A Professional Job
The novel's setting has been changed to a fictional city called Mujin City.
Harsh sunlight cut a slanted path through the windows of Violent Crimes Team 1 at the Mujin Southern Police Station. Inspector Oh Sae-ah sat beneath the washed-out glow of an old fluorescent light, working through a serial theft file. She wore long sleeves even in the dead of summer, and her face, like that habit, never so much as flickered. The blue light bleeding off the monitor only honed the cold in her eyes.
She should have been exhausted — nights of investigation stacked on nights — but her gaze let nothing slip. Not a line of text. Not a single image. The only sound that broke the quiet was the occasional tap of her pen against the folder.
Then the door slammed open.
"Team Leader!"
Sergeant Park Jong-ho burst in, his face slick with sweat and twisted with something close to panic. Oh Sae-ah didn't look up from the file.
"A rare sight for a weekend, Sergeant. What's going on?"
"Ah... it's a homicide, Team Leader!"
Sergeant Park couldn't get the next words out, still catching his breath.
"Central District shopping alley... they say there was a stabbing in broad daylight."
A stabbing.
Oh Sae-ah's brow tightened by the smallest fraction. If it were a simple knifing, there would be no reason for the Violent Crimes team leader to get involved. Only then did she set down her pen and look Sergeant Park in the eye.
"The victim."
"That's the thing... he's one of ours. Corporal Park Kyung-chul, from Traffic."
A heavy silence filled the office. An active-duty police officer, murdered in broad daylight — this had already gone well beyond an ordinary case. Oh Sae-ah's lips parted, thin as a cut.
"Cause of death?"
"According to the scene report... a puncture wound in the back. But... it's strange."
Sergeant Park hesitated.
"The wound is so small... closer to an awl than a knife, and they say he died instantly from that. Even the officers on scene can't make sense of it..."
Oh Sae-ah rose slowly from her chair. Her eyes were as cold and deep as the fog that hung over Mujin City. She picked up her leather jacket. Her voice did not waver.
"We're going to the scene. Now."
The sirens had already gone quiet. The black van carrying Oh Sae-ah rolled to a stop at the mouth of the Central District shopping alley. The moment she stepped out, a wall of muggy air and the roar of a crowd closed over her.
Inspector Oh Sae-ah pushed through the tangled mass of people packing the heart of the city. Inside a police line already triple-layered in yellow tape, dozens of officers were fighting to hold back the onlookers. The fact that a cop had died on a downtown street in broad daylight had whipped the crowd's curiosity into something feral, something that could not be contained. Beyond the outermost tape, smartphone flashes popped like muzzle fire, and a low, restless murmur rolled through the street as everyone tried to get a word in.
"Make a hole! Police!"
Sergeant Park bellowed, forcing a path. Oh Sae-ah's face tightened. Perfect containment was already impossible. Countless feet would have already trampled the ground they needed to protect. She clicked her tongue once and gave Sergeant Park a clipped order.
"No civilians inside the cordon. Anyone taking photographs is to be stopped on sight."
She looked over a scene whose deadline had been drawn in crude, hurried strokes. At the innermost point, around the body, forensic technicians moved with a sharp, careful urgency she had rarely seen. This was a site where a fellow officer had been killed, and it showed. A heavy silence hung over the alley, braided with a tension that had no name. On the faces of the police standing over a colleague's death, anger and a raw, unsettled grief sat side by side.
She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and stepped over the tape. Cold reason took the wheel. A white sheet covered the body, but the heavy silhouette beneath it bulged unmistakably. Oh Sae-ah's eyes, however, went not to the corpse but to the asphalt around it.
Something was wrong.
The fabric over the victim's back was soaked dark with blood, but the blood that had actually reached the ground had gathered in nothing more than a small pool. It had not spread the way it did at an ordinary stabbing. Far too little external bleeding for a death.
Oh Sae-ah's eyes narrowed. Unlike the colleagues around her, who were leading with rage and grief, her mind had already begun to turn, cold and clean. She did not let feeling take her. She rubbed her chin with a gloved hand and swept the scene again from end to end.
No sign of a struggle. The victim had most likely gone down in a single blow — and from a wound no bigger than this.
"Where's the medical examiner?"
Sergeant Park stepped in to answer.
"Not on scene yet. Preliminary exam says the wound is so small they can't pin down an exact cause of death. Doesn't look like exsanguination, though..."
"Not exsanguination..."
Oh Sae-ah repeated it under her breath. Then shock? Or poison? But if it was poison, why bother stabbing him at all?
She crouched carefully beside the body. From here, at the center of this chaos, she would have to pull out a single truth. And the first piece of that truth was hiding inside the contradiction between so little blood and so final a death.
"Start by securing every CCTV in the area."
