And he was still screaming as a second, and then a third vulture moved in, excited by the stink of fresh meat, and Santosh pulled himself away from the edge, the screams ringing in his ears as the vultures continued to feed.
Chapter 94
It was two in the morning, and Yoga Sutra was a hive of police activity. Overall control of the crime scene had been given to Private, and Santosh and Jack stood over the body of Devika Gulati. She wore her loose kurta pajama practice clothes and her neck had the familiar yellow garrote tied around it.
There was no Nisha, which on the one hand was good news, because there was no second body. But on the other hand, it was bad news. It meant the killer had Nisha and she would die that night, the ninth victim.
And yet her death would be a footnote if the Mujahideen’s attack went ahead.
“Oh God, Santosh, you look like shit,” said Jack.
Santosh looked at him, his eyes tired and haunted behind his glasses. “You should have seen me before my shower,” he said.
He’d been home to change. The bottle of Johnnie Walker had called out to him and he’d looked at it, known it would blot out the screams of Rupesh and the image of Isha in his arms.
But instead he’d chosen Nisha. He’d chosen Mumbai.
“I’ve spoken to Commissioner Chavan,” said Jack, his hands in his pockets. “The Rupesh business. They’re going to recover his body and obviously they’ll be launching a full investigation, but they’ve agreed to leave it twenty-four hours before they pull you in.”
Santosh nodded, grateful, as Jack added, “For what it’s worth, the Commissioner was not exactly blind to what Rupesh was doing. He told me as much over our round of golf. Truth be told, I arrived in Mumbai earlier at his specific request. I think you’ll come out of it well. Meanwhile the Commissioner assures me we have the full cooperation of the cops to find Nisha. You know Nisha — to know her is to fall in love a little bit and all these guys,” he gestured behind them at the cops moving in and out of the studio, “they all know her. Anything you want, Santosh, you shout.”
“A trace on her cell phone?”
“Done. But no dice. You need a working battery in the phone and either Aditi’s removed it or it’s flat.”
“And her RFID chip?”
Jack looked uncomfortable.
“What, Jack?”
“It’s inoperative,” said Jack quietly.
“And what does that mean?”
“It means Aditi’s probably cut it out.”
“Fuck”
There was a long pause as both men banished thoughts too terrible to contemplate.
“What about the other thing?” said Santosh in a lower voice. “Any news?”
Jack shook his head, spoke into his lapel. “Not yet. Old contacts at the Agency are working on it, but the problem is...”
“There isn’t much to go on. An international target in Mumbai...”
“It could be any one of a hundred.”
Santosh closed his eyes, wanting to open them and for it all to have been a nightmare. “Then we need to squeeze Munna. Nimboo Baba.”
Jack looked pained. “They’ll deny it, and we have nothing to connect them to it, apart from street gossip and the word of a bent cop who’s currently passing through the digestive systems of several vultures on Malabar Hill.”
“The killer,” said Santosh thoughtfully, waving the tip of his cane at the corpse by their feet. “Aditi Chopra. She’s the key to all this. If we can take her we can use her as leverage with Baba and Munna.”
Jack clapped him on the shoulder. “Then find her, my friend. Find her.”
Chapter 95
And then, much as it hurt him, much as he hated to be inside when he should have been out combing the streets for Nisha, Santosh went back to the Private HQ, recalled Mubeen and Hari too, then retired to his office — where he closed the door, picked up the phone, and dialed Nisha’s home.
Sanjeev Gandhe became very silent when he realized his wife’s boss was calling. “I’m afraid to inform you Nisha is currently missing, whereabouts unknown,” Santosh told him.
He was some kind of stockbroker type, Santosh knew. “Oh God,” he said in a small voice. “Is it something to do with the case she was working on, the strangler?”
“Mr. Gandhe, I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say, but you can be reassured we are doing everything we can to find her.”
He wished he were as confident as he hoped he sounded. But getting off the phone, he put his head in his hands as though to massage his brain into life and all he could see were vultures tearing at skin, Isha in the arms of Rupesh, Pravir wanting him to see his high score.
Think, dammit, think.
Devika’s face had been whitened with talcum powder and in one hand she had been made to clutch a small drum, the sort of instrument used by street performers all over India. She’d been made to look like the eighth avatar of Durga — Mahagauri, who was always depicted with a fair complexion and holding a drum.
Which meant that the ninth would incorporate references to the discus, mace, conch, and lotus.
Great. They knew what to expect when they found Nisha’s corpse. The trouble was the Durga reference had no bearing on the location of the crime. At their home, at their place of work — it was all the same to Aditi. The one difference being she was holding Nisha captive.
Aditi was Nimboo Baba’s lover: “So where did the happy couple meet?” mused Santosh. “Where did you go to, Aditi? From the arms of Lara Omprakash into the clutches of Elina Xavier at the orphanage, and then...?”
There was a knock at the door. Hari stood there — a reduced Hari, his shoulders stooped, his eyes averted, a shadow of the beefy, muscular guy he’d been.
“Hello, Hari,” said Santosh, wishing that he could speak to him, wishing there was something he could say — something to ease the pain of his ordeal.
“I’ve got something, boss,” Hari said, unable to meet Santosh’s eye.
“Tell me.”
“You asked me to check the name Aditi Chopra against clients represented by Anjana Lal when she was just a lawyer, not a judge.”
Santosh looked at him. “Yes? And?”
“Anjana Lal represented her.”
“Brilliant.” Santosh hobbled excitedly over to the magnet board and his fingers moved names around, completing another section. “Look, the story continues: after leaving the orphanage Aditi fell into the clutches of Ragini Sharma, where we can assume she was forced into prostitution.
“She’s busted by Nisha. Then represented by Anjana Lal, except Anjana Lal obviously fails her...” he moved names, “and she goes to prison, where... Does she meet Devika Gulati? Does she meet Munna? Hari, I need to know if those three shared jail time. Can you get that for me?”
“I think so, boss,” said Hari from the door. He hadn’t moved over the threshold.
“My bet is they shared jail time, but for some reason Devika Gulati fell foul of Aditi, whereas Munna did not. Perhaps it was Munna who introduced her to Nimboo Baba. They became lovers. What do you—”
He turned, but Hari had gone.
Chapter 96
The clouds in her head drifted slowly away. The world gradually re-formed. And Nisha woke. Her jacket and sneakers had been taken, but otherwise she was clothed. White T-shirt and jeans.
She lay tied to an ancient, rusted four-poster bed, the kind of thing that looked as though it had been reclaimed from a dump site, her wrists and ankles secured to each corner using yellow scarves. She struggled. Then stopped and gasped as she saw what was attached to the posts by her hands and feet: a plastic frisbee was nailed by one hand, a rubber mallet with a rounded head hung near the other. On the posts near her feet were tied a conch and a lotus.