A New Faith: Part 3: Chapter 41

Another day had gone by. A little more than twenty-four hours remained before the imminent riot. Tozi had worked through the night and pulled together yet another list of names for Sonia and Alia. It was decided that Sonia would continue to persuade some of the riot-planners over phone so that she could be accessible at the police HQ at all times. While Alia would try to meet up with others in person and see if she could have better luck than Sonia.

Tozi was walking to back to her desk after handing over the list to Alia and Sonia, when she suddenly remembered that the uniformed police who had been on duty during the last riot had been wearing body-cams. That footage could be invaluable in figuring out who the leaders were at the last riot - those holding the megaphones or standing up in the front of the crowds or directing the others.

She practically, ran back to her desk and started pulling together the video files from that day. There were at least a hundred files to go through. And each was about 2-3 hours long. Luckily, she realized that many of the cops were not stationed at the heart of the riot. They were either holding the lines to keep the crowds at bay or they were with other cops, held back by Sonia as a reserve. Their videos were of less use. The videos had precise GPS coordinates stamped on them. She pulled up all those GPS coordinates into a mapping software that allowed her to identify the most promising videos. There were about a couple of dozen videos at most that she had to go through instead of a hundred. 

She started playing them one by one. Whenever, she felt like an individual seemed to be showing some initiative, she would tag that face for subsequent use as a reference in the facial recognition software that she was planning to use to process all the videos. After scanning through a couple of videos, manually, and at normal speed, she had tagged about forty individuals. The video quality was excellent and the facial recognition software was quickly able to tag all the places in the remaining video files where those people had appeared. She pulled up those instances in each file in order to verify that the behavior of those individuals was indeed that of organizers or leaders of some sort. Only four of the tagged faces seemed to fit the bill. None of the four names were on the list she had put together based on social media trawling. She found their names and passed them on to Sonia for follow up. She felt that her crude algorithm - part automated and part manual - was reasonably sound to identify some more targets for Sonia and Alia to engage with.  

She started scrolling through the remaining short-listed videos at double speed. Time was of the essence. After watching four more videos, she felt like her eyes had gotten far more attuned to looking for patterns even with the higher speed. For starters, the scenes playing out were similar. The main difference among the videos were the different vantage points because of which new faces popped up. She got so familiar with the scenes and the faces that she had already seen several times that she was able to triple the speed without really losing out on any interesting new prospects. Of course - every time she found someone, she would slow down to normal speed and carefully observe their behavior. This was a tedious process and yet, she managed to get through at least a dozen videos over the course of the afternoon. She flagged another ten names for Sonia and Alia.

After grabbing a quick bite for dinner, Tozi settled in again to scan the last few videos. She had saved these ones because they had captured the latter part of the riot better. The part during which the spectacular flame-out of Shahid had happened. Tozi had not been present at the riot. But she had seen some of the videos posted on social media. She had thrown up when she had seen the video of Shahid’s death the first time around. She had no desire to watch any of that again. But now she had no choice. She was hoping that the high-speed scanning would make it somewhat easier to get through the remainder of this ugly task.

She had heard some of her colleagues talk admiringly about how Alia had walked right into the middle of the riot and attempted to calm down the crowd. Now she got a chance to watch it. Tozi had always found Alia to be a quintessential introvert. Quiet and peaceful. Even though her presence was always felt by everyone. She didn’t know much about Alia simply because Alia didn’t talk much about herself with anyone. Yet, it was clear to her that Alia was a naturally gifted investigator. She was not the plodding kind. But someone who had an imagination that allowed her to come up with hypotheses that no one else would even dream of. Those hypotheses would allow Alia to examine all the available evidence and information from different perspectives. Invariably, that methodology would yield the correct answers. She admired this unique quality of Alia’s. She had assumed that Alia would lead them all in cracking the two murder cases in no time. Yet - that had not happened. Both cases seemed to have stumped Alia. And increasingly, she had felt that Alia was unable to deal with this lack of success. She was a bit worried about her boss’s health, in fact.

