A New Faith: Part 1: Chapter 1

Alia felt as if someone had split her head open with an axe. The pain was instantaneous and reached every neuron in her brain. She, literally, felt like stars were shining in front of her tightly shut eyes. If it didn’t ease up soon, she thought that she would faint. Then, almost magically, it began to ebb. And she could hear a voice. No, voices. They all seemed to be yelling at her. 

“Wake up, Alia!” Maria was gently shaking her. Maria’s face was grim. When the investigation into Sequoia’s first-ever murder had stalled, Maria had noticed that Alia started taking sleeping pills. As days had turned into weeks, both the frequency and dosage of the sleeping pills had gone up. Last night, Alia must have taken an, especially, high dose.

“Uhhh… whaaat?” Alia mumbled. She managed to identify the owner of the absolutely livid voice blasting from the speaker of her phone. It was Sonia, her boss and the police chief of Sequoia. 

“If you don’t answer your damned phone right now, Alia, I swear I am going to turn you back into a beat cop. ALIA?!!”

Alia meekly answered the phone, “yes… yes… I am here, boss.” 

“AAAH… FINALLY!” thundered Sonia.

“We have another one and I need you to get down here ASAP.”

“Huh?! Yes… yes…”

“Meet me at the park on Rose and Vine in ten minutes. I got here five minutes ago. I had your team call you but to no avail. And since when did you start ignoring the official calls? No, don’t answer that. We shall talk about it later. Just get here ASAP.”

“Of course. I will be right there.” 

Through the haze of sleep and flashes of pain, Alia groggily tried to sit up. She had been lying with her legs and arms splayed on the floor as if she had dived off the bed. 

That fucking dream. No! She should be calling it a damn nightmare now. She had dived at the end of it. Probably, for the umpteenth time. And obviously in the latest instance, she had dived in the real world, too, because of which she had hit her head on the edge of the side table. 

She put the phone down and gingerly got off the floor. She heard the soft whoosh of the flush and then Maria floated back into the bedroom. 

“How many did you take last night?” 

By then, Alia had managed to stand up by resting on that same side table which had also been the source of the shining stars that continued to blink, albeit dimly, inside her head. She slowly turned to face Maria and shook her head.

“Really? You were out like a light last evening. You didn’t even taste the baklava that I made specially for you,” she was pouting. 

“I used orange blossom instead of rose water and that new peach-infused honey.”

Alia mumbled something. She was not sure if she could take a step in any direction without falling down. That blinding pain in her head had diminished but not gone away. It was making everything wobbly. 

“What was that?”

“Nothing. I am sorry... I was… y’know… tired… and I… Fuck… Please can you get me an aspirin?”

Alia walked with deliberate steps to the wardrobe and pulled on an ankle-length dark blue skirt. She rummaged around and snagged a frilly white top that Maria had exclusively designed for her.  

“You look like shit. Wash your face and brush your teeth before you head out. You stink, too.”

Maria was saying all these things kindly. She was starting to get concerned with her partner’s overall demeanor. 

“BTW - did she say that there was another death?”

Alia nodded from the bathroom. She splashed some cold water on her face and tried to run a comb through her tangled hair. The comb merely snagged and made her wince. She gave up and just tied a bandana to cover up them up. She pecked Maria on the cheek and left. 

In the first five years of her city’s existence, there had been no deaths at all, let alone murders. And now, in one month, two had occurred. The first one was still unsolved and Alia was the lead investigator for it. No wonder she was having that same stupid dream - correction, nightmare - where she chased fleet-footed suspects all over the bloody place. Never catching them. The dream invariably ended with her grasping at thin air as the suspect got away. Sometimes, she had the distinct impression that her dream-self almost didn’t want to catch the suspect and was intentionally falling just short. She shook her head in a determined manner. She did not need this kind of an attitude if she was to solve that case. 

She shivered as she swiftly strode to the new crime scene. It was still summer, and yet there was a surprisingly chilly breeze. She should have picked up a cardigan to go with that linen top. But she really liked wearing that top on its own. Partly because it was handmade by Maria and Alia loved to show off her partner’s craft; and partly because, it fit in a way that made Alia feel most comfortable. As if Maria knew each and every curve of her body which Maria most definitely did. And with that thought, her purposeful stride slackened into a stroll. Again, she shook her head to snap out of thoughts about Maria and picked up the pace. 

Ever since she was a little girl, Alia wanted to become a detective. She had been absolutely smitten by the fictional detective from Australia, Miss Phryne Fisher. She had secretly watched all the episodes of that TV show on the tiny screen of her phone. Of course, the life of Phryne from 20th century Australia was impossibly different from Alia’s life a century later in Iran. For starters, Phryne could do whatever the hell she wanted. Alia couldn’t even step out of her home without wearing a hijab. Even with the hijab, a male relative had to accompany her at all times. And disclosing her sexuality to anyone at all would have been the fastest way of getting tortured to death. When she was a teenager, she had heard rumors about the massive protests that had engulfed Tehran where women had demanded more freedom. The government had, of course, brutally smashed the protest. Many people had died and many more had been jailed. If anything, the restrictions on women became even more draconian since then. 

