A SERIAL KILLER IN CUSTODY
By Neel Anil Panicker
Ultimately, all roads lead to Khoda, right Bose?
“Yes Sir, it’s pretty common. This place is the first port of call whenever a crime happens in a five mile radius.”
The ummarked police vehicle slowed down at the edge of a rectangular patch the size of a football field and the two men, in mufti, waited even as they kept the engine on.
Chacko lifted his high powered long range binoculars to his eyes. A 100 metres ahead, the mundanity of daily existence played out in front of his eyes. From every single narrow lane and bylane and there were dime a dozen, snaked out men and women, almost all carrying a small metal or plastic box which they swung about as they maneuvered their way past filth filled mud roads, careful not to step into the umpteen potholes and the thick slab of human and animal excreta that greeted them every alternate square inch of earth. The industrial working class up and about, thought Chacko. He watched with intent as the young, middle aged, even the old crawled out out of non-existent spaces and like ghosts made their way towards the highway that was already brimming to the full withe ubiquitous cars, two and three wheelers that are the calling cards of any big city in India.
He knew there were heading for the morning shift; heading towards NOIDA and towards its near uncountable factories. It’ was a three kilometer walk. They would reach their destinations in about 30 minutes and then stay put there and work the machines or work their hands and sweat and toil all day for the next 12 odd hours or so before trooping back to their hole in the wall hell holes to reunite with their families. Sir, this is just the morning shift. There was also an afternoon shift and a night shift ___both with the same atmospherics. It…’
‘Pardon me Sir, but how the hell do we catch our man in this veritable human deluge?”
Chacko turned and looked at his junior and wondered.
Just a year in the Crime Branch and the man had already turned pessimistic. Instant results without breaking a sweat__that’s what these newbies were always looking for.
He thought of giving Bose a lesson in hardcore detective work.
“Listen, young man, policing is 90 per cent surveillance and ten percent acting on that. In the last two days, I have burnt the midnight oil studying over 500 hours of CCTV footage. They all cover a kilometre long radius around every single murder that’s been committed in the past one week. Have also gone through over a 100 Call Detail Records (CDRs) of all phone conversations that have taken place in the vicinity of these murders. I have personally interrogated over a 100 suspects. And now…”
There was a tap on the right door.
Chacko turned around. A man, nondescript, was revealing yellowed betel stained teeth through the windshield. The gesture was meant to convey a smile but the effect was exactly the opposite.
Looking at him, Chacko’s lips curled into a smile.
He opened the back door and the man, who judging by his shaggy hairs and shabby dress and jaunt face and deep sunken eyes could be anywhere between twenty-five and fifty-five. The double whammy of poverty and ill health ensures such a predicament.
The informer had arrived.
“Namaste Saab. I know the man if he’s who you are looking for. But first my commission.”
Chacko smiled and thrust two crisp five hundred rupee notes into the man’s eagerly opened out palms.
“Look, Riaz. No bull shitting. I need him now, ok”?
A gleeful Riaz opened his mouth to say something but stopped midway. Something had caught his attention.
“Saaab…look…I think I have found what you are looking for”.
The two cops looked through the windshield, their eyes follwing the gaze of the informer.
“He’s there. The one on the left. Hands to his pockets. Can you see him, Saaab”?
Chacko lifted his binoculars and peeped through the lens that he had directed towards the third lane__the one from where the largest throng of people were trooping out. As the focus narrowed down to a group of people who wedged past one another from the left of the faded out front board of ‘Rashid Meat Shop’, he saw what he was longing to see.
First, grainy images of a young man, bearded, and with thick lips, and an oval shaped head that sported thinly cropped hair that all assembled to form a beehive at the top. Chacko held his breath and watched over for a coupe of minutes. All doubts were now allayed. His hunch had proven right. The thirty something bearded man with a stiff shoulder gait and a most peculiar walk was indeed the serial killer, the man responsible for the recent spate of killings in Delhi.
“That’s out man. Go get him.”
Within a minute of the wireless message, another six member team, also in civil dress, and stationed about fifty meters away, had swooped down and held the man.
And within seconds after that, the two unmarked cars had rolled of Khoda and were headed towards Crime Branch Office, Delhi, their prey safely tucked in between two burly and sinister looking constables.
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