Ajay Kulkarni was in custody. The threat was contained. The Crime Branch issued a statement. The media ran the story for three days, then moved on to a celebrity divorce.
Priya didn't move on.
Because Ajay, during his interrogation, said something that lodged in her brain like a splinter. He was being questioned by Vikram in the Crime Branch interrogation room — a windowless box with a single table, two chairs, and a camera that recorded everything. Priya watched from behind the one-way glass.
"How did you access Inspector Sharma's personal case notes?" Vikram asked.
Ajay smiled. Not the smile of a madman — the smile of someone playing a game and knowing something the other player doesn't.
"I didn't."
"The notes in your storage unit were exact reproductions —"
"I know what they were. But I didn't access them personally. They were given to me."
"By Devendra Patwardhan?"
"Dev Sir gave me the general case files. The official records. But the personal notes — Priya's private observations, her theories, the details that never made it into any report — those came from someone else."
Vikram leaned forward. "Who?"
Ajay's smile widened. "Someone who's been watching Inspector Sharma much longer than I have. Someone who has access to her office, her files, her routines. Someone she trusts."
"Give me a name."
"I don't have a name. I have an email address. The correspondence is on my laptop — a separate account, encrypted. The person contacted me after I started working with Dev Sir. They offered to help. They provided the notes, the photographs, the insider information. I never met them. I don't know who they are."
"You're lying."
"Check the laptop. The encrypted folder. Password is 'saurabh2019' — my brother's name, the year his life ended."
The cyber cell cracked the folder in two hours. Inside: thirty-seven emails exchanged over six months between Ajay's anonymous email and an address registered through a VPN-routed service that the cyber team couldn't trace without international cooperation that would take weeks to arrange.
The emails were chilling in their specificity. The anonymous source had provided exact copies of Priya's case notes, detailed information about her daily schedule, floor plans of her apartment, and — most disturbingly — personal observations about her emotional state, her relationship with her daughter, and her psychological vulnerabilities.
"This person knows you intimately," Rajan said, reading the emails in Priya's office. "Not just professionally. Personally. The way you react under stress. The fact that you skip meals when you're obsessed. The specific brand of whisky you drink when a case goes cold."
"Antiquity Blue," Priya said. "I didn't think anyone noticed."
"Someone noticed everything."
She looked at the emails again. The language was educated, precise, clinical. The observations were those of someone trained in investigation — someone who could assess behaviour, read patterns, and predict responses. A cop.
"It's someone in the department," Priya said. "Someone who's been in the same building as me for years."
