Ananya D’Souza Part 1 — The Locked Flat The rain had fallen hard the night before, and the grey morning light was doing little to scrub the city clean. Mumbai was damp, impatient, and hungover. Detective Inspector Reeva Kale lit her third cigarette of the morning as she stepped out of her beat-up white Mahindra Thar, ignoring the security guard trying to catch her attention. She hated apartment towers—too many floors, too many alibis. This one was worse: a posh building in Andheri West with glass balconies and silent lifts. Too clean to be honest. The call had come at…
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Amal Shukla Part 1 It was just past 3 AM when the neighbors in Versova’s Sea Breeze Heights heard the gunshot. A loud, sharp crack that echoed through the tiled corridors and bounced off the closed windows of sleeping apartments. No one called the police. In Mumbai, people had learned to let things pass. Besides, the rains were hammering down, and it was easy to believe the noise was just thunder. In Flat 9C, Rajiv Mehta lay sprawled on the Persian carpet of his study, a bullet hole clean through his forehead. His right hand was still resting on the…