She stood and issued the order to the team ringed around her. Even as she spoke, her gaze slid over the surroundings with a serpent's cunning. Old three-story commercial buildings. A small restaurant hanging a rusted sign. A locked hardware store with dust caked on the glass. She raked every building corner and every eave, but all she found were aging air-conditioner compressors and power lines tangled like spider silk. A few shops had their own security cameras, but every one of them pointed only at its own front door, missing the middle of the alley completely.
The killer had known. This alley was a perfect blind spot.
This was no crime of impulse. Someone had mapped the routes in advance and chosen this place.
She bit down hard on her lip. An ugly start. Their opponent was the careful kind. The meticulous kind.
Four hours had passed since the incident. The air in the autopsy room at the Mujin National Forensic Service was cold enough to bite. Under a hard white light, Corporal Park Kyung-chul's body lay on a stainless steel table. Oh Sae-ah stood with her arms folded, watching in silence as the medical examiner, Dr. Hwang, worked over the corpse's back.
Dr. Hwang took the magnifier from his eye, shook his head, and let out a hollow little laugh.
"...This was a pro's work."
Oh Sae-ah's head snapped toward him.
"...A pro?"
Dr. Hwang pointed at the body's back with a gloved finger.
"The puncture itself is tiny. Whoever did this avoided the bone and every other organ and drove it straight into the posterior of the left kidney. This guy knows his anatomy."
"You're saying they targeted the organ deliberately?"
Dr. Hwang's hollow smile didn't fade as he went on.
"This thing was intelligent."
"...Intelligent?"
"Let's start with the shape of the wound."
He gestured at the body on the table.
"A single puncture, less than two millimeters across. It slipped precisely between the erector spinae and the thoracolumbar fascia and reached the back of the kidney. That's surgical-grade precision. On its own, it would have been enough to tear the renal artery and trigger a retroperitoneal hemorrhage — a fatal wound by any measure."
He paused, then picked up the thread.
"But that is not what killed him. Total blood loss was under five hundred cc. Nobody dies instantly from that. The actual cause of death is acute chemical trauma."
Dr. Hwang pointed at a monitor where the lab results were up.
"We pulled a large quantity of high-purity volatile petroleum distillate from the kidney tissue samples. In plain language, a naphtha-based solvent."
Oh Sae-ah's eyes went as cold as ice.
"Injected into the body through the weapon."
"Exactly. The killer stabbed the kidney with surgical precision and, in the same motion, delivered a chemical payload from a device built into the weapon."
"Direct cytotoxicity in the renal parenchyma. Rapid tissue necrosis within seconds, and a full systemic inflammatory response — SIRS. Add the pain load on the nervous system and the neurogenic shock that would have followed... death would have been almost instantaneous."
Dr. Hwang adjusted his glasses and looked at Oh Sae-ah with a face that had gone entirely serious.
"Inspector Oh. This is not a simple homicide. This is a clear assassination, carried out by someone with a deep command of anatomy and toxicology, using a purpose-built injection weapon. The killer wanted the victim to die in agony — and so fast he never even had a chance to fight back."
Oh Sae-ah said nothing. In her mind, a single profile was already taking shape, one that satisfied every condition. It was unlike any type of criminal she had ever stood across from.
9:14 p.m. The Digital Evidence Analysis Lab on the third floor of the Mujin Southern Police Station was thick with the heat of dozens of monitors and the whine of server cooling fans. Oh Sae-ah stood with her arms folded, staring at the large screen where a map of CCTV coverage across Central District, Mujin City, was laid out in glowing lines.
"So. Have you found the 'young man' the witness described?"
Lieutenant Kim, who had been running the analysis, looked distinctly unhappy about the answer he had to give.
"That's... difficult, Team Leader. The middle of the alley is a perfect blind spot. We never got footage of the actual collision."
Sergeant Park, standing behind them, sounded like he was running out of patience.
"So we've been spinning our wheels for hours, is that it?"
"No."
Lieutenant Kim shook his head and clicked the mouse.
"As a fallback, we screened every male estimated to be in his twenties or thirties who appeared on any camera within a five-hundred-meter radius of the scene, in the ten minutes before and after the incident, based on the witness statement."
Dozens of video thumbnails bloomed across the screen.
"Most of them are neighborhood residents or shop customers. Identities confirmed, alibis clean. But... there's one. One person we can't identify, whose route lines up."
Lieutenant Kim pulled two clips up side by side.
"Left side is a convenience store camera covering the approach to the scene, five minutes before the incident. Man in a black hoodie. Right side is a utility-pole camera on the road leading completely away from the scene, fifteen minutes after. Same build, same clothes."
"The face?"
"Impossible. Hat brim throws a shadow over all of it."
