The COMPLETE Siya Rajput Crime Thrillers (Books 1 to 4)

by UD Yasha

  My eyes narrowed as his burly figure walked towards me.

  ‘What are you doing here again?’ he said.

  I did not trust Shukla to tell him about my real reason for representing Manohar. ‘Everyone has the right to be defended, ACP Shukla,’ I said and walked away. I did not want to waste my time and energy.

  I walked out of the CID building. Went to my car and got inside. The moment at which I had told Manohar about Rucha came back to me. What was Manohar hiding? I wanted to know more about him. What was he like as a person? He had almost choked up while talking about his family. Maybe that was a starting point. I also needed to speak to Malini Sinha. She was on her way to Pune. The CID would want to speak to her first. I reckoned she would go directly to the CID office. I had at least an hour's window to meet Manohar's family before CID officers would want to speak to them.

  Before doing anything else, I pulled out my phone. I typed out a message to Rathod.

  I will explain everything. Text me once you are free. When can you meet me? I owe you an apology.

  I inhaled deeply. I decided I would tell Rathod about what had happened with Kunal Shastri three years back. I wished he would give me a chance. The truth was, I was afraid to admit to Rathod that I had been wrong. We had been through a lot together. I did not want to let him down by telling him I had messed up. But I also could not keep him in the dark any longer.

  I rummaged inside my tote bag for my copy of CID’s file on Manohar. I found his address in it. He lived in Hinjewadi, an up and coming area in Pune, popular for hosting dozens of IT companies. It was past Baner and near the Pune-Mumbai expressway. The drive would take me about twenty minutes at night. I put my foot on the accelerator and veered the car on the main road.

  My next course of action was to know more about Manohar. What he did, what ticked him off, what his family had to say about him. I wanted to get a feel for the kind of person he was. Being his lawyer, his family would be more than happy to talk to me.

  My mind drifted and I began thinking about my meeting with Manohar.

  Apart from his reaction when I had mentioned Rucha, something about the case seemed off. Manohar had spoken with restraint and caution. Those are not the characteristics of an innocent man. But at the same time, he made no effort to prove his innocence. Which was also unlike a criminal. He told me his version of what happened. There was no way I could prove it in court. I could have independent forensic experts analyze the evidence and point out a loophole in the prosecutor's argument. But did I even want to go down that road? Was Manohar actually innocent? I was not yet sure. Thinking about all of this, I wondered where Rucha Sinha fit into the plan. Four murders, one kidnapping.

  I put away the idea of the two being different crimes. It was too big a coincidence. I don’t think I would have found more than a couple of dozen instances of something like this happening across the world. I felt Rucha’s abduction was central to the murders. It was the cause of the murders, and not the effect. I could not think of a reason to take the child after the murders were committed.

  The thought did not give me comfort.

  Children going missing is an epidemic in India. More than sixty-three thousand children have disappeared in India in the past year alone. That is an average of one hundred and seventy-four children every day. And that is not even the scariest part. More than fifty per cent of them are still missing. It is a chilling fact and even though I was aware of it already, my hands went cold just thinking about it. I pulled over on the side of the road. I was afraid one more child was going to be added to that stat.

  Children were kidnapped for extremely specific reasons. Child trafficking and prostitution were the most common ones. Both generated billions of dollars across the world. The crime syndicates operating them were sophisticated. In most cases, by the time a child was reported missing, he or she was already en route to the nearest port or airbase. Within no time, they were shipped out of the country. The favoured destinations included South East Asian and Eastern European countries. From there they were trafficked to the rest of the world for different purposes like child slavery, forced labour, child trade and prostitution.

  A kidnapping in the middle of the city in a high-class neighbourhood by such a crime syndicate seemed unlikely. It was too inconvenient and out in the open. Not to mention too risky. The same crime syndicate would have been better off nabbing Rucha from her school than from her house.

  Then there were domestic motivations for abducting a child. These included a classic case of kidnapping by a stranger where a demand for ransom was made in exchange for the child's release or a parental abduction during a custody battle. There were other reasons of course, apart from these two general categories.

  I wondered if Malini and Daksh were having any problems in their marriage. I knew I would be able to meet Malini once Atharva was in town. With him by my side, she would have her guard down when she spoke to me. I figured the CID would want to meet her first. I could only meet her much later in the night or the next day.

  The stream of my thoughts broke when my phone vibrated on the dashboard. I picked it up. A text message. It was Rathod.

  This better be good. I just got done with Manohar. Shelly’s Smokes in 20 minutes?

  My phone buzzed again in my hand as I was reading the message. It was Rathod again.

  I only have forty minutes though. Malini Sinha will reach soon and I have to be back to speak to her.

  I texted him with an affirmative, deciding that I would go to Manohar’s house after meeting Rathod. Shelly’s Smokes was the restaurant where Rathod and I used to meet to discuss all our cases. It was nearby. The last time we had been there, Rathod had told me that my mother was still alive, sixteen years after she had gone missing.

