STIFLED
CHAPTER SEVEN
Killing had been overwhelming.
It had not been easy. It had been tough and tiring. And draining. Even a little bit scary. But the wild rush of joy, the sense of achievement had been ecstatic. It made everything worthwhile. Most importantly, it brought back the sleep that had remained elusive until then. Deep, dreamless sleep. The kind of sleep that had been impossible for weeks -- months, really -- as the rage built and built, a pressure cooker with no valve, no release, no way to let the steam escape without something breaking. Now the steam had escaped. Something had broken, yes. But not inside. Outside. The thing that broke was another person, and the breaking had been... satisfying. More than satisfying. Necessary. Like scratching an itch that had been driving you mad, like drinking water after days in a desert, like finally, finally being heard after a lifetime of being ignored.
The bathroom mirror showed a face that was almost unrecognisable. Not because of guilt or horror -- those were feelings for people who had done something wrong, and this was not wrong, this was justice -- but because the tension that had knotted every muscle for weeks had finally released. The jaw was relaxed. The eyes were clear and bright, no longer bloodshot from insomnia and fury. The skin looked better. Even the bleeding gums had stopped. The body knew, even if the mind hadn't fully processed it yet, that something fundamental had shifted. A threshold had been crossed, and there was no going back, and the body was glad.
Mind was fresh. Time to get ready and go to work. Prisma would probably be buzzing with the news.
The thought brought a frightened frown. Would anyone know? No, of course not. How would anyone know? There were no clues left behind. Everything that was used had been brought back. The knife, cleaned and returned to its drawer. The gloves, washed and dried and folded. The clothes, run through a hot wash cycle at 3 AM, now hanging innocently on the drying rack alongside last week's office shirts. The shoes -- ah, the shoes had been a problem. Blood had seeped into the sole treads, into the tiny grooves that no amount of scrubbing could fully clean. They had gone into a plastic bag, then into the boot of the car, and would be disposed of on the way to work. Dropped into one of those large municipal bins near the market, the ones that were emptied every morning by the PMC trucks. By afternoon, they would be in a landfill somewhere, anonymous among tonnes of the city's waste.
The frown cleared. Everything had been thought of. Everything had been planned.
Killing Mira had been necessary. There hadn't been any choice. Eyes closed to relive every moment of the previous night. The shock in the bitch's eyes, the crunching sound as the rod connected with her head, the flailing of legs as the rope tightened around her neck. The knife was just to make sure. But it was the one that gave the most thrill. The sensation of the sharp blade digging into the body, messing with the organs. There had been no movement though. Mira hadn't felt the pain. The rope had done the job.
The next one would have to be planned better.
Oh, this was so much better than scaring those school girls off or threatening the mean bitches in college. This one took away a little of the hatred. It worked and was way more powerful. Yes. Power. That was what had been missing before. Not anymore though. Not anymore.
One down, two to go. One down, two to go.
Feet tapped in sync with the lyrical words as fingers grabbed and pulled a light brown shirt from the hanger.
One down, two to go-o-o. One down, two to go-o-o.
Monday morning, Sanika was humming to herself as she entered the lift and pressed the button that would take her to her floor at Prisma. She had to accept it. Her mornings were definitely better these days. Uninterrupted sleep -- well, reasonably uninterrupted. The lights and music were still on, although on a low key. But she had worked her way around it. She kept one room dark and used it for sleeping. Since she was not blaring her speakers with rock bands, the music didn't bother her. She in fact liked it. Found it soothing and relaxing.
And last but most definitely not the least, her early morning exercise regime. That morning her phone alarm had pinged at its usual time and as usual she had snoozed it. But the next moment it had started ringing. Eyes still closed, she muttered a sleepy, "'lo."
"Time for our run, Sanika Joshi. Move it," came the voice from the other end.
She had blinked and sat up. "W-what?"
"I plan to run a couple of extra kilometres today and you're coming with me. Be ready in five."