Sergeant Park let out a long breath. Oh Sae-ah's eyes, fixed on the screen, did not move at all.
"Kim."
"Yes, Team Leader."
"Play both at once. I only want to see how he walks."
Lieutenant Kim gave her a puzzled look, then started the playback. The two anonymous figures on the screen were simply walking, at a perfectly ordinary pace.
"Again."
"......"
"Again."
After several more loops, Oh Sae-ah finally stopped the playback and turned to Sergeant Park behind her.
"Sergeant."
"Yes, Team Leader."
"In your experience — does a man who just stabbed someone usually... walk like that?"
The question was odd, but Sergeant Park answered it seriously.
"Unless he's out of his mind, he runs. Heart trying to punch out of his chest. That's normal."
"You'd think so."
Oh Sae-ah turned back to the screen.
"But this man didn't run. He doesn't even look like he's in a hurry. Stride, posture — before the incident and after, they're identical."
She pointed at the blurred shape on the monitor.
"If that man is the perpetrator the witness described, we can build two hypotheses."
Every eye in the room pulled toward her.
"First. He has nothing to do with this case. Just a pedestrian whose route happened to overlap at the worst possible time."
She let the silence sit for a beat.
"And second..."
Oh Sae-ah's voice dropped, cold and even.
"The person we're hunting is so far from a normal state of mind that he can control even his own heart rate."
Dr. Hwang's words from the autopsy room turned over in her ear. Surgical-grade precision... a clear assassination. This was a pro's work.
Oh Sae-ah's decision settled. She issued the order to Lieutenant Kim.
"This man is suspect number one. Pull the dashcam of every vehicle that crossed paths with the figure in these two clips and reverse-trace his route. Even if it takes all night."
The flat announcement that they had just gone past overtime and into a full all-nighter made Lieutenant Kim's face collapse in on itself. Twenty-seven years old, and the blind date he had finally worked up the nerve to lock in for Saturday evening was dissolving into dust, scattering into the air. His pupils lost focus for a second and drifted into empty space.
Sergeant Park saw it and cracked him across the back hard enough to make a sound.
"Wipe that look off your face. One of our own is dead."
"...Yes, Sergeant."
Lieutenant Kim took hold of the mouse with a face like a funeral. Oh Sae-ah had no interest in either of their reactions. She pulled her eyes off the screen and turned to Sergeant Park, who looked thoroughly worn down.
"More importantly, Sergeant. Where are we on the victim's grudges?"
In a single turn she had left the technical problem of the CCTV behind and come back to the oldest question there was. Who killed him, and why.
Sergeant Park, as if he had been waiting for it, pulled a crumpled notepad from his jacket and scratched his head. His face said he had no idea where to even begin.
"Ha... Team Leader. You know what kind of bastard Park Kyung-chul was."
He flipped through the notepad with a long sigh.
"For starters, the money he was skimming off that karaoke bar wasn't pocket change. He fell out with the figurehead owner over the split. There were gang punks he pissed off by refusing to pay tribute. Looks like he ran up some private loans, too — signs he was getting leaned on from more than one direction."
Sergeant Park's voice grew more tired with every sentence.
"Bottom line, the man went out of his way to give people reasons to hate him. Honestly, it's a miracle he made it this far without getting stabbed. If we build a suspect list, we'll have enough for two soccer teams."
It wasn't an investigation so much as digging through a landfill. Oh Sae-ah listened to the report in silence, then sat with it for a moment. When she spoke again, she pointed in turn at the two large screens in the briefing room. On one, the medical examiner's findings. On the other, the ghost of a suspect from the CCTV.
"Let's put this in order."
Her calm voice pulled every gaze in the room.
"We have two roads. The first is motive."
She indicated the examiner's report.
"As Dr. Hwang said, this is not an ordinary grudge killing. It's an assassination that required surgical precision and chemical knowledge. The killer knew exactly how to put the victim through extreme pain. That points to a hatred that is deep, and personal."
Her eyes moved to Sergeant Park.
"So, Sergeant. Forget the two soccer teams for now. Money problems, business disputes — ordinary grudges go to the back of the line. From this point, you focus only on people who would have had that kind of personal hatred. Park Kyung-chul's ugliest secrets. Start with the family, and go through all of it again."
She paused, then pointed at the suspect on the CCTV.
"The second is the person. Right now we have one strong unidentified suspect whose movements match the witness statement."
She looked at Lieutenant Kim.
"The CCTV team stays on identifying that suspect. Use everything we have and reverse-trace the route. Finding out who that man is is the priority."
Oh Sae-ah looked from one screen to the other again. A motive made of hatred. A suspect who never broke his stride. There was still no thread connecting them. But she knew it in her gut — these two roads would meet, in the end, at a single destination.