Lee Jaehyun arrived in Incheon and stood beneath the slanting sunlight, gazing out at the sea.
He looked at the dazzling, glittering waves and breathed in deeply, letting the scent of the ocean wash over him.
With a long exhale, Jaehyun released the breath he’d taken in.
“Where am I supposed to start poking around with this?”
He had come to Incheon without much of a plan.
Now that he was actually here, he had no idea where to begin or how to even start tackling this.
He had to retrace the incident Park Chunbeom had committed in a place where he had no clues at all.
Beyond the long horizon that stretched before his eyes,
“…Just standing still isn’t going to solve anything. Guess I’d better get moving, at least.”
With a deep inhale and a tense body, he simply started walking, letting his feet take him wherever.
In some ways, it was a hopeless situation.
But Jaehyun, oddly enough, felt a certain welcome familiarity in this kind of moment.
Back in his past life, during the days when he received cases and solved them,
Every day was just a series of these situations.
Of course, criminals weren’t kind.
They always did their best to hide the facts of their crimes, and it was up to detectives to somehow
dig out what they’d concealed.
Finding evidence and catching criminals had been Jaehyun’s lifelong job, so this was nothing new to him.
Besides.
“Difficult or easy, I’ll catch him for sure, anyway.”
Just like he’d caught Myung Jinhan, Jaehyun was determined to catch Park Chunbeom this time, no matter what.
He’d find proof that bastard was a murderer.
Criminals hide things as best as they can, but since they’re still human, mistakes are inevitable, and evidence is always
bound to turn up somewhere.
Even in situations that seemed empty, there were always hints hidden about the case.
Especially for a case like this—an old one where you didn’t even know where to start digging—
if you just went back to the beginning and calmly examined things, you were bound to find something.
“First, I need to get my thoughts in order.”
Jaehyun stared out at the rolling sea and began calmly organizing his thoughts.
Most of the information he had came from what was written in the Incident Report for Park Chunbeom’s case.
According to the Incident Report, Park Chunbeom suffered the accident here, in Incheon.
He’d been trying to park his car when he crashed into a protective guardrail. In his confusion, he broke through the railing
and both he and the car ended up plunging into the sea.
Park Chunbeom’s older brother, Park Seongbeom, who was in the passenger seat, lost his life.
Park Chunbeom barely escaped and survived on his own.
It happened late at night in a deserted area, so there were no witnesses.
Park Chunbeom himself was the first to call it in, and according to the Ambulance Crew’s testimony, the call came through in a breathless voice,
so they rushed right out to the scene.
They arrived as fast as they could, and found Park Chunbeom clinging to the Sea Wall after falling into the ocean.
The Ambulance Crew rescued Park Chunbeom first, then tried to save Park Seongbeom, but he was already dead.
The shock of falling into the sea and the saltwater had ruined the Black Box, so there was no way to check it.
“Perfect, huh.”
He didn’t fully understand the situation, but from the Incident Report alone, there wasn’t really much reason to suspect Park Chunbeom.
It was a bit odd that Park Chunbeom was the beneficiary of Park Seongbeom’s Insurance Money.
But the reason Chunbeom wasn’t suspected at all was because the Insurance Money had been paid for over a year,
and most decisively, Park Seongbeom had set it up so that Chunbeom would be the recipient of the payout in the event of his death.
They’d taken out the insurance on the same day, and according to Park Chunbeom’s own testimony, the two had agreed that
whoever survived in case of an accident should at least be able to get by, so they’d insured each other.
That’s why he wasn’t suspected at all.
If it hadn’t been for Se-re-hen’s words, Jaehyun might have doubted his own instincts at least once.
But as things stood, both his own intuition and Se-re-hen insisted that Park Chunbeom was a murderer.
That meant the Incident Report couldn’t be fully trusted.
After all, it was written more based on Park Chunbeom’s and the Ambulance Crew’s statements at the time
than on any concrete evidence.
Even if Chunbeom had lied, there was no way to tell for sure, so while he could use the Incident Report as a reference, he couldn’t fully trust it.
At least he could get some sense of the situation.
“So, he killed his brother in an ‘accident,’ and the motive was… the Insurance Money, most likely. Maybe he planned it out even a year before
they took out the policy, or maybe the idea only came to him after they were already insured.”
A number of possibilities presented themselves, but Jaehyun could guess Park Chunbeom’s goal was ‘money.’
Even when he was caught together with Han Seona for that medical scam, the profit ultimately went to Chunbeom—
Han Seona just called it ‘pocket money’ she gave him.
She claimed it was pocket money, but in the end it was the commission he got for brokering the illegal medical operation.
“Well… I guess I’ll just have to look around one step at a time.”
Jaehyun muttered softly to himself.
Since he couldn’t rely on the Incident Report alone, the most reliable method was to retrace things in person and investigate the case himself.
He’d have to go around to the businesses and restaurants near the Accident Site and ask around.
