AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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.
They were the four symbols—discus, mace, conch, and lotus—of the ninth and final form of Durga, Siddhidatri.
She felt a stinging on her upper back, the prickly sensation of surgical tape, and knew at once that her RFID chip had been removed. The bitch had taken it out while she was under.
Okay, okay, keep calm. They couldn’t locate her using the RFID chip but they could trace her—
Laid out on the bed by her hip was her cell phone, the battery placed neatly on top.
Bitch.
Instead Nisha tried to figure out her location by taking note of her surroundings. Above her were ominously high ceilings criss-crossed by rafters of rusting metal. She seemed to be in a massive industrial space, the hard concrete floor on all sides of the bed stretching into infinity, meeting up with exposed brick walls containing vast boarded-up windows. Huge ducts and pipes ran overhead, giving the place a creepy feel. A single naked bulb hung on a wire from an ancient beam overhead, casting an eerie glow over the bed, itself incongruous in the warehouse-like space.
She fought back tears as she remembered her adoptive parents, her husband, and her daughter. She tried not to think about them, but couldn’t help herself.
Four arms. A four-poster bed. A discus, a mace, a conch, and a lotus.
She’d been laid out here to die.
Chapter 97
COME ON. COME on.
The story of Aditi’s life was forming on the board in front of him but still there were names left: Priyanka Talati, the doctor, the journalist.
“How did they piss you off, Aditi?” mumbled Santosh. “Why did they deserve to die?”
And what connected them?
Okay. Cell phone records showed that Dr. Jaiyen and Bhavna Choksi had spoken to each other. In fact, they’d spoken to each other several times on the day of Dr. Jaiyen’s death. The next day, Bhavna Choksi was also killed.
“So was it something they were cooking up between them?” Santosh asked an empty room.
Dr. Jaiyen had been in Mumbai on a personal matter, according to her colleague in Thailand, Dr. Uwwano. Maybe she was mixing work with pleasure, granting an interview to the journalist at the same time.
“Boss?”
Hari startled him, skulking in the doorway.
“Sorry, Hari, come in.”
