The Woman Who Vanished

by UD Yasha

  ‘I'm sorry I'm late,' Ranjit said. ‘I was stuck in a meeting. The traffic here in Pune is getting worse because of the metro construction. I can't believe what it'll be like near my house in Dadar's Shivaji Park when they start the construction there. I'll hope then as well that my work keeps taking me out of Mumbai.' He paused. ‘And a superb job with Zakkal yesterday. I don't know how you managed to crack him. People, including me, have been trying it for years.'

  ‘I got a little help from you,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you about it later.’

  ‘Right. He said that he killed his own father. That was big. There was something else he said which was equally big. When you asked him why he held his victims captive for so long, he said because he wants to show them the other side. That sounds vague on the surface of it. But it has a deeper meaning.’

  ‘I wanted to ask him what he meant by that but he said he’ll only answer one more question.’

  ‘No. I think you did great. Here’s what I think. His father was an alcoholic. Most alcoholic husbands come home and beat their wives. Zakkal, even at a tender age of eight, could not bear to see that happening. The violence he saw at home was unbearable. There was only one way to stop it. That’s why he killed his father. He could’ve easily deflected your question like he did on a number of times. The fact that he told you that means he is proud of it. He didn’t care about its repercussions.’

  Even though I wanted to let Ranjit continue, I did not want to miss Zakkal’s free time. I wanted to be there throughout. It was five minutes to five. Just as I was going to interrupt Ranjit, my phone buzzed on the table. Rathod was calling me.

  ‘Where are you?’ he said, his voice was urgent.

  Something is wrong.

  ‘I’m reaching Yerwada in five minutes. What’s the matter?’

  ‘You won’t believe what happened. Zakkal had a heart attack as they were preparing him for the free time outside.’

  The shock in my eyes made Ranjit lean forward. He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘What are they doing with him now?’

  ‘They’ve taken him to the special care unit at Yerwada. There’s a high chance they’ll move him to Sasoon Hospital in a few minutes.’

  ‘Have they confirmed if it’s a real heart attack?’ I said, knowing heart attacks could be faked.

  ‘Yes, it’s real. The doctor here confirmed it. I’m trying to get Sonia to reach Sasoon by the time we reach if we go there.’

  Silence.

  ‘What if he gets away? It’s the classic getaway move from prisons.’

  ‘I know. I asked Warden Shetty. They’ve all kinds of measures in place. They’re good at what they do, Siya. They’ve done this before. Let’s hope this isn’t the one-off instance in which the inmate escapes. Get here now. We’re waiting. Be ready to move to Sasoon,’ Rathod said and hung up.

  I stared at the phone, wondering what was happening. I had always believed Zakkal had a bigger game at play. His goal was freedom. The heart attack was too much of a coincidence.

  ‘Zakkal had a heart attack,’ I said.

  Ranjit pursed his lips. He wanted to say something but he stopped because I got up to leave.

  ‘Where do you have to go?’ he said, picking up his car keys from the table.

  ‘Yerwada.’

  ‘Don’t drive. I’ll drop you.’

  I considered. I realized then my hands were shaking. It was not a good idea to drive. I nodded.

  ‘My car’s right next to the entrance. Stay here. I’ll get your sister and her boyfriend,’ Ranjit said and bolted up the stairs.

  He emerged ten seconds later, Radha close behind him followed by Rahul who holding Shadow. Radha rushed to me. ‘He told us,’ she said and hugged me tightly. ‘Don’t worry. He has not yet escaped.’

  I tried to keep my calm. My mind kept telling me the worst was yet to happen. I inhaled deeply.

  I turned to Radha and Rahul. ‘Our car is parked further away. We’ll go with him right now.’

  We followed Ranjit to his car. He veered it out and drove as fast as he could to Yerwada. Just as we were turning for Yerwada from the main road, my phone started buzzing again. It was Rathod.

  ‘Don’t come to Yerwada. Head to Sasoon. They’re taking him there now,’ he said and cut the line.

