The Second Crime

Marine Drive never sleeps, but that night, it fell silent.

A black BMW X7 stood by the promenade, door ajar, rain pouring like judgment from the heavens. The corpse of Vinod Pawar, Aditya Khanna’s driver, slumped in the front seat with a bullet lodged in his temple. Rain blurred the blood but couldn’t wash away the intent.

Detective Arjun Mehra arrived minutes later. Lean and angular, a man hardened by silence he stood still as his eyes flicked across the crime scene. No scuffle. No panic. One shot. Cold execution.

Aditya Khanna—the billionaire, real estate tycoon, party fixture, and unproven white-collar criminal—was gone.

No body. No call. No ransom.

Aditya Khanna’s wife, Anita, wore mourning like a cocktail dress—impeccable but performative. She cried, but her eyes were dry. Her statements were neat. No confusion. No chaos.

Mehra noticed her wedding ring—twisted nervously. It wasn’t grief. It was control cracking at the edges.

Rajat Khanna, Aditya’s younger brother, wore his guilt like an aftershave—too strong, too obvious. There were photos. Hotel receipts. Phone pings. The affair between Anita and Rajat wasn’t just real; it was recent and reckless.

The motive glittered in front of Mehra like broken glass: the wife, the lover, the money.

But it didn’t explain the timing. Or the absence of a ransom.

Then on Day 3, it arrived.

A hand-delivered envelope to their Worli residence. Inside: a voice recording distorted with static and fear.

“Aditya is alive. ₹15 crore. No cops. Instructions will follow.”

The message ended with a codeword known only to Aditya and his chief of security—a detail meant to prove authenticity.

Mehra listened to the tape three times. Something about it felt off. Not the voice—it was clearly masked—but the pacing. The phrasing. The delay. Three days? That wasn’t desperation. It was calculation.

Still, they had to follow protocol. Ransom squad activated. Money marked. Phones tapped.

But Mehra’s gut itched. Something fundamental was wrong.

Surveillance teams caught Anita and Rajat meeting discreetly. A confrontation followed.

Rajat broke first. “We talked about leaving him. Yes. But we didn’t do this. I swear.”

Anita said nothing. Just lit a cigarette and watched Mehra like she was studying a predator.

She never asked once—Is Aditya okay?

Mehra kept circling the crime scene, questioning the domestic staff, probing timelines. Every detail led back to the BMW. To Vinod. But no one cared about him. Just a dead driver in the wrong place.

Yet Vinod kept nagging at Mehra.

Sarla Pawar, Vinod’s wife, lived in a small chawl in Chembur. She was quiet, deferential, and soft-spoken. Mehra visited her twice. The second time, she slipped.

“I just hope they give back that poor man’s boss, after asking so much money.”

Mehra blinked. He hadn’t told her about the ransom. Neither had the press. It hadn’t been leaked.

Only a handful of people knew.

He left, didn’t react. But the noose had begun to tighten.

Sarla had been speaking regularly with a low-level constable named Kiran Shinde. Transfers between accounts. Private meetings. A phone found in Kiran’s home had the original ransom recording, unmasked.

Under interrogation, Kiran tried to bluff, then broke.

Then Sarla cracked.

Aditya Khanna wasn’t the target. He was the distraction.

Vinod had found out about his wife’s affair with Kiran. He threatened to report them both—destroy their lives. So Sarla and Kiran did the only thing they thought would free them:

They killed him.

A clean shot. Fast. But they knew one thing—a dead driver was just another crime. It would lead straight to them.

But if a billionaire was abducted? If the city was ablaze with headlines about Aditya Khanna missing?

No one would care about Vinod Pawar.

So they abducted Aditya. Used Vinod’s insider knowledge to plan the route. Knocked Khanna unconscious and kept him hidden in a safehouse in Navi Mumbai. Kiran knew just enough about police procedure to stay ahead of the early response teams.

And then they waited.

Waited until the media was hooked. Until the city’s pulse was pounding in the wrong direction. Then, dropped the ransom demand—just for the hell of it. Greed, maybe. Or just to tighten the performance.

They almost got away with it.

But Sarla’s one slip—the mention of a ransom no one should’ve known about—ripped it all apart.

Aditya was found weak but alive. Drugged. Traumatized. He remembered nothing beyond the injection.

Anita and Rajat were cleared, their affair reduced to tabloid fodder. Disgraced, but not guilty.

Kiran and Sarla were charged with murder, kidnapping, obstruction of justice, and extortion.

Vinod Pawar, whose name no one remembered when the case began, became the reason it was solved.

Detective Mehra sat alone in his office. The rain outside had turned into a fine mist. The city would never stop moving. Another case would come. Another body would bleed on the pavement.

But for now, he lit a cigarette, opened a new file, and whispered to himself:

“The truth always hides behind the obvious. The real story’s where no one’s looking.”

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