"Or unless her involvement isn't what you think it is. You saw her driving to the farmhouse. You didn't see her inside it. You didn't see her interacting with the victims. There could be an explanation."
"What explanation allows a DSP to visit a farmhouse where four kidnapped women are being held in drugged sedation?"
Sahil couldn't answer that.
Aarav drove home through the empty Delhi streets, his mind racing through possibilities like a man running through doors in a burning building. Each door led to a room worse than the last.
He didn't sleep. At 5 AM, his phone buzzed. Unknown Caller.
Fourth call. He was at four of nine.
He answered. The tapping — nine beats. Then the voice:
"You found the temple, Inspector. But you don't understand the prayer. Ask your DSP about 1997. Ask her about Meenakshi."
The line went dead.
1997. Aarav would have been seven years old. Kavita would have been twenty-five — a young Sub-Inspector, probably still in training. What happened in 1997?
He dug into the archives. Not the digital ones — those only went back to 2005. The physical archives, stored in the basement of the SP's office in metal trunks that smelled of rust and neglect. It took him six hours of sorting through yellowed files, illegible handwriting, and the dried-out corpses of insects that had made their homes in the margins of criminal justice.
He found it in a trunk labelled "1997-1998, Missing Persons, Noida-Greater Noida."
A file. Thin, barely ten pages. Case No. MP/97/0423.
Missing person: Meenakshi Sinha. Age: 19. Daughter of Constable Ram Prasad Sinha and homemaker Savitri Sinha. Sister of Kavita Sinha.
Kavita's younger sister. Missing since September 14, 1997. Last seen at a diagnostic clinic in Sector 27, Noida, where she'd gone for a routine blood test. Her results had been normal. Perfect health.
She was never found. The case was filed as "Open — Pending."
Aarav sat in the dusty basement, the file open on his lap, and the case rebuilt itself in his mind.
Kavita Sinha had lost her sister in 1997. A sister who'd visited a diagnostic clinic. A sister who'd been in perfect health. A sister who'd vanished without a trace — the same way four women were vanishing now.
Was Kavita hunting the person who'd taken Meenakshi? Or was she something else entirely — a woman whose grief had mutated over twenty-eight years into something unrecognizable?
He didn't know. But he knew one thing: the caller was feeding him information. Piece by piece, call by call, leading him deeper into a labyrinth. And the question he should have asked from the beginning wasn't "who is the caller" but "why are they helping me?"
Nobody helps a detective for free. Every tip has a price. Every anonymous caller has a motive.
And Aarav was running out of calls. Four down. Five to go.
What happened at nine?
