The Twin Who Came Back
If the National Forensic Service had accepted private requests for analysis, I would have done it long ago. It was a shame.
I could have submitted the request directly to the court, but I had deliberately brought it to the prosecution instead.
Even Kim Sung-gil, who has a soft spot for me, is suspicious. A judge would be worse.
Before the first trial even began, the judge in charge could look over the case file and form a prejudice. He could say the same thing Kim had: that a lawyer had visited the crime scene and written a story around the evidence he found there.
And then there was the fact that fewer than five percent of the forensic requests filed through the courts ever went to the National Forensic Service in the first place.
At Seoul Central District Court especially, more than half of those requests got bounced to the prosecution and told to go through them instead.
Which meant that even if I filed for forensic analysis through Seoul Central District Court, the odds of the judge sending it to the prosecutor’s office were high, depending on the judge’s temperament.
The worst-case scenario was filing through the court only to have the detention period expire, just like now.
I already extended his detention during the investigation stage, so I can’t extend it again. Then the prosecution will indict him and proceed with detention-based custody.
If a case had already hit the media, an indictment often meant the court would accept it and extend the detention period by two more months.
That remained true even if the circumstantial evidence didn’t clearly point to Lee Seon-dong, as it did here.
That was why I had come to Kim Sung-gil.
He’s hot-tempered, yes, but he isn’t the sort to be swayed by money or power. It’s better to leave this with him. And he already knows me.
It was the fastest way to get Lee Seon-dong out of the detention center, faster than a formal detention review, and it would also put Kim in my debt.
“For the record, I also put the knife from the photo in the shopping bag.”
“…Huh.”
He looked at me as if he couldn’t decide whether I was ridiculous or insane.
“So our junior here is convinced Lee Seon-dong isn’t the culprit.”
“Yes.”
To someone else, it might have looked like only a two- or three-percent chance. But even that was enough to prove that Lee Seon-dong was not the suspect.
The evidence itself was pointing away from him.
“I was wondering why in the world a lawyer would go to the crime scene. So that’s why.” Kim Sung-gil broke into a laugh, sounding equal parts incredulous and amused. “Now I see why the criminal division used to grind their teeth every time Cha Do-hyuk showed up.”
“……Excuse me?”
“Nothing.”
He waved a hand dismissively.
So the prosecutors who clashed with me got chewed out from above and turned around and bad-mouthed me. Figures. Everyone’s the same.
I really hated that sort of thing.
“In any case, this case also follows the same pattern. Offenders don’t usually leave behind a signature weapon, but this one has exposed his own consumption habits without the slightest hesitation…”
The expensive knife.
The luxury cord used to bind the offender’s clothes.
Even the way the cord was tied was unusual.
Only a lunatic would bundle up clothes stained with the victim’s blood with a cord like a gift package and toss them away.
“Taking into account the cruelty shown to the victim and the audacity of leaving only DNA behind, Lee Seon-dong cannot be the culprit.”
When the evidence itself, the context surrounding that evidence, and its relationship to the other evidence all fit together consistently with Lee Seon-dong’s account, the entire frame changed.
Even if the DNA pointed at him.
Clap. Clap.
“Impressive, impressive. You’ve got a real story there.”
“I’m only stating the facts.”
“Right. A defense attorney shouldn’t be getting blood on his hands.”
“……”
In legal circles, when you have a defendant taken into custody in court, they say you’ve got blood on your hands.
So what Kim had just said was really a compliment — praise for doing my job well as a lawyer.
It gave me a slight chill.
I know Kim Sung-gil likes people who get things done, but he’s not the type to hand out compliments.
Still, it worked in my favor.
“These days, young punks think consistency means repeating the exact same words down to the last particle. That’s not what it means. What matters is whether the whole thing points in the same direction.”
He gave me a friendly slap on the back.
Ugh. That’s going to leave a bruise.
If I was going to rebut the CCTV footage from the third case, it helped that the listener was already inclined to like me, so I let the sting in my back pass and moved on.
“I’ll start with the third case.”
At around 11:30 p.m. on Friday, October 27, he lured a woman in her thirties from an alley of bars on Teheran-ro and raped her.
The culprit had been looking for a target at a terrace pub around 10:00 p.m., then followed a drunk, unsteady woman around 11:00 p.m. CCTV footage showing him leaving the alley before and after the crime had been submitted as evidence.
Not video of the actual assault.
That’s not a bad thing, not for Lee Seon-dong and not for the victim.
If the most painful moment had been preserved on video, it would haunt the victim until the verdict was handed down — maybe for the rest of her life.
Hard as it was to believe, video from illegal filming done more than thirty years ago was still circulating openly to this day.
“Prosecutor, the CCTV from the third case doesn’t show the crime itself, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t. But circumstantial evidence alone is enough to secure a guilty verdict.”
“A careful judgment is required, yes, but couldn’t the opposite also be true?”
Direct evidence and circumstantial evidence did not carry the same weight.
Direct evidence — like an eyewitness with no room for mistake, or CCTV footage capturing the crime itself — directly proved the offense, so it had strong probative force.
By contrast, CCTV of the culprit loitering near the victim’s home was treated as circumstantial evidence and considered weaker.
Still, circumstantial evidence alone could absolutely support a conviction, and the reverse could be true as well.
I slid the forensic gait analysis report toward him.
“What’s this?”
“I assumed the police had requested a gait analysis, but they hadn’t.”
Because with the victim’s testimony and the culprit’s DNA, they figured they could force the rest of the story to fit the result.
