Why Should I?
Gyeonggi Northern Provincial Police Agency, Homicide Division observation room.
"Pleased to meet you. I’m Song Tan, a sergeant with the Violent Crimes Unit at Annam West Station."
"Nice to meet you. I’m Do Se-lin, a senior inspector with the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency’s Criminal Behavior Analysis Team."
The two of them exchanged a dry handshake.
After studying Song Tan’s face for a moment, Do Se-lin suddenly asked, "How did you know Kim Choon-gon was the culprit? As far as I know, there wasn’t even a suspect identified at the time, let alone any meaningful information."
Song Tan answered the blunt question with equal calm. "While I was on patrol, I happened to notice Kim Choon-gon pouring drinks for the victim. The moment I saw him, I suppose I just knew."
"Just knew, huh..."
Do Se-lin mulled that over, then let out a faint laugh. "Well, fine. That’s not the important part. What I want to know is this—when Kim Choon-gon was arrested at the scene, was there anything else unusual?"
"Unusual, you say?"
"Anything. If there was even the slightest irregularity, tell me everything without holding back. It matters."
Song Tan scratched his cheek and spoke in a low, even voice. "At the time, my senior officer and I were keeping a close eye on Kim Choon-gon from inside the car. Then we saw him disappear into an alley, and we had the intuition that the crime was about to occur, so we pursued him at once. After that, we barely managed to find him in the brush near Annamcheon, where he was strangling the victim with a rope, and apprehend him. That’s all."
"That really is all?"
"Was there supposed to be more?"
"No, but..."
Do Se-lin frowned, a pale crease forming between her brows.
There was still a lingering, unsettling frustration on her face, as though nothing had quite been resolved.
"Right now, Kim Choon-gon is denying every crime except the attempted murder in Annam. We’re in a position where we have no weapon to break that denial."
Seated in her chair, Do Se-lin sipped cold coffee from a mug.
"What’s worse, at some point he stopped eating and sleeping altogether. His delusions got even worse, and now he’s reached the point where an interview is impossible."
"That doesn’t sound easy."
"No, it isn’t. We only have two days left. If we can’t get something done by then, Kim Choon-gon will be indicted only for attempted murder. For the police, that would be the worst possible outcome."
Song Tan nodded as if he understood. "I see the situation. But why did you call me here?"
"Kim Choon-gon is asking for you, Sergeant Song."
"Why would he want me?"
"That’s exactly what I can’t figure out. Why you, of all people? Ah—sorry. Why is he demanding Sergeant Song? I’ve thought about it every way I can, and I still can’t come up with a clear answer. So we had no choice but to bring you all the way to Uijeongbu."
Do Se-lin tested him gently. "Do you have any idea why?"
Song Tan shrugged. "Who knows. Maybe he wants revenge. His nearly perfect murder spree was brought to a halt, after all."
"It didn’t sound like that. He said something like... that he could escape majang only if Sergeant Song came? I don’t even know what he meant."
"Majang refers to the many trials monks face during training. In Buddhism, the deeper the practice, the more strange illusions, fear, and temptation appear."
"Oh... I see."
Do Se-lin looked at Song Tan with renewed surprise.
She hadn’t expected him to know that kind of thing, too.
"And Kim Choon-gon said something else as well. He said you had already told him that majang was going to come."
Bang!
Before the sentence had even finished, the observation-room door flew open so violently it seemed as though it might splinter off its hinges.
"Agh! Damn it, I swear I’m too old for this police crap."
The captain of the Violent Crimes Unit stormed in, fuming, then changed his expression completely the moment he saw Do Se-lin.
He looked as anxious as a man on the edge of collapse.
"Inspector Do! I just got absolutely chewed out by the commissioner. This is serious—serious!"
It didn’t sound like an exaggeration; his face was red and slick with sweat.
"Right now, every media outlet is staring at Gyeonggi Northern Provincial Police Agency—specifically at our Violent Crimes Unit. If we can’t prove Kim Choon-gon is a serial killer, then this is really..."
Just imagining it made him blanch.
"It’s not just me going down. The commissioner, everyone under me—we could all get wiped out. We need to get a confession out of that bastard within two days, no matter what!"
