An Audience for Every Death
The air was colder than it had ever been.
Oh Sae-ah stood in a room steeped in the mingled stench of cold metal and formalin, watching the medical examiner, Dr. Hwang, work over Kim Sung-jin's corpse.
Dr. Hwang checked the position of each stab wound one by one, his head tilting. A man with decades of experience behind him, he clicked his tongue and muttered under his breath.
"Tsk tsk. This guy... he might've actually lived, if things had gone a little differently."
Oh Sae-ah's eyes sharpened.
"What do you mean?"
Dr. Hwang looked at her as if he couldn't quite believe it himself.
"Twenty-one stab wounds in total, and twenty of them aren't fatal."
He pointed at the corpse's back with a gloved hand.
"Look at the wounds along the back. Every one of them only reached the muscle layer. They either hit bone or just barely missed the major organs. It's like whoever did this deliberately avoided the vitals."
He pointed again, this time at the single wound in the side.
"This one, of course, is the exception. It punched straight through the liver — looks like the first strike. A perfect killing blow."
He looked at her and delivered his conclusion.
Oh Sae-ah turned his words over in her mind. Then she asked the question that mattered most.
"You said the first attack. How can you tell the liver was stabbed first?"
As if he had been waiting for that, Dr. Hwang pointed into the opened abdominal cavity.
"Because of this."
His fingertip indicated the area around the liver, where dark, clotted blood had pooled thick and heavy.
"Inspector Oh, a living person's heart pumps blood at tremendous pressure."
"The instant that first stab tore through the liver, the heart would still have been beating normally — and that pressure produced a massive hemorrhage inside the abdominal cavity. The size of this hematoma is the proof."
He pointed again, this time at the other wounds covering the back.
"But the tissue around these remaining twenty wounds shows almost no internal bleeding at all. You know what that means? By the time these were inflicted, the victim's blood pressure had already crashed from the liver damage. He was as good as dead."
Dr. Hwang clicked his tongue, the sound almost regretful.
"In the end, if it hadn't been for that first stab through the liver, the other twenty were just torn flesh... he might well have survived."
"Plain unlucky. That's about all you can say."
He gave the elaborate tattoos carved into the corpse's arm a few idle taps.
"So what did this guy do, anyway, to get carved up like this?"
Oh Sae-ah answered evenly, without lifting her eyes from the chart.
"An MZ-generation gangster. He sold drugs."
Dr. Hwang shrugged.
"Ah. That so? Well then... nothing to be sorry about."
She gave no answer to his offhand remark.
She looked down at the body as it grew colder. What kind of garbage the victim had been did not matter. What mattered was that he had died by someone's hand, not by the judgment of the law. And that the someone in question was, at this very moment, still walking around somewhere in the city. That was all that mattered.
"Anything else unusual?"
"Nah. Nothing. Cause of death is too clear."
Too clear...
Oh Sae-ah turned his words over once more, then turned her back without a word. She was just about to leave the freezing autopsy room when Dr. Hwang's voice caught her from behind.
"Inspector Oh."
Her hand, reaching for the cold doorknob, stopped in midair. She turned her head slowly toward the sound.
"Yes."
"I'm not an investigator, so maybe I shouldn't say this, but... that face of yours right now? That's the face of someone who's already picked their killer."
"........."
"Don't. Once you lock onto somebody and start investigating, everything starts looking suspicious."
The already freezing air of the autopsy room seemed to harden another degree around her voice.
"Are you saying I'm fitting the evidence to a conclusion I've already drawn?"
Dr. Hwang only shrugged. He went back to arranging his surgical scalpels, adding the rest as if talking to himself.
"Well, you're free to write it off as an old man staring down retirement talking nonsense..."
"I've seen plenty of investigators wear the same face you're wearing now. None of them ended well."
Oh Sae-ah said nothing. She walked out of the freezing autopsy room and down the corridor. Dr. Hwang's last words circled in her ear like a grim prophecy.
The air hung heavy with the fatigue of an all-nighter and the smell of coffee gone cold.
Oh Sae-ah stood with her arms folded, staring at the large screen where a map of CCTV coverage across the Jungang-dong area had been pulled up. Inspector Kim, speaking for the team, began to report Kim Sung-jin's last known movements.
"The victim, Kim Sung-jin, was confirmed entering the Rodeo Street public parking garage in his own vehicle at approximately 1:20 p.m. on the day of the incident."
Footage of Kim Sung-jin's car pulling into the garage appeared on the screen.
"After that, he wandered the shopping district on foot for about fifteen minutes, and at approximately 1:35 p.m.... right here. He entered the alley that became the crime scene. That is the last time he was seen."
Inspector Kim put a laser pointer on a spot on the map.
"And as you can see, that alley is a complete CCTV blind spot. After that point... there is no footage anywhere of the victim coming back out alive."
Sergeant Park asked the question with a restless edge in his voice.
"So nobody else went into that alley around that time?"
Inspector Kim shook his head.
"The problem is there's far too much foot traffic to single anyone out as a suspect. As for anything distinctive... we didn't find it."
The official briefing ended there.
"Any witness statements?"
Sergeant Park flipped through his notebook and answered with a deep sigh.
"That's messy too, Team Leader. The owner of the shop right next to the alley says he heard a thud, and something like a short scream... but it was mixed in with construction noise, so he didn't think much of it."
"If it was a scream — a man's voice?"
"He isn't even sure of that. Just said it sounded like something tearing..."
Oh Sae-ah's brow furrowed.
No CCTV. No witnesses. The only piece of evidence was that single fruit knife pulled from a nearby trash can.
