A New Faith: Part 1: Chapter 8

The next morning, Alia reached her office earlier than usual. She had gotten good rest, during the night. So she b up early and feeling fresh. She wanted to spend some time thinking about the case before she gave everyone their tasks for the day. 

The previous night, she had quickly edited Tozi’s daily report. Tozi was excellent at organizing information in a very short period of time. That was the understatement of the year, she thought. In fact, Tozi was a genius at connecting the dots. Then she had sent it on to Sonia.

It had been a long and exhausting day for her. Maria had made dinner, a stew of long-grained rice, lentils, squash, dried bay leaves, turmeric, and dried red chillies. Maria knew that this was one of her comfort food items. On the other hand, Maria had an unexpected day off because of the cancellation of the concert. 

After dinner, she had fallen asleep with her head in Maria’s lap. She dozed fitfully. The nightmare had showed up, almost like clockwork, the moment her eyes had closed. Yet again, she had the strange sensation that even though she was pursuing the suspect, she was unsure of actually wanting to catch the suspect. Or even know its identity. That was a really disorienting feeling. She had sat up suddenly. But then she just shook her head and then went off to sleep on their bed before Maria could react. 

She had taken the tram to work. Usually, she walked during the summer months. She intentionally took a circuitous route that wound through as many parks as she could fit in without really going off on a tangent. She never tired of the greenery. But that morning she had felt like she needed to get to the office as soon as possible. The tram had passed by a mural of a gorgeous phoenix gliding in the sky that was painted across an entire block . In the last frame at the end of the block, the phoenix disappeared into mist. Another thing vanishing from her sight. It had reminded her of the recurring dream. It seemed like the artist who had painted the phoenix was rubbing her face in her inner turmoil. Not fair! She had frowned at the mural and looked away as the tram crept closer to her stop.

The last conversation of the previous day had unnerved her far more than she wanted to admit. Was it only Shahid who thought this way? She must get Tozi working on this right away, get a feel for what the public sentiment in Sequoia was like. 

Leela had sent over the post-mortem report overnight. It was murder. They had found a heavy dose of over-the-counter sleep medication in his blood. Too bad that sleep medication was easily available from vending machines across the city. 

The sleep medication, though, had not killed Nadeem. Death had indeed occurred due to strangulation. Time of death was between 12 midnight and 2 am. There were numerous traces found on his clothes that would need to be checked against all the people that he had come in contact with before his death. She needed more help for sure. Unlike Qasim, Nadeem had come in contact with a far larger number of people and her small team was simply not sufficient to tackle that. 

Qasim’s body was found at a research camp-site just outside the city, all alone in the wilderness. It was unambiguously murder. His head had been cracked open by a single blow of a shovel that was found next to him. The shovel had traces of his blood and hair on it. It had rained and they had found no fingerprints or other clues such as foot-prints around the body. Leela hadn’t been able to narrow down the timing of his death. It could have been anywhere between a few hours to a few days because of the rain and the unseasonal chill that sometimes settled down at those latitudes. 

During the investigation, they had found that Qasim seemed to have been one of those solo researchers who spent most of his time in the laboratory or the field. He did collaborate with researchers in other parts of the world - especially, those who funded his work - but those contacts had been purely transactional. Lots of communications related to work. But, none of his regular collaborators knew anything about his personal life. Nor did his neighbors. He came and went at odd hours, rarely talked with anyone in his building, and seldom hung out with anyone. According to his remote colleagues, he had not been in touch for almost a week before he was found. 

In contrast, Nadeem had worked with other people in Sequoia on a regular basis and seemed to keep normal hours. He had also seemed to do a few normal things such as drink coffee in a cafe and chat with the barista. So far, a couple of people - Vidya and Shahid - had been able to describe him. And Tozi - god bless her - had come up with some potentially relevant material from Nadeem’s pre-Sequoia past. 

Why would someone want to kill a researcher and a musician? The first murder had all the hallmarks of being a spur-of-the-moment crime. The perpetrator had grabbed whatever weapon that had been available. The second murder seemed like it was meticulously planned. Nothing opportunistic about it. Someone must have been with Nadeem to have fed him the sleeping pill at some point in the evening. Then that someone must have worked out a way to move the unconscious Nadeem to the park. Finally, they must have hung Nadeem in a public park without anyone seeing them do so.

S0 far, there was nothing to connect Qasim and Nadeem. There was no apparent motive for both murders. Nothing had been stolen. It didn’t seem that Qasim and Nadeem had caused anyone any harm of any kind. They barely seemed to have talked with other people. For five years, nothing. And then suddenly they were murdered in quick succession. 

Was the motive religious? Alia knew that practically every single person in Sequoia came from troubled parts of the world. Men preying on women had been a common occurrence. Conflicts arising out of religion, race, culture, caste, and all kinds of tribal identities happened routinely and were often extremely violent. This had been one of the primary reason why Sequoia’s residents were selected in such a way that no one was related to each other as far as possible. They had actually used DNA mapping to ensure this. No one was even from the same village. The goal was to not have any pre-existing tribal identities carrying over from their place of origin to Sequoia. 

