She stood at the living room window and looked out at Mumbai waking up — the early joggers on Carter Road, the fishing boats returning to shore, the hazy skyline that always looked slightly unreal in the morning light. Somewhere in this city of twenty million people, someone was constructing elaborate crime scenes from her personal failures, and doing it with the precision of a craftsman.
Her phone buzzed. An unknown number. She normally wouldn't answer, but something — instinct, paranoia, the particular electricity in the air — made her pick up.
Silence on the other end. Then a voice — distorted, run through software that stripped it of gender, age, and identity. Flat, digital, inhuman.
"Did you like it, Inspector? The locked room. Your favourite puzzle."
Priya's hand tightened on the phone. "Who is this?"
"You have my work in front of you. Seven cases. Seven failures. I'm correcting them."
"Correcting them? You're killing innocent people."
"Innocent people died in your cases too, Inspector. The difference is, I finish what I start."
The line went dead.
Priya stood motionless for ten seconds. Then she turned to Vikram and Rajan, who'd been watching her face change colour during the call.
"Trace that number. Now."
The number was a burner phone, purchased with a fake Aadhaar from a mobile shop in Dharavi that sold hundreds of prepaid SIMs daily to people who preferred anonymity. The shopkeeper remembered nothing. The phone had been activated two hours before the call and was switched off immediately after. No GPS data. No cell tower triangulation possible.
Professional. Meticulous. Patient.
At the Crime Branch, Priya assembled her team in the conference room — Vikram, Rajan, two constables, and Dr. Ashwin from forensics. She pinned the seven case files to a whiteboard, numbered them, and drew lines connecting the original crimes to the copycat scenes.
"We're dealing with someone who has intimate knowledge of my investigations," she said. "Not just the public details — the specifics. The things only I would know." She tapped the Siddiqui file. "The locked-room case. I had a theory about how the killer got out — a theory I never put in the official report because I couldn't prove it. The theory involved the building's old-style deadbolt, which could be manipulated with a specific tool from outside if you knew the mechanism."
"And the copycat used the same method?" Rajan asked. His voice was calm, measured. He was the kind of person who spoke only when he had something worth saying, which Priya found both admirable and infuriating.
"I'll know when forensics finishes with the lock. But the point is — the only place that theory exists is in my personal notebook. Not the FIR, not the digital records, not the official case summary. My notebook."
The room was quiet.
"So either someone broke into your office and read your notes," Vikram said, "or..."
"Or someone close to me already knows them."
She didn't say what they were all thinking. The copycat wasn't an outsider studying her cases from a distance. The copycat was someone who'd been close enough to read over her shoulder. Someone who'd had access — physical or digital — to the most private corners of her professional life.
That night, alone in her office, Priya did something she hadn't done in years. She took a blank sheet of paper and wrote down every name. Every person who'd worked closely with her in the last decade. Partners, subordinates, seniors, informants, witnesses, forensic technicians, lawyers. Twenty-three names.
One of them was the copycat.
She stared at the list until the names blurred. Then she locked it in her drawer, turned off the light, and drove home through streets that no longer felt entirely safe.
