Aarav didn't go to Raghav immediately. That was the hardest decision he'd made in the case so far — harder than the sleepless nights, harder than the mounting pressure from Kavita's superiors, harder than the look on Simran's face when she'd packed Rhea's overnight bag with the quiet efficiency of a woman rehearsing a permanent departure.
He didn't go because he needed proof. Not suspicion. Not a phone call from an unknown number pointing fingers. Proof — the kind that survives a courtroom, a defence lawyer, and the specific scrutiny of a Delhi media that would eat this case alive.
He set up surveillance on Raghav Saxena. Two plainclothes officers, rotating shifts, watching the Jasola office and Raghav's apartment in Vasant Kunj. He obtained Raghav's phone records through a separate warrant — one that Kavita signed with the understanding that if this leaked, both their careers were over.
The phone records were clean. Disturbingly clean. No calls to unknown numbers, no suspicious contacts, no communication with anyone outside a small circle of colleagues, family, and a girlfriend named Ananya Desai who taught yoga in Chattarpur.
But the absence of evidence was itself evidence. Raghav was a system administrator — a man who built databases and managed digital infrastructure for a living. If anyone knew how to communicate without leaving a trace, it was him.
Aarav went deeper. He pulled Raghav's financial records. Salary deposits, EMI payments, credit card bills — standard upper-middle-class Delhi life. But there were cash withdrawals. Regular, moderate amounts — ten thousand here, fifteen thousand there — that didn't correspond to any visible expense. Over eight months, the withdrawals totalled nearly four lakhs.
Four lakhs in unexplained cash. The same amount, roughly, that it would cost to rent an isolated property, purchase prepaid phones and VoIP services, and fund whatever infrastructure was needed to make four women disappear.
On day three of the surveillance, Officer Tripathi — the morning shift — reported something. Raghav had left his office at 2 PM, which was unusual. He'd driven not toward his apartment but south, through Mehrauli, past the Qutub Minar, into the semi-rural outskirts where Delhi dissolves into Haryana.
He'd stopped at a farmhouse. Stone walls, iron gate, surrounded by mustard fields. He'd stayed for forty-seven minutes, then driven back to the office.
The farmhouse was registered to a trust — the Nava Foundation — which was registered to a single trustee whose name was listed as Nitin Saxena.
A dead man's name on a living trust. A farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. And Raghav Saxena, visiting it on a Tuesday afternoon.
Aarav needed to get inside that farmhouse. But a warrant required probable cause, and "visited a property" wasn't enough — not in a case this sensitive, not with a suspect this connected. Raghav had money, lawyers, and the corporate infrastructure to fight a premature move.
So Aarav did something that would later be described in the case study as either "brilliant field improvisation" or "career-ending recklessness," depending on who was writing.
He went at night. Alone. Without a warrant, without backup, without informing anyone.
The farmhouse sat two hundred metres off a rural road, accessible through a dirt path flanked by neem trees. At 1 AM, the mustard fields were silver in the moonlight, and the only sound was the distant barking of village dogs and the hum of a transformer somewhere in the dark.