"Goddammit, Samar!"
"Good morning to you too," he had laughed. He had actually laughed at her curse before ending the call.
And she had been out of her gate in six minutes. Not bad at all, considering she had answered the nature call, brushed her teeth, changed her t-shirt, and got on her socks and shoes. They did run those extra kilometres too. But she could tell he looked tired and frustrated about something. That nasty business he'd mentioned was probably still on. She didn't press for details and he didn't offer them. Her silent companionship must have worked because by the time they stopped for some coffee at one of those roadside stalls, he had been back to his usual self. Which was a combination of a hero and a jerk.
She had felt wide awake and quite refreshed as she got ready in one of her most favourite work outfits. Cream-coloured trousers with a black full-sleeved shirt. The cuffs, when rolled up once, had the same cream colour on the inside as her trousers, and so did the inside of her collar. A tan-coloured thin belt around her waist and a black-strapped wristwatch. Oh, and thick gold earring loops. She sighed in satisfaction as she stepped into the foyer.
She was the first one at the office. She did like being the first. Getting a jump-start on the rest of the lazybones, she thought with a grin. As she walked through the foyer, she crossed paths with Patel.
"Hi Patel, how's it going?" she asked.
"Uh, what, yeah, fine, OK," he mumbled distractedly before ducking into the elevator, his fingers busy on his tablet. Her grin turned into a chuckle when she remembered Patel's notorious social awkwardness.
There was other good news that day. She had come across quite a few of her colleagues on her way to the elevators and even in the parking area. None had mentioned or even hinted at the damn video. Maybe the craziness was dying down and people had finally moved on to something new, Sanika thought, silently crossing her fingers. No nasty calls to her phone and no snide comments to her face. So far, so good.
The budget meeting took longer than usual and everyone, including the CEO, was glad when it finally ended. He was not happy, but neither was he pissed off enough to slash their paycheques in half. But no more new recruitments unless the performance and profit graphs picked up in the next couple of months. HR was so not going to be happy rescheduling and cancelling the campus interviews, Sanika thought with a grimace, as she went back to her seat.
And that reminded her that she and Mira were going to go apartment-hunting that evening. Frowning, she took out her phone. After having said her hello in their group, she had put it in silent mode and gone to the meeting. The hello was a signal that she was alive and kicking. Shruti had put on a raised-hand emoticon marking her attendance a little after that, but so far no Mira.
Frown deepening, she called her number. It rang about six times before going to voicemail. Shaking away her uneasiness, she left a message.
"Si, where are you? Call me at the first chance you get."
Her inbox popped up with a new message regarding an upcoming investors' meet, and before she knew it, it was lunchtime and still no word from Mira. But there was a message in the group from Shruti asking where Mira had disappeared.
Biting her lip, she made her way to the HR department. Mira's seat was empty and her manager had been trying to reach her since morning. Heart thudding loudly in her ears, she called Shruti.
"Shratz, Mira didn't turn up to work."
Shruti sounded equally perturbed. "I tried both the mobile and landline numbers, Su. She's not answering. Hope she didn't have an accident or something on the way to work."
"Or..." Both of them became silent as neither wanted to voice their increasing terror.
"OK, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Best-case scenario is she lost her phone and is probably stuck in traffic somewhere, or her bike gave a problem. Worst-case scenario is she had some accident and is in a hospital." Shruti said, making her way to the elevators. "I'll meet you at the canteen."
"I'm coming there. I think I'll call Samar. He might be able to help us." She ended Shruti's call and speed-dialled Samar's number. "Hey, sorry to disturb you."
"I could use a break," came his reply.
"Listen, it's probably nothing, but we're not able to contact Mira. She hasn't come to work, not picking up her phone... maybe she was in an accident or something. How do we check the hospitals and stuff? What do we do?"
"Where are you now?" He had that cop voice on. Sanika ruefully wondered if they had some kind of special training for that too. "At work."
