Uprooting (2)
The conference room was still in an uproar. Choi Seongwoo's rebuke had already turned the stomachs of the high-ranking old men, and then D.K had walked in and dropped a bombshell on top of it. Boxed in front and behind, not one of them liked where this was headed.
"A public investigation, out of nowhere? What is that supposed to mean?"
Lee Jeongwoo stepped forward in Park Jeongho's place.
"It means exactly what it sounds like. If we continue as we are, everyone dies. Everyone in this room included."
A murmur rippled through the chamber at once.
"And what, precisely, do we gain from a public investigation? It will only magnify the chaos!"
"Exactly! Investigate in the open all you like—you think evidence that was never there is suddenly going to leap out at us?"
The objections burst out hot, but the voices in favor were hardly quiet either.
"Isn't it better than dying without having done a thing?"
"D.K will handle that sort of thing well enough on their own. Why are you all fretting so much?"
Argument and counterargument latched onto one another in a chain, like a string of Vienna sausages, and the conference room sank once more beneath the noise.
That was when Park Jeongho lifted a palm and spoke, low.
"That's enough. Quiet, all of you."
As if a spell had been cast, the hall fell silent at once. His eyes burned like fire.
"I see you don't all agree. Every one of you makes a fair point. But if we let this continue, every person in this room will be in danger—and the whole of the Republic of Korea along with you. That bastard has crossed the line. He should have stopped at punishing criminals. Now he's threatening fine people like yourselves, the very ones who enforce the law. I will not stand by and watch any longer."
The room went still. Some nodded. Others dropped their eyes.
A middle-aged judge who had been watching the room for his opening spoke at last, careful.
"The reasoning is sound enough. But even if we open a public investigation, what actually changes? We haven't turned up a single lead until now."
Park Jeongho was silent for a moment, then answered low.
"Among ourselves, our reach is limited. That's why the investigation has been narrow. But if we begin taking tips from the entire country, things will change. At least a little."
"And by that you mean...?"
"Look at how the bastard has moved so far. Watch him long enough and the depth of his information is anything but ordinary. It's beyond what any normal person could know. There is no way an ordinary civilian is sitting on this much."
Several of the judges went rigid.
"So I intend to put a bounty on his head. Once I do, people will move differently. The public loses its mind in front of money, doesn't it?"
The murmuring spread through the room again.
"How large a bounty are you prepared to pay?"
"Ten billion won."
The moment the figure left his mouth, their eyes went wide. Park Jeongho remained perfectly calm.
"Should there be prank tips, or false reports, I must ask a favor of you. Deal with them firmly, under the law. That is why I came to all of you today."
A chief prosecutor asked, his face set hard.
"That kind of money—where is it coming from?"
Park Jeongho snorted.
"You needn't worry. Investigative expenses, the bounty, all of it—D.K will bear every cost."
The hall reacted in a dozen different ways, but the silence was the same in every one of them. No one could manage a reply on the spot.
Then—
BANG—!!
The conference room door flew open, clean and violent. A D.K guild member came bursting in, gasping for breath.
"What the hell is this, all of a sudden?"
Still hauling in air, he ran straight to Lee Jeongwoo and whispered in his ear. Lee Jeongwoo's eyes wavered.
A moment later he glanced around, sidled over to Park Jeongho, and spoke shortly against his ear.
"Master. They're saying Mr. Park Jinho has been taken by the police."
"What? What are you talking about. Why?"
Park Jeongho's eyes flashed.
Lee Jeongwoo's face tightened with discomfort as he went on.
"...On a murder charge."
Park Jeongho's expression locked all at once, and he stepped out of the room.
"Excuse me a moment."
He looked as if his face might burst on the spot.
"What the hell does that mean. Weren't guild members posted in front of his house?"
"It seems he slipped out."
Park Jeongho dragged a hand across his brow.
"So what's this sudden bullshit about a murder?"
Lee Jeongwoo flicked a look at the guild member, who went on without daring to meet anyone's eyes.
"It seems he took Blue Dust. He stabbed an entire family with a kitchen knife. They were out in the neighborhood park."
Lee Jeongwoo let out a breath and asked.
"So where is he now?"
"He made such a scene they arrested him on the spot. As far as we can tell, he's in a detention center for the time being."
Park Jeongho's clenched fist trembled.
"I'll speak to the police commissioner in there myself. Jeongwoo, you get a read on the situation, then go straight to every paper and every network and tell them, hard, to bury this."
Lee Jeongwoo nodded.
"I don't care what it takes. This does not get reported. Not under any circumstances."
"Understood."
I couldn't take my eyes off the television, even while I ate. How long had it been since I started taking judges apart?
Plenty of them had already crossed over by their own hand. By now, criminals and the legal world alike ought to be shaking where they stood.
A reaction should have been due about now. They were probably shut up together, screaming you failed, I did just fine, tearing into each other until something ruptured. And if even one person in that mess could still say the right thing out loud, then maybe something would actually change. I knew perfectly well it wouldn't be easy. Standing in a crowd like that, staking the very bowl you eat from and publicly putting a torch to your own institution—that takes a vicious kind of courage.
