Arjun tracked Vikram to a seedy bar in Chittaranjan. The man was lean, with darting eyes and a scar running down his cheek. After a few rounds of cheap whisky, Vikram loosened up. “There’s a guy,” he said, voice low. “Calls himself ‘The Traveler.’ Works the night trains, preys on women traveling alone. Charms them, gets their trust. Then… poof. They’re gone.”

The coal-dusted streets of Asansol, West Bengal, shimmered under a brutal July sun in 2025. The city, a gritty blend of industrial might and small-town secrets, was no stranger to trouble. But when a body turned up in the abandoned slag heaps near the IISCO Steel Plant, it wasn’t just another day in the life of Inspector Arjun Das.

Arjun, a wiry man in his late thirties with a perpetually furrowed brow, stood over the corpse. The victim, a young woman in her twenties, lay sprawled across the blackened earth, her silk saree stained with blood and soot. Her throat was slashed, clean and precise, but her face was untouched, frozen in a silent scream. No ID, no jewelry, just a single clue: a crumpled train ticket to Kolkata clutched in her hand.

“Another one,” muttered Constable Roy, wiping sweat from his forehead. “Third this month.”

Arjun nodded grimly. Three women, all killed the same way—throats cut, bodies dumped in Asansol’s industrial wastelands. The press had dubbed the killer “The Coal Reaper,” and panic was spreading faster than the monsoon rains. The Asansol Police Station was under pressure from Kolkata brass to deliver answers, but clues were scarcer than clean air in this town.

Back at the station, a crumbling colonial-era building with peeling paint and creaking fans, Arjun pored over the case files. The victims had little in common: a schoolteacher, a factory worker, and now this unidentified woman. All were locals, all in their twenties, all killed under cover of night. The train ticket was new, though. The previous victims had nothing like it. Arjun’s gut told him it was significant, but how?

He drove to Asansol Junction, the city’s bustling railway hub. The platform was a chaotic swirl of passengers, hawkers shouting about chai and samosas, and porters weaving through the crowd. Arjun flashed the ticket at the counter clerk, a nervous man with a pencil-thin mustache.

“Train 12311, Kalka Mail,” the clerk said, squinting at the ticket. “Left for Kolkata last night, 11:45 p.m. No name on it, sir. Could be anyone’s.”

“Any CCTV footage?” Arjun asked.

The clerk shook his head. “Cameras have been down for weeks. Budget cuts.”

Frustrated, Arjun returned to the station and called in a favor from an old friend, Riya Sen, a tech-savvy private investigator who’d left the force after a corruption scandal. Riya, with her sharp wit and sharper hacking skills, met him at a dimly lit tea stall near Burnpur Road. Over steaming cups of kadak chai, Arjun slid the case details across the table.

“Three women, same MO, no witnesses,” he said. “This ticket’s the only lead. I need you to dig into passenger records, anything off the books.”

Riya raised an eyebrow. “You know I don’t work for free, Das.”

“Help me crack this, and I’ll owe you big,” he replied.

She smirked and got to work, her laptop glowing in the flickering light of the stall. By midnight, Riya had something: a pattern in the train’s passenger manifests. All three victims had traveled on the Kalka Mail in the weeks before their deaths, though none had booked under their real names. Fake IDs, maybe? It was a lead, but a thin one.

Arjun’s next stop was the underbelly of Asansol’s industrial sprawl: the shanties near the steel plant, where workers and their families lived in the shadow of smokestacks. He questioned locals, flashing photos of the victims. Most shook their heads, wary of police. But an old woman, her face creased like worn leather, pointed him toward a man named Vikram, a former railway employee turned local fixer.

“Vikram knows things,” she whispered. “Sees things at the station. Ask him about the night trains.”

Arjun tracked Vikram to a seedy bar in Chittaranjan. The man was lean, with darting eyes and a scar running down his cheek. After a few rounds of cheap whisky, Vikram loosened up.

“There’s a guy,” he said, voice low. “Calls himself ‘The Traveler.’ Works the night trains, preys on women traveling alone. Charms them, gets their trust. Then… poof. They’re gone.”

Arjun’s pulse quickened. “Description?”

“Tall, maybe six feet. Always wears a black kurta, carries a leather satchel. You can’t miss him.”

That night, Arjun and a small team staked out Asansol Junction. The Kalka Mail was due at 11:45 p.m. Under the station’s flickering lights, Arjun scanned the crowd. Then he saw him: a tall man in a black kurta, satchel slung over his shoulder, chatting up a young woman near the platform’s edge. The man’s smile was too smooth, his movements too calculated.

Arjun signaled his team. They moved in, but the man—sensing trouble—bolted into the maze of parked trains. A chase ensued through the railyard, Arjun’s boots pounding against gravel and steel. The suspect was fast, ducking between carriages, but Arjun was relentless. He tackled the man near a rusted freight car, pinning him to the ground.

“Who are you?” Arjun growled, cuffing him.

The man smirked, blood trickling from a split lip. “You’ll never prove it.”

A search of the satchel revealed a bloodied knife, a roll of train tickets, and a notebook with names—dozens of them, including the three victims. At the station, Riya’s tech wizardry uncovered more: the man, one Anil Sharma, was a former railway clerk with a history of stalking complaints, all swept under the rug by corrupt officials. His MO was clear—target women on the Kalka Mail, lure them with promises of jobs in Kolkata, then kill them in Asansol’s wastelands.

But something nagged at Arjun. The notebook had too many names. Was Sharma working alone? The next morning, a fourth body turned up, throat slashed, same MO. Sharma had been in custody all night.

Back at square one, Arjun realized the Coal Reaper wasn’t one man but a network. Sharma was just a cog. The real mastermind was still out there, hiding in Asansol’s shadows. As the monsoon rains began to fall, washing the coal dust from the streets, Arjun knew the hunt was far from over.