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

by UD Yasha

I took an auto-rickshaw back home. I was jaded by what had happened to Dr. Sonia. I didn’t know her well, but I knew she was a capable woman. More than anything else, she was a good woman who didn’t deserve to go away so young. I kept checking my phone to see if there was any update from Rathod about her.

  Maa was already fast asleep by the time I got home. Radha, Rahul and I sat in the living room without saying anything. As Sonia was conducting the tests for us, she was a part of our team. An attack on her was an attack on us. There was a bleak and depressing silence that none of us wanted to break.

  After a while, I thought about how we were on the right path. Sonia would not have been shot otherwise. She had found something relevant and useful. Something that had the potential to expose some powerful people. The only way to stop the truth from coming out was to silence her forever. The bullet was a match.

  I looked at my phone again just as it started buzzing in my hand. It was Rathod.

  ‘Are you home?’ he said, sounding urgent.

  ‘Yes, I got back a while ago,’ I said. ‘How’s Sonia?’

  ‘Still in surgery.’

  Silence.

  ‘I’m coming over right now,’ Rathod said. ‘Secure yourself. Make sure all the doors and windows are locked. I think everyone who’s involved in this case is now in danger. Don’t let anyone in. I just found something that changes the way we look at this case. It was again Sonia’s work. She’s a gem. I’ll reach in ten minutes.’

  I asked Rahul to check the doors and windows upstairs while Radha and I made sure everything was in order on the ground floor. Shadow sensed something was up so he followed me around. Once everything was locked up, I paced the living room floor to try to keep my mind occupied. The last time we had locked down the house was when Kishore Zakkal was back in our lives. It had sent us into a spiral of constant fear, especially as Zakkal was then trying to personally target me and Radha.

  The silence was broken when we heard the gate outside. Shadow leapt towards the door, probably thinking that he needed to guard us in some way. I went to the door and opened it slightly to check who it was.

  Relief spread its wings when I saw Rathod. He climbed up the stairs and walked in. Shadow jumped on him once and then sat quietly on the floor.

  ‘What happened?’ I said as soon as I locked the door.

  Rathod looked at me and took a deep breath. He said, ‘Remember I had told you that Dr. Rastogi had found gunshot residue on Jane Doe’s hands?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, that hinted that she discharged a firearm sometime before dying.’

  Rathod said, ‘That’s right. Sonia decided to see if the same GSR was present in any of the other bullets we have found at both crime scenes. Turns out it was.’

  A chill shot up my spine.

  Rathod continued. ‘The GSR from the bullets we retrieved from the bullets in the bodies of Niyati and Malhar Jathar and John Doe matches the GSR found on Jane Doe’s hands.’

  I knew what that meant. It really changed everything. I thought out loud, ‘That means Jane Doe was responsible for the triple homicide.’

  ‘She killed them between ten and twelve at night,’ Rathod said.

  ‘And then she called me at three o’clock,’ I said. ‘Was I a target too?’

  Radha turned to me and said, ‘Your meeting with Komal revealed that Jane Doe was already shot by the time you got outside the Stan Mills factory after the call was cut.’

  ‘That means somebody else shot her,’ I said under my breath.

  ‘And that bullet in her body doesn’t match any previous crime,’ Rathod said. ‘But the bullet in the wall matches one that was used in case number M-31222.’

  ‘I’m trying to figure out what happened in the morning at Stan Mills,’ I said. ‘If the bullet that killed Jane Doe doesn’t match any, that means that she was shot by, let’s say Person A. But if the bullets that ended up getting lodged in the factory walls don’t match those in Jane Doe’s body but instead match a prior crime, that means there was a second gun.’’

  Radha jumped in. ‘Which means there was another Person B.’

  ‘If that’s right, there were four people present in the morning at Stan Mills,’ I said.

  Silence.