The captain grabbed Do Se-lin by the shoulders and stamped in place, frantic.
He no longer seemed to care about dignity or face at all.
Do Se-lin opened her mouth calmly. "I want a confession too. But if he’s in a state where conversation itself is impossible, what am I supposed to do?"
"Then what am I supposed to do? Just let us all die like this?"
"That’s why I brought him here. He’s the only person the culprit asked for."
Only then did the captain’s gaze settle on Song Tan, who had been standing there quietly.
"You’re Song Tan? The one Kim Choon-gon had handcuffed?"
The captain abruptly seized Song Tan’s hand.
"I don’t care if it’s only one charge—get that bastard to confess, no matter what. If there’s something he wants, find out what it is."
Song Tan gently pulled his hand free and asked in a placid voice, "Forgive me, but why should I do that?"
"What?"
For a moment, the captain blinked, dumbfounded, and reflexively asked back.
He had never imagined that some lowly sergeant would answer a chief superintendent like that.
Whatever the captain’s reaction, Song Tan calmly laid out his thoughts.
"For several weeks, I couldn’t even go home; I was lying in wait the entire time. It was winter, and I couldn’t even turn on the heater properly. My senior officer and I went through all that trouble to catch him. But then I heard the credit was going to some other place."
The captain, who had been on the verge of exploding, hesitated and shut his mouth.
"I was disappointed beyond words. Felt empty. Angry, too. Honestly, I lost all appetite for work. To be even more honest, I didn’t really want to come here either."
"Hah."
It was the first time the captain had ever heard anyone speak so openly, so unsparingly, right in front of him, and he could only stare blankly.
"Of course, if you order me to go in, I will. But I won’t do my best. There’s no point in trying hard when nothing comes back to me anyway."
Realizing the true meaning behind those words, the captain pressed a hand to his forehead.
His breathing came rough and uneven. Then, slowly lowering his hand, he spoke in a calmer, subdued tone.
"All right. Fine. I was wrong. If Kim Choon-gon opens his mouth, I’ll give you a promotion, a commendation, everything. So please, just get that bastard to talk. I’m begging you."
The situation had already driven him to the very edge of the cliff; rank, hierarchy, and the rest no longer mattered.
At this point, he had no choice but to grab whatever scrap of hope he could.
"You’re promising that?"
"Yeah, damn it. I swear it on my position. Satisfied?"
The captain glanced out the window at the reporters milling around outside and nodded hard enough to hurt.
"Understood. Then I’ll go in first."
As Song Tan turned toward the interrogation room, Do Se-lin caught his shoulder and held out a thick file.
"These are the profiling materials on Kim Choon-gon. Read them before you go in. There may be a lot in there you wouldn’t expect."
Song Tan looked at the file for a moment, then shook his head.
"No. I’ll just go in."
Do Se-lin’s eyes narrowed, and her voice turned cold. "This isn’t the time to be stubborn. If you want Kim Choon-gon to open his mouth, you need to understand him precisely..."
"I’d wager I know that man better than anyone else."
"Excuse me?"
Ignoring her stunned reaction, Song Tan opened the door and walked into the interrogation room.
"Ha!"
Do Se-lin let out a disbelieving snort and shook her head.
Another self-important brat.
That type was always lurking somewhere inside the police.
People who had merely gotten lucky and somehow convinced themselves they were exceptional.
Arrogant fools who believed they needed no one’s help and could solve everything with their own ability alone.
Do Se-lin was certain Song Tan was exactly that kind of person.
"I was actually looking forward to him, since he managed to arrest a suspect no one had even identified... But he was just a clueless little punk with no sense of direction."
With a sigh, Do Se-lin stared into the interrogation room with flat, expectationless eyes.
And not long after, her eyes flew wide in shock.
***
The interrogation-room door clicked open.
Under the fluorescent lights, Kim Choon-gon sat with his eyes closed, not moving a muscle.
In less than three weeks, he had deteriorated so badly he could have passed for a different man entirely.
His cheeks were sunken, the skin beneath his eyes a bruised blue; he looked less like a living person than a corpse.
At the sound of the door closing, Kim Choon-gon slowly opened his eyes.
