Sandeep knew there was no point in giving a motivational speech to someone as tough as Vishal and he didn't pursue the route of maintaining an unfulfilling formality between them. He had wanted to give an assurance to Vishal in as few words as possible that the cops had not given up on the case, and that's what he did.
At exactly ten in the morning the next day Vishal walked into Sandeep's office where the rest of the SIT members were assembled. He looked extremely strained yet determined, worn out yet fierce.
He didn't avoid anyone's gaze and gave the icy stare that sometimes intimidated the rest of the team.
"Last night's video is yet untraceable, Sir," Basava reported.
"What about the ones before?" Sandeep asked.
"Still untraceable. The Cyber Cell team said they will need another day or two."
"What in the world are they doing?" Sandeep burst out in frustration.
"Sir, I couldn't understand the technicalities of what the cyber team pointed out, but they are not able to trace the source of the videos' origin. They are trying to create programs to hack them now and want time for that."
"Could he have really taken her to a location outside of Bangalore?" Sandeep wondered aloud.
"Highly possible," Raghavan answered.
"No," Vishal broke his silence. He breathed in a lungful and continued, "The first video was posted a few hours after the kidnap. It's not enough time to leave the city, set up the whole place, film the video, edit and upload it to so many internet sites. It would be definitely in the city."
"Then it wouldn't be easy to dispose the body..." Raghavan started but broke off abruptly catching Vishal's eye. He felt awkward to talk about the details of Mitra's remains with the man who was suffering the most.
If Vishal felt the pain of listening to the gory, he masked it properly with a stiff fixation of his jaw.
"Has there been any report of sighting Mitra?" he asked.
"No," Raghavan answered.
"Set up checkpoints everywhere possible. Check every vehicle, verify anyone who seems suspicious. Tell the city patrol teams to comb all the areas thoroughly," Sandeep started giving instructions.
"We need to analyze the video," Vishal cut in.
"I have been doing that since yesterday," Sandeep replied. He took a longer look at a completely wrecked Vishal and asked empathically, "Are you really ok with watching it again?"
Vishal nodded once.
Sandeep indicated one of the constables to turn on the projector in the room and played the video.
"Where are the others?" the audio rang in the room.
Sandeep paused the video at the point where the kidnapper in it posed this question to Mitra.
"Who do you think he is referring to?" Sandeep asked aloud.
"Can't think of anyone," Vishal answered. He had seriously been confused about it ever since he heard it the first time. "There's no one else involved in this whole mess other than Mitra. Maybe she threatened him that there are people watching him? Or... maybe there are other women trapped in the same place and she did something to hide them?"
"Exactly. Either of the cases is possible. A threat of catching him or the presence of other witnesses who have escaped or been hidden," Sandeep ceded.
After a moment's thought, Vishal shook his head. "If there really are others who were trapped with him, Mitra would have tried to give a hint in one of the videos in one way or another. Unless he edited it out of the video before posting it."
Raghavan raised a hand. "Still, it is only a speculation. If there really were other people who escaped the culprit or were hidden by Mitra, why wouldn't one of those people contact us?" he quipped.
"Fear, trauma, anxiety, a wish to just escape it all, can be a million reasons," Sandeep opined.
"Or maybe there wasn't anyone else in reality," Vishal hoped. Despite the advantages having an additional witness in this situation would give them to solve the case and find Mitra, he didn't want anybody to go through what she had undergone.
They realized it was a dead end. Sandeep resumed playing the video and stopped it at the point where Mitra called out the culprit's name.
"...Sashi."
"Possibilities of this name being his true name?" Sandeep asked it more like a quiz question he already knew the answer to.
"Fifty-fifty," Vishal answered. "It is either a false name, in which case it justifies him not editing it out of the video, or he let it be heard purposefully to challenge us, a kind of mockery to see if we can really find him. Personally, neither Mitra nor I know anyone with that name or even heard it in passing. He is playing with us."
If Sandeep was impressed, he didn't show it. "We still have to filter out the people and possible suspects based on that name. I have already asked Basava and Ahmed to look into it last night.
Any leads?" he turned to the two constables with his question.
"Not yet sir. There are two people in Mitra's neighbourhood with that name and neither of them are suspicious. Other than them we have a lot of names that match the profile."
"It's futile," Vishal sighed as he got up from his chair in frustration. "In a city as big as this and including the suburbs, it would be difficult to pinpoint the suspects. Plus, there are so many non-local people with no proper residency proofs, no civil registrations here, not to mention the amount of footfall we have in this city. We won't be able to find everyone with that name. It would take a lot of effort, and if it is indeed a false name, this would be a waste of time."
"Still, we need to pursue every tiny lead we can get," Sandeep stated.
As they completed playing the video, Sandeep posed the one doubt he had been having since the previous night to the team, "Why do you think he cut the video off at exactly this point?" He looked genuinely inquisitive as he asked, "Why did he refrain from showing her passing away when he so well made it look like he killed her?"
"He doesn't feature the actual violence in his videos," Vishal revealed his observation. "In the second video he released, when Mitra attacked him, he had edited their scuffle out of the video. Could be the same reason here."
"Did he really kill her?" Sandeep voiced his actual doubt.
It was something that had crossed Vishal's mind in his most desperate moments of hope through the long night of agony, every time a wave of denial took over his discern of reality. What if by a margin of 0.01% the killer stopped at the last second of the execution and Mitra survived?