Shamsuddin Ansari Chapter 1: The First Scent It was the smell that reached her before the crime scene did—sharp, floral, unsettlingly sweet. Inspector Ayesha Rizvi paused at the mouth of the narrow alley in Hazratganj, where the rainwater had begun to pool like slow-moving ink. The yellow tape fluttered in the humid breeze, but it was the fragrance in the air—unfamiliar, exotic—that made her stomach tighten. The dead girl lay beneath a crimson shawl, one hand stretched toward a rusted shutter, as if she had tried to knock before she died. On her chest, placed deliberately, was a glass vial…
