"How long missing?"
"Forty-eight hours. No phone activity since Saturday evening. No bank transactions. Activa found in office parking. Clean, no signs of struggle."
Aarav opened the folder. Standard missing person template. Photograph — a young woman with short hair and serious eyes, the kind of photo taken for an office ID badge. Work details, family contacts, last known movements.
"Pankaj, how many missing person cases have we had in the last three months? Women, twenty to thirty, NCR region?"
Pankaj thought about it. "Three that I know of. Megha Arora from Gurgaon, Saloni Bhat from Greater Noida, and Priti Verma from Dwarka."
"Pull those files for me."
"Why?"
"Just a feeling."
The files arrived an hour later. Three women, three different jurisdictions — Gurgaon Police, Greater Noida, and Delhi Police respectively. Three separate investigations, each going nowhere. No connection between the victims. Different ages, different professions, different social circles.
Aarav spread the files across his desk and did what he always did — looked for the thing that didn't fit. The detail that was too consistent across cases that shouldn't be consistent.
He found it in the phone records.
Each victim's phone log, obtained from the respective telecom providers, showed a cluster of incoming calls from unknown numbers in the days before their disappearance. The calls were short — most unanswered, a few picked up with durations under thirty seconds. The number of calls varied in the raw data, but when Aarav filtered out the spam calls and the identifiable numbers, the pattern emerged.
Nine calls. Each victim had received exactly nine calls from untraceable numbers before vanishing.
He checked again. Megha Arora — nine calls over fourteen days. Saloni Bhat — nine calls over nine days. Priti Verma — nine calls over twelve days. Neha Rastogi — nine calls over eleven days.
The number nine. Every single time.
Aarav sat back in his chair. The ceiling fan wobbled overhead, casting shifting shadows. The traffic outside honked. A constable walked past his desk eating a samosa. The world was normal. The numbers on his desk were not.
He picked up his phone and called the one person he trusted more than anyone in his professional life — DSP Kavita Sinha, his senior, his mentor, and the sharpest mind in the UP Police that nobody in the media ever talked about because she refused to give interviews.
"Ma'am, I think we have a serial case. Four women, three months, same pattern. I need to brief you."
Kavita's voice was calm, as always. "Come to my office. And Aarav — don't tell anyone else. Not yet."
He hung up, gathered the files, and headed for the door. On his way out, his phone buzzed. A message from his wife, Simran.
"Don't forget Rhea's school play tomorrow. You promised."
Rhea. His eight-year-old daughter. The school play he'd already forgotten twice. He typed back: "I'll be there. Promise."
He wouldn't be there. But he didn't know that yet. He didn't know a lot of things yet — like the fact that the person sending nine calls to women across Delhi-NCR was closer to him than the phone in his pocket.
And that the next number on the caller's list was one he recognized.
