The day before my fourth murder, another case broke out.
That day started ordinarily too.
As always, the station was hectic. Phones rang, people rushed around carrying paperwork, and the senior detectives went through the reports that had come in overnight while drinking stale coffee. I sat at one end of a desk, thinking again about the text I'd received yesterday.
An unfamiliar address.
11:40 p.m.
And the three words that had arrived before that.
A necessary evil.
Those words stayed in my head all night.
Who had sent it? Why were they calling me there? Was there a knife waiting for me? Or was there someone waiting for me? If it was a trap, who had set it? I couldn't tell whether it was meant to catch me or drag me somewhere even deeper.
Then the radio crackled.
Click.
An urgent voice came through after a burst of static.
“Body discovered. Believed to be a young girl. Secure the scene. All available units, respond.”
The atmosphere inside the station changed in an instant.
Someone stood up. Someone else grabbed a coat. The expressions vanished from the faces of the detectives who had been joking around moments earlier.
A young girl.
A dead body.
Those words stabbed into me.
I stood up instinctively. There wasn't much an intern like me could do. Still, if the scene was short on manpower, I could at least control the area. Keep people from stepping into the scene, stop residents from getting too close, and make sure reporters didn't cross the line.
That was all I could do for now.
I said nothing in the car.
The senior detective beside me was checking the location while the other officers exchanged details over the radio. I stared out the window and thought of the address in yesterday's text. This scene wasn't far from there. Not extremely close, but both were in the same city.
Could it be a coincidence?
I couldn't believe in coincidences so easily anymore.
By the time we arrived, the entrance to the alley was already packed with people.
It was a neighborhood lined with old villas and small shops. A plastic tent had been erected at the end of the alley, and the crime-scene unit was going inside. I couldn't see where the body was. No—I wasn't supposed to see it. My job wasn't to look into the scene, but to keep others from looking in.
I stood in front of the police line.
“Please step back.”
At first, no one listened to me.
People tried to peer inside with curious eyes. Some pulled out their phones. Others embellished whatever they'd heard from the person next to them as they passed it along.
“Wasn't she the girl who went missing?”
“Oh, that poor little thing. What did she ever do?”
“What are her parents going to do?”
“The world has gone crazy. It's gotten to the point where a girl can't even walk around alone.”
I bit my lip.
Missing girl.
Young girl.
Body.
The words came so easily from people's mouths. Without knowing her name, what she liked, or what she had been waiting for until last night, they were already calling her a case.
Then someone said quietly,
“You saw that serial killer who died a while back, right? The guy on the news.”
“The one who killed that college girl?”
“Yeah. People like that just need to die.”
“Exactly. If the police can't catch them, someone else should do it for them.”
“Man, I wish that murderer who killed the serial killer would show up one more time and kill whoever did this too.”
My breath stopped.
A murderer who killed a serial killer.
People said it as casually as anything.
They were waiting for someone who killed other people. Without knowing who he was. Without knowing what he had felt when he killed them. Without knowing whether he had truly done it for justice or was simply another monster.
They wanted a hero.
Someone faster than the law, simpler than procedure, more direct than their anger.
Standing among those voices, I wondered:
Who had killed that girl?
If that person were killed, would the girl come back to life?
If the killer died the same way, would her parents' time turn back? Would the fear the girl had felt at the end disappear? Would the world become even a little less broken?
Then why didn't people trust the law?
Why did they hope someone would secretly kill a person instead of capturing and punishing them?
As I was thinking about it, I saw Dad among the people.
He stood mixed in with the crowd, as naturally as the living, looking at me. A black coat. A familiar smile. An expression no dead person should have been able to make.
“Why?”
Dad mouthed the word.
I turned my head and pretended not to see him.
But his voice reached my ear immediately.
“Going to play the hero?”
I swallowed.
“Try investigating on your own?”
I didn't answer.
He was right.
All I could do right now was control the scene. I couldn't go inside, see the body, or touch the evidence. The investigation belonged to the senior detectives, and I was just the person guarding the line.
And yet, one of the people outside the line caught my eye.
At first, I thought he was just a local resident.
A man wearing a black hat pulled low over his face. He wasn't very tall and stood quietly behind the crowd. Unlike everyone else, he wasn't murmuring or holding up a phone. He was watching the scene without saying a word.
No.
He wasn't watching the scene.
He was watching inside the police line.
Then, for the briefest moment, his eyes met mine.
A chill ran through my entire body.
Those eyes.
I knew them.
The eyes I'd seen in Oh Sejun. The eyes Dad had looked at Mom with. The eyes of someone who saw a living person as if they had already disappeared.
I couldn't explain it.
I had no evidence.
I didn't know what that man had done, who he was, or whether he had anything to do with the case.
And yet, I felt like I knew.
That bastard was the killer.
It wasn't a thought. It was instinct.
A certainty my body recognized before my mind did. That certainty frightened me even more.
Why had I recognized it?