She slowed down one of the video’s that had the best view of Alia’s intervention at the riot and also had the best sound quality. Her respect for Alia went up by several notches. The crowd had been baying for blood. To be able to walk right into the middle of it all must have taken a ton of courage. Several tons, she thought. She doubted if she had that kind of courage herself. No one - not a single cop including Sonia had left the relatively secure bubble of the police cordon to engage with the crowd the way Alia had. Wow! 

Soon after, Shahid and his crew showed up. She promptly tagged all of Shahid’s co-conspirators and sent that data to the facial recognition software for processing. If these guys had bothered to join Shahid in his craziness, surely they must be part of the core group of planners. And that is when the section containing Shahid’s ill-advised final actions began. She sped it up and tried to look away. But the spectacle had a hypnotic effect on her and she found her eyes inexorably drawn toward Shahid’s body burning like a torch. The sped up video made it seem as if he was dancing around like a dervish. Then had come his collapse and the seemingly unending moments until he had died. 

The crowd that had been in thrall of the tragedy unfolding in front of its eyes had snapped out of it at some point and had started dissipating rapidly. She, somehow, managed to wrench her attention from the burning body and started tagging the faces of the people who had been trying to keep the crowd from leaving. These were, most definitely, in her view the most likely planners of tomorrow’s riot. They looked hardened even in the video. They would be the ones who would have led the re-grouping soon after. 

It was then that she noticed something amiss. She had seen Alia trying to - ineffectually - put out the fire and help Shahid. Eventually, Alia had given up and stood helplessly by the body as if in a trance. Tozi understood that… even she had been mesmerized by it. Then she saw Alia look up and away from where the body-cam was situated. She seemed to have realized that the riot was over. But Tozi felt that Alia was looking at something specific. 

It was someone, not something. Roughly in the direction where Alia was looking, she saw a tall black woman who seemed to be staring right back at Alia. With a shock, she realized that this just might be the mysterious black woman they had all been trying to track down for Nadeem’s murder. Tozi had no reason to back this realization of hers. But still, Tozi felt confident. There was something furtive about the woman’s manner - the way she was looking at Alia from afar. Tozi, promptly, tagged her face and set the facial recognition software loose on all of the images and videos that she had been scanning for days. This was top priority!

The second thing that Tozi realized a few moments later was that Alia must have recognized the woman from somewhere. Or else, why would she have noticed her in particular and why would she be staring at her. Incredibly, as Tozi watched the two women engage in a sort of staring contest with each other, the black woman turned around and started running. Then Alia promptly followed her. Tozi was very well aware of Alia’s athletic prowess. She had no doubt that Alia would catch the suspect unless the suspect managed to somehow hide herself in the pandemonium. 

So… Alia had found the black woman, after all? Tozi was puzzled. At no point since that day, Alia had mentioned anything about this incident at all. No reference to a black woman. No description of an attempted chase. What had happened? Tozi stopped the video as both Alia and the suspect were no longer visible in it anyway. She pulled up the official reports filed by Alia after the riot. She quickly scanned through them and indeed there was no mention of it at all. Why had Alia hidden this vital piece of information? If she had brought it to everyone’s attention, Tozi had absolutely no doubt that she would have pulled these same body-cam videos up earlier and nailed this woman by now. What the hell was going on!!

While Tozi was thinking about all this, the facial recognition software had started spitting out all kinds of matches for the black woman from the database. Her name was Sara and she was from Sudan. Immediately, Tozi remembered that Nadeem was from Sudan, too. That must be the connection. They must have known each other in the past. Tozi was - again, based on no actual evidence - confident that that was relevant to the murder. Tozi started scanning the other matches. Sara was on social media and she was connected to Shahid. In fact, Sara was the woman who had been with Shahid when the first mini-riot had broken out in the warehouse district. Again, the body-cam footage from one of the cops who had shown up there, had captured a glimpse of Sara. It seemed that Sara had slunk away. Tozi knew that Alia had also gone to stop that mini-riot. Tozi was sure that Alia had seen Sara there, too. 

