She showed him the power consumption data. A spike every Tuesday and Friday evening for the past month. "He's been here. Preparing. Setting up."
They set up in the adjacent room — a storage area with a connecting wall thin enough to hear through. Two officers on the roof. Two in the alley below. Vikram coordinating remotely from the Crime Branch.
They waited.
The first night — nothing. The second night — nothing. The third night was a Friday. At 9:17 PM, they heard the back door open. Footsteps on the stairs. The creak of the office door.
Priya listened through the wall. Someone moving furniture — a chair being dragged across the floor. The sound of rope being handled. A zipper — a bag being opened. Small metallic sounds.
She looked at Rajan. He nodded. He was holding his service weapon with the steady hand of a man who'd spent a decade doing exactly this.
They moved to the door. Priya counted — three, two, one — and pushed it open.
The room was lit by a single bulb. Ajay Kulkarni stood in the centre, a rope in his hands, a chair beneath a ceiling beam. He was thinner than his photographs, with dark circles under his eyes and the hollow look of someone who'd been running on rage for so long that the rage had eaten everything else.
He didn't run. He didn't reach for a weapon. He just looked at Priya with an expression she recognized — she'd seen it in the mirror often enough.
Recognition.
"I knew it would be this one," he said, his voice calm and clear and exhausted. "Of the three locations, this was the one you'd choose. You think like me."
"No," Priya said, her weapon trained on his chest, her voice carrying the authority of fourteen years and four dead people and a daughter she'd sent away to keep safe. "You think like me. That's your mistake. You studied me so closely that you forgot to be unpredictable."
Rajan moved behind Ajay. Handcuffs clicked. Ajay didn't resist. He stood there, rope still in his hands, and looked at Priya with something that wasn't hatred, wasn't madness — it was something worse.
Disappointment.
"You didn't solve them, you know," he said as Rajan pulled him toward the door. "My brother is still on dialysis. Sunita Jadhav's family still doesn't know who killed their daughter. Jyoti Nair's mother still lights a candle every night. The judge who was murdered on Juhu Road — his wife still writes letters to the commissioner that nobody reads."
"I know," Priya said.
"Then what was the point? Of any of it? Of you?"
The question hung in the room like the rope he'd brought — heavy, purposeful, designed to end something.
"The point," Priya said, "is that we don't stop trying. Even when we fail. Even when the system is broken, and the boss is corrupt, and the evidence disappears, and the case goes cold. We don't stop. That's not heroic. It's just the job."
Ajay was led down the stairs by Rajan and the waiting officers. Priya stood alone in the room for a long time, looking at the chair, the rope, the empty space where a body would have hung.
Case No. 6 of 7. The journalist's ghost. Stopped before it could become flesh.
One case left. But the last one — the disappearance — had never been about recreation.
It had always been about her.