When his gaze met Song Tan’s, his eyes went wide, and he shot to his feet, knocking the chair backward.
"Y-you’ve finally come!"
Without another word, Kim Choon-gon dropped to his knees on the floor.
Watching from outside, Do Se-lin and the captain of the Violent Crimes Unit could hardly believe their eyes.
"What the hell? Why’s he acting like that all of a sudden?"
"............."
She didn’t say anything.
She had a feeling that something ominous was about to happen.
"A-as you said, majang has descended upon me. The ones I sent to the River of Three Crossings... have returned as mara! Every night... they tear at my flesh and bite at my veins. I simply... simply cannot sleep..."
Kim Choon-gon’s rambling grew more and more breathless.
"I... believed it. I believed that I had pulled those suffering beings in this blood-soaked, hellish saha world from the wheel of reincarnation."
Song Tan shook his head coldly. "No. You called it compassion, but in truth it was arrogance. You spoke of liberation, but all you did was erase the inconvenience in my eyes."
"No! No, that’s not true!"
"Do you truly wish to be dragged into the Eight Cold Hells? You must accept it now. You told yourself you were following the Buddha’s path, but in your heart you were breeding demons. You did not redeem the slain—you merely wound another layer of karma around yourself."
Shaken to the core, Kim Choon-gon trembled all over.
"Then what... have I been doing all this time..."
"You were intoxicated by the feeling of having become a god. Judging, with arrogance, who should live and who should die."
Song Tan’s words flew like a blade and pierced straight through him.
Kim Choon-gon’s shoulders collapsed, and he covered his face with both hands.
"Hh-huk, hhh-huk... Kkhh-huk."
At last, he broke into ugly sobs.
Song Tan watched him weep like a child with no expression at all.
So the Deluded Soul Strike worked properly.
Deluded Soul Strike, a jeomhyeol technique that unsettled the mind, worked by obstructing the flow through Wind Pool, Temple, and Chest Center acupoints, thereby disrupting the autonomic nervous system and the processing of sensory input.
The reason Song Tan had used it on Kim Choon-gon in the first place was simple: his inner energy was insufficient.
It was no easy matter to break a monk consumed by unshakable self-certainty through physical pain alone.
Experience had taught him that people like that were far more vulnerable to mental torment than bodily suffering, so he had taken the precaution in advance.
He had never imagined it would be used like this, in a place like this.
"What... should I do?"
"Karma already committed does not scatter like wind. But repentance can lessen its weight. If you confess your sins yourself and accept their cause and effect, you will not fall any deeper into darkness from here."
Kim Choon-gon hung his head low.
In the silence, only the ticking of the wall clock echoed in the room.
After a long while, he raised his head, and a broken voice spilled from his mouth.
"It started in the Uijeongbu station underpass... I approached a man who had fallen asleep drunk, and..."
His steady confession began to be recorded on the interrogation-room recorder.
Before long, Kim Choon-gon had laid bare every one of his crimes, as though making a full confession before a priest.
"I admit to all of it. I will receive that karma gladly... Kkhh-huk."
In the quiet interrogation room, only Kim Choon-gon’s sniffles continued to ring out.
Song Tan rose from his seat, left the interrogation room, and headed back to the observation room.
Inside, only Do Se-lin remained, standing alone.
Her eyes were wide in complete disbelief.
"He confessed to all four cases, but... where’s Captain Kang?"
"You... what exactly did you do?"
She simply could not understand it.
Why was Kim Choon-gon so obedient toward this person named Song Tan?
What on earth did the words exchanged between the two of them even mean?
Why had a man who seemed out of his mind suddenly admitted to every crime?
She couldn’t make sense of a single thing.
She had studied until her nose bled in order to read the minds of criminals, and she had handled more cases than most people ever would.
Her gaze fixed on Song Tan again.
His face was so calm, so utterly unconcerned that it looked almost trivial.
Do Se-lin bit the inside of her lip.
It was the first time since becoming a police officer that she had felt like such a useless idiot.
And that fact was...
"Sergeant Song... by any chance, are you interested in the profiler side of things?"
...fanning the flames of her competitive spirit in earnest.