them. They do it just for the attention.
I started noting down the names of the people he regularly wrote to or heard from. A quick Google search told me that all of them had worked with Kabir then. Now, they were heading all kinds of newspapers or had their own independent journalism websites.
In fact, in one of the emails, Kabir was discussing the idea of independent journalism. All those years back, he had predicted what had been happening in the world regarding fake news and paid media. He was looking to develop a system that verified news from independent sources. The idea was still in an early stage. I wondered how much Kabir would have loved the modern world. Reading his emails, I had come to know that he was already far ahead of his time.
I got up after a while as my body started cramping up, and stepped out. I hadn’t realized that the sun had almost set. No wonder my body was aching from sitting in the same position for too long. We had even forgotten to have our afternoon chai.
‘Found anything?’ Rahul said, shooting me a quick look before eyeballing his laptop again.
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘I’m getting coffee,’ I said.
As I went inside and waited for the water to heat, I texted Rathod.
Any update on Sure Locked’s clients?
I got a reply by the time the coffee was ready.
We’re still waiting for the warrant. Should have it any moment now. I’ll message you when we get it.
I replied with a ‘thumbs up’ emoji, one that I started off by hating when I got it from other people. But once I started texting it to people, I realized it was a great way to acknowledge what they said with just one tap of the button. I had grown to love it so much that my phone’s auto-suggest now recommended it to me for every message I got, even if it was a question.
I placed three cups of coffee on a tray and took it to the garage. We took a small break at about seven o’clock. Looking at so much text was a hard and thankless job. In crime movies, TV shows and books, the stage where the detectives are just looking at heaps of information and data is never shown. It’s similar to how the entrepreneur slogging away for thousands of hours to build billion-dollar companies is not shown in the entrepreneur’s biopic.
None of us said a single word during our coffee break. As we finished, we quietly got back to looking at more information.
I could feel that the break had helped me get more alert. I thought of a new theory. I wondered why Rakesh Patil and the rest of the cops investigating the Kabir Ahuja murder were killed. So far, we suspected that the rest had been murdered to keep them silent. If Rakesh Patil was murdered, then even he had to have known something. There was no evidence of foul play in the deaths of the other two cops. But the killings had only started three days back. I wondered what Patil could have possibly known. Was he aware that some kind of evidence was going to be exchanged that implicated the Viper?
I had not come across anything till then that indicated that the three corr
upt cops knew anything about the Viper. Unless, they found something at the crime scene and didn’t report it.
We were almost certain that the three cops used to steal from crime scenes. What if they had stolen the evidence that Kabir was supposed to get? I wondered if the Viper had arm twisted them to arrest Mukund Dhar. Perhaps the cops knew who the killer was based on what they had found at the crime scene, or knew that Dhar wasn’t the killer. There was a chance that they could have been forced to take the evidence that implicated the Viper’s hitman.
Then there was also a chance that Kabir had met the person he was supposed to. I wasn’t sure what had happened on that day yet. Rathod was going through the records of the people who had been murdered in Pune. There was a chance that the person could have been killed outside the city as well. There were too many variables. That’s why, I decided to look at the crime scene photos from Kabir Ahuja’s murder.
Motilal Ahuja had shared his personal coordinates with me so I called him up and asked him to send us any old pictures of his farmhouse that were taken before Kabir’s death. I was thinking of comparing them against the crime scene photos.
While I waited for Motilal to send me the pictures, I opened the pictures of the crime scene. I looked at all the pictures of Kabir’s desk. There were four stacks of papers. I zoomed in on a high definition picture of them and counted the number of sheets, somehow being able to see them. Each stack had almost a hundred sheets of paper.
There was a desktop computer next to the stacks. The CPU was under the desk so I could only see its upper part. I couldn’t get much from the computer screen as it was shut.
Next to the computer was a notebook open on a blank page. I had gone through copies of the book. It was Kabir’s scrapbook where he noted down ideas for potential cover stories for the magazine that his newspaper was going to launch.
