“Ragini Sharma accepted you back?” asked Santosh.
She nodded. “A bitch she may have been. But she took me back when I had no home. I owed her for that at least.”
“And then?” pressed Nisha.
“I became one of her best-earning girls,” recalled the madam. “I was often sent to take care of her special political friends too. She welcomed me with open arms... so long as she knew I’d welcome new customers with open legs!”
“What prompted her to enter politics?” asked Santosh.
“She was especially close to someone high up in the government. She was soon serving the needs of several other politicians. I suppose it’s possible that she called in a favor,” replied the madam with a yawn.
She leaned and spat betel-nut mulch into her spittoon, the interview over.
On their way back down the creaking stairs they passed Mr. Blow Job, still nursing his swollen nuts and bruised ego. As they left the depressing and hopeless place and made their way toward Grant Road, they each privately breathed a grateful sigh of relief.
“It is said that politics is the second-oldest profession in the world but that it bears a close resemblance to the oldest,” said Santosh. “It seems that Ragini Sharma mastered both.”
Chapter 66
“You’re not going to like this,” said Mubeen, entering Santosh’s office.
“Go ahead,” replied Santosh. “I’m a big boy.”
“The hair we found on Ragini Sharma’s pillow? I was able to extract DNA from the root. I then ran it against several databases. I ended up with a match, but you’re not going to believe whose it is,” said Mubeen anxiously.
“Given that the root was intact,” said Santosh, “I would have expected the hair to belong to the victim, Ragini Sharma.”
Mubeen handed over a single A4 printout to him: details gleaned from a database at the...
“India Fertility Clinic and IVF Center?” Santosh started. “You found a match using a hacked database?” Mubeen had been right. He didn’t like it.
Mubeen shrugged. “There’s no national database, so...”
“You hacked.”
“It’s called cooperation, not hacking,” replied the medical examiner defensively.
Santosh shook his head then looked at the printout once again. Sure enough, they had a match. The DNA from the hair found on Ragini Sharma’s pillow — it belonged to a clinic sperm donor.
“There’s something else you need to know,” said Mubeen.
Santosh looked up from the printout. “Yes?”
“In the entire series of killings we only found two DNA samples — the hair on Ragini Sharma’s pillow and the saliva on Elina Xavier’s eyebrow. We thought we had a possible third sample under Ragini Sharma’s fingernails because she seemed to have fought back, but the material turned out to be dirt.”
“Go on,” said Santosh curiously.
“I expected the DNA from the hair to match the DNA from the saliva on Xavier, given that both murders were apparently committed by the same killer,” continued Mubeen.
“They’re not the same?” queried Santosh.
“They’re not,” replied Mubeen. “But they are related.”
Santosh’s eyes traveled down to the bottom of the page. Saw the name there.
Nalin D’Souza.
Chapter 67
The property was long abandoned, its grounds so mud-soaked and choked with weeds that she was forced to park the car by the side of the deserted road and cover the last mile on foot.
And she wished that time wasn’t against them, and that she could have made this trip in the daylight hours.
Ahead of her loomed the crumbling building, painted gray by the moonlight. The roof had caved in, she realized as she came closer. The rear of the building seemed to have been burned down, the walls black with the marks of an inferno. All the windows were either cracked or covered in a thick coat of dust and grime. Behind them was utter darkness and a strange eeriness.
A solid door made from Burma teak had been subjected to years of adolescent graffiti. A rusted chain and padlock held it shut and a couple of speckled lizards stood guard on the smooth stone framing the teak. Nisha’s torch beam sent them scurrying for cover as it illuminated a faded signboard above the door.
Bombay City Orphanage, it said, and below that in smaller letters: ESTABLISHED 1891 BY THE SIR JIMMY MEHTA TRUST. She snapped a picture of it with her smartphone.
There was part of her that wanted to turn away from this sinister place. It dredged up memories of her own childhood, of a dead mother and an absent father. Adopted by a loving couple with strong middle-class values, she had been well educated and her adoptive parents had supported her endeavor to join the police force. But privately she always felt the absence of her biological parents.
Anyway. Enough. She shrugged off the memories to focus on the task at hand.
Would there be anything worth examining inside the ramshackle place? She could almost hear her own thoughts in the ominously silent ruins of the neglected establishment. Except for the chirping of crickets there was no sound to be heard, the nearest dwellings over a mile away. The land that had been donated to the orphanage trust was along the fringes of the long stretch of dark and forbidding mangroves that bordered Malad Creek.
She didn’t have a warrant but given the building’s state of disrepair she decided to take her chances and picked a rock from the ground to hammer against the rusting padlock. The blows reverberated in the stillness, shattering the creepy calm, and the rusted lock fell with a clunk to the porch floor.
Taking a deep breath, Nisha kicked open the door then slipped inside, listening. All was quiet.
So how come she had the feeling that she wasn’t alone?
She ran her flashlight beam over what turned out to be a colonial-style entrance lobby. Years of neglect had resulted in a heavy layer of dust everywhere and she brought a kerchief to her face as she moved the light. To her right was a doorway leading to smaller office rooms; to her left empty hooks and patches of fading plaster spoke of pictures removed from the wall.
In front of her was a wide staircase leading to the floor above. She stepped toward it, then jumped as startled pigeons suddenly took to the air, the flapping of their wings loud as explosions in the damp silence.
Her heart hammered in her chest and she fought to control her breathing, almost laughing. She decided that if it came to a straight choice between a drunk demanding a blow job and pigeons, she’d take the drunk any day.
Now she took the steps, gingerly, praying the creaking floorboards wouldn’t give way. She reached the first floor where a large room was filled with old rusting bed frames. Once upon a time it would have been a dormitory filled with children — children with no parents. Children like her.
Lost in thought, she didn’t sense what was behind her until it was too late, and a blow from behind sent her sprawling to the floor.
Chapter 68
Surrounded by his entourage, the Attorney General made his way across the plaza outside the courtroom of the Chief Justice with an almost majestic swagger.