The call was from home. Simmi was missing.
Sequence I
Simmi Is Missing
Sanjay stopped breathing for a moment.
His daughter had disappeared during the night. No one knew where she was.
Then he remembered her birthday: 6 October.
Simmi belonged to the next Rashi in the sequence.
The fifth girl had not been the end. The killer had already chosen the sixth.
Sanjay lowered the phone. The officer inside him understood the pattern. The father inside him felt only fear.
The ritual had entered Sanjay’s own home.
Sequence II
The Name
Sanjay moved toward Aghornath.
“Who is doing this?” he demanded. “Tell me his name.”
Aghornath finally revealed what had happened six years earlier.
In 2020, a man had come to him for help. The man’s wife had been seriously ill for almost five years. Doctors, medicines, and repeated hospital visits had failed.
The man was desperate to save her.
Aghornath had told him about the twelve-Rashi ritual. The man looked horrified and left at once. Aghornath believed he had rejected the idea.
He had been wrong.
Sanjay asked the only question that mattered.
“Naam kya tha?”
Aghornath looked directly at him.
“Sarpanch.”
The man guiding the village had been choosing its victims.
Six years earlier
Sequence III
The Real Pattern
Everything began to connect.
The Sarpanch’s wife, Reema Devi, had been ill for years. The first murders began after he visited Aghornath.
As Sarpanch, he could see records that most people could not. Panchayat registers, school information, family records, ages, and dates of birth were all available to him.
He could use them to find the girl required for each Rashi.
After Riya Sharma’s murder, the next girl in the sequence was the Sarpanch’s own niece. But she lived in Delhi and had not returned to the village since 2019.
The ritual could not skip her Rashi, so the Sarpanch waited.
For six years, he kept asking his younger brother to bring the family back for festivals and weddings. His brother kept refusing.
Then, one month earlier, the family finally returned.
The Sarpanch killed his own niece and completed the fifth step.
Now he needed Simmi.
As Sanjay raced back toward the village, he remembered the witnesses who had seen the killer limping.
The Sarpanch did not have a bad leg. He had been dragging a heavy gunny sack. The weight had made him walk unevenly in the darkness.
The police had misunderstood the clue from the beginning.
The six-year silence was not mercy. It was waiting.
The Sarpanch had hidden the ritual beneath his own home.
Sequence V
The Basement
At the bottom of the stairs, the police entered a hidden chamber.
Personal objects taken from the murdered girls had been kept as evidence of every crime.
On one wall was a hand-drawn chart of twelve Rashis. Five spaces were marked. The sixth was still unfinished.
In the centre of the room was Simmi.
She was tied to a pillar. She was terrified, but she was alive.
The Sarpanch sat in front of her, performing the ritual.
“Simmi!” Sanjay shouted.
The Sarpanch turned. For one second, nobody moved.
Then the police rushed forward.
Sanjay ran to his daughter and freed her. Raghuvir and the other officers pulled the Sarpanch away and placed him in handcuffs.
The search of the basement gave the police evidence connecting him to every murder since 2020.
The sixth space remained empty.
Sequence VI
The Final Revelation
Sanjay held Simmi close, then faced the Sarpanch.
“Apni bhatiji ko bhi maar diya?”
The Sarpanch showed no emotion. To him, the girl had stopped being his niece. She had become only the fifth Rashi.
Sanjay asked how he could destroy so many families to save one person.
The Sarpanch looked toward the room above, where his sick wife lay.
“Tum nahi samjhoge.”
The police began taking him upstairs. Before climbing the steps, he stopped and looked back at Sanjay. A small smile appeared on his face.
“Prabhu Sharma bhi bahut kareeb aa gaya tha, Inspector saab.”
Sanjay froze.
Until that moment, everyone had believed Riya Sharma was simply the fourth victim. Now Sanjay understood that Prabhu had discovered something. Perhaps not the whole truth, but enough to become dangerous.
The Sarpanch had selected Riya when her turn in the sequence arrived. By killing the investigator’s daughter, he had also destroyed the man searching for him.
It worked. Prabhu never recovered, and the old case disappeared with him.
Even now, the Sarpanch showed no regret. He still believed everything he had done was necessary.
Prabhu Sharma had not failed to find the killer. The killer had destroyed him first.