Silent Fires, page 7
He was looking directly at Ashish, who wanted to tear Arun’s eyeballs out for that smugness in them. “Thanks for your hospitality,” Ashish managed to mutter. Arun’s smile clawed at his stomach.
“Your team must be so tired,” Arun said as if sympathetic, “Never have I seen such a meticulous and long search.”
“We didn’t want to miss out on anything,” Ashish said shortly.
“Dig in, team,” Arun smiled graciously at everyone.
Ashish nodded at his hungry team. Bharath grabbed the papad cone before Arun could finish his sentence. The rest of the team tucked into their food but Ashish was too exasperated to swallow anything.
“We’re taking her laptop and a few doodle books we found,” Ashish said wanting the topic to stay on business.
“Of course,” Arun said. “I hope you can bring them back to me when you’re done. Her doodle books mean a lot to me.”
Ashish promised himself that he would find more clues inside that book than he did in this godforsaken ghastly bungalow with its endless rooms and corridors. He’d carefully ransacked ten bedrooms, three living rooms, a home theatre room, two kitchens, two dining areas, four outdoor areas, a gym, two storage rooms and the entire servant quarters. There was also a large library, where he had inspected every little bookshelf to make sure it wasn’t actually a secret cupboard. Arun was probably given ample warning in advance to hide whatever he wanted to, Ashish thought to himself in disgust.
“What’s the next step of action?” Arun asked. Maybe he didn’t mean any harm but Ashish quickly sensed a tone of authority, as if he was trying to take over the situation.
“We have a few leads from the lake site,” said Ashish ambiguously.
“What are they?” probed Arun.
Ashish noticed that the team had stopped chewing. They had probably sensed something hot and heavy charging their way. They were right, of course.
“I have communicated it to the DCP,” said Ashish.
Arun sipped on his hot tea thoughtfully. He looked up. “See, I am not your enemy.”
“Didn’t say you were,” Ashish looked around at his team. “Shall we leave?”
“Yes, and it was a waste, wasn’t it?” Arun said, unexpectedly. It was as if he had been holding back this whole time. The actor’s face had become contorted with anger. Ashish felt it made Arun look ugly.
Ashish smiled, as if he had been expecting the outburst, “Not really. I found what I was looking for but I don’t see the need to share this with you,” he lied at once.
Arun took a deep breath, “Look, I am not angry that you searched my house. I am angry that are wasting the time that you could be using to find her.”
Ashish shrugged and signalled for his team to leave. As they bundled out, the irate Arun continued, “God knows… if you’d followed any right leads, you might have found her by now.”
“Yeah, I am sure if this was a movie, you’d have found her on the first day. Rescued her while you flew your helicopter, maybe?” Ashish’s reply was swift and as intended, deeply damaging. Kishore’s snort grabbed everyone’s attention.
Arun looked like someone had whacked his beautiful face. “Excuse me?” he said in disbelief.
“Just saying,” Ashish said, as his team watched with bated breath.
“Are you insulting me and my work?” Arun marched up to him slowly, intimidatingly, till he was a few inches away from Ashish. He was much taller than Ashish, and looked down at him in a very pointed way.
Ashish didn’t budge. He stared back unblinkingly at him before answering coolly, “Just like you insulted me, my work and my team.”
“My wife is out there and this is not the time to act petty with me,” whispered Arun.
“Exactly,” said Ashish. He spun around on his heel. “Let’s concentrate on our respective jobs.”
The rest of the team clambered into both jeeps. Arun was left on his porch, open-mouthed and aghast.
The team was well-aware that Ashish’s ardous display of cool and calm was going to blow up in their faces in some time. They decided to keep shut for the rest of the day and do only what they were told.
Back at the station, Ashish antagonized over the Santro – the only real lead they had so far. He set the air on fire with pressure.
“Sir,” said Kishore. “We have shortlisted it to two Santros. I have the CCTV footage of both.”
