"Five more completions. And then — the final act. The ninth ninth. Whatever this person is building, it reaches its apex at the ninth victim."
Aarav left the clinic with a profile that was both clarifying and horrifying: a subject who believed in a system, who operated on ritual, who was selecting medically perfect women for a purpose that had the logic of faith and the mechanics of a machine.
On the drive back, he called Pankaj. "I need you to check something. LifeCare Diagnostics — pull the records of every female patient aged twenty to thirty across all branches who had test results showing perfect health. No conditions, no anomalies. In the last twelve months."
"That could be thousands of names, Aarav."
"It's the selection pool. The killer is choosing from that list. And somewhere on that list is the next victim — and the five after her."
He hung up. The Delhi evening traffic closed around him — a river of headlights and horns and exhaust fumes. His phone buzzed. Not a call — a message. From Simran.
"Aarav, I'm taking Rhea to my parents' house in Lucknow for the weekend. She needs some normalcy. So do I."
He typed: "Okay. I understand. Kiss Rhea for me."
He didn't type what he was thinking: that his wife was slowly, methodically packing her emotional bags. That the weekends at her parents' house were becoming more frequent. That the distance between them was growing in inches that felt like miles.
But there was something else he didn't type. Something that had been bothering him since the phone call in traffic. The voice on the phone had said: "You're looking at the wrong brother."
If Nitin Saxena was the wrong brother, that pointed to Raghav. But the voice had been young. Raghav was thirty-eight. The voice had sounded younger — mid-twenties, maybe. It didn't sound like Raghav.
Which meant there might be a third person entirely. Someone neither brother knew about. Or someone both brothers knew and neither had mentioned.
Aarav's phone buzzed again. This time, a call. Unknown Caller.
Third call. He was at three of nine.
He answered.
Silence. Tapping. Nine taps. Then the voice — the same young, calm voice:
"Ask Raghav about the nine-day festival, Inspector. Ask him what happened to the tenth girl."
The line went dead.
The tenth girl.
Aarav's mouth went dry. If the pattern was nine victims, what was the tenth? Who was the tenth?
He was still asking that question when his phone buzzed one more time. A notification. An email from the cyber cell, timestamped forty seconds ago.
Subject: URGENT — Digital trace results for Nitin Saxena.
He opened it at a red light, and what he read made him miss the green.
Nitin Saxena had been dead for three months. A body found in an agricultural field near Hapur, decomposed, identified through dental records. The case had been filed as an unidentified body by the local police and only matched to Nitin's missing person report — filed by Raghav — two weeks ago.
Nitin was dead.
The account accessing the database was Nitin's. The backdoor was Nitin's. But Nitin had been dead since before the first victim disappeared.
Someone was using a dead man's access to hunt living women. And the only person who'd known about that access — the only person who'd helpfully pointed the police toward his dead brother — was Raghav Saxena.
The wrong brother. Not the dead one. The living one.
