Inspector Kaveri Nair had been a Bengaluru crime investigator for eleven years, which meant she had been called to dead bodies in apartments on a hundred and twelve separate occasions. She had counted them, early in her career, and then stopped counting, and now she counted other things — the quality of the first officer on scene, the time between death and discovery, the specific way a room presented its information to someone who knew how to receive it.
This room was presenting something she had not encountered before.
The call had come in at six-forty AM from a neighbour — Mrs. Aruna Prasad, fourth floor, who had come downstairs to return a borrowed book and found the door of Flat 12 slightly ajar, and through the gap had seen something that had caused her to call 112 rather than knock. The first officer had arrived at seven-fifteen and secured the scene and called Kaveri, and Kaveri had arrived at eight-thirty with her documentation kit and the specific state of mind she maintained at crime scenes: present, receptive, drawing no conclusions before the scene had been allowed to present them.