For five years, there had been no violence of the tribal kind. Sure, there had been numerous inter-personal conflicts that had at times led to minor violence. Many of them had been the result of misunderstandings as lack of a common language had been a problem for the first few months. Misunderstandings also arose from ignorance about each others’ cultures and norms and behavioral patterns. As no one was keen on getting thrown out of Sequoia for misbehaving, all those inter-personal conflicts had been quickly and amicably resolved. At times cops had to be brought in, of course. But to a large extent, people had tried to resolve their differences on their own. The cops also had made every effort to keep those interventions unofficial. They had tried to, primarily, nudge the aggrieved parties to sort their problems out. At most, the cops would mediate. This had worked quite well so far.

The downside of the process of selection - e.g. no relatives - was that everyone was, literally, on their own and had to build their social networks from scratch. Some folks found that easy while others didn’t. Alia was in the latter group. While she was generally sociable, she was a quintessential introvert. In a group setting, especially, of strangers, she was not likely to be the one to speak first or at all. Maria was the opposite. But the real queen of the social world was Nadia. She was, immediately, the beating heart of any gathering. 

On top of that, the lack of a common language was a huge barrier to form those networks. To a large extent, though, the language barrier had been overcome through the constant use of universal translators that were ubiquitous on everyone’s wrist. But the ones who struggled, did struggle a lot. On the plus side, there was the lack of any consequential tribal form of organizing. Or was that really the case? 

Alia started to jot down tasks for her team. In addition to doing those tasks, she wanted them to keep their eyes and ears open to organizations that appeared to have a tribal slant. This was going to be a challenging ask. She was not even sure what signs they should look for and how they should interpret them. Maybe, Tozi could come up with some tips based on her scans of social media. Maybe, she should discuss this with Sonia before talking with the team.

As if on cue, Sonia poked her head into Alia’s reverie, “how’s it going?”

“Good timing, boss. I was just about to come look for you,” said Alia as she continued to jot down her list of tasks before she forgot something important. 

“Tell me!” Sonia said brightly as she delicately perched herself on the corner of Alia’s desk. 

“Not much to go on, so far,” Alia said, carefully.

“Early days, Alia… early days. Keep digging. Something will pop out, I am sure.

This murder happened in the middle of our city and was pre-meditated. There must be some trail left behind by the killer.”

Alia nodded.

Sonia knew what was going on through Alia’s mind. She added gently, “Qasim was different. We knew that would be hard to solve right from the beginning.”

Alia didn’t react. It was nice that Sonia was not judging her performance. Yet. Nevertheless, Alia was not happy with her failure to solve the case so far. She was not being harsh on herself. She knew that Sonia was objectively right. Yet, in her eyes the outcome was not what it should be. The killer should have been found and punished. Anything other than that was wrong, however, realistic and pragmatic it seemed. Alia’s particular form of idealism was what kept her on her toes all the time. Another person may have taken their boss up on this way of thinking in order to absolve themselves of any responsibility. But such moments only made her uncomfortable. And as always, she dealt with it by moving on to talk about something else.

“Leela has managed to pin the time of death to a small window, midnight to 2 am. The death was by strangulation even though they found quite a bit of sleep medication in his blood. Which means he was intentionally drugged. That implies the killer had to move him to the park. So… there is that.”

“Excellent! Then there must be some witnesses. C’mon! It is a city of three million souls living in close proximity with each other. Sure, it was late at night. But it is summer and the murder happened in a public park. This is good news, Alia. You may want to consider doing a public announcement to see if anyone would like to step forward with information.”

“I agree. We should do that. I shall get you a draft of the press release later today. Also, we are going to need more help. Do you think you can make some more uniforms available to us? For answering phones and chasing down details once the tips start coming in?”

“Absolutely! Tell me what you need. Although, I am going to have to keep track of the budget. We blew through quite a bit of it during the investigation into Qasim’s murder. I am going to have to go to the Council and get some additional resources approved. Any other leads?”

“Since Tozi managed to dig something up on Nadeem from his life before Sequoia, I was wondering if we should ask for some help from the Interpol to get in touch with the Nadeem’s home country law enforcement folks.”

“Hmmm… where was Nadeem from, again?”

“Sudan.”

Sonia sighed, a bit too theatrically than was warranted. 

“You know as well as I do, Alia, a country such as Sudan is in dire straits. God knows how many years it has been since they last got some relief from the drought. I am not sure we are going to reach anyone there who could find something useful for us. They probably don’t even have records worth sharing with us. I wouldn’t hope for much. But, in order to not leave any stone unturned, I will get the ball rolling with the Interpol. I hope they don’t ask us for funds!”

“Thanks. I just have this nagging feeling that both the murders may have to do with something with their past, that is from their lives before Sequoia.”