  ‘Don’t turn,’ I screamed. ‘We’re going to Sasoon. They’re shifting Zakkal.’

  Cars honked as we changed lanes fast. Ranjit was manoeuvring the car swiftly. Ranjit took a U-Turn and pulled over a little further away on the opposite side of the road. ‘We’ll follow the ambulance taking him.’

  ‘There’ll be a string of police cars on all sides of it,’ I said.

  ‘I know. We’ll be as close as possible.’

  We first saw police cars, followed by the ambulance and then some more police cars come out from Yerwada’s lane. I recognized Rathod’s police SUV. It was last in line behind the other police cars. There were three police officers on bikes as well on either side of the ambulance. Ranjit eased into the flow of traffic and got behind Rathod’s SUV. I called Rathod and told him we were behind him. The traffic police would have been alerted because signals at some intersections had been stopped and the police were manning them. Rathod would’ve also told them that we were a part of the envoy because even we got a free pass everywhere.

  We reached Sasoon in twenty-six minutes. The police cruisers lined up, forming a semi-circle around the ambulance. A crowd had gathered, wondering what was happening. We got out of the car and left the windows open for Shadow to breathe. The ambulance door opened. Two doctors pulled out a stretcher.

  I saw Zakkal. He was unconscious on a stretcher. An oxygen mask was put on his face. I saw another doctor, holding the oxygen tank. They put the stretcher on a trolley and took him inside the hospital. He was already surrounded by five armed guards and two more doctors.

  Rathod joined me by my right elbow. We broke step together to go in. We had to jog to keep pace with Zakkal. They took him into an elevator that was already full because of the number of doctors and guards accompanying him. We took another one. More guards came with us. Zakkal’s room was going to be a fortress. As the elevator door opened on Zakkal’s floor, I felt a cool breeze flutter against my neck.

  My stomach sank.

  How could I have missed it?

  The clues had all been there. They were right in front of me all the time. Panic unfurled its wings and fluttered hard inside me. I clawed Rathod’s arm. He looked at me in alarm.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Ranjit Kadam is our killer,’ I said, realizing I had left Radha, Rahul and Shadow alone with him.

  ‘What? Ar—?’ Rathod stopped halfway through.

  I hope I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. I said to myself as I fumbled with my phone to call Radha. I tapped on her contact card. I pressed the phone hard into my ear. It beeped once, twice. I could not get through to her. My mind turned numb. How could I have missed all the clues?

  ‘I’ve dialled Rahul’s number,’ Rathod said, his eyes narrow. I waited.

  ‘His phone has been switched off.’

  A chill darted up my legs past my heart and to my neck. I shivered. Over and over again. I ran for the staircase.

  Fuck.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  How could I have missed all the clues?

  They had all followed each other and come to me in one moment of realization.

  The first clue, that triggered my thought process, was something that had I had wondered before. How had Zakkal come to know that I had defended a guilty murderer? The only people who knew were Radha, Rahul, Shama and Karan. They had seen first-hand what I had gone through. Apart from them, I had only told Ranjit. I do not remember why. It might have been in the heat of the conversation. But I remembered the exact words I had said to him. I made a mistake. I defended the wrong person. Because of that, a young girl is battling to stay alive. It really hit me hard. I took time to recover. I’m only here because I wan
t to get my mother back. I had not ventured into the details but he profiled criminals for a living. He could have figured out the rest about me. He had access to police records as he was a criminal profiler himself. Zakkal got to know about Kunal Shastri because Ranjit told him.

  I was yet to confirm my second clue. I had been trying to find a link between Supriya Kelkar and Tarla Raheja. I knew both of them had gone through medical treatments—albeit of different natures—in the past two years. Fertility consultations for Supriya and therapy sessions for Tarla. Ranjit Kadam was a certified doctor as all psychiatrists have to study MBBS. Ranjit went around the country conducting various kinds of workshops and sessions on dealing with trauma. Dealing with fertility issues was a hard phase in any woman’s life. She would have probably gone through therapy herself. With Tarla, there was a high chance that she would have been asked by her therapist to go for to one of Ranjit’s lectures. I needed to verify Ranjit’s movements between two hospitals—where Supriya and Tarla went for different treatments. I was fairly certain he would have been at both the hospitals when the women in question were visiting them. As we rushed down the staircase, I told Rathod to ask his officers to call the hospitals and check the validity of my theory.

