Sandeep's question was reasonable.
"Because silencing the witness is not his only objective," Vishal affirmed. "He has stated very clearly in the video that he has been stalking Mitra for a very long time, since much he kidnapped the other woman which Mitra had witnessed. His original target might have been Mitra herself, but he happened to kill this unknown woman in the meantime. Mitra stumbled on him in action, witnessing his crime and now he has two reasons."
Vishal sighed before adding, "If only people had reacted when she first complained."
"Are you blaming the police now?" Raghavan interjected, asking seriously.
"Why? Do you feel guilty about it?" Vishal retorted.
Frustration visible on his otherwise usually poker face, Raghavan raised his voice, "We investigated it. We tried searching for the woman, we enquired everyone in the neighbourhood, we did what we can."
"And yet you failed!" Vishal raised his voice equally. "Mitra had been venting it all out to me every day. How the Police and her neighbours were disbelieving her, how everyone around was claiming that she might be crazy, how helpless she was. And she voiced her intuition that the criminal would come after her next to silence her. She tried nabbing him on her own because the Police thought she was lying. She got captured trying to do your job. And now, she is out there somewhere fighting a psychopath to stay alive." Vishal was visibly angry, his chest heaving as he spoke, his emotions rooted deeply in the helplessness he was feeling about the whole situation.
Raghavan could see through that and he didn't utter any counter words.
"Playing a blame-game now is not going to help in any way," Sandeep quipped.
Vishal turned to Sandeep, responding, "I am trying to find the root cause of the issue, sir. Telling you where things started going wrong. I have been in the profession of finding the truth for a long time now, and I know howmany people try to ignore it, bury it and sabotage it. Mitra knew it too."
"No one tried to bury it Vishal," Sandeep tried to assuade him. "It is not a political issue to be buried. We may have ignored it, and that's our fault. I won't deny that. There are a lot of issues, lot of people we are responsible for and we are always swamped with cases. Sometimes we miss things, and it is not necessarily intentional. We tried our best the first time around. The criminal was ahead of us and we missed it."
There was a pause as Vishal collected himself.
"The videos are still not traceable?" Sandeep asked Raghavan, trying to take the tension off in the room with Vishal.
"No sir. They are bouncing off various servers, all offshore at foreign locations. With the equipment we have, we are unable to trace them. I have requested a deeper investigation on that with the Cyber Cell. They will get back to us on the further measures," Raghavan updated.
"We need to look through older CCTV footages to see if anyone was stalking Mitra," Vishal suggested.
"Yes, I have already asked another team to look into that. They will report to us if they find anyone," Sandeep answered.
Another pause followed as Sandeep pondered on the situation. "We should analyze the happenings in the videos..." he muttered.
"I have done that," Vishal said slowly. "There's something we are missing."
He took Raghavan's laptop with a quick nod of communication between them to use it, browsed through the internet to get the second video and played it. He paused the video as soon as the culprit confessed that Mitra was his motif.
"He wasn't just stalking her," Vishal highlighted. "There's some connection which we don't know of yet. If it was just an obsession he had with her, he wouldn't be broadcasting these videos. He didn't share any videos of the other woman he had killed earlier. There's some missing link between why he killed the woman, why he targeted Mitra and why he is filming her. Also, we don't know if he has committed murders other than the one we already know of."
"A connection with Mitra that even you don't know of..." Sandeep wondered aloud.
"So, you are guessing he can be a serial killer?" Raghavan asked.
"I..." Vishal thought it out. "I don't know. We can't say anything without knowing who he is or if there have been similar occurrences before."
He sighed and resumed playing the video. He paused it again after the cut in the video where Mitra and the killer had a scuffle.
"He isn't injuring her as much as a sadistic psychopath would. Vishal pointed at the injuries and band-aids on Mitra in the video as he explained, "Whatever injuries and scratches she has are from the times she attacked him. He is most probably only defending himself and restraining her, tending to her wounds as we can see from the band-aids. Mitra is still trying to overpower him and capture him."
"What does he want from her?" Basava mused aloud.
"That's the missing link I was talking about earlier," Vishal answered. He resumed playing the video again and waited for it to complete.
"This is why no one reported the kidnap, including the housewife who had witnessed Mitra and the kidnapper fighting each other on the street. Mitra didn't scream for help or try to gather people because she knew he would try to run away and escape the moment anyone else entered the scene. So, she tried to capture him on her own. The people who saw the incident thought it was a normal street brawl between two acquaintances and ignored it." Vishal's analysis was to the point.
"What's the public reaction?" Sandeep asked.
"It's a mess," Raghavan replied. "Some thought it was a prank, some questioned the validity of the videos, till a couple of people posted online about Mitra's identity. Must be her classmates from college. From there it gathered momentum and people who are acquainted with her have been posting about her. Nothing negative on their accounts so far. People, especially media houses are questioning the Police action so far. I have arranged for a press meet at eleven to give a preliminary statement. Vishal is handling the newspaper he is working for."
"I have informed them that I am a part of the investigation team. They won't bother you. I will be covering this for them," Vishal filled in.
"What about Mitra's parents?"
Vishal filled in on the precautionary measures he has advised them.
"That was quick and smart." Sandeep's statement sounded close to an appreciating tone.
Vishal took the chance and said, "I want to be part of the press meet as a member of your team, not as a reporter." It came as a decision rather than a request.
"Why..." Raghavan started.
"Because if Mitra comes across the press release, just in case, if there is any possibility that the culprit lets her see the press release, she should see that I am here, looking for her. It would give her an assurance, a hope," Vishal answered, cutting Raghavan's question across.