Just a Feeling
Before I set about "learning" Oh Sae-ah, I needed to get the situation straight.
First: physical evidence? None. I hadn't left a scrap of DNA at the scene, not so much as a fragment of a fingerprint. The murder weapon was never recovered, and the only witness never saw my face.
Second: CCTV. The only hope the cops could cling to — and that hope was a mirage. Their only play was to pin me down through camera footage of my movements, but the spot I'd chosen was a perfect blind zone. It wasn't some deserted backwater, either. It was crowded, the kind of place where you hide a tree in a forest. Go through every dashcam of every car that passed by? Among the dozens, the hundreds of vehicles that rolled through that place at that hour? Next to impossible. And even if they pulled off a miracle and found one, the odds of my face being captured clearly converged on zero.
The conclusion was simple. On an evidence-based investigation, the police would never catch me.
Circumstantial suspicion? Suspicion has no legal force, and besides, there was zero causal connection between Park Kyung-chul and me. The only point of contact was that I currently lived with Park Ajeong, his daughter. A grudge? A money trail? Neither one even got off the ground.
In the end, the only link the cops could dig into was Park Ajeong — the woman I was living with. Which is why my plan, from the very beginning, had been to sever that link itself.
I told Park Ajeong to play the perfect lunatic.
What cops fear most isn't a case with no evidence. What they fear most is a human being they cannot understand. Grief, rage, denial, lies — all of those fall inside the "normal" range of reactions the police can predict and counter. They pry into the gaps in those normal responses, extract a confession, or tear a lie apart. But a lunatic who exists outside all of that — no motive, no emotion, no logic — throws their entire investigative system into chaos. Their profiling loses its meaning. Their leading questions lose the road.
So I gave her her orders. Play the perfect screw-loose bitch.
"Don't be sad. Don't get angry, either. Just act like someone who doesn't feel a thing. Like your father's death is worth less than a rock lying in the street."
And if the worst happened — if she broke and named me as the killer — I wanted to make sure that no prosecutor, no judge, no juror would believe a word she said. Who the hell is going to trust the testimony of a woman who says she felt good playing video games while her father was dying?
That was the plan. To turn the existence of Park Ajeong herself into the biggest mystery and the biggest source of chaos in this entire case. A thoroughly insane bitch. A bitch who felt nothing at all about the existence of a father. A bitch to whom social convention simply did not apply. Only if Park Ajeong was that kind of person could she be completely free of the shackle the police would reach for first: motive.
She hadn't killed him out of hatred. She had simply been there. He had simply died. A presence with no causal relationship whatsoever.
An extreme T-type. In other words... a mind like a machine, one that judged everything not by emotion but solely by facts, efficiency, and logical cause and effect. To her, "her father's death" was not a tragedy to grieve. It was nothing more than the removal of a "bug," an "error" that had been interfering with her life. The problem was solved, so moving on to the next step — a game, or dinner — was a perfectly natural algorithm in Park Ajeong's world. Social convention, morality, emotional communion... variables that did not exist in her circuitry.
Even if they ran a psych eval, even if they profiled her, the results would come out in Park Ajeong's favor. They would dig into her past. They would find the traces of the abuse she'd suffered at her father's hands, the trauma. And they would reach their conclusion. Her numbness would be diagnosed as a dissociative disorder. The absence of empathy would be recorded as a textbook symptom of long-term PTSD. Her grotesque statement — that she'd felt good setting a new game record while her father was dying — would be prettily packaged as "the illogical scream of a soul wracked by trauma," or some such bullshit.
In their thick reports, Park Ajeong would not be a "suspect." She would be a "victim." A pitiful, broken creature, worthy of sympathy. Mentally shattered. Physically, perfectly innocent.
Park Ajeong now stood behind a legally perfect shield.
And yet the gaze of the woman named Oh Sae-ah was still pointed at me and Park Ajeong.
