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

by UD Yasha

  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 corrupt 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.

  I started checking the pictures of the other side of the room. It had a large bookshelf and a dressing table. There were four photos of it from different angles. I zoomed in on the bookshelf to see if there were any notes in the books themselves. I would later compare the image to how the bookshelf looked earlier and then check if any books were added or deleted. I would then ask Motilal if those books triggered any memories.

  I started off from the topmost row, going right to left. As I reached the bottommost row, I was feeling a sense of resignation.

  Just as I was starting to lose hope, I noticed something that could change the case for us.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  My heart beat faster. I contained the smile that was curling my face.

  I had not been able to see the CPU of the computer in the pictures on the other side. But I could see it in the mirror of the dressing table. In one photo, I could clearly see that there was something in the floppy disk drive. I was old enough to remember putting in floppies at our home computer to play games. Even once they were in, they stuck out a little. In the photo I was looking at, the CPU had a floppy in its floppy drive.

  But I hadn’t seen it in the other photos that had the reflection of the CPU. The quality of the photos was good enough. I was sure. One picture had the floppy drive. The others did not.

  Who had taken it?

  ‘Radha and Rahul, can you check this for me?’ I said, showing them my laptop.

  ‘It’s definitely there in one and not the others,’ Rahul said.

  ‘Thanks. I wanted to double-check that I wasn’t seeing it only because I wanted to.’

  I said, ‘According to the crime scene report, all the three corrupt cops were at the crime scene when the forensic team was working. My gut tells me that the cops took the floppy drive. They had to be audacious to pick up stuff from a crime scene that was being photographed. But then again, from what Radha found, they seemed to have grown in confidence over the years. Then, they had suddenly waned down after the Ahuja murders. Something had changed.’

  Radha said, ‘That’s when they crossed paths with the Viper.’

  ‘Maybe they had taken the floppy disk or even something else and then blackmailed the Viper. Maybe the Viper had himself coerced them to arrest Dhar. Once they would have taken the bribe or arrested the wrong man on purpose, the Viper would have had them pinned down.’

  I downloaded the picture that had the floppy drive and sent it to Jay Parikh. I told him to clean it up as much as he could.

  The new clue enthused all of us. There was an outside chance that the person who Kabir was supposed to meet had met him. He might even have handed Kabir the evidence if it was indeed the floppy drive. I felt I was onto something. I called Rathod and told him about what I had found.

  The answer to who Kabir was going to meet had to be somewhere in the heaps of data that we had on his emails, call records and IM and text messages.

  I once again began going through his emails. I resumed from September 2002. Out of the hundreds of emails he had got that month, one got me interested. It was from a woman named ‘Anju Sharma’. Kabir and her had exchanged only one email.

  Anju had written the first one.

  Dear Kabir,

  I loved your interview with our Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. You praised his Cabinet Ministers. I have some information on one of them that will interest you. It doesn’t hurt to look.

  Regards,

  Anju Sharma

  Kabir had responded to it two days after getting it.

  Anju,

  Thanks for writing to me. Please share what you have. I will go through it and get back to you. If you are not comfortable sending it to me, please send it to Indian Times’ ‘Anonymous Tip’ email address.

  Best,

  Kabir Ahuja

  There was no more correspondence between them. I knew there was no way to get our hands on the contents of Indian Times’ anonymous tip email address or even the specific email Anju may or may not have sent.

  The exchange made me curious. It also made me think how difficult it was to be a journalist. If you were remotely successful, everyone wanted a piece of you, whether or not they had something that would actually be of value.

  As I was going through more emails, I noticed that Kabir played a game called ‘World of Titans’. At first, I thought Jay’s spam filtering system was not working. But then I saw what the email was about. Kabir had forgotten the password to his game’s account and had got an email from the game’s makers to reset it.

  I texted Jay to confirm once.

  Even if an email is auto-generated, will your software mark it as important if the user has opened that email?’

  Jay always had his mobile next to him. I got a reply within the next minute.

  Any email that is opened will NOT be classified spam.

  I Googled the name of the game and found that it was a virtual player multiplayer game. If you had an account, you were a part of a virtual world where you were a different person. I found it strange that a man as busy and sought after as Kabir had time to play such games. Not that playing games was wrong or made you less productive, but they didn’t fit the kind of person I thought Kabir was.

  I had a theory. I called Jay.

  ‘I know the World of Titans,’ he said. ‘It’s a cool game. You have an online persona. You build it by doing random everyday things. It’s basically how life is, but virtually.’

  ‘I don’t get the fascination behind it,’ I said. ‘That’s not why I called you though.’

  ‘I figured,’ Jay said.

  ‘If it’s like real life, can you talk to other people who have accounts as well?’

  ‘Of course. That’s what makes it so good. You can actually talk to people over the microphone. The voice gets redone because they don’t want anyone to know the real you.’

  I knew games kept getting updated and given the bandwidth available in 2002, I had a doubt. ‘Was this feature available in 2002?’

  ‘No, it was released six years back.’

  ‘How did people speak on it earlier then?’

  ‘Good old messenger. The game makers have developed an internal messaging system.’

  I felt excitement crawl up my body. ‘If I give you someone’s user ID, can you break into their account?’

  ‘That’s my job,’ Jay said and laughed. ‘Send it over.’

  I once again stepped out of the garage to stretch my body and move around. When I finished walking the length of our garden once, Radha came out, holding her hand up, saying, ‘Siya, you’re getting a call from Kedar Sathe.’

  I ran to her and answered the call. He uttered the words that I was hoping he would. He said, ‘Siya Rajput, I’ve got Jane Doe’s original face for you. I’m sending you an image of the reconstruction of how Jane Doe looked before her plastic surgery.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  While Rathod was looking up the murders that had happened on the same day in Pune when Kabir Ahuja was murdered, he was subconsciously tapping his feet on the floor under his desk. He was both excited and nervous. He had just been told by Siya about t
he possible theft of the floppy disk. Rathod had been a cop for more than a decade and he had developed an innate sense to know when things were starting to unravel.

  He shifted his focus back to the task at hand. According to police records, there had been just two other murders on that day in Pune. One was of a man who had cheated on his wife and the wife had pushed him from the balcony of their house. It was a straightforward case as the neighbours heard the fight, placing the couple in the house when the murder had taken place. The wife was serving time in jail. Rathod was sure that it had nothing to do with Kabir Ahuja.

  The second murder was tricky, because it was eventually ruled out as not a murder. A forty-seven-year-old man had been found dead by the side of a road with his wrist slit. All cases of suicide had to be reported to the police. They had found it odd that someone would kill themselves in a public area. Most suicides were extremely personal. The place where this body was found was far away from Kabir’s farmhouse. But his farmhouse was in the middle of nowhere. The case file told Rathod that the guy’s name was Shikhar Kunthe. The police had explored the angle of murder because Kunte’s life seemed to have no problems. Plus, there was no suicide note. They also felt it was their duty to explore all angles as Kunthe was one of their own. He was a junior officer at a police station in Mumbai, who was visiting his extended family in Pune.

  It could not be a coincidence, Rathod thought. It was a different police station than the one that was investigating Sheena Ahuja’s murder. But still, it was the same day as when Kabir had died. He needed to know if there was a link. He took the file and went to the basement to the forensics department.

  ‘Can you look up this case?’ Rathod said to Dr. Murali Murthy, Sonia’s temporary replacement.