Ajay skipped Case 3.
The foiled poisoning attempt had disrupted his timeline, and for a week, there was silence. No new bodies. No phone calls. No notes. Priya checked every morning, waiting for the call from Vikram, waiting for the next crime scene to materialize from her past.
The silence broke on a Sunday morning. Two cases in a single night.
At 4 AM, a woman's body was found in Aarey Colony — partially buried in a clearing off the Goregaon-Film City road. She'd been killed by blunt force trauma to the head. The positioning, the burial method, the location — all matched the Jyoti Nair case from 2020. Case 4.
The victim was Pooja Gaikwad, twenty-seven, a school teacher from Kandivali. She'd been reported missing two days earlier by her husband. In her hand: Case No. 4 of 7.
At 5:30 AM, while Priya was still at the Aarey Colony scene, Vikram called with the second hit. A sixty-year-old retired government official named Mohan Bhat had been struck and killed by a vehicle on SV Road in Santacruz at approximately 11 PM the previous night. The vehicle — a stolen Maruti Swift — was found abandoned in Vile Parle, wiped clean. A hit-and-run on a major road, late at night, targeting a retired official.
Case 5. The Juhu hit-and-run.
Two cases in one night. Ajay was accelerating. He was compressing the timeline further, rushing toward the end with the feverish urgency of someone who knows the police are closing in and doesn't care.
Priya stood in the Aarey clearing, dawn light filtering through the trees, and looked at Pooja Gaikwad's partially buried body with a grief that had crystallized into something harder than sorrow. Four people were dead because of her unsolved cases. Four human beings — with families, with futures, with ordinary Tuesday-morning plans — were gone because someone had decided that Priya's professional failures deserved a sequel.
"I'm going to find you," she said, not to anyone present. Just to the trees, and the earth, and the ghost of Jyoti Nair who'd been buried in almost the same spot six years ago. "I'm going to find you, and this ends."
The breakthrough came not from forensics or surveillance but from old-fashioned police work — the kind Dev Sir had taught her, ironically. Footwork. Interviews. The patient accumulation of small truths.
A tea vendor near the SV Road hit-and-run location remembered seeing a young man — thin, dark, wearing a baseball cap — sitting at his stall for almost two hours before the incident. He'd ordered three teas and barely touched them. He kept checking his phone and looking down the road.
"Like he was waiting for someone," the vendor said. "Not nervous. Patient. Like a person who has done waiting before."