Why? That was the first thing I needed to know. What principle did Oh Sae-ah operate on?
The fastest, most accurate way to understand a person is to follow the traces they leave behind. Conversation and behavior can be disguised. But the trash someone unconsciously throws away lays their essence bare.
"The hell are you picking through a garbage bag for, you psycho."
"Because I need to."
What spilled out was a cross-section of one human being's hollow life. Instant coffee packets. Convenience-store kimbap wrappers. A used-up ballpoint pen. And among them, a crushed plastic bottle and a snack bag. This woman didn't bother with recycling, huh... and her a civil servant, no less? I snorted a laugh and kept picking through the pile. Sure enough — no trace of a home-cooked meal, no trace of a private life. This woman's existence was nothing but work.
And then...
"You ever seen a guy going in and out of the place next door?"
"Not really?"
Park Ajeong didn't take her eyes off the TV, answering half-heartedly.
"Hmmm...."
I unfolded a tissue, just a little. Then what's this condom? Looking at the faint pool of semen inside... she'd definitely used it with a guy. A boyfriend? Or a one-night stand? The answer would come as I learned Oh Sae-ah....
A quiet vacant lot on the outskirts of Mujin City. In a darkness the streetlights couldn't reach, a black sedan sat in silence.
Inside the cramped space, two bodies were tangled together. The chassis creaked and rocked, and the wet friction of flesh on flesh was the only thing filling the dark.
Oh Sae-ah's eyes were closed. Her partner's ragged breathing beat against her ear, the smell of sweat washing over her, but her own breathing never broke rhythm. She was simply waiting for this to be over. It wasn't pleasure. It wasn't intimacy. This was closer to periodically relieving a physiological function.
The man's thrusts grew rougher. A signal that the climax was close.
"Hoo... haah..."
A moment later, the man collapsed on top of her, spent. Sticky sweat and smell. Oh Sae-ah wordlessly patted his back. The signal that it was done.
The man sat up, pulled off the condom, wrapped it carelessly in a tissue, and tossed it aside. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it.
"Want one?"
"I'm fine."
Oh Sae-ah straightened her rumpled clothes, answering with no feeling at all. Her head was already packed with the suspect list from an unsolved serial theft case. This act was nothing more than the trash in her head that she had to empty out for a moment so she could work.
"So you can't help me, then?"
From the darkness came the man's voice, mixed with a sigh.
"Yeah. I've got way too many cases piled up."
A senior from the police academy. A profiler. And her sex partner. Oh Sae-ah clicked her tongue in irritation at his answer.
"You have a minute?"
Without waiting for his reply, Oh Sae-ah picked up her phone and opened the gallery. Without hesitation, she found the video file labeled Park_Ajeong_Reference_Interview_1.
The man's brow furrowed at what she was doing.
"You again.... You know this won't just blow over if you get caught."
There was more than simple concern in his voice — a familiar weariness that suggested something like this had happened before.
"If you keep your mouth shut, nobody finds out."
Oh Sae-ah answered evenly and hit play. The dark interior of the car filled with the cold fluorescent light of an interrogation room, pouring from the phone screen. On the screen, Park Ajeong of the empty eyes opened her mouth.
"I don't remember."
The dark car filled with Park Ajeong's hollow voice, then fell silent again. Oh Sae-ah turned the video off and looked at the man in the driver's seat. She was waiting for his judgment.
The man let out a deep sigh and scrubbed his face with a dry hand, looking exhausted.
"This isn't a suspect."
Not the first words she'd expected.
"This is... a textbook case of a Dissociative Defense Mechanism that shows up after long-term abuse. When reality becomes too much to bear, they just shut the entire emotional circuit down."
He pointed at Oh Sae-ah's phone screen.
"Saying she doesn't remember. Saying she doesn't know about the relationship. All of it can be explained as a dissociative phenomenon accompanied by amnesia. That absurd remark about a 'new game record' is a kind of trauma response — clinging to something trivial to maintain psychological balance, so she can look away from a horrific reality."