Tozi’s mind was now frantically trying to make sense of this new information. There was not much concrete information to go on except for the fact that Alia had actually chased Sara and for some unknown reason AND had chosen to keep that a secret from everyone. She had to go talk with someone about this. Probably, Sonia. But before she did that, she wanted to check on something else. She remembered that Alia herself had asked the team to review each other’s raw notes a couple of days ago. Carlos had mentioned that he had reviewed Alia’s notes and found nothing new. Tozi wanted to make sure that that was indeed the case. She hurried over to the incident room where she knew Carlos was working away into his night shift. As she walked over to him, she saw that he was sitting back with his shoulders slumped. He looked like he was in daze. She grabbed his shoulder and shook him. 

“Hey man. You okay? You are looking like you saw a ghost or something!” 

“Huh… whaaat?” Carlos jerked his head around to look at Tozi. It took him a moment to realize that it was Tozi. He just stared at her. Then he slowly started shaking his head and said, “I must be going mad. Yes - that must be it.”

Tozi pulled up a chair and sat down next to him. 

“Tell me.”

“I dunno Tozi - this is weird. Why didn’t she tell us about this earlier? I don’t get it!”

“She? Who are you talking about?”

“Boss. I mean Alia. She never mentioned this. Either I am losing my mind or… I dunno.”

“What did she not tell us about?”

“This… this video. From the drone. She was there.”

“Carlos - you are not making any sense. Tell me everything from the beginning.”

He nodded,  “maybe you can make sense of this. A couple of days ago, Alia ordered all of us to review each others’ notebooks to see if there were some things that never made their way into the formal reports and memos. Just go over the musings and doodles and notes that people make when they are thinking and jot them down.” 

“Yeah… go on. I, actually, came to you just now to ask about that. But later…”

“Well we did go through the lot and came up with more or less nothing new. Then today morning, I realized that none of us had looked at Santosh’s notebooks because they had been packed up in a box after his…,“ Carlos faltered a bit, “you know…”

Tozi had a grim expression on her face. She nodded for him to continue.

“I finally got a chance to go through them. I didn’t find anything new except one somewhat cryptic note. Here… look.” 

With that Carlos pulled a notebook from the top of a stack on his desk and flipped open to the bookmarked page. It read, “check the drone footage!” 

Tozi looked puzzled. 

“Yeah… me too. I didn’t know what he was talking about. But based on the subsequent notes, this must have been before Nadeem’s death and during the investigation into Qasim’s murder.” 

“I don’t remember us doing any drone surveillance as part of Qasim’s investigation. Did I miss something?” Tozi, usually, preferred to not go out in the field. She was most happy with her computers.

“No - you are right. I mean, we didn’t need any drone surveillance. Why would we, anyway? I checked it out. There were no drone footage files from after Qasim’s murder in our database.”

“Okay… are you going to get to your point quickly? The suspense is killing me!” snapped Tozi. She was not a big fan of Carlos’ plodding style. 

“Yes… so… right. I was puzzled, too. Just for the heck of it, I looked at the files from before Qasim’s death. That is when I found this video,” he gestured at his screen. 

“What am I looking at?”

“She was there. They were all there.” 

“Who was where? C’mon Carlos!” Tozi couldn’t keep the irritation out of her voice. 

“Just watch this!” and Carlos hit play on the keyboard.

The drone footage came on, crystal clear images as the drone lifted off the ground and climbed to about 100 meters. In a typical grid-search pattern, whoever was operating the drone started scanning the land around the spot from where the drone had been launched. Slowly but surely, Tozi started getting a feel for the terrain as the drone continued its scanning. An ominous storm showed up on the horizon whenever the drone’s camera faced in that direction. 