“Why do you feel that?”

“With Qasim, we know for sure that he was a total loner. No social circle within Sequoia to speak of. With Nadeem, I am getting a somewhat similar vibe. It is too soon to say for sure. But he does sound like he wasn’t particularly close with anyone. Maybe it is 'man' thing.”

She chuckled and added, “maybe we should check with Santosh and Carlos about their social circles! After all, Sequoia is a strange place. Women outnumber men by two to one. And men don’t run anything. Who knows… how much of this has distorted the usual social dynamics of men. Apart from our colleagues, I hardly hang out with any men.”

“So bloody true,” thought Sonia. 

Alia continued to think aloud, “with Qasim, nobody seemed to have much of anything to do with him. He stayed out of trouble. To be able to antagonize someone, there needs to be some meaningful interaction. We didn’t see that with him, at all. He spent a lot of his time camping outside of Sequoia. Most of his interactions were with folks based far away from Sequoia. Maybe we need to interview them more closely to see if they remember anything he might have said about his past life. 

We shall know more about Nadeem as we dig further. I sure hope that he chatted with someone somewhere. We are just not seeing even the hint of a motive yet. Establishing means and opportunity is not likely to be a problem.”

“Hmm… has anything turned up in the search of their places? I know Qasim lived a very spartan life.  Although - I remember - we found some personal stuff at his campsite. Some photos and souvenirs. Did we ever manage to track them down?”

“No - we didn’t find any real leads from those. But I think that maybe we didn’t try hard enough. I will get Tozi to see if she can find any visual matches for those pieces online. We have been spread quite thin with the interviews. We had to cast a really wide net!”

“So - this is all a gut feeling? I mean, this hope that the murders are connected to something from their past?”

Sonia looked carefully at Alia as she asked that question. In her opinion, there was absolutely nothing wrong about going with the gut. And a gut such as Alia’s was something worth going with. Always. Alia - in her judgment - possessed an excellent combination of a logical brain and an instinctive grasp of how various pieces of a puzzle fit together. But still, she really wanted her top investigator to be more deliberate about this. The budget was indeed getting tight and cajoling the Interpol to do anything quickly was going to be tiresome. In general, the Interpol tended to ignore their queries until Sonia made a song and dance about them with the right folks at the UN. 

“The way I think about this, boss, is that it has been a difficult adjustment for most of us. We all left our homes five years ago knowing full well that we can never go back. In a way, it was a choice we made, but maybe it was not really a choice. We all left because it was an extremely difficult life. It was the innate survival instinct that dictated our actions. And we came here alone, literally. At the same time, not really alone in a very fundamental sense of the word. We may not be with our families and friends and the society that we grew up in. We are here - instead - with people who came here for the same reason. I guess… one could even say that we have more in common with each other in Sequoia than we ever had with the society that we left behind.” Alia paused to gather her thoughts.

“We share a unique kind of camaraderie because our individual futures are dependent on us succeeding together. Collectively. We are, in my view, a forward-looking bunch of individuals who are forming a new kind of society. A society that is not based on any shared attribute, as traditional societies have been, but on shared objectives about our futures.”

Sonia was nodding her head in agreement. 

“Maybe, Alia, that was the cause. I mean, maybe Qasim or Nadeem or both of them were impeding our future in some way and that is why someone decided to do something about it.”

Alia was silent for a while as she worked through this possibility.

“Sure. That is possible. But I would say, very unlikely. None of us has a clear picture about our future, yet. We are barely getting settled here. Getting to know each other a bit. I am not sure a violent reaction can be caused for something so vague and hazy. I would be quite surprised if that was the motive.

But, I do see the past having such a powerful hold on someone that it would compel that person to commit a murder. I do think that is a far more likely possibility than what you are suggesting. We may not be brooding much on our past as I was saying earlier. But some trauma can be deep-seated and it can trigger such a violent action.”

“Fair point. I trust your instincts any day over mine. Go for it!”

“There is one thing that I want to flag, though,” Alia paused as Sonia turned back toward her. 

“Yesterday, Santosh and I interviewed one of Nadeem’s neighbors. He runs a cafe in Nadeem’s building and seems to be one of the few people who had known Nadeem. This guy - Shahid - went off on a tangent pretty much right from the start of the interview. He made it sound as if this was some anti-Muslim pogrom. Qasim had definitely been seen in the mosque on a few Fridays. We shall check out the mosque to see if Nadeem prayed there, too.

What worries me is that people like Shahid may turn this into something where there is nothing. I guess - it is possible that someone targeted these two victims because they were devout Muslims. But we don’t have any indication of that. At the same time - hardly anyone waits for actual evidence to form opinions anyway. People do love to jump to conclusions. I am hoping that Shahid is an outlier that we can ignore. It just - you know - left a bad taste after that interview.”

Sonia thought, “it was, most definitely, not good!” Then she promptly forgot about it. Until a few days later when the topic popped up again in a totally different conversation and in a far more serious context.