Somewhere in her fate though, she was destined to experience the life of Phryne. After moving to Sequoia, she was asked what she wanted to do. Without any hesitation, she had answered “Police”. She had no prior experience of policing. So the first three years were mostly devoted to basic training coupled with simple duties such as patrolling. As her problem-solving talent became apparent, two years ago, she was asked to join the small team of detectives some of whom had a little bit of experience prior to Sequoia. She easily outshone her colleagues and was quickly promoted to the rank of a senior detective in the squad. She loved her job and was excellent at it. Every time any thought of her past life crossed her mind, she thanked her stars that she got the opportunity to move to Sequoia, a place where she could just be herself.  

She reached the intersection of Rose and Vine. Even though it was 4 am, it was not dark. Sequoia, after all, was located within the Arctic circle and it was still August. Even after five years, she was still getting used to these extreme conditions: seeing the sun all twenty-four hours during the peak summer months versus not seeing it at all for weeks on end in the middle of winter. But not getting used to something didn’t mean that she didn’t like it. On the contrary, she loved it all. The fact that she - a young woman - could walk outdoors on her own in the middle of the night was incomprehensible to most women who were not lucky enough to live in Sequoia.    

Most Sequoians made full use of the summer months. So much so that perennial fatigue due to lack of sleep reached epidemic proportions during the mid-summer weeks. Alia - a stickler for punctuality - had to learn to be patient with her colleagues during summer as they more often than not showed up late at work. She felt that humans behaved exactly like plants in these higher latitudes. They tried to soak up as much of the sunlight as possible whenever they got a chance. 

Ironically, most of Sequoia’s residents had come from tropical regions where sunlight was generally considered a hazard to life. There was just too much of it and it tended to produce unbearable heat. By default, tropical people preferred being in shade to being out in the sun. To them, heat had morphed into a deadly threat in recent years. They used to find it incomprehensible that white-skinned folks from Europe and America craved the sun. So much so that they would spend a fortune to travel thousands of miles away from their homes during winter to places where they could take off all their clothes and simply lie in the sunshine for hours doing absolutely nothing. After being transplanted to the Arctic Circle, however, practically every Sequoian had become a worshipper of sun and heat. All that muscle memory about the sun and heat being bad had gone out the window after experiencing the first cold dark winter that seemed to last for an eternity. 

One adapts. One evolves. That was what life was all about. Pretty much from the beginning of time. 

Alia heard her colleagues long before she saw them and could tell that Sonia was very agitated. She rounded the corner, crossed the street, and walked into a small park with a bubbling stream passing through the middle of it. Sonia was gesticulating at someone.  

Unlike the first murder where the victim’s head had been brutally cleaved with a shovel, this one showed no sign of any violence at all. Not a leaf seemed to be out of place. Except, of course, for the body of a man peacefully hanging from the branch of a Rowan tree. Alia thought that while there was no sign of blood, there definitely was a lot of red color from the distinctive red fruits of the Rowan tree. She walked around the body trying to take in as much as she could. Sonia noticed her and beckoned. 

“Not a single death, even by natural causes, for the first five years. And now suddenly two murders in one month!” Sonia voiced the thought that was soon going to be at the top of everyone’s mind. 

In a large city packed with migrants from all over the world, the latter was not the strange part. The former was. Such an extended period of peace was practically unheard of in human history. But people got used to a pattern and they started thinking that that was how it had been all along. “Shifting baselines” was the name of this cognitive phenomenon. Alia had read about it during training. She had also been taught about other cognitive biases that most people routinely exhibit. Actually, there were quite a few of those and she always felt that she should permanently keep a cheat-sheet handy. It would be useful when talking with not just suspects and witnesses but also colleagues. And friends, too. Basically, everyone in the world.

Sonia, meanwhile, continued with her commentary, “…and two Muslim men at that. I mean - what are the fucking odds of that happening? 

Women outnumber men by two to one in Sequoia. At least on paper, that is. Who the hell knows what everyone considers their gender to be anyway. And Muslims are less than a quarter of the population.”

Alia raised an eyebrow at these statistics. The odds were indeed quite small. But then she thought, two data points were just that - two data points. They did not indicate a pattern. This could still be just a coincidence. She grabbed a tablet from one of the uniforms and started scanning the information about the victim. All his basic information had already been downloaded from the chip implanted in him.  

The first murder had been deemed to be a crime of passion while this one seemed to have been methodically executed. Outwardly, the two victims looked nothing alike. The man murdered three weeks ago was a fair-skinned bearded former Syrian while the one hanging in front of her was a dark brown clean-shaven Sudanese. Qasim, the Syrian, had been 30 years old while Nadeem, the Sudanese, was 27 years old. The age was not really a helpful parameter, thought Alia. At that moment, everyone in Sequoia was between the ages of 23 and 40.