  I couldn’t believe that Jane Doe was responsible for the triple homicide. We still didn’t know who she was. We also didn’t know if Niyati Jathar had operated on her to change Jane Doe’s looks. If she had conducted that surgery, this was even more twisted. The patient who changed the way she looked killing the doctor who made it possible. If that’s what had happened, then was Jane Doe scared that the doctor would reveal how she looked before? Finding Jane Doe’s identity became even more crucial now.

  ‘What’s case number M-31222?’ I said.

  Rathod rummaged in his bag and pulled out a stack of papers and a pen drive and said, ‘I’ve got hard and soft copies.

  Rahul stepped into the dining room and brought his laptop to the living room. He inserted the pen drive. Rathod and I referred to the hard copy while Radha and Rahul looked at the laptop.

  I started reading the report. Here’s what I found.

  Case number M-3122 was of the murder of Sheena Ahuja, a woman who worked at an accounting firm in Mumbai. She had been killed on 23rd November 2002. Her husband, Kabir Ahuja, was also murdered, but on 20th November 2002, three days before Sheena’s murder.

  Like in a lot of Indian households, Kabir and Sheena stayed with Kabir’s parents in their house in Lower Parel in Mumbai. Kabir’s father Motilal Ahuja was a government civil servant at the time. His mother was a teacher. Kabir and Sheena had one three-year-old son at the time who was in the care of his grandparents. Kabir was a journalist with one of India’s leading newspapers called the Indian Times while Sheena was a financial analyst at a large multinational company.

  Kabir was killed in Pune at their family farmhouse. Kabir had a habit of spending a couple of days alone every few months. That’s why his visit to the farmhouse was not suspicious. Sheena had been killed in a hotel in Andheri West in Mumbai. Sheena’s closest friends and family members didn’t know why she had checked into a hotel when she already had a house in Mumbai. According to her company, she had taken an indefinite leave of absence after her husband’s murder. So, she hadn’t gone to the hotel on company business. The Mumbai Police had also noted that the hotel was the kind that accepted cash payments and didn’t require the person checking in to show an ID card.

  Sheena’s in-laws had gone on record to say that Sheena had been shocked by the sudden demise of her husband, along with the fact that he had been murdered. On the day Sheena was killed, they reported her missing when she didn’t show up for breakfast and her in-laws could not find her in her bedroom.

  The hotel staff had seen Sheena check-in at noon the day before she was murdered. She had been reported missing at nine in the morning on the same day by her in-laws. They had last seen alive the night before.

  At one in the afternoon on the next day, Sheena was found dead in her hotel room by the staff of the hotel. They had entered the room forcefully as Sheena had not checked out and it was past her time. The report stated that no one from the hotel staff had seen Sheena with anyone since the time she checked in.

  Sheena had been shot twice. Once in the head and the other time in her stomach. The same shooter was now active almost eighteen years later at Stan Mills. The connection and timing were bizarre and had no reasonable explanation.

  Kabir was found dead in the study of his family farmhouse in Pune. The farmhouse was slightly outside the city but still fell within the jurisdiction of the Pune Police.

  We quickly realized why the murder was jointly investigated by the Mumbai and Pune police together. The Pune Police was already investigating the murder of Sheena’s husband Kabir. As Sheena was murdered in Mumbai, the Mumbai Police had jurisdiction over the case. As there was a high chance that the two murders were connected, the police forces from the sister cities had decided to conduct a joint in
vestigation.

  To date, Sheena’s murder had remained unsolved. On the other hand, Kabir’s killer was caught, arrested and was now serving time in Yerwada Jail. He was a man named Mukund Dhar. A fingerprint was found at the farmhouse where Kabir was staying. It matched Dhar’s. At the same time, Dhar’s bloody clothes were found at his house with Kabir’s blood on it. Dhar had no alibi for the murder. The murder weapon had not been retrieved. The only missing piece in the investigation was Dhar’s motive. The report stated that a lot of cops believed Mukund was a gun for hire.

  Dhar had known contacts with the underworld dons of Mumbai. A criminal informant had recognized Mukund as the person who was tasked with killing a businessman but the actual plan had never gone through. What the informant said was not admissible in court as it was classified as hearsay.