He delivered his verdict.
"That woman is not the perpetrator. I don't know what her old man did to her since she was a kid, but she's just a pitiful victim whose soul shattered a long, long time ago. Testimony from someone like that has no credibility. Treating her as a suspect is a waste of time."
Oh Sae-ah said nothing. She snatched her phone back from his hand.
Victim. Trauma. Defense mechanism. The convenient words she hated most — the ones that tried to explain everything. Her intuition, her instinct, could see the real monster on the other side of all that. But the analysis of the profiler she'd trusted had dismissed her gut as a waste of time.
She looked out at the darkness beyond the car window and spoke, coldly.
"Just one more thing. I need you to check this."
The man had been about to start the engine. He turned to her, looking annoyed.
"What now?"
Instead of answering, Oh Sae-ah worked her phone and played another video. CCTV footage of a police station hallway. She zoomed in on the part where Lee Doyun walked out of the interrogation room. On the screen, Lee Doyun hunched his shoulders and slipped down the hallway with a frightened look on his face. Anyone would have seen an ordinary guy in his twenties who'd just been questioned by the police.
"Who's this?"
"Park Ajeong's roommate. Lee Doyun. My team is... no. He's the prime suspect I'm looking at right now."
The man stared at the screen a few more seconds, then laughed like he couldn't believe it.
"And what the hell am I supposed to do with this?"
Oh Sae-ah didn't rise to the mockery. She simply, calmly, moved her finger and played another video.
"Look at this one too."
The phone screen showed the same place, the same person. Lee Doyun's interrogation footage. On screen, he was still hunched, still frightened, mumbling.
"I don't really know...?"
The man was looking at the screen with a face that said, why are you showing me this again? The moment that video ended, Oh Sae-ah immediately showed him CCTV footage of an unidentified man leaving the crime scene. In the grainy footage, a man in a black hoodie melted into the crowd with an unhurried gait. Not a hint of hesitation. Not a trace of hurry. Perfectly controlled movement.
The amusement vanished from the man's face completely. His eyes narrowed. The profiler's gaze was back. He pointed back and forth between the two videos.
"The 'ghost' in this footage is goal-oriented, extremely composed, overflowing with confidence. A classic predator's walk."
He pointed at Lee Doyun's interrogation video again.
"But the kid in this footage is the exact opposite. Avoidant, unstable, a prey animal with absolutely no confidence. The probability they're the same person is..."
He paused. Then, looking at Oh Sae-ah's face, he said quietly,
"...close to zero. So why did you flag this guy?"
She couldn't answer his question. Because he lived next door? Because the look in his eyes when he stared at a ballpoint pen was strange? None of that could be evidence. It was nothing but a deeply personal sensation.
"I don't know."
Oh Sae-ah answered shortly. The man sucked in a breath of disbelief.
"Haa? No evidence, nothing, just a 'feeling'?"
Disappointment and reproach mixed in his voice.
"Do you have any idea how much the team suffers when the team leader runs on 'feelings'? That's the thing you hate most, isn't it? The illogical."
"..."
"The woman's a textbook victim, and this guy's just a scared little loser. Neither of them is the monster you're trying to catch. Please. Stop chasing ghosts and look at the other suspects again."
The man pulled out another cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. A clear signal that he didn't want to talk about this anymore.
Oh Sae-ah didn't answer. She quietly opened the car door and stepped out.
Slam.
With the sound of the door closing, she was alone again.
The engine growled low, and the car pulled away. The red taillights became two points in the darkness, receding. Oh Sae-ah's gaze locked onto the yellow sticker on the back of the car. Even in the dark, the words were clear.
The sticker vanished completely into the darkness.
With the squishy feel of the tissue-wrapped condom in her pocket, Oh Sae-ah turned toward her own car.