It was something he’d always done in his detective days, so Jaehyun slipped back into the routine with ease.
The first place he visited was an old Supermarket.
People often came and went at a Supermarket, and in small neighborhoods like this,
the benches out front usually served as a hub for local information exchange, which made it a good place to start.
A bit of a tip he’d picked up from his detective days.
“Hello.”
“Yes, welcome.”
As he entered the store and greeted the owner, the ajumma at the counter glanced up from her 7’/ and responded in a languid voice.
She looked as if everything was a bother, but Jaehyun just dipped his head slightly and spoke.
“Excuse me for troubling you. Do you happen to know anything about the car accident that happened out front about five years ago?”
“…Why are you asking?”
The Super Owner immediately furrowed her brow, looking at him with guarded suspicion.
Catching the wariness in her eyes, Jaehyun realized he hadn’t shown his Badge and took out his wallet.
As soon as the Super Owner saw the police Badge inside Jaehyun’s wallet, her gaze changed.
“I’m with the police. I’m here to check on an old case.”
“The police? But why poke around something that happened so long ago?”
The Super Owner sounded a bit annoyed as she asked.
Even at her brusque tone, Jaehyun kept a gentle smile and replied,
“Something suspicious has come up recently. Do you know anything at all about what happened back then?”
“Hmph, even if you say that, it was so long ago… I think one of them—either the older brother or the younger—died, right?”
The Super Owner rattled off her words in a tone that suggested she didn’t really care.
But there wasn’t anything useful in her answer for Jaehyun.
“There’s no way it’ll be easy chasing this down now.”
It wasn’t a year or two ago, but five years.
There probably wouldn’t be much in the way of traces left.
All he could do was ask around among the locals for any testimony.
That, too, wouldn’t be easy.
As Jaehyun was thinking this,
the Super Owner folded her arms and let out a thoughtful grunt, as if she was mulling something over, before finally opening her mouth.
“Now that I think about it, I heard back then that they were here on some kind of trip, but that seemed a little weird. At that hour, there wouldn’t have been any open shops around here.”
“Is that so?”
“That’s right. Who’d be out there that late at night? There’s not even a good spot for fishing, so no one comes out for night fishing either.”
That, at least, was a piece of information he could call progress.
Jaehyun jotted down her words in his notebook, then nodded slightly in thanks.
“Thank you very much. You’ve been a big help.”
“Yeah, sure. Good luck.”
The Super Owner nodded as if brushing him off.
Jaehyun turned and stepped out of the Supermarket.
“So, what should I do now…”
After having that short conversation with the Super Owner, Jaehyun realized finding evidence might be even harder than he’d expected.
Of course, if he kept poking around, he’d probably dig something up eventually, but time wasn’t exactly on his side.
He couldn’t just keep chasing after this case forever.
As he stood there for a moment, gazing silently at the sea and thinking over his next move, Se-re-hen appeared by his side.
“So, when are you going to catch that human?”
“I think I can get him in a few days…”
“A few days?”
Se-re-hen furrowed her brow and pressed him for an answer.
What could he do without evidence?
To Jaehyun, slogging through for several days was just normal, so he simply nodded without fuss.
But Se-re-hen twisted her face with dissatisfaction and spoke up.
“I want to eat him today. Can’t you do something?”
“No patience, huh?”
Se-re-hen asked in a subtly annoyed voice, as if she couldn’t understand why he couldn’t get it done right away.
Jaehyun chuckled and answered.
Wanting to ‘eat him today’ was her way of saying he should expose, by today, that Park Chunbeom had intentionally murdered his brother, Park Seongbeom.
But with even the Incident Report unreliable, there was no way Jaehyun could do that in a single day, no matter how good he was.
“You can’t expect patience from a Demon.”
At Se-re-hen’s response to his comment about her impatience, Jaehyun fell silent.
She wasn’t wrong.
It was foolish to expect patience from a Demon in the first place.
But that didn’t mean Jaehyun could conjure evidence out of nowhere.
“Well… guess I’ll just have to keep poking around for now.”
All he could do was keep knocking on doors and searching.
Jaehyun spoke and started to walk off, but Se-re-hen clicked her tongue.
“Wait a second. I’ll help, so let me eat him today.”
“No, I still need to go around and talk to people to get information… and with that body, it’s not possible.”
Jaehyun shook his head slightly as he answered.
Right now, Se-re-hen was invisible to others.
Even if she made herself visible, it’d just be as a child.
Going around asking people questions in that form wouldn’t do any good.
Judging as such, Jaehyun declined Se-re-hen’s offer of help.
But Se-re-hen just laughed as if she couldn’t believe him.
“What do you take a Demon for…?”
She muttered quietly, then before Jaehyun could say anything more, she waved her hand through the air.
When Jaehyun saw the wisps of black energy blooming from her fingertips, he froze.
“What are you doing—”
He tried to react, but the black energy swept over him.
Jaehyun squeezed his eyes shut.