“What are we looking for, Carlos?”

“Just… just keep watching… you will see it.”

The drone, methodically, quartered over a small hill and suddenly Qasim’s campsite came into view in one corner of the shot. Then the drone seemed to make a beeline to a grove of trees not too far from the campsite. The camera focused on the trees for a few moments capturing footage from all angles and from multiple heights. And then the operator must have recalled the drone because it headed straight back to its base. As it landed, almost like a snapshot, Alia’s face flashed on the screen and the video ended. 

Tozi was too stunned to say anything. She looked at Carlos with the same dazed expression that she had seen on his face earlier. She mutely, gestured at the screen, “she was there?”

“That’s what I have been trying to tell you.”

“Please explain and don’t ignore any details!” ordered Tozi. 

“Three days before Qasim’s body was found - Alia, Santosh, and Nadia had taken Max, one of our regulars, to find his loot. The spot that he remembered appears to have been close to Qasim’s camp. I looked up their reports. All three of them match. Nothing to see there. But when I looked at Santosh’s notes - he mentioned that he and Nadia had returned to the HQ with Max while Alia had stayed back at the site. Here, read this…,” Carlos pulled another notebook from the stack and flipped open to the bookmarked page. 

“I will read it later. Just tell me!”

“Yeah… so, it seems that Alia wanted to explore the terrain with a drone. A storm seemed to be approaching and she didn’t want all of them to get stuck in it… that too with Max in tow. In any case, Nadia had plans that evening and Alia had asked Santosh to type up the report of their wasted afternoon before he clocked out for the day.”

Before Carlos could continue with his narrative, Tozi said, “so Alia saw Qasim’s campsite three days before his death and she never mentioned it to anyone.”

“Exactly! That doesn’t make any sense, unless…” and Carlos’ voice trailed off uncertainly as he stared at Tozi. 

“Unless she killed Qasim!” 

Carlos waved his hands around as he stood up.

“I don’t believe it, Tozi. I just don’t. There has got to be some other explanation for this! There is no way Alia would do something like this. That is not who she is. She is the most honorable person I have ever known. She follows ALL the rules and makes us do the same. All the freakin' time.”

Tozi was quietly thinking.

“Well… we don’t really know people, do we?” she said it out loud, almost as if she was speaking to herself and not to Carlos.

“The timing could fit, too. The autopsy had been unable to pin an accurate time of death because of the stormy weather before Qasim’s body was found.”

Reluctantly, Tozi stood up and said to Carlos, “we have to go talk with Sonia about this.”

He nodded unenthusiastically. This whole thing was well above his pay-grade. As Tozi started to walk toward the door, he grabbed her arm. 

“You wanted to look at Alia’s notebooks, didn’t you?”

“Ohh… right. Do you know which one is from the day after the riot?”

“Here it is…”

Tozi quickly flipped through the notebook. Nope. There was no mention of Sara anywhere in the notebook. No mention of the chase. Nothing. In fact, Alia had no notes from the evening of the riot at all. With a grim look, Tozi started walking toward the door.  

Tozi and Carlos approached Sonia’s office. They didn’t have to wonder if she was in there. Sonia was letting someone have it with both barrels. Her voice was echoing through the entire floor. She was pacing in her office like a truly pissed off lioness. Her hands were slashing through the air and her fingers were pointing - or maybe poking hard - at some imaginary person’s chest. She saw them outside the partially open door and beckoned them. She was silent for a few beats as she heard out the person at the other end of the line. It was surprising to see her be patient. But that was Sonia - she took it just as well as she gave it. With a final round of yelling, she hung up and threw away her headset in disgust. 

“They would rather burn this place down than look bad. Fucking egomaniacs!”

Then as if by magic, all the anger and frustration in her entire body vanished as she gave a tired smile to her young colleagues. 

“How are you two doing? Do you have some good news for me? I really need that.”

