The Twin Who Erased the Truth
“So he had a twin? Then why was the cops—no, wait. They must have had no choice but to pin it on the fourth victim’s statement and the DNA match rate.”
Chief Prosecutor Kim Sung-gil rubbed a hand over his dry face, looking frustrated.
Even if we denied that Lee Seon-dong was the culprit and looked for another suspect, his family members were no help; his father and younger brother both lived overseas.
And because his twin brother, Lee Hoo, was a U.S. citizen, they had probably written him off without a second thought. Why would a foreigner be living in Korea, let alone have entered the country?
If there had been more manpower and more operating expenses,
if pressure hadn’t come down from above because the case had drawn media attention,
maybe none of this would have happened. It was only a hypothetical, but still.
“I can kind of see how this all came together.”
He patted my shoulder and muttered that it had been a decent meeting after all.
It had been, for both of us. But I could steer it somewhere better.
“Senior Prosecutor.”
“Hmm? Got something else to say?”
“Last year, at the Public Prosecutors’ Office branch in Gongju under the Daejeon District Prosecutors’ Office, I spotted something suspicious during a supplementary investigation and caught the real culprit. And the senior prosecutor and the line prosecutor in charge of that case were selected as one of the Criminal Division’s outstanding investigative examples.”
I paused, just long enough.
I had to give him a moment to think about what I was implying.
“For reference, there isn’t a single outstanding investigative example at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office, where you work.”
“……”
“How about this: ‘The police investigation was insufficient, so the prosecution stepped in to supplement it and uncovered an innocent man, then caught the real criminal.’”
So we’d take a made-for-the-public, emotionally satisfying story and attach it to a case already under scrutiny?
That meant snatching one of the conditions for climbing higher than everyone else inside the prosecution.
Either you’d been born into the right bloodline,
or you were a political prosecutor,
or you were the kind of prosecutor who looked righteous from the outside.
The chance to be handed the title of a righteous prosecutor.
“Hahaha!”
“……”
“Our junior is really worried, aren’t you? I was already thinking it was strange.”
As expected, once you reached the rank of chief prosecutor, you had to come equipped with ambition and shamelessness.
“As expected of you, Senior Prosecutor.”
“Heh. Call me anytime! Just not when you come to the prosecutors’ office.”
He wanted to wrap it up with tomorrow’s suspect examination.
I wouldn’t need to write a meeting report, he said.
That won’t do.
Normally, interviews in the lead prosecutor’s interrogation room were conducted with an investigator present.
But I had met with Prosecutor Kim in an extremely unusual way, without an investigator, even though I wasn’t a former prosecutor turned lawyer.
That meant trouble could come back later, for both Kim and me.
“Senior Prosecutor, the judicial researcher and administrative officer should be here.”
“...Huh?”
“Wasn’t there a rumor a few years ago about a false meeting report involving Deputy Chief Prosecutor Yu?”
There had even been an incident where, in defiance of the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission’s findings, people threw eggs at the deputy chief prosecutor’s car on the way to work.
Because of that, he never got promoted.
“……”
He was probably torn. If he wanted to follow the model-prosecutor story I’d just laid out, then there mustn’t be any meeting report.
So I had prepared for that too.
He could simply proceed with the interview as it was.
“Senior Prosecutor, I was worried you might be short on time, so I went ahead and drafted a meeting report on my own.”
“What?”
“I tried to follow everything I learned from you, but it’ll probably be lacking.”
Kim let out a dry laugh and took the meeting report and the USB containing the original without even looking closely.
* * *
November 30.
At the entrance to the lawyer visitation room in Seoul Detention Center, I handed over my smartphone and other electronic devices along with my attorney ID and received a neck badge for entry.
Beep.
I tapped the badge at each door I passed through and eventually entered the assigned visitation room.
“Other people get glass-walled visitation rooms, and I get the imperial suite for the third time. Luxury to the bitter end, huh.”
Today was the day I would meet with Lee Seon-dong for the last time.
Creak.
“Lee Seon-dong, come on in.”
His shoulders stiffened as he entered the room.
I snorted softly.
“You’re laughing too, Attorney?”
“Of course. I’m human too.”
“Wow, you can even deadpan?! No, I mean, I just said that because you don’t really seem like the type to show emotion!”
“Me?”
“Yes!”
I’d thought he was joking, but I hadn’t expected him to keep snickering after he sat down, either. He seemed lighter somehow, as if a weight had slipped off him.
“Attorney, my mother came by the other day.”
“I see.”
So he’d had a family visit on the same day I met with the prosecutor. I didn’t know if she’d come informed or not, but she’d been one step too late.
“But the visitation room was different from this one.”
“The regular visitation room and the lawyer visitation room are very different. And we got one of the nicer rooms, too.”
It must have felt even more stark to him.
“Really?”
“Yes. This is the visitation room reserved for chaebol chairmen when they’re detained. It’s bigger and more comfortable than the others.”
When I tapped the floor with my finger, Lee Seon-dong nodded.
“Maybe that was why the environment felt so different. Talking to my mother, I kept getting weirdly distracted. They said the conversation would be recorded, and there was that transparent barrier, too.”
“That’s a contact-blocking barrier. Lawyer visitation rooms don’t have those, so we can prepare for trial efficiently. That way, the guards can’t listen in or make a record of the conversation.”
There was also the matter of how much time we were allowed to meet.
“I see. Anyway, I told my mother that I’d have good news for her soon.”
“We can’t be certain of that yet.”
“Yesterday, when I was sitting there in the interrogation room for the suspect examination, I just knew it!”
Even though nothing special had happened, Lee Seon-dong was practically bursting with energy, waving his hands all over the place.
