Compass Box Killer Read Online Free PDF Page A

each sleeper, indicating its ownership. Virkar stood at the door, wondering which one of the sleepers was Nandu, since all of them seemed to match the broad description given to him. One of the young men on the floor opened a curious eye and lazily surveyed him. ‘Nandu?’ Virkar whispered the question, not wanting to disturb the others.
    ‘Gone,’ the half-asleep man whispered back, pointing towards an empty-looking bundle hanging from the ceiling in the far corner of the room. Deciding that he had had enough conversation for the morning, the young man rolled over and went back to sleep. For a second, Virkar felt the urge to join the sleeping men on the floor and shut his fatigued eyes briefly. He sighed, knowing he couldn’t do anything like that; instead, he would have to summon the plainclothes policemen to rudely wake up all the men and troop them down to the police station for interrogation. Tip-toeing over the men, he made his way across the room towards the hanging sheet-bundle. As he reached it, he snaked his hand between its folds, searching for anything that might provide some clues of Nandu’s whereabouts.
    His hand connected with something cold and metallic. Suddenly, his tired brain whirred back to life. Virkar looked at the familiar object grasped in his hand. It was yet another old and battered metal compass box, quite like the first one he had found at the site of Akurle’s murder. Virkar gently pried it open with his fingers, his pulse quickening. He was not disappointed; the note screamed at him in blood that seemed fresher than the one on the earlier note:
Y
ou found me. Now find Dr Prabhat Bhandari.
     

 
5
    R aashi Hunerwal was angry. She had been waiting for nearly two hours in the visitors’ waiting room at the Mumbai Crime Branch headquarters. In the five years of her remarkable career, she had become accustomed to waiting for important people—politicians, businessmen, top guns in the law enforcement hierarchy—but she didn’t expect to be kept waiting by someone as inconsequential in the pecking order as this Inspector Virkar. Clad in an expensive-looking pair of stilettos, her impeccably pedicured feet tapped on the floor impatiently. She was thirsty and hungry and desperately wanted to go the washroom, but was controlling herself fearing that the slippery Inspector could use an absence of even five minutes as an excuse to not meet her. He had been avoiding her calls for the past two days but today, Raashi was determined to buttonhole him into spilling the story, strands of which she had picked up from one of her police informants. Something big was happening on the Mumbai crime scene (at least that’s what she’d been told) and she was determined to find it, expose it and propel herself into the big leagues of TV journalism. For two years, she had been waiting on the sidelines, diligently digging up dirt on small-time domestic crimes and plastering each sordid little detail of sundry street crimes on her show
Crime Update
on the local CrimeNews channel. She was hankering to take a bite out of the big-time and was waiting to break a story that would score her the massive brownie points she desperately needed to get noticed by the big guns of the national news channels. Today was her day to hit the jackpot, she could feel it.
    As the clock passed the two-hour mark, she reached into her patent leather handbag and drew out her compact mirror and lipstick. She flipped open the compact and surveyed her sharp-featured, attractive face for the umpteenth time. Eyes: sky- blue contact lenses.
Check
. Skin: flawless.
Check
. Nose: sharp and straight enough to be called sexy.
Check
. Hair: tightly curled and hanging firmly in place.
Check
. Satisfied, she swiped the lipstick across her full lips, rendered dry by the sultry Mumbai weather and anticipation. Practicing the famous television smile that was known to disarm even the hardest heart, she decided that she was ready, as always, to plunge