Dev found her at the chai stall near the bus stand two mornings later, sitting on the wooden bench with her notebook closed in her lap, like she'd been waiting for him without wanting to admit it.

"I read the old files," he said, sitting down across from her without being asked. "All eight."

Aditi didn't look up from her tea. "And?"

"And I think you're right, which is the single most annoying sentence I've said all year."

That got a small, surprised laugh out of her — gone almost as fast as it came, but he'd seen it, and it seemed to please him more than it should have.

"I can't make this official," he said. "No budget, no manpower, and the SP's office will have my head if they hear I'm reopening closed cases over a hunch. But I can't leave it alone either. So." He turned his cup slowly on the table. "I know the procedure. You know the town. If we're doing this, we do it together, or we don't do it at all."

Aditi studied him for a moment, the way she studied everyone before she decided to trust them, which was slowly, and with visible suspicion.

"Balki's not going to like this," she said.

"Balki doesn't like anything that isn't his afternoon nap."

They started with the families.

The panchayat head's son ran a hardware shop now and didn't want to talk about his father at all, until Aditi mentioned the missing hand, and then he talked for an hour — about how his father had cheated half the farmers in the district over land records, how there were men in this town who'd have been glad to see him dead, how nobody had ever really looked into it because nobody with any power had wanted to.

The priest's nephew said much the same, in different words. His uncle drank. His uncle had touched women he shouldn't have touched, in ways nobody talked about out loud, and there'd been more than one husband who'd wanted him gone.

The midwife's daughter cried the whole time and told them her mother had once let a baby die because she was too drunk to help, and the family had never forgiven her, and neither had the mother forgiven herself.

By the third house, Dev had started keeping a second notebook of his own, and by the fourth, he'd stopped being surprised that every victim seemed to have done something, at some point, that this town might have quietly wanted to punish.

"None of it explains the missing pieces," Aditi said, as they walked back toward the thana in the evening light. "Motive isn't the mystery. The method is."

"Maybe the motive's the same for all of them," Dev said. "Maybe that's the point. Somebody who thinks he's balancing a scale nobody else is willing to touch."

Aditi looked at him sideways. "That's a very generous way to describe a man who cuts pieces off dead bodies."

"I didn't say I admired him," Dev said. "I said I understood the shape of the thing. There's a difference."

She didn't answer that. She only walked a little closer to him for the rest of the way, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, and neither of them mentioned it, because mentioning it would have meant deciding what it was.