Murder In Beltour | Chapter 09 | Dev’s Story

Dev had joined on the low-rung of an inconceivably complicated interconnected network of thugs, the head of which was someone called the ‘Boss’. Dev was not someone you could call a good man, but with a slight push he was capable of being one. And, the ‘Boss’ had given him several top-down orders to be executed. Sometimes, they were petty thefts of things that seemed insignificant to Dev. And at other times, it was either a job to threaten someone or finish them off. 

Dev wasn’t someone you could call a good person, yet he wasn’t so devoid of emotion to be capable of shooting someone dead. Or, stabbing them, or any other physical violent means of bringing death. So, he had never been assigned anything more than poisoning someone once. And, with this weakness came Dev’s downside- he never really progressed up the ladder like the others did. Like Yash did. As always, Dev got the job of delivering a message to Ruchi one day, as he was always the one to do such trivial jobs. But, the job was taken back from him, and Yash was sent instead. And, then he was made to quit, and was sent to the streets. 

The Boss had made one mistake- of thinking Dev was as much a fool in his head as he was physically. Dev was sharp in his senses, his eyes and ears always noticing and hearing things. And, by the time he was thrown out, Dev knew quite a bit about the plans that were being whispered through the hierarchy ladders. There was going to be an attack on the owner of The Period.

He had rushed to a detective so that he could find more, and make sure it didn't happen. That’s when he had met Sunanda, another woman who had worked for the Boss but had been way high up in the ladder. For reasons unknown to him, and he didn’t dare ask her, she was left alive by the Boss though she knew too many things about his deeds. He had narrated everything he knew about the plan to her. 

As rumoured in the rung of the ladders, The Period had a set of sixty tapes with the whole history of the Boss since twenty years ago, when he was in his formative years to rising a terror ladder. Who was the Boss exactly? And, what did he terrorize? Dev did not really know exactly, and to Dev’s best knowledge, nobody seemed to know when he had worked with them. The Period, over the years, had grown so big that threats weren’t really effective with them. The Boss wanted the editor-in-chief done away with, to induce terror, stall the project and destroy the content they had. And, it had been rumoured that Ruchi, a very trusted aide of the Boss, was supposed to do the job. 

But, by the time that Dev had gone to tell all the little conversations that he had heard, Ruchi had already died in a fire. When he had reached out to Sunanda to save the editor-in-chief, she had already been involved in the fire case in which Ruchi died. How did both the cases come to her? Was it mere coincidence?

Sunanda sat in her office, her notebook in front of her, and her thoughts turning over what all the case had thrown at her. Sunanda had seen the paper trails and the tool marks at the bottom of Ruchi’s door. And, Saira had kept her door unlocked for two minutes. Somehow, all of them were involved: the Boss, The Period, Ruchi, Yash, Dev, and yet, something was still missing for her. Who did Ruchi have to meet the morning she died?

Sleep took over Sunanda as she worked it out all on her mind- over and over- was it the Boss? Or, was it The Period? She fell asleep on the table, her notebook still open and a pencil still clutched in her fingers.

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Read Chapter 10!