“Bring it to my desk,” Ashish ordered, sitting down on his chair. “Bharath, tea. Strong tea.” He sat there, rubbing his temples. He observed Kishore taking the laptop to another room and decided to follow him.
Ashish saw Manav and Kishore hunched over the laptop, checking something with interest.
“What are you doing?” His booming voice startled both of them.
“Sir, your footage is being copied. Will bring it over to your desk,” said Kishore. “Two minutes.”
“But what are you doing here?” Ashish walked over to take a look.
“Sir, Manav sir – I mean, Manav also asked me for some CCTV footage…” Kishore’s voice trailed off. “So…I got it for him.”
Turning the laptop towards Ashish, Manav smiled and pointed at the screen, “Anna, I found something. Just wanted to double check, that’s all. Look.”
Ashish didn’t look. He was staring at Manav, who seemed to be running things on his own. Ashish couldn’t believe his audacity. Manav continued, “I’ve gone through three cameras’ footage from Arun’s neighbouring street. The car that dropped her off, the one that Sukruthi was driving, is parked here for ten minutes. After they dropped her off. Isn’t that odd?”
Ashish was taking deep breaths, his eyes flitting between Manav and Kishore. He felt anger rising to his throat. He wanted to throw the laptop across the room. Manav switched to footage of the three cameras while he spoke, “See the time they dropped her off and – “
“Maybe she needed to answer a phone call and didn’t want to talk and drive,” said Ashish.
“Anna – “
“Whatever this is, it has to go through me first,” Ashish cut him off abruptly.
Manav fell into silence, blinking at his brother. Ashish could see from Manav’s crumpling face that he had probably expected a little pat on the back for his effort. He wondered if he had overindulged Manav. The air in the small room balled up into stiff discomfort very quickly.
Kishore tried to leave the room so that the brothers could disagree with each other privately but bumped into Bharath who was cluelessly entering the room with a tray of tea and biscuits for Ashish. Kishore made warning eyes at Bharath but before the pair could exit, Ashish, who noticed them both, barked, “You both stay. Where are you going?”
Ashish knew that sometimes a statement was more effective in front of a larger audience. He didn’t see the point in disciplining anyone privately.
He turned to Manav and narrowed his eyes, “I am still in charge, alright?”
Manav who towered over Ashish height-wise, slouched awkwardly. “I got that, Anna,” he muttered, staring at the floor. “I was trying to help.”
“It’s of no help if we disrupt hierarchies.”
“I thought you hated hierarchies,” mumbled Manav.
“What did you say?” Ashish snapped. He glanced at Bharath and Kishore, both of whom were staring at Manav, their eyes full of sympathy. They both looked away hastily when they saw Ashish glaring at them. Manav swallowed and bowed his head, a wave of shame rising up his face. “Nothing, Anna,” he said. “I’ll be more careful the next time.”
The anger which had pent up inside of Ashish just wouldn’t go away. It had started out as despair at the end of the search at Arun’s house and had mutated into something wild. He turned to Kishore, breathing angrily, “And you. Tomorrow he will ask you to give him a gun and kneel down. You’ll do it?” Ashish had always felt Kishore lacked a sense of responsibility. He was a pushover.
Kishore hung his head. “No, sir.” Ashish saw Manav look at Kishore regretfully. Ashish left the room and his men followed him without a word.
From inside the room, Manav heard Ashish’s trailing voice, “Why is it taking so long to narrow in on one god-damn car?”
“Sir, we’ll find it by the end of today,” Kishore was saying to him in a blank voice.
“And also, the forensic reports are ready. We shall go there in person to collect them,” Ashish was saying. “Stuti, come.”
Once the voices had faded away, Manav felt the heat on his face finally cool off. He slowly picked up his phone and pulled out the card that Rupa had given him.
“Hey, can we meet?”
The RKS forensic lab was a part of an old two-storey building spread across a large green campus. The building also housed several government-run research departments. It was in a fairly busy area of the city.
The pathologist, Dr. Mala Lakshmi, was an old friend to Ashish. They had gone to high school together and had always been on good terms.
