You are currently reading the second chapter of Atonement. Click Atonement for chapterwise listing
An urgent phone call on Kabir’s cell woke him up in the middle of the night. It was from the office.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“It’s 2 AM”, said the person on the other side of the call.
“Why have you disturbed me at this hour?”
“Sir, there has been another death. Similar M.O. The chief has demanded your presence at the crime scene.”
Another killing? This puts my hypothesis all wrong. This clearly means that Nischayy is innocent. Maybe he killed again to throw me off his track. Only the new dead body would shed some light on this. thought Kabir while dressing up.
He quickly reached the crime scene. The body was found in a posh residential area in the municipal dumpster. An anonymous tip informed them of the murder. The call came from a payphone nearby. Nobody was there when the inspector on call found the body. This murder was as gruesome as the last one. The deceased was a young college boy in his early twenties. Kabir told the inspector to pull the body out of the dumpster so that he could examine it. The body had a pen drive this time instead of a video tape. The pendrive had “play me” written on it. Kabir asked the inspector to fetch him a laptop so that he could play the video message. The video message was a similar one. It was a confession video. A same hooded man kept appearing and disappearing.
“I am Priyank Dwivedi. I study in Delhi University. There is a pack of stray dogs and pups that roam near my college campus. They have no place to go and kids in my college keep feeding them. I love good breed dogs but I can’t stand strays. They spread diseases and germs. I do like to show them their place. One day I applied chocolate sauce on rocks and fed them with it. They coughed so hard that some blood even came out. Once I threw boiling hot pebbles at them.
One of them has no eye because of this. I took a pup home once and fed him cement. He kept puking cement everywhere. That sucker died a slow death as the cement had hardened in his stomach. That was not it. I dragged the pups’ mother by binding her legs at the back of my car and when someone asked me to stop I pretended that I had no idea. There I said it. Now let me go!! You don’t know who you are messing with. If my dad finds out. You are dead!!”
The hooded man started throwing boiling hot pebbles on Priyank’s face. He dodged some but some got in his eye and some grazed his cheek. Screams of pain came out of his mouth. He said, “My dad is going to kill you!! Ahh!! My eye… it burns!!! You are a dead man walking Ni…” The hooded man didn’t let him finish. He ran towards him and fed him with those boiling hot pebbles! He couldn’t speak after that. His vocal chords were fried with the heat. Then he brought a funnel and started pouring liquid cement in his mouth till it started leaking out of his eyelids. After some time the cement hardened and Priyank stopped moving. The video went blank after that.
A lot of things became clear after the second murder. Priyank knew the murderer. He was about to say his name before the murderer silenced him. The name started with Ni… One thing was for certain. We have a serial killer on our hands… thought Kabir.
Stay tuned for more crisp…