Even so, I believed. Among all those people, wasn't there a single judge like that? If there wasn't, then we were even more fucked. Because that would mean this country didn't have a scrap of salvation left in it.
I hadn't thrown away the last of my hope. I picked up my phone.
The crime rate these days had gone quieter than I'd expected. Maybe that was my curses. The drop was real, and you could see it. They still weren't willing to admit I existed. But the fall in crime was a fact.
That was when a headline on the internet caught my eye.
What the hell was this?
I tapped the title to read the article properly.
What?
I hit refresh. Same thing.
Had someone deleted it? Deleting it out of nowhere. Something was off.
I dug through other articles. There were similar stories from a few years back, but this incident didn't seem to have been reported anywhere at all. I looked up at the ceiling.
Even the headline was enough to sketch the shape of it: some lunatic in his thirties had killed a family for no reason whatsoever. And then the article vanishes, and there's nothing else? It was possible. Plausible, even. If that reporter had been first on the scene.
For now, I'd wait a little longer.
The moment With Crime got the call, he ran for the hospital.
He pushed into the room and found his senior, Reporter Kim, lying under the bright lights. The place had that particular smell of medicine, and a small television was murmuring the news.
"Sunbae! What happened?"
"Oh. You're here."
His senior's face was unbearably heavy. A traffic accident could do that to a man, of course. Even so, worry sat thick across his features.
"A traffic accident, out of nowhere?"
"That's what I said..."
Fortunately, Reporter Kim didn't look badly hurt.
"Did they catch the guy who hit you?"
He shook his head.
"Don't know yet."
With Crime hesitated, on the point of speaking, when Reporter Kim cut in.
"Hey. The more I think about it, the wronger it feels."
"What does?"
Reporter Kim had sunk deep into his own thoughts.
"You heard, right? Don't write up that particular case."
With Crime's eyes wavered. That was the real reason he had rushed to the room: pressure, sudden and from outside, to get the press under control. He hadn't even known which case it was.
The moment Reporter Kim had published the story, the company president had cursed him out in both directions and the post had been deleted. Then, the instant he clocked out, a traffic accident—and here he was. No matter how he turned it over, it was wrong.
Reporter Kim caught his breath, looked out the hospital window, and spoke slowly.
"Doesn't the front of it lock into the back a little too neatly?"
"What do you mean?"
He laid the circumstances out at length. Even he thought the whole thing stank. The attempt to control the press through outside pressure was suspicious all by itself—a push to suppress one single case with that kind of obsession. It didn't feel like the usual trick, important people tugging the public's eyes somewhere else.
Reporter Kim lowered his head.
"No matter how I think about it, this wasn't chance."
"Come on. If they really meant to shut you up, they'd have killed you. You're alive and well, aren't you?"
With Crime put on a show of disbelief on purpose.
"Who knows. Could've been a warning. Could've been the guy they sent to kill me was an idiot. Better than killing me and making the whole thing bigger."
"You've been watching too many movies."
He sat in the chair beside the bed and asked.
"Anyway, how did you even know about that case well enough to write it up? I heard it only happened a few hours ago."
"I was there."
"You were there? How?"
Reporter Kim popped the cap off a drink in a glass bottle as he answered.
"I had something to cover over that way. The park next door was noisy, so I went to look, and good God—some crazy bastard was stabbing people to death with a knife."
"So you really saw it by chance?"
"Of course I did. The second I saw it I thought, what a gift, and wrote the piece. That bastard of a boss is on me every other day to put out a real article for once, so I did him the favor and filed it right away—and all I got was a bucket of abuse."
With Crime's gaze went cold.
"Either way, it's pretty clear the killer and whoever's applying the pressure now are connected. Who's the organization?"
Reporter Kim swallowed. He glanced around, then murmured, low.
"The boss let it slip earlier, when he lost his temper. He definitely said D.K."
For a second With Crime thought his heart had stopped. His focus sharpened.
"D-D.K Guild?"
Reporter Kim dropped his voice even further.
"Yeah. He was flipped all the way over, yelling, 'You want to watch this company go under, is that it?' and 'Don't you know how scary D.K is?' He was so worked up he probably doesn't even remember saying it."
With Crime's color began to turn strange.
"Sunbae, do you know anything about the culprit?"
"No. I only stayed long enough to see him get arrested."
"Then the station they took him to?"
Reporter Kim rubbed his chin and went quiet.
"It was Nonhyeon-dong, wasn't it? Somewhere around there."
With Crime was on his feet at once.
"Hey! Where are you going?"
"I forgot I had something urgent."
"You are not touching that story. You hear me?"
With Crime answered, smooth as an old snake.
"Relax. If I can't even keep being a reporter, what am I supposed to live on? And I know exactly how much my life is worth."
Reporter Kim looked a little reassured, and nodded.
"I'll come again."
"Yeah. Don't come empty-handed."
With Crime smiled, light.
The senior brass of the National Police Agency were gathered. Park Jeongho sat among them, off to one side. Out front, a crowd of reporters held their cameras up, shutters working without pause.
The Commissioner of the National Police Agency walked out to the podium and took his place before the microphone. Dozens of flashes went off. Every reporter's eyes fixed on him.
The commissioner went on, his voice crisp and clear.