"Shruti?"
"At work," she repeated.
"I'll check with the traffic police. Message me her complete address and I'll have someone check her apartment. Stay put until you hear from me. Don't go anywhere alone. Either of you. Is that understood?"
"Yes." Her throat worked as she swallowed. "Samar, she would be fine, right?"
"I'll let you know. Take care of yourself for me."
Samar didn't take time to think after talking to Sanika. Even as a new recruit in the police department, he'd learnt not to discount his gut, and it was screaming at him that Sanika was not overreacting. She was not the type to panic over nothing either. He swiped his finger on his phone.
"Salim, I'm sending you one address. It comes under your jurisdiction. I want you to go and check it out, but don't go alone."
Salim knew Samar long enough to not waste time asking questions. "Want me to break in?"
"If the door is not answered, then yes. Call me when you know something."
A quick check at his phone -- he saw Sanika had sent him Mira's bike name, model, and registration number. He passed them on to the traffic section and asked them to let him know of any accidents involving the two-wheeler and the woman.
Forty-five minutes after calling Salim, his friend called back. "Boss, do you know this woman?"
Samar strode towards the police jeep. "Is she alive?"
"No. Samar, it's bad. Do you know this woman?" he repeated his question.
Scribbling the area name to the driver, he switched on the sirens. "I've never met her but I've spoken to her." He slammed his fist on the dashboard. "Dammit! I told her to be careful. She is Sanika's friend." Tyres screeched and horns blared as the Scorpio cut through the traffic.
"It's been more than twelve hours is my guess."
"COD?"
"Tough to say. I've called it in. Does she have any family?"
"Her parents live in Kolhapur. She has a cousin somewhere in Pune but right now is out of town attending some wedding."
"We would need your Sanika to identify the body then," Salim said quietly. "I'll start talking to the neighbours. Ask them if they saw or heard anything."
Samar closed his eyes. Dammit! Dammit! Dammit! "I'll be there in a few."
Samar and Salim remained silent as the medical personnel shifted the body into the waiting van. Mira had lived in a single-bedroom apartment consisting of a small hall-cum-dining area, kitchen, and a bedroom with attached bath. Nothing looked out of place at first glance.
Mira had one whole wall of her hall filled with photo frames. Mira with her parents, both of them beaming with the particular pride of parents who have raised a good child. Mira with Sanika and Shruti on her birthday, probably -- cake on the table and the three of them with jaunty birthday caps on their heads and huge grins on their faces. Another one was probably during an office Christmas party. They were wearing red dresses, with their glasses raised in a toast. Another one was of the three of them in their nightwear, laughing into the camera, probably taken at Sanika's house. He recognised the furniture.
Samar and Salim looked at the markings in the hall. Her body had been laid sprawled. Samar had Mira's phone with him. He had read Sanika's and Shruti's messages in their group. The latest one from Sanika said: I've called Samar and if I know him right, he's going to have someone at your place ASAP. If you're hurt Si, sit tight. Someone will be there to help you shortly. There were a couple of missed calls from Mira's mom and a couple from someone named Karan. There was a message from Karan too, wanting to talk to her.
Dammit!
"What are you thinking?" Samar asked.
He pushed his feelings out. Just as he ignored the odour. Lots of people knew that dead bodies smelled bad. But he knew from experience that the smell varied depending on the stage of decomposition. Freshly dead but intact, they smelled of meat. Disrupted, they smelled of bowel, stomach, and bladder content. Burned, they smelled the same but with a porky barbecue tang. Decomposed, they smelled sweetly cheesy in an overpoweringly sickly, vomit-inducing way. This one was a combination of disruption and decomposition. The first time he had witnessed a similar scene, he had puked his guts out. The medical examiner had rolled his eyes and hustled him away from the mortuary. Now he was a bloody expert in tuning out his feelings along with the odour and tuning his objectivity in.
