“You must feel isolated,” Shanti said.
I shrug. “Sometimes.”
“Have you made any new friends?”
These are questions I should be asking her, the poor dear.
“None that I would take home to Mother,” I say with a smile. Then I change my tone, getting serious. “I should explain the purpose of my visit. I must warn you ahead of time it will shock you.”
“In a good way or a bad way?” Shanti asks innocently.
“I’m sorry, I wish I was here with good news.” I lift up the file I took from Marko’s house and pass it to her. “Shanti, can you read?” I ask.
“Yes. With these glasses on.”
“What is that you’re giving her?” Mr. Garuda asks.
“Once again, please brace yourself. This file was taken off a notorious hit man known to the FBI as Marko. He has a reputation as a killer for the Mob. But in this case, for reasons unknown to us, he’s been assigned to kill you, Shanti.”
Mr. Garuda gasps in fear, but Shanti remains remarkably calm.
“What did I do to him that he would want to kill me?” she asks.
“You misunderstand. He’s been hired by a third party to kill you. He’s a professional. He murders people for a living. He has no personal interest in you.”
Shanti holds up the picture. “This must have been taken recently.”
“How recently, do you think?” I ask.
“The dress I’m wearing in this photo—I only bought it last month.”
“Are you saying this Marko is going to come to our house?” Mr. Garuda demands.
I raise a hand. “There’s no danger of that. Marko has already been taken out of action. He won’t be harming anyone else. But we still have a problem. We don’t know who hired him to kill you.” I pause. “Do you have any idea why someone would want you dead, Shanti?”
She slowly shakes her head. “No. I mean, there’s Juna. He’s the one who . . .” She has trouble finishing the sentence.
“He’s the man you were engaged to?” I say carefully.
She nods. “But that was two years ago, in India. Juna’s a poor shopkeeper who makes his money rolling bibis all day.”
“Cigarettes?”
“Yes. How did you know that?”
“I’ve traveled in India. So you feel Juna is an unlikely suspect?”
“Yes.”
I turn to her uncle. “Mr. Garuda, do you have any enemies?”
“None that I know of.” He stops to wipe at his eyes. “I’m sorry, this is very disturbing. Shanti has been through so much, and to think there is someone out there who wants to hurt her again . . .”
Shanti strokes the man’s arm. “Don’t worry, Baba. The FBI is here to protect us. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
The girl’s calm courage impresses me.
“What Shanti says is true,” I say. “I’m going to assign a team of agents to this house so that Shanti will be guarded 24/7. Should a second contract be taken out on her life, no harm will come to her. Any professional hit man who approaches this house will quickly see how well she’s guarded and immediately leave town.”
“Why do you think there will be a second contract?” Mr. Garuda asks.
“Because they arrested the man who was supposed to kill me,” Shanti explains to him before turning to me. “Is that true, Jessica? Whoever wants me dead will just hire someone else?”
“Yes. Assuming they’re anxious to have you killed. And that appears likely given the fact they hired Marko at the start. Until he was caught, he was considered one of the deadliest hit men in the country.”
“I must be more important than I realized,” Shanti says.
“To someone,” I say. “We come back to our original question. Is there anyone you can think of that would want you dead?”
“There’s no one.” She gestures to her face. “Because of my injury, I seldom go out. Never mind enemies, I hardly have any friends.”
“Do you work, Shanti?”
She hesitates. “No.”
“You don’t have a part-time job that you might do from home?”
She glances toward her uncle. “There’s a small job I have, but I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
Mr. Garuda interrupts. “The company that employs her has a strict privacy policy. I’m sure you can understand.”
“On the contrary, I can’t think of a single American company that warns its employees not to talk about the firm they work for.” I pause. “We’re talking about IIC, aren’t we?”
Shanti and her uncle look surprised. “How do you know about them?” she asks.
“Let’s just say the FBI is very interested in them. In fact, we suspect IIC might be behind the contract on your life.”
“That’s impossible,” Mr. Garuda says. “They’re an investment firm. They have done nothing but help Shanti. I can’t believe they’d want to kill her. It makes no sense.”
“It makes no sense to me, either. But then, I don’t know what your niece does for IIC.” I pause. “How do they help you, Shanti?”
She hesitates. “They send me a check for one hundred dollars every month.”
“Why? Because you’re handicapped?”
“It has nothing to do with my face.” She stops and puts a hand to her wound. “At least, I don’t think it has anything to do with what Juna did to me.”
“Explain.”
She lowers her head. “It’s silly.”
“Tell me anyway.”
She raises her head, yet this time her eyes don’t go to me, but to one of the paintings of Krishna on the walls. She stares at it a long time before she answers.
“When Juna threw the acid in my face, the pain was unlike anything I had ever imagined. I felt as if someone was holding a blowtorch to my head. The burning wouldn’t stop, even when my friends washed away the acid. It just kept burning and burning. They took me to the doctor and he bandaged me and gave me pills for the pain, but still the burning stayed. I felt I would go mad. I couldn’t see then, nothing, and the doctor told me the blindness would be permanent. I didn’t know what to do. My mother and father—they felt sorry for me. Yet they also felt I had disgraced our family by refusing to marry Juna. My own father had the nerve to say that what Juna had done to me was my karma.”