Chapter Text
11-54 - Sojin
Being called out of the precinct for something as mundane as a suspicious vehicle was a welcome break for Sojin. After years of being a uniform, she thought that she would be glad to be rid of all the errand running once she made detective. However, now that she was the lead detective for a squad full of young kids, reverting back to her days in uniform was something she tried to do on a regular basis, usually for simple cases like this one.
Sojin knocked on the door of the apartment that dispatch had said the call had come from. The apartment building itself wasn’t much to look at--it was around twenty years old and the bottom floor was taken up by a convenience store. When the door to the third floor apartment opened, a young woman that Sojin guessed must be a stay at home mom, greeted her. She looked tired, and Sojin had obviously interrupted her cooking something, as she was wearing a well-used looking apron. “Are you the one who called about the suspicious car?” Sojin asked once she had introduced herself.
“Yes,” the woman responded quietly, looking over Sojin’s business card. “I didn’t think they’d send a head detective out. I might just be paranoid and I don’t want to be a bother...”
“It’s not a problem, ma’am.” Sojin reassured. “Even if it turns out to be nothing, we would rather be safe.” The woman nodded slowly, and though Sojin wanted to reassure her a little more, but she needed to get to work. “Can you show me where the vehicle is at?”
“Yes, of course,” the woman responded quickly. “Let me just grab my son; he’s just learned to walk on his own and won’t stop getting into things if he’s left alone.”
“No problem,” Sojin murmured with a little smile, watching the woman shuffle hurriedly into another room. Though she had no kids of her own, Sojin had enough experience with her younger brother to know what trouble toddlers could be.
Once the little boy was secured in his mother’s arms and had tried at least twice to pull Sojin’s hair when his mother introduced him, the group headed down the stairs, Sojin bringing up the rear. They exited the building from the back, which spat them out into a side alley where only dumpsters and rats should stay overnight.
The woman pointed to a white delivery van a little deeper into the alley. “It’s that van,” she said, and Sojin could hear the worry in her voice. “It wasn’t there a couple of days ago, and it hasn’t moved since it showed up.”
Walking towards it, Sojin asked in a light tone, “Have you seen it before?”
The woman, following behind, said, “No; I’ve lived in this building since I married my husband seven years ago, and I’ve never seen a car back here, let alone this one.”
Sojin nodded. It made sense that this woman would call the police. She was young, married, and had a very young son, her only child, to worry about. In truth, they got a lot of calls from these types of women, and though a lot of uniforms would usually dismiss their worries as paranoia, Sojin did her best to listen and investigate every one.
She reached the van, leaving the woman at the apartment building’s back entrance. Peeking into the window, she didn’t see anything, suggesting that someone had merely parked the van there while they had business to tend to. She was about to turn and tell the woman as much when something in the van caught her eye. Usually, in these types of vans, there were rows of up to twelve seats, all of which you could see from the front. This van was different, however. The two front seats were followed directly by a wall made from what looked to be cardboard that had been quickly painted black in order to match the interior. There were no other windows for her to look through on the van, so Sojin circled around to the front of the van to look through the front window.
One glance was all she needed.
She grabbed her phone from the pocket of her slacks and walked calmly towards the woman who had led her down here, hand hovering over her gun. “Ma’am, you’re going to want to go back upstairs,” Sojin told her firmly, leaving no room for any argument, though, because the woman went pale at her words, she doubted there would have been any words from the woman in a while to anyone.
Once the woman had gone back inside the building, Sojin turned her attention to her phone, dialing up dispatch. “This is Detective Park, please be notified that we have a possible dead body at that 11-54 in Eunpyeong. We’re going to need Crime Scene down here, and be sure Detective Jung is notified.”
Though she wasn’t entirely sure she was at the scene of a homicide, she had been to enough crime scenes to know that the amount of blood she had seen soaked through the cardboard and pooled on the floor of the van meant that, if it all came from one person, they had definitely lost too much blood to be alive.
~~~~
The silence was killing Sojin.
It had been hours since Sojin first laid eyes on the white delivery van, and everyone was working hard, but her partner, Detective Jung Taekwoon, had yet to say a word in her direction. While Detective Jung was a quiet person overall, Sojin had come to learn how to interpret his silences, and this deliberate, harsh, silence told Sojin that Taekwoon was put off by something. He had arrived first, followed shortly by the rest of the team and a number of uniforms, search warrant in tow. Once they opened the back of the van, the smell of blood hit everyone around. There was no body, but the blood seemed less than a day old. Everyone went to work--Sojin interviewed people in the apartment building, Taekwoon interviewed the workers in the convenience store, and the others on the team went about gathering evidence at the scene and in the surrounding area.
“FIGURED IT OUT!” a voice suddenly cried from the back of the van.
Startled and excited, Sojin, who had been following up with a uniform, rushed over to the van, closely followed by Taekwoon. “What is it?”
“Oh...I figured out a riddle that Hakyeon told me earlier…” Hyuk, the youngest member of the team responded sheepishly.
Sojin heard Taekwoon groan behind her. “We’ll figure this out,” she told him.
“Why did you take this call alone?” Taekwoon asked her suddenly, finally turning on her.
Sojin blinked a few times before responding, shooting a look back at Hyuk, who slid quietly out of the back of the van, just as Hakyeon was returning. “What are you doing?” Hakyeon asked, oblivious.
Hyuk sidled past his partner. “Mom and Dad are fighting…” Hyuk answered under his breath. The answer was enough to make Hakyeon follow Hyuk away from the van, mumbling about some blood that needed to be bagged properly.
“I didn’t think this would turn into a murder,” Sojin hissed back at her partner. By this time, it was dark, but even with the patrol cars’ lights flashing, there wasn’t much noise to cover their conversation.
Taekwoon shifted a little. “Still...you should have waited--I was only turning in some paperwork.”
Frustrated, Sojin spoke a little more harshly than she intended; “Fine; next time there’s a call from a paranoid mother in the middle of the day about a car that had only been parked in the area for a little more than twenty-four hours, I’ll make sure you escort me.”
Taekwoon was silent for a minute; he only watched Sojin’s face intently. When he finally spoke, he said, “What if the suspect was still in the van? What if he saw you snooping around by yourself? There’s a reason we have partners!”
“Excuse me…” someone interrupted before Sojin could retaliate. Turning, the two detectives saw Hongbin, a junior detective who was becoming well-known for his undercover work, looking at them carefully, as though he was observing a ticking bomb. “We...uh...found the body.”
The statement was rendered unnecessary a split second later, when a woman’s wail cut through the still darkness.