“So what happened to the child?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe Lara just kept her out of the limelight and Aditi Chopra is living with a husband and kids somewhere nice, enjoying the good life.”
“Maybe,” said Santosh doubtfully. “And maybe not. Our victims seem to specialize in double lives. I’ve just been looking at the Mumbai crime records and it turns out that Devika Gulati is not what she seems either. She spent several years in prison on account of drug charges.”
“Really?” Nisha gasped, trying to marry the two images. On the one hand, a jailbird. On the other, the diaphanous, model-like creature she’d just met.
What’s more …
“She’s friends with the Attorney General,” added Nisha.
“Now there’s a name that keeps cropping up.”
“Exactly. He’s her alibi for the night.”
“And she is his.”
“You think she’s covering for him?”
“It’s possible,” said Santosh. “I tell you what. Go back in there, confront her with what we know about her criminal record, and that name—Aditi Chopra—put it to her.”
“Got it,” she said.
“And Nisha?”
“Yes?”
“Be careful.”
“Will do, boss.”
Chapter 85
SANTOSH WAS THOUGHTFUL when he ended the call, his pulse quickening, feeling that familiar buzz—not of having cracked the case, but of being about to. A sense of the pieces falling into place.
He stood and leaned on his cane as he limped over to the magnet board. He’d kept it updated since the first two murders, record cards bearing the victims’ names, placed in the order in which the bodies had been found. There had been an average of one a night for the past seven nights. And if he was right, and the murders were an obscene caricature of the goddess Durga, then there would be two more, an eighth and a ninth victim. Tonight and tomorrow night.
Connections, he told himself. Look for connections.
Moving over, he gazed at the name Lara Omprakash. Her tattoo made her the only victim with a direct connection to the goddess Durga. The fact that she’d had a baby—this Aditi Chopra—might or might not be significant.
Double lives. Victims with double lives.
He moved the name Lara Omprakash to one side, placing it at the top of the right-hand side of the board.
What if Lara Omprakash had her child, Aditi, but for whatever reason had given the girl up? Where might she have taken the girl?
To an orphanage? He reached for the name Elina Xavier, taking it out of the victims’ order and adding it to the new one on the right-hand side.
But the orphanage had been gutted during the Mumbai riots, and the orphans presumably turned out onto the streets, where they would have been easy prey for pimps and human traffickers. People like …
Ragini Sharma, perhaps?
He stood gazing at what was looking less like a roll-call of victims and more like the beginning of a life story, wondering if he was on to something or if it was just the workings of a tired and overactive imagination—
“Ahem,” came a voice from the door.
Santosh snatched for his cane as he whirled, seeing Rupesh in the doorway.