The vendor provided a description that matched Ajay. More importantly, he remembered something else: the man had left a bag under the bench when he'd walked away after the vehicle hit Mohan Bhat. A black cloth bag, the kind that street vendors sell for fifty rupees.
The bag was recovered from the municipal lost-and-found two days later. Inside: a change of clothes, a baseball cap, a pair of surgical gloves, and a bus pass. The bus pass was registered to a name — Sanjay Varma — that didn't exist in any official database. But the pass had been used seventeen times in the previous month, always on the same route: Malad to Churchgate.
Churchgate. Where Rhea Kapoor had disappeared in 2023. Case 7. The endgame.
Priya mapped the bus route. Every stop, every turn, every street. She cross-referenced it with the surveillance photographs from Ajay's laptop — the photographs of Ananya, of the apartment building, of the security detail's shifts.
And she found the intersection. The place where Ajay's daily bus route passed within two hundred metres of a building she hadn't thought about in months: the Churchgate evidence locker. A secondary storage facility used by the Crime Branch for cold case evidence. The facility where the physical evidence from all of Priya's seven unsolved cases was stored.
He'd been visiting his own museum. Riding the bus past the building, probably getting off at the nearest stop, probably standing outside and looking at the building that held the fragments of his brother's suffering — the water bottles, the chemical analysis reports, the evidence of a crime that the system had failed to solve.
Priya felt the shape of the endgame forming in her mind, the way a developing photograph slowly reveals its subject in the darkroom tray. Ajay wasn't going to stop at seven recreations. He was going to make Priya feel exactly what the victims' families felt — the helplessness, the rage, the devastating knowledge that the system designed to protect you had failed.
And then he was going to make her the final victim.
Not by killing her. By taking Ananya — his version of the Rhea Kapoor disappearance — and leaving Priya alive, forever searching, forever not knowing.
A fate worse than death. He was designing it specifically for her.
She called Ananya in Pune. It rang five times before her daughter picked up.
"Maa? It's midnight."
"I know. I just wanted to hear your voice."
A pause. Then, softer: "I'm fine, Maa. Nani is making me eat too much. Nana is making me watch cricket. I'm studying for my exams. Everything is normal."
"Good. That's good."
"Maa?"
"Yes?"
"Are you going to catch him?"
Priya looked at the evidence boards covering her living room wall — the maps, the photographs, the bus routes, the timeline. Three cases left. Case 6: the journalist's murder. Case 7: the disappearance. And somewhere beyond seven, the endgame that Ajay had written for her.
"Yes," she said. "I'm going to catch him."
She meant it. For the first time in this investigation, she wasn't reacting. She was ahead.
