"Saurabh Kulkarni was one of the four. I didn't follow up on him." She said it flatly, factually. "I was focused on the twins. The other victims were listed in the FIR but their individual statements were taken by a constable. I never interviewed Saurabh personally."
"And Ajay — his brother — ends up working at a lab that stores the exact chemical used in the crime."
"Not a coincidence."
"Definitely not."
Priya made three phone calls. The first was to ACP Deshmukh, requesting an arrest warrant for Ajay Kulkarni. The second was to the cyber cell, requesting a full digital trace — phone records, bank transactions, social media, everything. The third was to every police station in Mumbai, alerting them to watch for a twenty-seven-year-old male matching Ajay's description.
Then she sat in her car in the BioShield parking lot and thought.
It fit. Too well, almost. The brother connection to the Malad case gave Ajay a motive — anger at the police investigation that had sidelined his brother, resentment toward the inspector who hadn't deemed Saurabh important enough to interview personally. But motive only explained one case. What about the other six? What connected Ajay Kulkarni to the Sunita Jadhav case, or the Siddiqui locked room, or any of the others?
And how did a twenty-seven-year-old lab technician from Nagpur gain access to Priya's personal case notes?
The answer, when it came three days later, arrived not as a revelation but as a door opening onto a darker room.
The cyber cell traced Ajay's bank transactions. Standard expenses — rent, food, mobile recharge. But one payment stood out. Every month for the last eight months, Ajay had transferred fifteen thousand rupees to an account at a private bank in South Mumbai. The receiving account was registered to a trust called "The Archive Foundation."
The Archive Foundation had no website, no public presence, and no listed office address. Its registration documents, filed with the Charity Commissioner, listed its purpose as "the preservation and study of criminal investigation methodologies." Its sole trustee was a name Priya had to read three times before the letters stopped rearranging themselves in her vision.
Devendra Patwardhan.
ACP Devendra Patwardhan. Retired. Priya's first mentor. The man who'd trained her, guided her, shaped her into the officer she was. The man who'd sat in this same Crime Branch building for thirty years, who'd taught her how to read a crime scene, how to interview a suspect, how to think like the person you were hunting.
The man who knew every single one of her cases. Because he'd supervised half of them.
Priya sat in the cyber cell office, staring at the name on the screen, and felt the ground beneath her feet turn to sand.
