Sashi knew he didn't have much time. He was already getting warning phone calls from his superiors in Mumbai mafia, which he either ignored or attended to briefly with a promise that he would wrap it all up in two days. There was no way he could continue with his ruse.
The number of enemies he had in his old life in Mumbai was significant and they would soon rat him out. If only he could get some closure.
Sashi had been trying to confess his whole story to Mitra, but every time he started a conversation with her, it ended up getting sidetracked into something else. It had taken him days to come clean to her about the two people he had killed for her.
It left him with the truth of just one other person's death to be revealed, and that was the toughest of all.
Sashi had been following the news as soon as he leaked the burial location of the two pimps. He knew the police would try to trace him using the video Mitra had shot during the accident a year ago. The piece of information he and Mitra had spoken during their last chat was too revealing.
Thankfully, luck was still on his side.
He pulled out an old phone from his desk, turned it on and dialled a number.
"Hello? Shwetha, is your husband home? Great, can you put him through?" Sashi waited for the other person to reach the phone. "Hey Tarun, been a long time. Yeah, I am fine. How are you?"
He continued a brief conversation before soliciting, "Listen, I need a favour. Remember when I borrowed your bike last year and it got towed away by the police? You had got it back yourself because I had asked the police to check with you directly. If anyone comes over to ask you about you about that incident, just tell them that you had lost your bike for a few hours and then got a phone call from the police stating that it was in their custody."
Sashi knew the kind of doubts and questions Tarun would be getting, given the situation that had exploded after the video he posted of his conversation with Mitra.
He assured Tarun, "It's nothing. I am lying low these days, with the hawala business getting busted last week. I don't want the police to get to me in this condition. If they find out I have links to that hawala racket, things would get complicated."
"No, this has nothing to do with those videos of the girl, I swear," he laughed it over. "It's strange you would even get such a question. That is not the case at all. It is just our boss' orders to stay out of trouble with the police. You know how it is with them. Okay, great, thank you. I will call you again."
He clicked the phone off and sighed. That was one loose thread tied up properly. Sashi was buying himself some more time.
He turned to look at the CCTV streaming on his computer.
Mitra was sitting in a daze, without any movement. He could see that she was in deep thought. Obvious thoughts to him, for he could imagine her going on and on in her head analyzing the events that he had narrated to her the previous night.
Mitra was occupied with the dissection of every little confession and ambiguous tale that Sashi had disclosed to her. She wasn't sure how to take it all.
Sashi had declared that he had taken colossal offense about Mitra not knowing him, which had fuelled him to kidnap her and hold her captive. Then why did he bother to save her first? Was it purely as an instinct to keep his prey to himself?
If he really viewed her as a prey, he would have killed her or done away with her in some way by then. Yet, he wasn't doing anything violent, excepting the fake murder episode and the psychological attack he committed against her the first time he revealed about his involvement in Lekha's murder.
If he didn't want to hurt her, then that beats the entire premise of his locking her up in his basement. There were two contradictory assumptions and conclusions for his actions, neither of which made complete sense.
She didn't blame him for murdering the two hustlers; if he hadn't done that she would have been long dead herself by then. In fact, she did feel that the two deserved death, if not in the hands of Sashi, at least in the hands of law. Yet... something was not adding up.
Mitra sat without any physical activity, not arriving at any resolution on how to handle Sashi and his revelations of the past any further. She was drawing a blank in her choices.
He was hurt, in a psychologically dark place and didn't have any qualms about committing crimes. There was no way someone like him wouldn't have an endgame already planned out and well in control. She would be thoughtless to imagine she could handle him in a situation so futile as hers.
Mitra took a deep breath, burying her face in her hands, her head aching with all the theorizing her brain was doing. She felt it in her bones that she would be lucky to get out of the place alive and well. Something darker was about to happen and she couldn't pinpoint what it could be.
###
Vishal wasn't having a good day; not that he had been having a good day since Mitra disappeared anyways. Right when he thought they would be able to nab Seshu with the help of the accident video, they faced another dead end.
There was only one vehicle that led to a dubious person. The owner of the bike, named Tarun, vehemently said that his bike had been stolen that day and that he had received a call after a few hours that the traffic police had towed away his vehicle.
Did the police call him directly?
He didn't remember. The only recollection he had was of getting a phone call from some unknown number informing him of the bike's location, which he assumed as someone in the traffic police department calling him.
Tarun had rushed to the police station immediately, submitted his identity proof and all vehicle related documents, paid a fine and got his bike back.
Why didn't he question the police about forcing him to pay for a law violation which he didn't commit, especially being a victim of the bike theft?
Tarun answered that he hadn't wanted to get into any further complications at the time. He had just wanted his bike back and he was too scared of the police to fight it out with them regarding the fine or finding the bike thief.
Why was he scared of the police?
And the reply came - who likes police enough to be comfortable around them? Definitely not Tarun.
In a way that was completely plausible. A bike thief wouldn't want to pay fine to the traffic police to get a stolen bike back, especially when he didn't have any identity or bike related documents in his name. It would have taken the police just a few minutes to realize that the person they were dealing with was a thief. So, in all sense, he would have left it with the police and run off.
Of all the people visible in the accident video, only one person stood out: a bearded man wearing tinted glasses. The snapshot the police got of him was unclear and his face was too guarded to use that picture to identify him through the state's internal facial recognition software program.
Some members from the investigating team even questioned the premise of assumption that the singled out person from the video would be the culprit just because he stood out among others.
The quiet and obvious ones could be more dangerous too.
But then, the odd looking one was the only person the police weren't able to track. The rest were all well enquired about and the police still kept a watch on all of them, tried to see if any of them fit their description of Sashi, or if anyone's activities neared even a little towards the suspicious side.
Vishal felt he was close to something, yet, he didn't know what it was.
He suggested going through Tarun's phone call records, to validate his statement: Tarun wasn't present at the scene of the accident himself, and if he had lied about his bike being stolen, then the "thief" should have called him to instruct him on how to answer the police's questions.
The covert card was Tarun's use of a second, 2G phone for his shady businesses, registered in his subordinate's name, which Tarun always kept hidden with the help of his wife in case of emergencies like the current investigation. And so, neither Vishal, nor the police were aware of the phone number to which Sashi had dialled in to give his disposition to Tarun.