“Who would’ve thought they’d analyze my gait and say I was different from the man in the CCTV footage? The investigator’s face was totally stone-faced.”
“That’s standard.”
“What are you talking about? They broke down the apartment CCTV by each crime time and proved my alibi piece by piece, and then the prosecutor goes, ‘Why are you only telling me this now?’ Wow!”
Clap, clap.
“I almost shouted, ‘This guy is my lawyer!’”
He kept replaying everything that had happened that day without taking a breath.
Strangely enough, I should have been preening under the praise he was heaping on me, but instead I just swallowed hard.
“But you didn’t say you were coming today. What brings you here?”
“I came to tell you about the culprit.”
“You caught him already?”
“He should’ve been caught by today.”
I watched the way Lee Seon-dong bristled, furious that the bastard hadn’t been left alone a second longer.
“Who was it, anyway? How did they even get my DNA?”
When I kept my mouth shut, his expression gradually hardened.
He’d graduated from Seoun University’s Department of English Literature, then gone on to graduate school in biological sciences.
He worked for a pharmaceutical company, so he probably understood the implications better than I did.
Maybe, until someone was willing to spit out the truth, he’d wanted to keep dodging it.
Accepting it was a different matter entirely.
“It was Lee Hoo.”
“...What?”
“Lee Seon-dong’s twin brother, Lee Hoo.”
“That’s enough nonsense!”
He waved both hands as if he couldn’t bear to hear another word.
Of course he’s confused.
I knew, dimly, the kind of emotion he was feeling now.
I had my own impossible thing to accept.
Even if you studied law at one of the nation’s best universities, even if you passed the bar exam that toppled elites all the same,
I still couldn’t change my mother’s verdict.
If I had passed just a little earlier.
If I had held my mother to the end, even when she shoved me away.
No amount of stacking up “what ifs” and the emotions that followed could pin down what had filled me back then. If anything, the vague thoughts only swelled, then evaporated.
Perfect conditions for sinking into the mud.
Looking back now, maybe what a lawyer should have done in that moment wasn’t some halfhearted comfort, but the truth.
Cruel, yes.
But because we had to live.
“In the case of identical twins, their DNA matches.”
“It doesn’t all match!”
“I know. Depending on when they were formed, fingerprints, irises, and certain genes can differ.”
Using documents from Choi Jae-woo, the urologist, a same-person verification test had been launched the day before yesterday.
“And you still tell me he’s my brother?!”
“Yes.”
Even as I looked at his bloodless face, I kept going without stopping.
“There’s something I haven’t been able to tell you. Before I visited your house, I conducted an on-site inspection at Gogae Park, where the second crime took place. It’s near your home.”
“……”
“There, I found blood traces and fingerprints on the clothes the culprit wore during the crime, as well as on the weapon. Most likely, there’ll be blood from both the victim and the culprit.”
That was what the past I had seen through psychometry had shown me.
Lee Seon-dong’s body shuddered constantly, his emotions unable to stay still for a moment.
“I’ve already requested Lee Hoo’s immigration records, and the defendant will be changed to Lee Hoo.”
It would move forward in a straight line from suspect to indicted defendant.
“Why would that bastard frame me like this?”
“I don’t know that either. I don’t know what was going through his head when he committed the crimes, but if we investigate, it’ll come out.”
Bang!
As if my explanation sounded like a story I’d invented just to exonerate him, he shot to his feet and the chair crashed over onto the floor.
“Is this how Continent Law Firm does things? Crush a client’s family to make the client innocent?”
“My client is Lee Seon-dong.”
“Ha!”
“You may not care about this right now, but I’ll tell you what comes next. After sentencing, the court will likely order Lee Hoo’s personal information, as a sex offender, to be made public.”
“What does that have to do with me!”
“The two of you look exactly alike.”
“...What?”
“The face that gets posted on the sex offender alert will be Lee Hoo’s—your exact face.”
Lee Seon-dong, who had been pouring out his fury, froze.
“The number of people who actually check the sex offender alert isn’t that large, but if a household has children, they’ll search every location near the house.”
“B-but these days, a house with kids...?”
“Just a house with kids? What about households with daughters? Women living alone? Men worried about their girlfriends in a world this ugly? You think they won’t search?”
“Th-that can’t be. Then what am I supposed to do?”
Only now did he grasp how serious this was.
“Lee Seon-dong, I believe Lee Hoo’s registered address in Korea is your parents’ home. Is that correct?”
“Y-yes.”
“How far is your parents’ house from your own?”
“A-about six minutes by car, fifteen minutes by public transport.”
“Then think of it as a place about as close as a law office. In that case, wouldn’t quite a few people in that neighborhood see you and think you’re Lee Hoo?”
“H-how could that happen? Attorney, can’t you stop the personal information disclosure?”
It didn’t matter whether he was furious or trembling.
Even if we filed to revoke the disclosure of Lee Hoo’s personal information with the court, the chances of cancellation were high.
“A petition to cancel the disclosure of personal information is limited to cases where another layer of harm is expected because of the disclosure, or where it may infringe on someone else’s human rights, so they won’t accept it.”
“B-but I’d become another victim!”
“That’s hard to regard as greater harm than preventing sexual crimes committed by the offender.”
Moreover, because Lee Hoo had committed serial sexual assaults, the risk of reoffending was high, so the court would never accept the request.
“What crime did I even commit?”
Thud.
He collapsed and broke into sobs.
“……”
It was cold-blooded, but
what he needed now was to predict what would happen next and prepare for it.
So I would.
As his lawyer, I would help him back to his feet.
“It’s not as if there’s no way.”