  I got to see the way the scenario would have played out. The guy seemed guilty from all angles. Just the motive was missing. But then, the prime suspect was a suspected hitman. The police had not been able to find who had paid Dhar. Which was the key piece in the mystery because without knowing that, the real killer was still out in the open.

  The police gave up on finding who had paid Dhar as Kabir had got multiple death threats from various people throughout his career. As a journalist, he had written scathing articles on various powerful people. He had many enemies. The police had assumed that one of them had paid Dhar to kill Kabir.

  To add to the police’s stress, Kabir was the son of a government employee. At the time, his father, Motilal Ahuja was in the Indian Administrative Services, the bureaucratic wing of the Indian Government. There was a note on how well respected Motilal was and that the media was not letting the case go. The pressure on the police would have been mounting to make an arrest. They eventually had.

  Given all the evidence in front of them, the joint investigation of the police forces had concluded that Dhar had killed Kabir. But they couldn’t prove that he had killed Sheena as well. He didn’t have an alibi for her murder either but nothing else tied him to Sheena’s crime scene. The guns used in both murders were different.

  As easy and straightforward as the investigation seemed to be in arresting Mukund Dhar, it was that much harder to find Sheena’s murderer.

  Both the Mumbai and Pune Police had spent many hours and months on it. But their efforts had not yielded results. There were no suspects, let alone arrests. The case was dead long before it was declared unsolved.

  Now, eighteen years later, we had uncovered the first-ever clue in Sheena Ahuja’s murder. We knew it was connected to dad’s disappearance. It had to be. I had no other explanation for how the gun used in Sheena’s murder landed up at the place where I was asked to come by a mystery caller who promised to tell me what had happened to my father.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  There was an air of excitement in the living room. The murder of Sheena Ahuja seemed far too distant but it gave us more leads. I didn’t remember seeing anything in dad’s diary or notes to indicate he knew the Ahujas. That Jane Doe had killed the Jathars and John Doe meant that all of them were connected to dad’s disappearance. If there was a silver lining to Sonia being shot, we knew we were getting closer. Someone was getting afraid that we were going to expose them. But that also meant that we needed to be careful. Because whoever was behind this had shown us that they weren’t trigger shy. Counting the Ahujas, there had been a total of six murders with an attempted seventh on Sonia.

  ‘Do you know how Sonia is doing?’ I said.

  ‘I received a text that the surgery they were conducting in the forensics department went through well. She’s far from out of the woods. However, the surgery’s success means that she can be transferred to a bigger hospital. We have got security there. Whoever wanted her dead could try to kill her again.’

  I sighed in relief. I knew Rathod was feeling the burden of having asked Sonia to conduct the tests. But I was equally responsible. Six months back, I had decided not to involve Radha and Rahul in any fieldwork. I had not realized that even those people who were trained in self-defence and were a part of law enforcement had not signed up to be in danger because of me. It was a narrow line because deciding to help me or anyone else was their personal choice. But when faced with a situation when you can save someone’s life, most people I knew would choose to not follow the black and white lines of the law. It probably all came down to guilt. The thought of knowing that you could have done more. Funnily enough, I was feeling the same guilt for having put them in that spot.

  ‘What’s the status on reconstructing Jane Doe’s face?’ Rahul asked me.

  I said, ‘I spoke to Kedar Sathe once in the evening. He said the facial bones have been chiselled a lot. He’s going to take more time to tell us how she looked earlier. He also said that the surgery was extremely advanced. Only an expert could even think about doing it. The procedures would have also cost Jane Doe a lot of money.’

  ‘Is there any marker that could help us identify her?’ Rathod said.

  I had an idea. I said, ‘I don’t know if this is a thing. But both Kedar Sathe and Dr. Rastogi said that the plastic surgery was advanced. I’m sure like all technologies, they have gotten more advanced. Maybe we can get a timeline on when the surgery was conducted by comparing it against the technology that was prevalent then. For example, if a particular type of grafting was not available in 2005 and there’s evidence of Jane Doe having got that done, we know it was after 2005. We can corroborate that against a missing persons database with Jane Doe’s age and other characteristics.’