They had handled the case carelessly.
If they had requested gait analysis, it would have taken at least two weeks to get the results. Since the case had already hit the media, someone upstairs probably told them to hurry up and wrap it.
If you wanted to shorten deadlines, you could throw money at the problem like I did. But public institutions didn’t have that luxury.
“He could have changed the way he walked after the crime on purpose, couldn’t he?”
That was classic prosecutor logic.
Well, sure. He’s a prosecutor who has spent his entire career living by the motto that if someone sits in front of him long enough, they’re a criminal. Of course he’d think that way.
“You’ll understand as soon as you meet Lee Seon-dong, Prosecutor Kim. He has a problem.”
“Oh?”
“He drags one leg. It doesn’t stand out unless you look closely, but one leg is more than five centimeters shorter.”
“…Does he have a disability rating?”
“No.”
“In this day and age, he doesn’t have one?”
“Apparently there are personal reasons.”
When I told Lee Seon-dong at the detention center that I had requested a gait analysis, he had panicked.
He’d asked if that meant he would be registered as disabled.
Only after I explained that they were analyzing his gait and nothing else did he finally relax.
After that, I had carefully asked him about disability certification, wondering if the word itself might trigger a negative reaction.
-Honestly, I’d like to have a disability rating too, because of the vehicles. But the company said they don’t like that, so I can’t really do anything about it, hehe.
He may have felt awkward because he’d gotten the job through a professor’s recommendation. Still, getting a disability rating while employed would be seen as an industrial accident? It sounded absurd.
And then there was this.
-My mother thinks negatively about it, ha-ha.
He had his reasons, and there was no need to press further.
Kim Sung-gil folded the report shut with a snap.
“Then we can just observe his walk tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“But here’s the thing. The victims gave consistent statements, and the DNA points to Lee Seon-dong. How exactly are you planning to break that? It won’t be easy with the evidence from the second case alone.”
He pointed at the shopping bag I had brought with me.
“Let me touch on the fourth case first.”
He nodded.
“First, the victim said someone was following her and grabbed Lee Seon-dong, asking him to take her to the local police box. Then the culprit tailed the victim and the fourth case happened, didn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“Prosecutor, doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
“……?”
“The victim clearly said someone was following her, so why did she grab Lee Seon-dong and ask him to take her to the police box? She said Lee Seon-dong was the culprit, didn’t she?”
“……!”
I wasn’t pointing out that the victim’s statement had been inconsistent.
I was saying that her mistaken but unwavering account proved Lee Seon-dong was not the culprit.
I turned on my smartphone and played the CCTV footage from the neighborhood bus Lee Seon-dong had taken at the time.
“If you look at this neighborhood bus CCTV, Lee Seon-dong was on the bus around 9:20 p.m.”
Then I immediately cross-cut to footage around the Leaders Apartment complex, where Lee Seon-dong lived.
“Meanwhile, the culprit was moving toward the apartment’s main gate while following the victim.”
“H-how is that possible? What is this, a doppelgänger or what?”
Kim Sung-gil kept replaying the footage of Lee Seon-dong entering the apartment’s shared entrance and the clip of the culprit following the victim out of the police box area, over and over again.
He looked genuinely bewildered.
If the police had checked the footage from Lee Seon-dong’s apartment, Kim wouldn’t have been nearly this shocked.
Trying to make the result fit the story had caused this entire mess.
“Prosecutor, it’s possible if the culprit, whose genetic makeup is almost identical to Lee Seon-dong’s, committed the crimes and framed him for them.”
“…You mean family?!”
Kim had probably seen all kinds of things during his years as a prosecutor, but not this many times.
“That’s right.”
“Ha! So that’s why our junior said Lee Seon-dong was being wronged!”
“Yes.”
Lee Seon-dong had kept saying it was a terrible injustice, but the police had ignored him.
When the fourth victim saw the company name tag hanging around Lee Seon-dong’s neck, they never even bothered to check anyone else. They’d already decided who the culprit was.
“So that’s why you said he was being mistaken for the suspect. Hah. This is why cops are useless, tsk.”
Kim Sung-gil reached for a cigarette, then lowered his hand.
He had probably lit one out of habit in his office, where smoking was formally prohibited, and stopped when he realized I was there.
“Ahem.”
In any case, I submitted my opinion along with a paper on the match rate of genetic information between family members.
“On that basis, please check the immigration records for Lee Seon-dong’s younger brother, Lee Hoo.”
“Immigration records?”
“Yes. According to Lee Seon-dong, Lee Hoo hasn’t visited the Republic of Korea once since reaching adulthood.”
His younger brother Lee Hoo had changed his name the moment he became an adult and gone overseas, supposedly for good. He said he would never set foot in Korea, because if his parents ever landed here, they’d rename him Ho-dong out of spite.
But...
He’s an American citizen, sure, but would he really have lived in Los Angeles and never come to Korea? Not once in fourteen years?
No.
Even the past I had seen through psychometry showed him running wild in Gangnam.
“In the first case, the culprit paid in dollars. Usually a Korean would pay at a club with won or by card.”
“Right.”
“If he were a foreigner, he’d be using roaming or a prepaid phone.”
The back alleys behind Gogae Park, the information on the Teheran-ro side streets — he knew Gangnam inside and out.
The man who said that if his parents canceled his card, he’d never contact them again.
His tendency to spend only on high-end brands.
After weighing all of that, I reached one conclusion.
“I believe Lee Hoo, the identical twin, secretly entered the country and committed the crimes.”