Now, they shared a professional relationship; she was Ashish’s go-to for highly sensitive cases. She had always been reluctant but Ashish felt her lab was perfect; RKS was an unassuming, small lab in a highly populated area so Ashish was confident that no one would try and infiltrate data here. Besides, he always stationed two of his constables outside the lab premises to keep an eye out for intruders.
In hindsight, Ashish would always wonder if he should have kept more men in-charge of protection because of all the powerful people involved in this particular case.
Ashish could tell something was wrong as soon as they entered the building. There was smoke in the corridors and everyone was rushing out of their rooms.
“Call the fire department immediately,” he said to Stuti and Kishore. “I will go upstairs and you guard the gate.”
Ashish pulled fire extinguishers off the walls as he went, heading straight to the source of the smoke. He saw his constables, limping and injured. “Sir…” they mumbled in embarrassment.
“Evacuate everyone! Evacuate now!” he ordered his constables as he broke into a run. One of them pressed a surgical mask into his hands. He leapt up the stairs. by the time he reached the lab, he was cradling three extinguishers in his arms. He quickly doused the growing flames.
He charged across room, searching for Mala and her assistant. He pulled out the second extinguisher. Once the flames were out, he heard thumping on the storage room door. He immediately kicked it open.
The assistant crawled out, coughing, his face red. Mala was on the floor, unconscious. Ashish pulled her out without wasting another second. The assistant staggered to his feet and let out a raspy little groan. “Everything’s been burnt!” He stammered, blinking in disbelief. “The laptop is gone…”
It was difficult to tell the perpetrator apart from the crowd of employees filing out of the building. Some of them were leaving the gate, making phone calls. Stuti tried to send them back inside and close the gate.
“Stay where you are! No one exit the premises!” she shouted. Gripped by tension and confusion, the crowd moved around in a helter-skelter fashion while she tried to control them.
Kishore scanned through everyone quickly but since everyone wore lab coats, it was difficult to pick anyone out.
By now, a crowd of people and vehicles were forming outside on the streets. Curious onlookers were slowing down to see what the commotion was all about. A traffic jam was building up.
“Kishore!”
Stuti was charging down the footpath outside already, in hot pursuit of a tall burly man in a hurry. They tore through the gaps between the jammed vehicles. Kishore lagged behind. The man was nimble on his feet despite his large structure. He moved in zig-zags to slow Stuti down but she soon caught up with him.
He ducked into a narrow road and pulled out a gun. Stuti threw herself behind a parked bus and aimed her gun at his feet. But a second before she could shoot, a bike came ripping into the street. The miscreant scrambled onto the bike and made off. Stuti took a shot at the bike but it ricocheted off the guard of the bike. Passers-by began screaming.
“Get down!” she told them but they only ran in every direction they could. She put her gun back into her holster and let out an exasperated sigh.
Ashish laid Mala on the grass and pushed onlookers away so she could have air to breathe. He caught a glimpse of Kishore pushing through the crowds. “Didn’t you find anyone?”
A minute later, Stuti appeared along with him, ashen-faced and still. “Sir, he escaped. On a bike. It was planned.”
“You saw him?”
“He was wearing a surgical mask,” said Stuti tonelessly as if expecting what Ashish was going to say next.
“You let him get away,” Ashish said to her, a heat rising through his face. “What’s the use of bringing you here?”
He saw Kishore stare at the floor, drawing circles on the ground with his toes. But Stuti wouldn’t even keep her head down like that. She stared right back at him, as if disputing him, her eyes challenging him.
“Dismissed,” he growled at her. “Go back to the station. Kishore, did you call the ambulance?”
CHAPTER NINE
Lake Site Again
When Rupa arrived in front of Manav’s apartment, he began having second thoughts. She waved at him and leaned over to the window, “Get in! Let’s go for a drive.”
Manav swallowed. He wasn’t an impulsive person; he didn’t just hop into strangers’ cars and drive off with them without asking questions.
