The Crime Branch headquarters on DN Road was a building that looked like it had given up on life around 1987 and never recovered. The lifts worked intermittently, the paint was a shade of green that existed nowhere in nature, and the air conditioning had been "under repair" since the BJP's first term. Priya's office was on the fourth floor — a ten-by-twelve room with a metal desk, two chairs, a window that overlooked a parking lot, and a wall of filing cabinets that contained fifteen years of human misery organized alphabetically.
By 8 AM, Priya had three things.
One: the victim's identity. Kavita Mane, twenty-four, from Dombivli. Worked as a data entry operator at a logistics company in Vashi. No criminal record. No known enemies. Her roommate, Deepa Shinde, had reported her missing thirty-six hours before the body was found.
Two: the preliminary forensic report. Cause of death: asphyxiation by ligature strangulation. Time of death: estimated between 10 PM and midnight on Sunday. No signs of sexual assault. No DNA under the fingernails. The killer had been careful — gloves, likely full body coverage, no biological trace evidence at the scene.
Three: a growing sense of dread that she was keeping carefully locked behind her professional demeanour.
She opened the grey filing cabinet. Third drawer. The section she never opened unless she was having a particularly self-punishing night with a glass of whisky.
Seven folders. Seven unsolved cases. She laid them out on her desk.
Case 1: Sunita Jadhav. 2017. Found in abandoned textile mill, Lower Parel. Strangulation. No suspect identified.
Case 2: Farhan Siddiqui. 2018. Thirty-one-year-old accountant. Found in his locked apartment in Bandra with a single stab wound to the chest. No weapon recovered. No forced entry. Locked-room mystery that Priya had spent four months trying to crack.
Case 3: The Malad twins. 2019. Fourteen-year-old brothers Rohan and Rahul Desai, found unconscious in a construction site in Malad West. Poisoning — a specific industrial chemical mixed into bottled water. They survived but suffered permanent neurological damage. The poisoner was never found.
Case 4: Jyoti Nair. 2020. Twenty-nine-year-old teacher. Disappeared from her home in Dadar during the lockdown. Body found three weeks later in Aarey Colony, partially buried. Cause of death: blunt force trauma. The lockdown had made the investigation nearly impossible — no witnesses, limited movement, a city frozen in fear.
Case 5: The Juhu hit-and-run. 2021. Sixty-two-year-old retired judge Prakash Kulkarni (no relation to Dr. Ashwin Kulkarni) killed by a vehicle on Juhu Tara Road at 11:30 PM. The vehicle was found abandoned the next day in Goregaon — stolen, wiped clean. Priya suspected it wasn't a hit-and-run but a targeted killing, but she could never prove it.
Case 6: Manoj Tiwari. 2022. Forty-five-year-old journalist. Found hanging in his office in Fort. Officially ruled a suicide. Priya had pushed back — the angle of the ligature mark was wrong, the chair was too far from the body, and Tiwari's laptop had been wiped clean hours before his death. But she was overruled by her seniors, and the case was closed.
Case 7: Rhea Kapoor. 2023. Twenty-year-old college student. Disappeared from Churchgate station on a Friday evening. Never found. No body. No ransom. No trace. Priya's most recent failure, and the one that kept her awake at night more than any other.
Seven cases. Seven human beings whose stories she couldn't finish. And now someone was rewriting them.
