If You're Bored, Catch Jack O'Lantern
Some presence had laid white magic on a pigeon and tried to pass him a message. In this country at the far tip of the East, perched on a peninsula, traditional Western white magic was a rare sight. No matter how fashionable the occult grew or how thoroughly it stirred the world, the people capable of sending a message like that remained few.
Jack O'Lantern, huh.
Silvester felt a flicker of genuine interest for the first time in ages. What the hell was this creature? Why was he doing any of it? And who, for what reason, was handing out information on Jack O'Lantern? If someone truly wanted the bastard caught, they could simply point the police—already foaming at the mouth for him—in the right direction.
"If you're that bored, why not try catching Jack O'Lantern?"
Silvester tossed the suggestion at Se-geon without warning. Se-geon nodded.
"…That might be entertaining."
It was the kind of remark that would have made every cop within earshot foam at the mouth in pure outrage. Catching, for fun, the very monster they were all killing themselves to find. Yet Se-geon really did feel like doing something—anything. Money had piled up nicely. Almost everything he wanted was already within reach. But against the boredom that kept seeping through the cracks, he had no defense at all. For the chance to kill that boredom, he felt ready to do anything.
"But how do you catch a guy the entire police force can't even get a tail on?"
"Beats me. All I know is the culprit is a young Korean student. The rest you'll have to figure out yourself. Handing you every answer and then telling you to go catch him would be ridiculous."
"…"
Se-geon rose from his seat at Silvester's words. He had no idea what grounds the man was speaking from, but Silvester the Jinma hunter rarely spouted nonsense. Trusting him was safe enough.
"I'll dig up the rest myself."
"Already?"
"Work's best done the moment it occurs to you."
With that he sprinted out into the rain-lashed city.
Detectives Jo and Park had been poring over ledgers since morning and found themselves thoroughly stuck. They had given up hunting the culprit directly online and chosen instead to reverse-trace the explosives and the laptop used in the crimes. Even that path refused to open.
First, the laptop buyer turned out to be the student who had committed suicide. Jack O'Lantern, wary of police reverse-tracking, had apparently goaded the dead boy into purchasing the machine himself. The student had stolen money from his parents, bought a hot machine from a fence, finished preparing to film, then leaped onto the concrete while recording his own death.
With that method, even tracing the explosives would probably dead-end the same way. If the suicide victim himself had gathered every prop, no amount of upstream investigation would lead past the corpse.
"Damn it. Bastards like this ought to get a full tax audit!"
Detective Jo spat the most terrifying curse a Korean could utter—tax audit—while staring at ledgers whose numbers had clearly been cooked. Balancing books was a simple parlor trick any clerk could manage. That was why the whores in the red-light districts could shoot up cheap narcotics like nalbuphine without breaking a sweat.
"Looks impossible after all, doesn't it?"
Detective Park grinned with that massive face of his. Jo fought the urge to smash a fist into it.
"Anyway, there are too many Jack O'Lanterns popping up now. All we can do is wait for a fresh profiling result."
Jo held no love for psychologists either, but this case left them no choice except to lean on profiling. Mystery novels might make you believe perfect crimes were rare; reality was that even crimes with zero clever tricks vanished into the cracks—too few officers, too little investigation, too little time. A case like Jack O'Lantern, however, could not be allowed to end unsolved.
"Ahem… Captain. We'll head out and dig around a bit."
Jo said it while shrugging into his rain gear. The captain merely flicked a glance at the two detectives and gave a single nod.
"Going to catch him?"
"…Going to investigate."
"Ah. Right."
Exhaustion from endless overtime had the captain talking nonsense. Police usually hated becoming the prosecutors' sidekicks, yet in a mess this irritating they almost wished the prosecutors would step in. The same prosecutors who loved throwing roadblocks whenever something looked solvable were now simply watching events unfold. Were they refusing to jump into a fight they couldn't win, or was a nationwide Jack O'Lantern rampage still too small to catch their interest?
"Let's hit the PC bangs again. Oh—before we leave, go downstairs to Cyber Crime, find Officer Yang, and get him to pin down Jack O'Lantern's usual online hours."
"Yes, sir."
Detective Park put his huge frame into motion and thundered down the stairs.
Profiling on Jack O'Lantern and the investigation materials accumulated so far kept appearing steadily in the media. Tips mattered most in cases like this; the wider the information spread, the higher the chance of catching the culprit. Which meant that without tips the police themselves were admitting they had no real shot.
Crime was simply like that. Anyone could become a criminal, and nearly everyone broke the law—jaywalking, spitting on the street, brawling in back alleys. Offenses that went unpunished because no one got caught, or because there weren't enough officers to bother. Jack O'Lantern's work fell into that same light category. Nearly double-digit body counts, yet still treated like petty crime. The bereaved families would rage at the thought, but that was the truth. Things anyone could commit casually, thoughtlessly… and this was merely the extension of that continuum, wasn't it?