  This time, I needed to tell him about the day that haunted me even now in order to save our friendship.

  Chapter Five

  The girl opened her eyes to darkness.

  What’s happening?

  She looked around. But she could not see anything. The air around her was black and still. Terror seized her body. She started shaking.

  She waved her hands. But she could not move her legs. Something was restricting them. She tried to feel what it was. A chain. Her legs were bound. She knew something was very wrong. Her heart was beating loudly. Despite the air being hot around her, a chill ran down her spine.

  And then it hit her. I have been taken.

  She did not remember how long she had been sleeping. Was I sleeping at all? Even after opening her eyes, she wanted to close them. Something heavy was pulling them down. Her mind was blank. She tried to remember how she had gotten here. But nothing came to her. She could not even tell what time it was, whether it was night or day.

  She kicked, hoping the chain would give way and magically set her free. Instead, something stung her leg. Like pins poking it. She shrieked in pain. What was that? She grimaced and felt the rings around her ankles. The inner wall of the rings had small pointed teeth. They scratched against her skin every time she tried to move her legs. She wanted to explore where she was by walking around. But that was not going to be possible now. She became dead still.

  Her world was collapsing.

  She could not hold them in any longer. Tears flowed down her cheeks. She wiped them with the back of her palm but they kept coming, making her feel worse. Her body began shivering again. She had always been afraid of the dark. But at that moment, she somehow knew that something worse than darkness was waiting for her. She pictured her mother, the way she put her to sleep every night, telling her stories from the Panchatantra. She wished she could be with her then and this was just another night where it was the two of them. Thinking about her made her cry harder. Her eyes hurt. Her head drummed. She looked around once again but all she could see was darkness. Where is mommy?

  A gasp escaped her mouth as her leg hurt once again. The cut was stinging. Her head began to ache from the crying. She stared into the darkness until
her eyes became dry.

  ‘Anybody there?’ she said softly.

  Silence.

  ‘Can someone help me?’ she said, her voice louder now. She felt her energy being sucked out each time she opened her mouth to speak.

  Silence.

  ‘Is anyone out there?’ she yelled as loudly as she could.

  Silence.

  She heaved, taking in air. She bit her lower lip and shut her eyes tight to stop the tears from flowing.

  She closed her eyes tighter and tried to remember what had happened. She could not place the events that had led her to be there. She tried harder. Her mother had taught her how to meditate. It helps you find happiness in this world that tries to rob you of it every moment, she had told her. She had no idea what that meant. Not then, and not now. She had never enjoyed their meditation sessions. She used to always open one of her eyes and see what was happening around her. Now, she wished she had done it properly.

  She recited the mantra in her mind. Om, she said again and again. She decided she would recount the last day she remembered. When was that?

  She had woken up at the usual time she got up during her holidays—nine o’clock in the morning. She had watched the cartoon channel on TV. The day had unwound gradually. She went to her friend’s house for lunch and then solved puzzles with her for a while.

  Then her memory began to get hazy.

  She did not recall when she went back home. Or even if she went back at all. For some reason, she remembered a sunset. She put a hand on her shoulders. She realized they were hurting. She remembered hard hands lifting her. It had left bruises.

  Who was it? What had happened after that?

  She completely blanked out.

  She put both her hands to her head, trying to think, trying to remember something. The more she thought, the louder her head drummed. The graveness of the situation hit her. She was all alone, far from anyone. Goosebumps thundered through her body. Her breaths became short and loud.

  She opened her eyes, wanting to shout as loudly as she could, hoping someone would hear her. She wanted to cry because that was all that could make her feel better. She even tried to force out the tears. But the horror of it all took over her body. She froze in shock. Her body refused to bring out more tears.

  At that moment, out of nowhere, she remembered something. A face. The face of a man.

  First, her hands started trembling. Then her entire body began shaking. She could recall the face clearly now. Particularly the scar on it. It was raw and red and ran from his mouth to his ear.

  A sound.

  She could not tell from where it came. All the directions seemed the same. She wished she was not shivering. The clattering of her teeth made it hard for her to hear the sound. It grew louder every second. Now too clear to miss.

  An echo. A pair of footsteps. Someone was coming towards her.

  Chapter Six

  Confusion always has its roots in a deviation from the basics. As I sat at our usual table at Shelly’s, I thought about the mechanics of a crime.

  Every crime has three elements. The method, the perpetrator and the motive. All three are important and all three must be satisfactorily explained to catch the person responsible for it. The job of a criminal defense lawyer is to only create reasonable doubt in the prosecutor’s argument, for a court of law would never punish a person if there is even a vestige of a doubt. They do not want the wrong person to be punished. The concept of reasonable doubt was the basis of all defense. I decided to go through all the three elements to examine if there was reasonable doubt in anything.

  The first element. The gun. The members of Sinha family had been shot dead. Manohar had been caught holding a gun. The method was tied to the suspect. A positive ballistics test on the gun would be conclusive evidence.

