“Kanya Jaiyen was killed between eight and ten on Sunday night,” answered Mubeen. “This can be further narrowed down by the CCTV footage, which showed the suspected killer going into her room at eight fifty-one and leaving at two minutes past nine.”
“And Bhavna Choksi?” asked Santosh.
“My medical estimate is between eight thirty and ten on Monday morning. Given the fact that the cleaning lady discovered the body at nine thirty, we can safely assume that time of death is between eight thirty and nine thirty.”
There was silence. Santosh got up from the table and began to pace the conference room, an action that made everyone else rather uncomfortable. He had an annoying habit of popping up behind them unexpectedly.
“Do you mind if I leave you for a moment?” asked Mubeen. “I was in the middle of a critical test and should have the results in a few minutes.” Santosh nodded irritably as Mubeen got up to leave the conference room.
“Why don’t we release his picture to the press?” asked Nisha.
“He is waiting for us to do precisely that,” said Santosh. “Look at the crime scenes and all the props around the bodies. Consider the fact that the second victim is a newspaper reporter. The strangler is hungry for publicity. Give the murders some extra column inches and you will see the body count increase. Yes, the body count will go up.”
“You’re right,” agreed Nisha. “It may also send the city into a panic. No one knows that there have been two women strangled in similar fashion. As of now, they are simply two unrelated murders in a city that is famous for its high crime rate. Any public disclosure could make the murderer that much more careful. We would rather have a careless perpetrator.”
“We also need to keep in mind,” said Santosh, “the possibility that the person in question may simply have been a visitor. We have no clear evidence linking them to the murder. On the whole, it’s better that we keep this under wraps.” He settled down in his chair. Within a few seconds he was up again and over behind Hari.
“For a moment,” he said, “let’s focus on the fact that both women were discovered with a variety of objects tied to their hands and feet with string.”
“I’m stumped on that one,” Nisha admitted. “A lotus flower, a dining fork, and a Viking helmet at the first scene; a rosary and a bucket of water at the second. The murderer is obviously trying to tell us something but I wish I knew what.”
“Have we contacted Dr. Kanya Jaiyen’s relatives?” asked Santosh.
“We have informed her husband in Thailand,” replied Nisha. “Her body will be sent home via a Thai Airways flight to Bangkok this evening.”
“What about the suitcase in her hotel room? Anything of importance?”
“Just personal effects—clothes, shoes, toiletries, jewelry, makeup, and medicines,” said Hari. “We found her passport, some cash, and her American Express credit card. The card had not been used in Mumbai except to guarantee her reservation at the hotel.”
“Have we checked relatives and employers of the journalist?” asked Santosh.
“No family. Just a boyfriend,” replied Nisha. “He’s an investment banker and has been out of the country for the past five days. We’ve ruled him out as a suspect. I’m scheduled to meet Bhavna’s boss at the Afternoon Mirror in the next hour.”
Mubeen strode briskly back into the conference room. “I have some important information,” he interrupted. His face was flushed with excitement. “The fiber and dye analysis that we ran on the two garrotes used for the killings. Both are made from handwoven cotton. In both, the yellow dye is a natural one that has been used for centuries in India—Acacia nilotica.”
Nisha looked questioningly at Mubeen. “What exactly do the fabric and dye tell us?” she asked.
Santosh cut in before Mubeen could speak, his encyclopedic memory having been spurred into action. “Handwoven cotton or silk—dyed using Acacia nilotica—was used by an ancient Indian murder cult called the Thugs.”
Chapter 16
“THUGS?” ASKED NISHA incredulously. “Didn’t the British wipe them out from India entirely?”
“Yes, but while it’s easy to destroy a cult,” replied Santosh, “it’s far more di
fficult to destroy the ideology that spawns it—an ideology that has thrived for five hundred years.”
“Five hundred years?” said Nisha. “I thought that the Thugs were a nineteenth-century phenomenon.”
“Actually, tales of an ultra-secret cult of killers roaming India go all the way back to the thirteenth century,” explained Santosh. “It’s just that the Thugs became famous only after the British took over India. In the 1800s India’s British rulers began getting sporadic reports of a substantial number of travelers going missing, but there was no proof to indicate that these were anything but isolated incidents of weary people becoming lost.”
“What’s your point?” asked Nisha, bemused by his historical digression.
“It was the discovery of several frighteningly similar mass graves across India that revealed the truth,” said Santosh, effortlessly recalling from memory details of the obscure group—information that no normal individual would bother to hold on to. “Each grave site was filled with the corpses of people who had been ritually massacred and buried. The uniform method of killing was strangulation with a rumaal—a yellow silk or cotton handkerchief.”
“Why strangulation in particular?” asked Nisha.
“Shedding blood was strictly prohibited. This was at the very core of thuggee belief. It was thus absolutely necessary that the murders were carried out in a perfectly bloodless manner.”