"Come back safe, Maa," Ananya said.
"I will."
"Promise."
Priya hesitated. She never made promises she wasn't certain she could keep. It was a principle she'd held since Siddharth left — the policy of never lying to her daughter, even when the truth was ugly.
"I promise," she said.
Back in Mumbai, she worked the two tracks in parallel. Track one: finding Ajay before he struck again. Track two: quietly investigating the Tiwari connection.
For track two, she turned to the only person she trusted completely: Dr. Ashwin Kulkarni, the forensic pathologist. Ashwin had performed the autopsy on Manoj Tiwari. He'd noted the anomalies in his report — the wrong ligature angle, the displaced chair. His concerns had been overruled.
They met in his office at the JJ Hospital morgue — a room that smelled of formaldehyde and bureaucracy. Ashwin listened to Priya's findings without interrupting. When she finished, he removed his glasses, cleaned them on his lab coat, and said:
"I always knew Tiwari was murdered. The hyoid bone was fractured in a pattern inconsistent with self-suspension. I wrote it in my preliminary notes. By the time the final report was filed, that detail had been revised."
"Revised by whom?"
"The revision came from above. I was told the initial finding was inconclusive and that the final determination should reflect the consensus of the investigating team. The investigating team's consensus was directed by Deshmukh."
"Why didn't you fight it?"
"I'm a forensic pathologist in a government hospital, Priya. I have two years to retirement, a son in medical school, and a pension that depends on not making enemies. I'm not proud of it. But I'm honest about it."
She couldn't blame him. The system didn't reward truth-tellers. It recycled them.
"I need your original notes," she said. "The preliminary ones, before the revision."
"I kept copies. I always keep copies." He opened a drawer, reached to the very back, and pulled out a yellowed envelope. "Insurance."
Priya took the envelope. "If something happens to me, these go to the CBI. Not to the Mumbai Police. The CBI."
"Nothing is going to happen to you."
"Ashwin, a man with two hundred milligrams of poison and photographs of my daughter is somewhere in this city. Something might very well happen to me."
She left the hospital with the envelope tucked inside her jacket, feeling the paper against her ribs like a second heartbeat — the heartbeat of a dead journalist whose story wasn't over.