  The third clue was the rags to riches story of Ranjit Kadam, coupled with where he stayed in Mumbai as a child. The retired cop Phadkule had said the hit and run had taken place near Shivaji Park—which is where Zakkal lived. In the café, less than an hour back, Ranjit had let it slip that he used to stay near Shivaji Park. He did not know we had spoken to Phadkule. I told Rathod again to look at Ranjit’s childhood. Did he go to the same school as Zakkal? Did he live in the same locality even when he was a kid?

  The fourth clue was how he had described Zakkal’s protégé. His words rang in my mind. It shows he’s a meticulous planner and stays cool under pressure. He’s also patient. He’s highly intelligent as well. He can hide or show his emotions to manipulate you. Throughout all my meetings with Ranjit, he was describing himself. My stomach turned to ice thinking about it. I had been talking with a deranged psychopath for all this time.

  There were other small things as well. Ranjit had told me that Zakkal had not cooperated with him when he had visited him. But the time stamps that I had seen on Zakkal’s visitor log suggested he had spent two full days inside talking to Zakkal. I had wondered what Ranjit had done for so long. There was also a spark in his eyes when he was profiling himself and Zakkal. He spoke with passion. I had been fascinated by his energy. Now, I knew where it stemmed from. He had been talking about himself. He had spoken about control so many times. I realized, in those moments, he had been controlling me by talking about control.

  Ranjit Kadam was an ideal member of society. No one had ever looked at him with suspicion. He was a doctor. He was supposed to be a bearer of life. Instead, he was a beast. I was sure we would find more missing women across his workshops and medical practice.

  * * *

  We reached the ground floor. I looked around, weaving my gaze through the crowd. Ranjit’s car was nowhere to be seen. I opened my phone and went to the ankle tracers app. Both the dots had stopped responding. How had he disabled them? Fear paralyzed me. Rathod was calling out my name and tapping my shoulder.

  ‘I just received a message from my officers. Both the hospitals confirmed that Ranjit Kadam conducted a workshop in their hospitals. Both Supriya and Tarla attended it. That’s too big of a coincidence to not mean anything else. Ranjit Kadam went to the same municipality school as Kishore Zakkal. They lived in the same chawl as well,’ Rathod said.

  My heart beat fast. We needed to act. Every moment was crucial now. We had already lost out on time. The Bedroom Strangler had taken Radha and Rahul. I turned to Rathod and said, ‘The big question is: where are they now?’

  Chapter Forty-Four

  They could have gone anywhere. The sheer enormity of the expanse of the world scared me. I focused on my breath. I had to maintain my calm. I would not be able to think otherwise. I pictured maa’s face alongside Radha’s. I counted to ten. It helped every time.

  Ranjit Kadam has been killing for a long period of time. He has gone undetected until now. He has only been caught because he changed his modus operandi to draw attention for Zakkal. I don’t know if taking Radha and Rahul was a part of Zakkal’s plan. Right now, I needed to focus on Ranjit and getting back Radha, Rahul and Shadow. Or even maa if Ranjit had taken them to where he had held her.

  I tried to get into Ranjit's mind. I wondered how long he had been killing. He had been a practising psychiatrist for over fifteen years. He had travelled a lot for work in the last few years of his life. Through his workshops and by the virtue of being a doctor, he had a potentially unlimited access to women. He was also into necrophilia. Zakkal had told me women who had been dead for a while were not Ranjit's thing but he still had sex with them when there was no one new. For that, I reckoned, he would need a place to keep all the dead bodies.

  Five years back, he also had to take in Zakkal’s women. At least five of them were alive. He probably also had to preserve the ones Zakkal had killed. Or at least make sure their hearts were well maintained. For all of that, he would have needed a lot of space and a lot of privacy.