  The second element. The person. Manohar was present at the crime scene. He was caught red-handed at the crime scene by the police with a gun in his hand. Additionally, he had the victims' blood on his clothes. I wanted to know if the pattern of splatter on his clothes would match that of when a person is shot. It would tell where Manohar was when the shots were fired, thereby proving or disproving whether he was in the right place to have killed. I knew a blood splatter expert from back in the day when I used to work under my mentor Santosh Hegde. I decided I would ask him to review the evidence. But Manohar was at the crime scene. A judge would be satisfied with that. So, even the second element was fulfilled, at least for now.

  My problem was with the third element. The motive. Shaunak Manohar seemed to live a decent life. Speaking to his family, friends and colleagues would give a better insight into his personality. But it was hard to believe that an average and well-to-do man would kill an entire family in cold blood. I had seen crazier things happen, having practised law for almost a decade. But something about a normal everyday person committing brutal murders never sits right.

  We do not believe that monsters walk among us. It is good in a way. The bricks that hold our society together will begin to crumble the day we think otherwise. But knowing what I knew then, Manohar did not have a motive to kill the members of the Sinha family. At least for now. The investigation had just started.

  Which brought me to the girl. Rucha Sinha. I opened the photo that Atharva had sent me. It was taken a week ago on her eighth birthday. My stomach sank for a beat as I wondered where she could be. Or if she was even alive. And if she was, then was she alright? I remembered the change of expression in Manohar’s eyes when I had mentioned Rucha.

  I looked around. Shelly’s Smokes had changed over the years but it still retained its old school charm and calmness, unlike other restaurants. Coming here always meant a new case for me.

  I poured some water in a glass. I glanced at the artificial lake, the way the light from the restaurant shimmered on it. Its water level had gone down drastically. Summers in Pune were relentless. The heat was dry and burned the skin in the afternoon. Evenings were relatively better. There was also no respite from the heat this year in the form of pre-monsoon showers. Times were only going to get tough. A sub-par Monsoon was going to be cruel, especially for the seventy million farmers in the western part of India whose livelihoods depended on the rains. Already prevalent drought-like conditions coupled with widespread issues regarding minimum selling price had resulted in thousands of farmer suicides across the country. My heart went out to them.

  I felt grateful for the position I was in. In a world where millions died from hunger, I did not have to worry about getting the basic needs of survival. Even maa was with us once again. We would have loved to have our dad with us as well, but he had vanished one night sixteen years ago and no one had seen him since. Since then, we were happy as a family for the first time after getting maa back.

  As I sipped more water, my mind drifted back to the present.

  ‘You need to stop doing this,’ a familiar voice said.

  My chain of thought was broken. I turned around. It was Rathod.

  ‘What the hell were you doing at the CID office defending that guy?' he said. ‘I thought you had quit practising law. At least that's what you had told me when you last saw me.'

  I had never seen Rathod lose his cool. I understood why he was angry. I felt bad, knowing Rathod deserved to know the truth. He always had my back. It was time to be a better friend. I did not know where to begin. He had no idea what had happened in the past three years, or even why I had quit practising law.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  Rathod sat on a chair across the table. He had changed his clothes from an hour back. He was now in a crisply ironed light blue shirt and a black pair of jeans. His thin moustache was sharper than ever before.

  He looked away at the drying lake for three heartbeats. He appeared less angry when he turned back at me. A lot of people thought Rathod was an angry and stern man. I did not fault them. He had a commanding presence at six feet three and ninety kilos. He was fit and loved discipline. It was apparent in the way
he dressed. He used to observe his surroundings with narrow eyes. He spoke to the point and only when required. But that changed when he was around people he liked and was comfortable with. With me, he had always been gentle and talkative.

  ‘I owe you an explanation,’ I said, setting down my glass of water.

  I slid a file across the table. It contained papers and the judgement from my case in which I had defended Kunal Shastri to keep him out of prison.

  ‘What’s this?’ Rathod said.

  ‘Have a look and you’ll understand. It’ll explain why I haven’t been around in the past three years.’

  The Kunal Shastri case was not handled by the CID, but by the CBI instead, given its sensitive and brutal nature. Rathod did not know I had defended Shastri. He flipped through the first two pages. He looked up, realizing what had happened.

  ‘The young girl…’ his voice trailed off.

  ‘Suhana Kulkarni,’ I said.

  Silence.

  The expression on Rathod’s face changed completely. As annoyed as he was initially, his face softened. There was a deep furrow between his eyebrows. I could tell hundreds of thoughts were running through his mind.

  I said, ‘Kunal Shastri came to meet me right after kidnapping Suhana. He bragged about his latest conquest. He told me about his earlier exploits and then he left. I could not move, knowing that I had let him get away the first time. I could not handle knowing that I had helped kill a girl. I thought she was dead from the way he spoke about her. But I still decided to take a chance. I managed to relay a message across to the CBI that Suhana was in danger. I shared a working theory of where she could have been held. I fainted soon after that. I found out later that the CBI got to Suhana just in time to save her life but not before she had suffered already. She is in a coma-like state today, even after three long years.'