“I was thinking you could just come upstairs,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound weird inviting a woman he hardly knew up to his apartment.
“I want to show you something. Come on,” she said, urgently.
After a moment’s hesitation, Manav stepped into the car. It smelt of mint and beer apart from Rupa’s strong perfume. She took off at once.
Manav was all for speeding on the roads but he felt she drove carelessly, breezing past signals and cutting through lanes. She kept changing the radio station and drumming her fingers on the wheel.
“So, you just call women up to your place like that?” she chuckled after a few minutes of silence. “Is that a thing?”
Manav smiled, “And you call men to come for a drive off to nowhere. Is that a thing?”
She laughed. “You could be an axe-murderer with an intricate murder setup waiting for me upstairs.”
“There is no part of my house that’s intricate,” he snorted. “Plot twist, you are driving me to the intricate setup.”
She roared with laughter. The drive was very casual. She even allowed him to smoke in the car but spoke in length the whole time. Her presence felt somewhat crowded, drowning out Manav’s own thoughts from his head with her loud ones. But after a few minutes, he got used to it.
She spoke about her job as a reporter very matter-of-factly. “I’m not in crime anymore,” she said. “I moved to lifestyle. But the department still hooks me up with cases some times. I wrote to the head saying I know these people so he assigned this to me.”
Rupa seemed like a woman who wore her shoes well. She appeared like a resourceful woman, tempered with the kind of unabashed grit that one often saw on serious journalists. She had questions about Manav and his work, about his relationship with Ashish. He brushed them off with short monotone replies, wondering how someone he hardly knew could be this inquisitive.
Only when they reached their destination did they actually get down to discussing the details of the Shravya case.
“We’re at the… the lake,” said Manav trying to hide his surprise. Light had fallen, making the lake site looked eerie in the darkness.
She slowed the car down a few feet away from the water body, the tyres crunching on the gravel. “Yes, here we are.”
The site was deserted. The waters were completely still. The trees rustled, casting ghostly shadows on the surface of the lake. Manav shivered.
“These crime scenes are always that much scarier in the night,” he said, pulling his arms around himself. “Aren’t they?”
“Are they?” Rupa looked around vaguely.
“Admit it,” said Manav.
She stepped forward, her eyes flitting across the light poles that were spread around the circumference of the site. “It’s not a crime scene,” she said bluntly. “No crime happened here. If only your brother bothered to look properly.”
“What makes you think he didn’t?” he turned defensive.
“He won’t listen. I already tried reaching out to him,” she said. “He doesn’t want to hear anything that goes against his pre-conceived conclusion. He’s always been like that, hasn’t he?”
Manav shrugged his shoulders. “And it’s worked for him. I can’t think of a single case so far where he wasn’t right.”
“Then why are you here?” Rupa shot back without missing a beat.
Manav almost bit his tongue. He stayed quiet for a couple of seconds and added in a low voice, “I said so far.”
“Check out those markings on those light poles,” said Rupa pointing to circular markings on top of the pole, bright grooves that suggested that something had been perched in that position for some time. “I would say that there were CCTVs there but have been removed recently.”
“If they removed cameras, then doesn’t it mean that something happened here?” Manav asked.
“Or maybe something didn’t and they just want you to think it did. I mean look where they apparently found the Kurti,” Rupa pointed at an old tree stump, her tone derisive when she said the word ‘apparently’.
“Are you saying the police didn’t find anything there?” Manav frowned.
“No, I’m saying it seems to have been found at a very convenient spot. Like it was…” she paused for effect, “…planted there. After the first day you were here. How come you didn’t see the Kurti on the first day?”
Manav blinked at the tree stump and tried to rack his brain for memories of their first visit to the site. She did have a point because the site had been swarming with police officers that day. Someone would have noticed a bloodied Kurti crumpled up near it. Or would they have? His mind played tricks on him. Those rotting bodies had sucked in everyone’s complete attention. The Kurti was coffee-coloured, after all, perfectly blending with the sandy gravel of the ground. It was entirely possible they’d simply missed it.