Complete opposites.
In her mind, the two crime scenes unfurled side by side. The Park Kyung-chul case had been so clean, so precise, it looked like the work of a professional. The Kim Sung-jin case was so filthy, so crude, it looked like the work of an amateur. They were perfectly, exactly opposite.
Coincidence?
It was Sergeant Park's voice that broke through her thoughts. He jerked his chin toward the spot where the body had lain.
"Team Leader. I don't think we need to overcomplicate this."
"......"
"A guy like Kim Sung-jin — why would he walk himself into a spot like this, where nobody's eyes can reach?"
"It's obvious. Drug deal. The deal went sour, some junkie got high or got greedy, and started stabbing. That's the most reasonable read, isn't it?"
His voice was full of conviction as he laid out the next direction for the investigation.
"For now, let's start by shaking down every drug offender in the precinct."
Oh Sae-ah said nothing.
It was an entirely reasonable, entirely commonsensical inference. Every member of the team was nodding along with Sergeant Park. She had no grounds on which to refute it.
She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them.
"Understood. Sergeant Park, take that line and run with it."
"Alright, everybody move out!!"
At Sergeant Park's order, the team burst into motion. Their voices, so full of certainty, rang in Oh Sae-ah's ears like an ominous warning.
The following morning.
While the Violent Crimes Team 1 office tore through the loan shark Kim Myung-seok and every drug offender in the precinct, Oh Sae-ah had come back to the scene alone. She stood in the back alley where Kim Sung-jin had been found.
The police tape had already been taken down, and the rain in the night had faded even the bloodstains to near nothing. Standing there, you would never have known a man had died on this ground.
Oh Sae-ah's gaze began to travel slowly from one end of the narrow alley to the other. Morning sunlight squeezed between the old buildings and laid itself across the damp pavement. The noise of the busy main road leaked faintly over the walls, while the far end of the alley was sealed off by the tightly shut back door of the building where the victim had been found.
Why here, of all places?
The question was only growing louder in her mind. She lifted her head and swept her eyes over the buildings rising on either side of the alley. Four stories, five at least — fairly large commercial buildings. Dead signs for bars and karaoke rooms clung to the aging facades, and gas pipes and ventilation ducts sprawled across them like dirty spiderwebs.
A perfectly ordinary back alley in an entertainment district. By night it would have been packed with the shouting and singing of drunks. Now every sound had vanished as if it had never existed, and only a silence like a hangover remained.
Oh Sae-ah's gaze settled on the faint bloodstain on the asphalt where Kim Sung-jin's body had lain. Sergeant Park had been exactly right. For a drug deal, the location was almost too good. Out of anyone's sight — and if something went wrong, you just scattered down either end of the alley. A reasonable inference.
She wiped every hypothesis from her mind for a moment — Sergeant Park's drug-deal-gone-wrong theory and her own theory of a staged murder alike. Then she began to rebuild from the most basic facts.
Kim Sung-jin had come here with a purpose. In this place, he had come face to face with someone. And then he had died. That was fact. So what was that purpose, and who was that someone? The answer would still be here somewhere on this scene. Hidden inside some tiny mistake the killer had never thought of.
Her gaze stopped beneath a crushed can the smokers used as an ashtray, among cigarette butts pulped and sodden from the rain.
A very faint red.
Oh Sae-ah crouched down slowly. She took out her tweezers and lifted it with care.
A cigarette butt.
On the end of the filter, a vivid lipstick stain remained.
There had been a woman.
Park Ajeong?
The first name that surfaced was erased just as quickly. Starting the car, pulling out of the parking lot, looking up at the third-floor window. Park Ajeong's vacant face, a cigarette between her lips. At the exact hour Kim Sung-jin had been dying, Park Ajeong had been at home. Her alibi was solid. This time, too.
Oh Sae-ah eased the cigarette butt into an evidence bag. In a courtroom, it would have no evidentiary value whatsoever. This back alley was a smoking spot that countless people passed through. There was no way to prove when this lipstick-stained butt had been discarded, or by whom.
And yet.
That red lipstick mark pulled hard at her cop's instinct.
A fight between a dealer and a junkie. The commonsensical, reasonable hypothesis Sergeant Park had built. What were the odds that the "junkie" was a woman? It was plausible enough. But she could not make the picture hold.
She thought of Kim Sung-jin's build. A hulking frame pushing two hundred pounds. A woman high on drugs, inflicting wounds that one-sided on a man who was fighting back? Without a single sign of a struggle? It was close to impossible.
No.
This lipstick did not belong to the killer. This belonged to a third person who had been there at the scene. Perhaps the trace of a spectator who had watched the whole thing.
Oh Sae-ah slipped the evidence bag into her pocket.
Park Ajeong, watching Park Kyung-chul die from the other side of a window. An unknown woman, smoking somewhere in this dark alley, watching Kim Sung-jin die. Two murders. And beside both deaths, there had always been an audience. A vicious, arrogant need to show off — a compulsion to make sure someone was watching his work.
Could that really be it?
Dr. Hwang's words brushed past her ear in that same cold voice.
Don't investigate with the answer already decided.
Maybe all of this was nothing but coincidence. Maybe Park Ajeong really had been there by chance, and this lipstick-stained cigarette butt had nothing to do with the case at all — just trash. Maybe all of it...
Was nothing but her own delusion.
Oh Sae-ah looked down at the evidence bag in her hand. This small cigarette butt could be the decisive proof that shook the world, or it could be nothing but garbage.
She let out a long breath. She could not know. Whether the path she was walking now was the only road that led to the truth — or a road that led her deeper into a delusion of her own making.