Case #2: The second puzzle
541 Words
Outside the interrogation room, Smriti " So, we got one killer." David " Yes. But who killed Preeti & why?"
Smriti " Billy is talking to her colleagues to check if we are missing something." David " Yes, we're missing something, but what was it? We have to check their details, look into their pasts including Preeti's."
Smriti " Will do."
Preeti's colleagues told Billy that the CCTV of the storage unit was not working for two days after Preeti's murder, but it is working now. When they were checking the previous footages, they saw someone stole a vial of cobra venom, but the thief's face couldn't be seen. Only the hand can be seen. The quality of the video is very poor. Billy took the footages & sent them to have them enhanced. After enhancement, a tattoo of Griffin, a creature with the head of an eagle, body of lion & tail of snake can be seen on the wrist. Smriti checked all of them for tattoos but couldn't find any. It is evident, that someone erased the tattoo. Nobody seemed to know about who had that tattoo. They said they remain so concentrated on research, they took little to no notice of the surroundings.
Billy went to the all tattoo parlors in the area to find which parlor had done this tattoo and on whom. He got a name & address, but when he went to that address, he found out that nobody lives there for twenty years. Ahmed found out, Preeti had done Ph.D. from the same university, where she works as a senior researcher now. While doing Ph.D., Preeti was constantly competing against another top student, Nikhil Khanna. But he was found dead before the final exam in his mess, with snake venom in his system & a suicide note was found beside him where he wrote that he's feeling the pressure & so he used venom to kill himself.
Nikhil had a brother, six years younger than him, but no one knew anything about him. So Billy asked for the friends who knew both of them or who may know about the brother. The university came up with some names of the friends. Billy talked to them, one friend told him that Nikhil's brother Akhil also went to do Ph.D. in snake venom at another university, then he went to the USA, but no one knows what he's doing now. Akhil looked a lot like Nikhil & he always blamed Preeti for his brother's suicide although it was not Preeti's fault. Billy asked for a photo of Nikhil from the university. After obtaining the photo, he went back to the tattoo parlor.
The tattoo artist did some artwork on the photo & then confirmed that the person in the photo is indeed the person who came in to do the tattoo. He went to the station, showed them the photo & told them the whole story. David matched the photo with the employee database. He found the person who killed Preeti, now he has to do is arrest him and gather evidence against him. So that he could charge him and he owuld go away and rot in jail cell for the rest of his life.
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