  ‘He needs a place to keep all the women,’ I said. ‘It needs to have virtually unrestricted privacy. It also needs to be huge.’

  ‘It could be anywhere,’ Rathod said.

  ‘Even I thought so. But the privacy bit is crucial. It cannot be in the city. It needs to be away from nosy people.’

  ‘How are we going to find it though?’

  ‘The straightforward way. We look up places that Ranjit Kadam owns.’

  ‘Why would he keep women he has killed and Zakkal has kidnapped in a house that’s in his own name?

  ‘For the world, Ranjit Kadam is a peace-loving doctor. He has no reason to hide anything. He has been killing for almost two decades before being found out now. And that was only because he moved away from his original method. If he did not want to be a part of Zakkal’s plan, we would’ve probably never known Ranjit was a serial killer. The best place to hide anything is in plain sight.’

  ‘I’ll ask for details on all the properties he owns in and around Pune.’

  We walked to Rathod’s SUV as he called ACP Shukla, explaining to him what we had found. The call went on for five minutes.

  ‘He’s putting up roadblocks. An APB has been issued for Ranjit’s car. His photos are being sent across all departments. He’s also sending us the known houses Ranjit owns,’ Rathod said.

  We got in the car and waited patiently.

  ‘I did not think that Ranjit’s decision to take Radha and Rahul was premeditated. There had been too many variables,’ I said. ‘That gives me hope. With someone who has the experience of planning a murder like Ranjit, it would have been virtually impossible to trace him. This rash move gives us a chance. Moreover, he is on the defensive. He is not used to taking action without a solid plan.’

  Rathod’s phone started ringing. It was hooked up to the car’s Bluetooth system. It was ACP Shukla.

  ‘He owns four houses in total. First is in Mumbai, which is where he stays with his family. The second is in Bangalore. Both of them are apartments. The third is a farmhouse in Pune. I think this is what you’re looking for. It’s in Gahunje, which is towards the Pune-Mumbai expressway. The fourth house he owns is a villa in Mahabaleshwar. I’ve sent you the location of the farmhouse in Pune.’

  Rathod put the car in gear. The tires screeched when he veered it away from the hospital. He said, ‘Thank you. We’re heading there now.’

  ‘Backup will take time to come.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Maybe an hour to reach. Gahunje is away from the city.’

  ‘Hopefully, they'll make it on time and save us if we need help. But we cannot wait for them.'

  Silence.

  ‘You don’t know how dangerous Ranjit is or what weapons he has.’

/>   I jumped in. ‘

  ‘I don’t care. People I love are in danger. This could also be my only chance to get back my mother. I’m going in regardless of how unwise it is. I understand the risks.’

  Silence.

  ‘Go ahead. We’ll join you soon with backup. Stay careful and get that bastard,’ Shukla said.

  Rathod put up his police siren. The traffic parted for us like the sea was supposed to have for Krishna in Mahabharata. I did not know what to expect at the farmhouse. I knew Ranjit would not be stupid. There would be some kind of security presence there. We got to the neighbourhood of his farmhouse in forty minutes.

  I looked around. The land on both sides of the road was flat and sparsely occupied. Houses had large yards around them. They were so deep inside their plots that we could not see anything through the thick tree cover. The road itself was not paved. The SUV wobbled as we made our way to plot number ten. Rathod pulled over just before it.

  We stepped out and got on foot.

  Rathod threw me a bulletproof vest. I slipped into it. I pulled out my Glock. I walked behind Rathod who had taken a duffle bag from his car’s boot.

  The nameplate confirmed that the farmhouse belonged to Ranjit. I wondered if I had made the right decision coming here. Were they actually inside? Was this the place maa had been held captive since Zakkal’s arrest?

  A barbed wire fence spiralled the compound for as far as we could see. Rathod laid his duffle bag on the ground and opened it. He pulled out a large pair of scissors. He took off his shirt and held the scissors with it and began cutting the wire. Sparks flew the moment the metals touched. But we were inside in less than two minutes.