Sonia was excellent at observing people and reading their minds. She had seen the expressions on Tozi’s and Carlos’ faces. They looked tense and also, maybe, confused. She wanted to make it as easy on them as possible. The fire and light show she had put on a moment ago for that idiot on the phone was going to scare these two into an awkward silence. And she had no time for dancing around at that moment. Shit was - indeed - about to hit the fan. Well…  in a few hours, that is.

With that sudden change in mood, Carlos had the expression of a deer caught in a headlight. His large black eyes stared blankly. He couldn’t even stutter out anything. 

“Why don’t you start, Tozi?” Sonia waved at them to sit down as she made her way back to her chair. She was tired. Really tired. She didn’t mind talking with people at all. But the stress from the situation was really taking a toll on her. For once, she was finding that her extraordinary skills of persuasion were not making any impact on her targets. She was going to have to come up with some new tricks if she was going to stop the riot. 

Tozi relaxed at the change in Sonia’s mood.

“Boss, how do I say this. We may have good news and bad news for you.”

Sonia, astutely, didn’t say anything. She merely raised her right eyebrow slightly and let Tozi continue. Tozi decided to take a more deliberate approach instead of just blurting out the facts.

“We may know the perpetrators. At least we have strong suspects, I think.”

At that, she stole a sideways glance at Carlos who adroitly nodded. He was getting back his ability to converse. 

Sonia was still quiet. She was carefully watching Tozi. 

“Let me start with Nadeem’s murder. Remember all those reports and witness statements had mentioned a large black woman? We figured out who she is. Also, she probably knew Nadeem from before Sequoia - in Sudan.”

Sonia merely gesticulated with her eyes for Tozi to go on.

“Her name is Sara. She is training to be a nurse and right now she is doing part-time work as a courier. I have her contact information and everything.”

Finally, Sonia spoke, “how did you find her?”

Tozi hesitated a bit. She bit her lower lip and then made her decision. 

“Let me show you this video.”

With that Tozi pulled out her tablet and summoned the video she had been reviewing earlier. She had book-marked the exact spot from where to roll the video. Carlos pulled up his chair and Sonia leaned across the desk to look at it. The scene showed Alia standing close to Shahid’s burning body but looking somewhere in the distance, away from the body-cam. And then the video started playing. As it did, Tozi isolated the section of the screen toward which Alia was looking and magnified it. Sara’s face popped up from the gloom. Tozi zoomed out again and let the video roll forward through the subsequent moments where Alia and Sara stared at each other, then Sara turned and ran away, and finally, Alia took off after her in hot pursuit. Tozi paused the video there and looked at both of them.

“I checked the formal reports from that night and also Alia’s notebook. She doesn’t mention this encounter anywhere. To the best of my knowledge, she never brought it up at any of the team meetings. Even if her chase had been futile, if only she had told me about this, I would have pulled out this video and identified Sara days ago.”

Tozi paused. Sonia’s face was inscrutable. Sure - everyone joked that they would love to play poker with Sonia given how transparent her face was. But few knew that when needed, Sonia could exert full control on what emotion to show and what to hide. All she asked was, “anything else?”

“Uhh… yes. There is something else that Carlos found out. Actually, we found out different things independently but simultaneously.”

Carlos decided to follow Tozi’s lead and lay out the video evidence before discussing it. The drone footage started playing out on his tablet as Sonia and Tozi watched. He fast-forwarded through it until the drone footage showed Qasim’s campsite. Sonia recognized it immediately and again, her right eyebrow went up. Carlos fast-forwarded the video again until it was almost at the end. Then he slowed it down so that they wouldn’t miss the last frame. The frame in which Alia’s face popped up. At that point he paused the video. 

“This is a video from three days before Qasim’s body was discovered. I was going through Santosh’s notebooks when I found a note he had made about checking some drone footage. It was not clear what he was referring to. As I was scrolling through the list of videos, I noticed one from a drone that Santosh had requisitioned three days before we found out about the murder.”