“Do we suddenly have a serial killer to deal with?” continued Sonia with a strained laugh. She was known to attempt poorly-worded humor. Hardly anyone bothered to react to it. 

“The city council had been getting impatient about the unsolved first murder. With this second one, I don’t know what I am going to tell them.”

“Well," Alia thought, “don’t tell them that!”

Even though she seemed outwardly calm, Alia’s heart was hammering away. She didn’t know why she was feeling this anxious. She was not unaccustomed to death. Rather, she had seen too much of it in Iran. Way too many people died in her village due to natural causes and not-so-natural causes. Diseases were common and unfortunately, so were arbitrary executions by the various militia. Her own father and elder brother had been summarily shot dead when she was a teenager. According to her mother, she used to get nightmares for months after. Later, she had done what most people did when faced with a never-ending procession of traumas, she became numb to the pain. Then she stopped trying to make sense of it. And at some point later in time, she simply tuned it out.  

The crime scene investigation team arrived with their kit and started collecting whatever evidence they could from the body and the immediate surroundings. The medical examiner, Leela, had done a quick in-situ medical examination and was supervising the lowering of the body to the ground. Helping the cops was a part-time job for Leela. Her main occupation was that of a professor at one of the teaching hospitals. However, as luck would have it, she had been trained in conducting post-mortem examinations before she had moved to Sequoia. She was one of the few folks in the police department that had extensive hands-on experience in the job that she was doing. That particular skill of hers had not been called upon in Sequoia until last month.

She walked over to where Sonia and Alia were standing and said, “at first glance, the cause of death seems to be straightforward - strangulation and the resultant asphyxia. 

We haven’t found any evidence as such. There are no finger-prints. No tears in the clothes. No signs of struggle anywhere around. Looks like the victim did not put up any fight.

The rope used is available in most hardware stores in the city. We shall try to see if we can get any traces from it.

We picked up some foot-prints in the vicinity but they may not have anything to do with the murder. This park is quite popular, especially, in summer.”

Sonia made a face. There was not much evidence found for the first murder either. Although, in that case, the evidence had been washed away by heavy rain. No crowds because that crime had been committed outside the city in a research camp. They had not even found the body for three days. 

“We shall interview the neighborhood as soon as folks are up and about. Hopefully, we shall get some leads on his movements from last evening,” said Alia.

Leela was looking carefully at Alia’s expressions. She could tell that Alia was tense, but couldn’t figure out why. She had been one of Alia’s instructors and had gotten to know her fairly well over the years. She had found Alia to be a preternaturally calm person. But since the first murder, she had sensed that something was amiss with Alia. Initially, she had put it down to nerves as Alia was asked to lead her first-ever murder investigation. But now that she thought more about it, it didn’t seem to be nervousness. Maybe something else. She just couldn’t put her finger on it.  

She patted Alia on the shoulder and added, “we shall figure it all out soon enough. Try not to get too bogged down. Sometimes these investigations take more time than usual. But the perp always makes mistakes. And that leads to their arrest. We shall get them. Don’t worry.

And remember what I said after the first murder. The killer is still here in Sequoia. That chip they injected in all of us when we came here ensures that if we put even one toe outside the designated boundary, it automatically gets flagged.”

Instead of seeing relief, Leela was puzzled to see the tension deepen somewhat before Alia managed to wrestle her face back to a neutral expression. 

“Yes, of course, we shall get them,” Alia murmured. She nodded at both women and left. Sonia had told her that her team had assembled at the police HQ.

Leela and Sonia continued to talk after Alia left. They were about the same age and among the older residents of Sequoia. They were both Bengali but from different countries. Leela was from West Bengal, a state in India, while Sonia was from Bangladesh. Since it was just the two of them, for a change, they could freely talk in Bengali, their mother-tongue. It was nice to air their thoughts that way. 

Leela glanced at the rapidly vanishing figure of Alia and asked Sonia, “she seems to be taking this hard. You sure that she has it in her to lead not just one but two murder investigations simultaneously?” 

Sonia was thoughtful for a few moments and then she quietly said, “she is our best chance at cracking these cases.”

“Hmm… okay. By the way, you mentioned the city council’s impatience. How about the UN administrators in New York? What are they saying?”

“Nothing so far. They seem to be taking it in their stride.”

“Well… let’s hope that we solve these cases satisfactorily.” 

“Yeah… cheers to that. I think, I should ask Alia to focus mostly on Nadeem and put Qasim on the back-burner for a bit. I feel that that we are more likely to make progress on this one than Qasim’s. We may never solve the first one. 

Just a feeling. 

Anyway… gotta go. 

And please make the post-mortem of Nadeem your top priority.”

“Of course!”