  ‘That will be helpful even after we know how she looks to track her real identity,’ Rahul said.

  ‘The CID’s search for Jane and John Doe has also not provided any results,’ Rathod said.

  I got up and started pacing the living room floor again. While walking, I said, ‘I think we should approach John Doe’s murder as a disappearance. He looks the same he has all his life. We can start searching for men who have been missing for the last twenty-four hours. Surely, someone knows he is gone. They would have reported him missing or will do tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll keep an eye out on that and check all the missing person reports that have been filed since last night,’ Rathod said. ‘Since we know this is about something far more sinister and deeper, I am also going to call off the investigation into the relatives and friends of the Jathars.’

  ‘Good point. Let’s go back to the drawing board,’ I said. ‘Our goal is now not just knowing what happened to my father Aniruddha Rajput. It’s about solving the mystery behind the six murders that have been committed. Finding the answers to one will tell us about the other. It all started with the murders of Kabir and Sheena Ahuja.’

  ‘We can talk to the guy arrested for Kabir’s murder. I think Kabir and Sheena’s murders are connected. She might not have been killed by Mukund Dhar. However, I have a feeling this guy knows more than he is telling. How often does the wife get killed within days of the husband getting murdered too? This is the first time I have come across such a scenario. Mukund surely knows something about Sheena’s murder.’

  ‘Here’s what I don’t get. I’m willing to accept that Mukund was a hitman. But why didn’t he just cut a deal and give out the name of the person who killed him?’

  ‘Maybe his family or kid or whatever was well taken care of in return for his silence,’ Rathod said. ‘We’ve seen that play out before.’

  ‘We’ll have to find that out,’ I said.

  Silence resounded inside the living room. The ticking of the seconds’ hand echoed. I glanced at the clock. It was one o’clock at night.

  ‘Let’s carry on tomorrow, everyone,’ Rathod said.

  I felt the exhaustion from the day seep into my bones. No one argued with Rathod. The two of us had been up since three-thirty. Rathod had worked late the previous day as well. He got up to leave.

  ‘Take care, everyone,’ he said and left.

  I walked out to the porch to see him off.r />
  ‘Hey, thanks,’ I said to him with a smile. I hadn’t planned on saying anything at all. At that moment, I was glad to have Rathod in my life. His unflinching attitude was a big boost. He was someone I could count on no matter what.

  Rathod turned around and waved at me.

  ‘I promise not to keep stuff from you anymore,’ I said.

  ‘That’s all I ask,’ he said.

  I watched him get into his car and then drive away.

  At that exact instant, the man in the leather jacket was watching an old man through his binoculars. The instructions given to him were simple: Finish him. I don’t care what it takes.

  He wondered how the old man wasn’t asleep yet. Perhaps I have a different impression of all old men. He smiled and stepped towards the house where his target lived.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Rakesh Patil was seventy-four years old and had retired from the police force fourteen years ago. He got a pension of twenty thousand rupees a month and was happy to save almost all of it. He had no fancy tastes. His house had been paid for and his wife was even more of a miser than him. In fact, she had taught him the value of money. So, there was no chance of any leakage.

  Rakesh was watching some news anchor half his age screaming on the television. He didn’t remember the anchor’s name but he loved his flamboyance.

  What he was watching was actually the repeat show of the Primetime Debate. He had seen it at nine in the evening. But he still loved watching the reruns again at one o’clock at night. That day one of his favourite topics was being discussed—a debate on some India-Pakistan issue. The Armies of both countries had been firing more heavily across the border lately.

  A Pakistani politician had suggested that the Pakistani Army should “nuke the shit out of India”. That statement had evoked heavy criticism from the Indian side—politicians and media houses who flamed the fires. Rakesh was enjoying watching the Indians shout loudly and the Pakistanis scream from the other end.