Again - Sonia’s face continued to be inscrutable. She had not shown any emotion at all. She ordered both of them, “state your conclusions. As clearly as possible. You go first, Carlos.”

“I think that Alia may have killed Qasim. She hid the fact that she had observed Qasim’s campsite before his murder. Why would she hide that? Unless, she went there and for whatever reason murdered him. And then acted as if she knew nothing about it. I think, Santosh must have remembered being in the vicinity of Qasim’s campsite with Alia, Nadia, and Max. He had noted that Alia had sent them back to the HQ after a futile search for Max’s loot. He clearly mentioned in his notebook that Alia had asked him to leave the drone with her as she wanted to spend some time exploring the area before she headed back.” 

Sonia nodded and then turned to Tozi.

“Sara must have killed Nadeem - we don’t know why. Alia figured it out somehow but chose to hide it from all of us. The only reason that I can think of why Alia covered for Sara is that she was herself guilty of killing Qasim and Sara probably guessed it when they met. 

I also found that Sara was present at the mini-riot that happened in warehouse district, the one where we had arrested a bunch of people but then let them go. Remember, that is when Shahid came across our radar for the second time. I think, Alia must have seen Sara there. That is why she recognized her again at the riot where Shahid died.” 

“Just to be clear, what I am hearing from both of you is that Alia chose to hide a couple of important things from the investigation team. And because of that, you are guessing that she may have herself murdered Qasim and covered up for Sara who may have murdered Nadeem. Apart from this circumstantial evidence, there is no actual evidence against both of them. Right?”

Both Tozi and Carlos nodded their heads. The way Sonia had summarized their theories made it sound as if they were both crazy. They forgot to breathe as they waited for Sonia’s wrath to descend on them. There was nowhere to hide.

“Good work. Both of you! I am proud of you.”

What? Sonia was buying all this? 

“I mean it - you two. It is a solid piece of police work. And you showed the courage to bring it to me even though this looks bad for your immediate supervisor. You also showed discretion in your behavior. You came straight to me, instead of bringing it up at the team meeting. Excellent instincts!

But… there is always a ‘but’, isn’t there?” Sonia smiled kindly at them.

“It is late and we have a riot on our hands in a few hours. I need all my team to be rested and ready to do whatever it is that we are going to have to do to save Sequoia. I want you to go home and sleep. There is not much we can do right now about Alia and Sara. It is not going to be of any use in stopping the riot. I am going to go get some sleep, too.”

She nodded at them and wished them a good night. Tozi and Carlos got up wearily and trudged off. 

Sonia debated whether to call Alia and confront her right away. She even picked up the phone and dialed her number. It promptly indicated that the phone had been switched off. She tried Sara’s number, too. Same result. Then she launched the phone tracker app on her computer. She - as the police chief - was the only one who didn’t have to seek authorization to use this app. She summoned up the movements of Alia’s and Sara’s phones over the last couple of hours. Sara’s had been at her home for a while. Alia’s phone had made her way to Sara’s place an hour ago. Then both the phones had started moving. And somewhere in the last half hour, they had both been simultaneously switched off. Sonia stared at the last known location. 

“What the hell is Alia up to?” she wondered. She thought of something and on a whim sent a text message. Within a few moments, there was a one-word response - “Yes!” Sonia smiled sadly. She still didn’t know what was going on in Alia’s mind. But this development was not so bad. She switched off her computer and got up. She needed to get some rest. Tomorrow was likely to be the most important day in her life. She had to have all her wits with her. Persuading people was her super-power. She needed to draw upon all of it tomorrow if the riot was to be nipped in the bud. In between the calls she was making to the leaders of the riot all day, she had been bouncing off some ideas with a few critical folks. She had a hunch that some of those ideas had now been put in play. She was praying that they would help her do her job well.