"That whoever did this, it's a first for him," Salim said. As usual, his thoughts ran similar to Samar's. They often completed each other's sentences and always had each other's backs. No matter what. That kind of trust in their profession was rare. And precious.
Samar walked around the markings, seeing the body in his mind's eye. "Head injury, knife wounds, strangulation. It's as if he couldn't decide what to do or how to kill. Hatred and rage drove him until that point but he probably didn't realise the effort it requires to actually take a life. To kill the object of his hatred."
"Yup." Salim pointed to the place beside the door. "He probably hit her on the head as soon as she closed the door behind her. Whoever it was, she knew him, opened the door for him. She fell unconscious probably, or just down on her knees. He then dragged her here--" They followed the blood trail that stopped in the middle of the hall. "Tried strangling before going for the knife. Or used the knife first?"
"Or tried the knife first, then switched to strangling and switched back to knife."
"Or strangled and later used the knife just to be sure. Or for the hell of it. We won't know until we get the postmortem report. She had her nightie on, so can't say about sexual assault."
If the bastard left any DNA on her, he was nailed. "It's going to hit Sanika hard," he muttered. "I have to tell her. She has to identify the body, notify Mira's parents... dammit! I told them to be careful. I told them..."
"Them?" Salim frowned. "Is there something I should know? This is not a small thing. The crowd within this small apartment complex has been relatively easy to handle so far but once the reporters enter the field..."
"Yeah," he could see the circus. "I'll tell everything I know tonight. Come by my house once you're done here. Meanwhile I'll handle the body identification and see if I can put a rush on the postmortem." He paused before adding, "This one might be the bastard's first, and if we don't figure out who did this soon, it won't be his last."
"Dammit, Samar, that is so not reassuring. If I have to walk up to the Commissioner and tell him that we have some kind of serial killer on our hands..."
"A killer with specific targets. For now." Because once a guy got the taste of it and started to enjoy it, he would find reasons to strike again and again until he was stopped or killed. And it didn't help his fury that one of those specific targets was the one he loved.
Both of them saw the news vans rolling down along the road. "You see to them. I'm out of here." Cap in hand, Samar strode towards the waiting jeep.
Sanika was ready to tear her hair out. Lunchtime had come and gone. Neither she nor Shruti had been able to swallow a bite. The longer Samar took in contacting her, the more she got agitated. Something was wrong. Definitely wrong. She stopped herself from calling him. If he was in the middle of saving her friend, she didn't want to distract him.
It was almost four-thirty in the evening by the time he called.
"You still at work?" he asked without bothering with pleasantries.
"Yes," she swallowed. Now he had called and she didn't want to ask. Didn't want to know.
"I'm at the Prisma car park. Beside your car. Can you and Shruti come down?"
She didn't waste time asking questions. "We'll see you there in five minutes."
Having discarded his cap, he had pulled on his black leather jacket over his uniform shirt. He was leaning against his Scorpio and straightened when Sanika burst into the basement and strode towards him the moment she spotted him. Her eyes were stark with fear as she studied his expression. He had on his cop face, an expressionless mask, but she went white.
"Tell me," she whispered in a choked voice.
He sighed and opened his arms. "I'm sorry, Sanika."
She stumbled and fell into them on a choked gasp. She clutched his jacket tight. He felt her shaking and held her tighter. "She's dead, isn't she?" she said in a trembling whisper. "Si is dead," she repeated on a choked gasp. It wasn't a question. She knew.
Sanika had cried so much her eyes were swollen almost shut. Samar simply held her tight through the storm of weeping in the basement car park of Prisma. Then she had gained a bit of control until Shruti ran up to them and it had started all over again.
Samar, this time, had gently but firmly hustled them into his jeep and told the driver to take off from the premises. He didn't want to draw attention to the women. They sat in the back while he took the seat beside the driver, held on to each other, and cried for their friend.