"Hmm. A young student."
Han Se-geon nodded while scanning the articles listing Jack O'Lantern's connection times. The reason the killer appeared from afternoon into night wasn't because that window best suited meeting victims. It was because the killer himself was a student.
"Middle school or elementary, then."
Se-geon clicked his tongue in disbelief. Had that many people really died because they got played by an elementary-school kid's sweet talk? Of course, it was better to think of them as people already itching to die who simply found a convenient stage laid out for them. Modern society was so cracked that sanity itself was the strange exception; people said it all the time, didn't they? Everyone in this world is a mental patient.
"Hmm."
Se-geon sat at a PC-bang terminal and turned the problem over. A part-timer approached with an ashtray.
"Need anything?"
"No. I don't smoke."
"Ah, okay."
The employee nodded and returned to the counter. Se-geon exhaled and sank back into thought. If Jack O'Lantern was a student, he possessed outstanding hacking skill and, like most of that breed, practically lived glued to a computer. Stuck to a screen at that age, he would inevitably wear glasses. His spending would be free—either the family was rich and allowance generous, or he was dipping into his parents' wallets.
"Still not nearly enough."
Wasn't there any juicy information? Se-geon prowled the net. Too many people impersonating Jack O'Lantern made the real trail hard to find. Information was better scarce than abundant. Scarcity let you weigh authenticity and analyze meaning; abundance drowned you before you even sorted truth from noise.
"Tch. A high-school dropout playing detective? I should just ask Silvester!"
He muttered it, stood, and headed for the door. At that exact moment the door slammed open and two massive men strode in. The one behind him was unfamiliar, but the first through the door was Detective Jo—junior to Detective Sim Gu-jin, the officer who had once fought vampires alongside Se-geon and died for it.
Back then, while investigating the aftermath of the gunfight between vampires and Father Silvester, Detective Sim Gu-jin had hauled Se-geon in as a material witness. Tasked with that case and threatened by Tetra Anax, Sim Gu-jin had ultimately lost his family and taken his own life. Naturally, suspicion had settled on Se-geon as well.
After the incident he had been summoned several times for questioning by Detective Jo. Gunshot residue had been found on Sim Gu-jin's body; the detective's well-known eccentricities, plus the fact that the entire affair was an institutional embarrassment, finally let them bury it as a firearms accident caused by mental breakdown.
"Huh? Oh—it's you."
Detective Jo recognized Se-geon's face instantly. Typical detective memory for faces. Then again, Se-geon had only himself to blame for the neon-green dye job that made him unforgettable. Hoping anyone would forget a look that loud was pure foolishness. Since the man had already greeted him, Se-geon had no choice but to answer.
"Ah—hello."
"Hmm. What are you up to? Oh, right. You any good with computers?"
"Not really."
Se-geon tried to extract himself with maximum politeness; involvement with detectives was the last thing he wanted. Jo simply clamped a hand on his shoulder.
"Come on. You chat online a lot?"
"…Not really. Why—planning to catch Jack O'Lantern?"
Se-geon dropped the name that currently obsessed every cop in the country. Jo's eyes lit up like fireworks.
"Huh! Yeah. You know something?"
"Not really… I just guessed."
"Ah. Right. Tch. Figures."
Jo told the PC-bang clerk to free the seat beside Se-geon and dragged him back down into it.
"Alright, alright. Just keep doing whatever you were doing. Or I start inspecting that bike of yours. You even own a helmet?"
"Of course I do. And you're not Traffic, Detective Jo. Pulling that would be abuse of authority."
When Se-geon protested, Jo glanced at his partner. The look clearly said this kid's getting cocky. Even if Se-geon had waded through slaughterhouses hunting vampires, Jo had no way of knowing; Se-geon's face was the mild, pleasant sort that looked harmless when he stayed quiet.
"Look, I'm not joking—I really need to go."
"You're a high-school dropout anyway. Where exactly do you need to be?"
"Part-time job."
"One day off and you grow mold? Sit down and keep me company for a bit."
"I absolutely would grow mold…"
Jo hauled him around like a thug manhandling a bar girl. Se-geon gave up trying to escape the detective's grip and sat. Since it had come to this, he might as well mine them for whatever information they had.
"This Jack O'Lantern guy—can't you track him by IP? Even if he hits PC bangs, the locations ought to give you something."
"Beats me. Hey, Park?"
"Ah—Jack O'Lantern routes his IP through foreign servers to spoof it… which makes things difficult."
Detective Park, apparently more computer-literate than Jo, took over the explanation. In short, Jack O'Lantern bounced through overseas gateways; to find the real IP you needed the log files from whatever foreign server he used as a hop. And what foreign police department was simply going to hand over log files just because some Korean detectives asked nicely?