Why had I looked into those eyes and felt that he was a murderer?
Then Dad's voice came, low and quiet.
“Can you catch him?”
I clenched my fists.
“Can you, really?”
Dad was smiling.
“You feel it too, don't you?”
I held my breath.
“You're just like me.”
Dad slowly walked out from among the people. He stopped in front of me and gave a slight nod toward the man.
“Murderers recognize a serial killer's eyes.”
I bit the inside of my lip.
No.
I wanted to say it wasn't true.
But no sound came out.
There was nothing I could do. Even if I shouted that man was the killer, no one would believe me. I couldn't arrest someone without evidence. The police weren't supposed to act on instinct. They couldn't label someone a criminal just because his eyes seemed strange.
But what if I lost him?
What if I was too late again?
“Hey, intern!”
A senior detective called to me from behind.
I turned around instinctively.
“Yes!”
“Push this line back farther. The reporters are coming.”
“Got it.”
I looked away for a few seconds.
Just a few seconds.
When I looked back toward the crowd, the man in the black hat was gone.
My heart sank.
I scanned the area. In front of the shops, at the villa entrance, around the corner of the alley, behind the parked cars. He was nowhere. He had definitely been there just moments ago. He had been watching me. And he had disappeared while I looked away.
“Where…”
I unconsciously started to take a step forward.
“Hey.”
The senior detective grabbed my shoulder.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Keep your head in the game. We're wrapping up and pulling out, so pack up the equipment.”
The scene was cleared faster than I expected. The body was taken away, and the crime-scene unit secured the major traces of evidence. The senior detectives exchanged brief updates, and I stayed in front of the line until the end before gathering the equipment.
The man never appeared again.
I kept looking out the window on the drive back.
Afraid I might see those eyes somewhere again.
But he was nowhere to be found.
And the next night.
I finally headed to the address in the text.
The address was near a warehouse complex on the outskirts of the city. During the day, cargo trucks and forklifts passed through, but at night it looked almost abandoned. Streetlights came on at scattered intervals, and the old warehouses stood in the darkness like monsters with their mouths shut.
It was 11:37 p.m.
I looked down at my phone.
Three minutes remained until the time in the text.
My heart was unnaturally calm. That calm frightened me more than anything. I could have run. Even now, I could turn back. I could call Uncle Taeseok. I could contact Mingyu.
But I didn't leave.
I waited.
11:40 p.m.
Footsteps sounded in the darkness.
I raised my head.
Someone walked out from the narrow passage between the warehouses.
A black hat.
The brim pulled low.
And the eyes visible beneath it.
I stopped breathing.
It was the man I'd seen at the scene the day before.
The man who had stood where the young girl's body was found.
The man I'd felt was a murderer.
The man smiled slowly when he saw me.
“So it was you.”
He spoke.
“The one who killed Oh Sejun.”
I couldn't move.
He hadn't called me by my old name. But those words alone were enough. This man knew me. No—at the very least, he knew what people called me.
“Who sent you?”
My voice came out low.
The man didn't answer.
Instead, he pulled something from his pocket.
A small hair clip.
A pink plastic hair clip.
I remembered what I'd heard at the scene the day before.
Young girl.
Missing person.
Dead body.
My throat burned.
“Is that hers?”
The man smiled.
That smile alone was enough.
Something snapped inside my head.
Dad's voice rang out.
“Look.”
He was standing beside me.
“This time, you even have evidence.”
I took a step forward.
“Did you kill her?”
The man tilted his head.
“If you're curious, come catch me.”
He stepped backward.
I followed.
What happened next was both vivid and hazy.
A narrow passage between warehouses. A cold steel door. Something in the man's hand. A body being shoved. My shoulder striking the wall. Short, ragged breaths. And the rage that had been held down inside me for far too long.
I caught him.
I thought I couldn't let him get away.
I thought I couldn't be too late this time.
I remembered the voices of people who didn't trust the law.
The people who said a murderer who killed serial killers needed to show up one more time.
I thought they were wrong.
I thought killing the criminal wouldn't bring the dead girl back.
But in that moment, my hands were giving a different answer.
When the man fell, I stood over him for a long time.
He wasn't smiling anymore.
There wasn't a sound anywhere in the warehouse complex.
The only thing I could hear was the wind rattling a steel door in the distance.
I panted for breath.
My hands were shaking.
I was afraid.
But before that fear, one thought came to me.
This man would never kill anyone again.
The fact that I had thought that disgusted me, and I took a step back.
Dad stood beside me.
He looked at me with an expression of complete satisfaction.
“That makes four.”
I shook my head.
“No.”
“This time, you got there first.”
“No.”
“Then what are you going to call it?”
I couldn't answer.
Dad gave a low laugh.
“An accident?”
I closed my eyes at the word.
That night, I realized something.
There were no more deaths in my life that I could cover up by calling them accidents.
My fourth murder ended that way.
And for the first time, I thought I had truly gone somewhere I could never return from.