"W-we need to call her p-parents," Sanika's voice was thick as she fumbled for a tissue. Samar extended the box that was in the jeep. She pulled out a few and blew her nose and wiped her face. Shruti grabbed the rest to do the same.
"Is her cousin back from the wedding?" Samar asked in that quiet voice of his.
"I-I don't think so. I don't know. S-Mira said three days and we don't have her n-number."
"I need to call Runal," Shruti said, swiping the screen of her phone. "Hello, Runal?"
"I'm in a meeting," his reply was curt before he disconnected the call.
Gritting her teeth, she tapped the callback option. This time she didn't give him a chance to say anything. "I just called to say that my friend Mira is dead. We're on our way to Sahyadri Hospital now. I don't know when I'll be home."
"W-what? Shruti, wait!" But she didn't wait. Just silenced her phone and threw it into her handbag. Her friend was dead. She had no business feeling bad that her husband had no time for her. Despite everything that had gone wrong between them, she had wanted him to be with her. Wanted him to hug her and tell her that he was there, that everything would be alright.
"I have her parents' number," she said to Samar. "Should we call them? What do we tell? How do we tell?" Tears streamed down her face again. How do you tell parents that their daughter was murdered? How do you say the words that would destroy their world?
Samar's jaw tightened. "I'll make the call. Give me the number."
The identification was the hardest thing Sanika had ever done.
The hospital mortuary was cold -- not just in temperature but in the way cold places absorb human warmth and give back nothing. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with the indifference of machinery that had witnessed too much death to register it as anything other than another Tuesday.
They had covered Mira with a white sheet. When the attendant pulled it back, Sanika heard a sound come out of her own mouth -- a sound that was neither a scream nor a gasp but something animal, something that belonged to a part of the brain that existed before language.
Mira's face was bruised. There was a gash on her temple, crusted with dried blood. Her eyes were closed, and her expression was... peaceful. That was the word the attendant probably used with every family, and it was a lie. There was nothing peaceful about being beaten and strangled and stabbed in your own home by someone you trusted enough to open the door for.
"That's her," Sanika whispered. "That's Mira Patil."
Samar's hand was on her shoulder. Steady. Present. She leaned into it without thinking, without caring about appearances or propriety or the fact that a DCP's hand on a civilian's shoulder in a mortuary was not standard police procedure.
"I want to go home," she said.
He took her home. Not to Shruti's apartment, not to a hotel, not to anywhere neutral. He took her to her own house, the one with the chrysanthemums in the garden and the alarm system and the motion-sensor lights and the brass padlock on the back gate. He walked her to the door, waited while she fumbled with the keys, and then followed her inside.
"You should eat something," he said.
"I can't."
"Try."
"I said I can't, Samar." Her voice cracked on his name. She stood in her own living room, in the house she had grown up in, surrounded by her father's books and her mother's prayer corner and the photographs of her family, and felt absolutely, completely alone. "She opened the door for whoever did this. She knew them. She trusted them. And they--" She couldn't finish.
He didn't try to finish it for her. Didn't offer platitudes or promises or the standard we'll catch him that cops are trained to deliver. He simply walked to the kitchen, heated water, made two cups of tea -- finding the supplies with the ease of a man who had spent enough mornings in her house to know where things were -- and brought one to her.
"Drink," he said.
She drank. The tea was too sweet, the way her mother made it when someone was in shock.
"Alarm system is good but it won't stop a determined killer," he said, after she had finished half the cup. "So until this is resolved, either you move into my house or I move into yours. Choose one."
"What? No. I'm not moving in with you."
"Then I'm moving in with you." He said it the way he said everything -- as a fact, not a negotiation. "The couch is fine. I've slept on worse."
She opened her mouth to argue and found she didn't have the energy. "Fine. But you're taking the guest bedroom, not the couch. I don't need you waking up with a back problem and blaming me for it."
The ghost of a smile crossed his face. "Deal."
End of Chapter Seven.
© 2025 Atharva Inamdar. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free to read and share with attribution.