Priya typed back: "Sorry, beta. Emergency. Breakfast is in the fridge. Take the bus." She paused, then added: "I love you." Ananya didn't respond.
The forensics van arrived. Dr. Ashwin Kulkarni — Chief Forensic Pathologist, fifty-eight, meticulous, with the bedside manner of a calculus textbook — stepped out with his kit and his permanent expression of mild irritation.
"What do we have?" he asked.
"Something that shouldn't exist," Priya said.
She briefed him as they walked back inside. Ashwin's face, usually unreadable, flickered when she explained the connection to the 2017 case. He'd worked that case too.
"You're sure?" he said.
"The cloth, the pose, the arm position, the eyes — it's identical. Not similar. Identical."
Ashwin crouched by the body and began his preliminary examination. Priya watched from five feet away, arms crossed, running the timeline in her head. The Sunita Jadhav case file had been in the Crime Branch archives for seven years. Who had access? Technically, any officer in the branch. But the specific details — the exact angle of the arm, the way the cloth was torn, the position of the eyes — those were in Priya's personal case notes, which she kept in a locked drawer in her office.
Or so she thought.
"Priya," Ashwin said, his voice flat and professional and therefore terrifying. "Come look at this."
She walked over. He'd turned the victim's left hand, opening the fingers that held the cloth strip. Underneath the cloth, pressed against the palm, was a small piece of paper. Folded once. White. Priya could see ink bleeding through.
Ashwin extracted it with tweezers, placed it in an evidence bag, and held it up to the overhead work light.
The note was typed. Clean, precise font. Five words:
Case No. 1 of 7.
Priya's blood went cold. Not the metaphorical kind — she felt her temperature actually drop, felt the hair on her arms rise, felt her body respond to a threat her mind was still processing.
Seven unsolved cases. In fourteen years with the Crime Branch, Priya had seven cases she'd never closed. Seven investigations that had consumed months of her life and yielded nothing. Seven failures that she carried like stones in her chest.
Someone knew about all of them. Someone was recreating them, one by one.
And the note said this was number one.
