Chapter Text
To absolutely no one's surprise, the first real screw-up they made was Young-jae's fault.
"Shut up," Eun-sung said absently, her focus on the large television screen in front of her instead of the arguing boys to her right.
Jae-kyu and Young-jae did so after one last mutual glare, both returning their attention to the TV as well. The seventy-two inch plasma screen displayed the blaring red police lights and crisscrossing yellow tape in crisp HD detail. A reporter stood in front of the building they shrouded—a two story house of fused Korean and European design, with tall corner towers that could have been taken straight from some fairy tale castle— speaking solemnly into her microphone.
"Police say they are still investigating the recent death of judge Lee Han-gyul, who fell from the window of his tower study last week. His office has offered no comment on the recently surfaced papers which showed evidence of possible corruption as well as..."
"That means they did find something," Jae-kyu commented. "I told you— "
"Ya, stop interrupting," Mi-reu's voice came from the tablet propped up on the coffee table. His portion of the split screen showed a view of him reclined on his couch at home, long legs sprawled as he furiously typed on his laptop.
"There's some speculation on how he died, but much more on the papers." Kang-mo's slightly distorted voice — just his voice—piped in from the tablet as well. “You guys should see the message boards!”
"Is any of the talk about how he died close to the truth?" Moo-yul asked.
There was a pause. "No," Kang-mo answered finally. "How could there be? It was clearly suicide." It had been the perfect crime.
Almost perfect crime, Eun-sung corrected to herself. Perfect except for one tiny detail, the reason everyone except Chi-hoon (currently out of the country at a mathematics conference) was gathered here now.
Moo-yul must have noticed her dissatisfaction. "We could try to fix the evidence," he offered.
Between all the skills and connections they now collectively possessed, they could probably manage it too. "And run an even greater risk?" She shook her head. “I’m not risking all of our necks again on the off chance the police have finally learned to check the fine details.”
“That’s the old guard,” Mi-reu cautioned. “Some of the rookies I’ve been working with are pretty damn bright.” Mi-reu’s work as a security consultant occasionally brought him into contact with the police, who liked to be kept up to date on all the new ways someone could break into a house or a computer.
“Well, if they did their jobs properly, we wouldn’t have to,” Jae-kyu grumbled.
Moo-yul frowned. “Do you think any of them could pick up on the tampered—”
“Oh, none of them are at our level.” Eun-sung resisted the urge to roll her eyes at Mi-reu’s cockiness. “I’ll drop into the station for a visit and keep an ear out, though,” he continued more seriously.
“Do that. Kang-mo, keep monitoring the news and tabloids as well,” Moo-yul ordered. “Young-jae, make sure you lie low until this has blown over.”
“It’ll be fine,” Young-jae said. “One little detector and an extra cardboard box; no one’s going to notice.”
“Just remember Young-jae, it was your mistake, and it’s your neck in the noose,” Eun-sung reminded him sweetly.
“If I go down, we all will,” he shot back. “Isn’t that how it always worked?” One arm rose in a mockery of the salute he should have learned during his military service. “All for one, and one for all.”
Once again, it is Jae-kyu — now almost a prosecutor, so close to having an entire courtroom captive to his words every session — who starts it all.
After the investigation into Kim Yo-han’s death concluded, Jae-kyu and the others had returned to Susin adamantly pretending nothing had happened. The first few months were filled with stares and whispers from the other students, not helped by the few occasions one thing or another drove the surviving seven to eat or study together. But the gossip soon lessened in the grind of studying for midterms, and by the time university applications rolled around, few remembered or cared.
He had graduated from Susin without any intention of seeing the others again. And he kept that conviction, all through university and law school and into his first year as a junior aid to the city prosecutor, until Goo Doo-young, the son of a wealthy manufacturer accused of beating two bar girls to death was declared innocent despite there being enough evidence for anyone with a brain to realize the truth.
The next morning, the other six woke up to find a pure black envelope in their mail, containing a postcard with a picture of a clock tower. There were no words on the card; none were needed. Three weeks later Goo Doo-young was found dead after a wild night of partying from consuming an unfortunate blend of alcohol and hard drugs.
Both Mi-reu and Young-jae had refused to do more than gather information then. Two months later, while chasing a lead for another tabloid article, Kang-mo discovered that a woman admired for her charitable works was using the orphanage she ran as a front for human trafficking. This time, only Young-jae maintained his relative impartiality. He probably would have kept on standing on the borderline, not going with or against the group, until the decision was taken out of his hands. One night Young-jae’s stepfather decided to go a little too far, and later Eun-sung found him shivering on her doorstep, needing an alibi.
Jae-kyu didn’t know at which point the seven of them had become a team, if you could even call them that. They were not friends. Most of them didn’t even like each other. They were seven people forced to see each others’ darkness after being trapped for eight days with a monster, and though Kim Yo-han was now dead and the snow melted the darkness was still there.
There was an unspoken pact between them: no one would ever, ever talk, because if one goes down, they all do. (Several of them glance at Young-jae sometimes, when things get uncertain, which he complains is unfair).
It is Mi-reu who finds out about Lee Han-gyul from his friends on the police force, grumbling over late night drinks about how this businessman or that perp with a trust fund was let go with a slap on the wrist after all the work put in to catch them. Lee Han-gyul, who also happened to be the judge who had proclaimed Goo Doo-young’s innocence.
Moo-yul had raised the concern that a corrupt judge wasn’t exactly the same as a human trafficker or an abusive killer. Then Chi-hoon, of all people, pointed out that they would cause more good in the long run (as well as less work for themselves) if the justice system functioned the way it was supposed to. The seven of them voted on the issue, and Chi-hoon’s pragmatism won. Lee Han-gyul would be their next target.
Ha-neul nodded to the policeman on duty as he passed the yellow tape surrounding the house Lee Han-gyul had lived —and died — in. The shoes in the doorway showed that there were still some investigators inside.
"Jung Ha-neul!" Kwon Nak-bin, a friend and fellow cop from his academy days greeted him as she passed by the doorway to the kitchen. There were latex gloves on her hands, and her wavy shoulder-length hair was tied back. She tucked away a stray strand that had stuck to her nose, fingers brushing over the bump left there when she had caught a blow in the face in a fight several months before. "Jo-nim not keeping you busy enough, so you decided to join in the fun here?"
He gave her a bright smile, and Nak-bin groaned. "Don't tell me. You want to see the study." She shook her head. "It's suicide. We're just going through the steps."
"And if you truly believed that, you would have booted me out on my ass when you first saw me." Ha-neul beamed up the wattage on his smile. "Come on, Nak-bin."
"Only to stop you batting your eyelashes at me. It's making me embarrassed," Nak-bin scoffed without real rancor. Ha-neul blinked, and followed her up the staircase of the southern tower, pulling on latex gloves as he went. Nak-bin did think something was off, then. She usually put up more of a fight when he tried to get a peek into cases that he technically wasn't assigned to.
They stopped in front of the only door on the top of the tower. Following the European castle theme, the door itself was made of black cast iron molded to look like wooden planks. It was incredibly heavy; Ha-neul worked out regularly and was in excellent shape, and he still had to make an effort to push it open. “Lee Han-gyul used this room regularly?”
“He liked to sleep up here whenever he’s in Seoul.” Nak-bin seemed to guess what he was thinking. “And apparently the judge prided himself on keeping very fit for his age.”
The room they entered was circular in shape, and the eye was immediately drawn to the sole pair of large glass windows which let in plenty of natural light. Partly because they were opposite the door and ran almost from floor to ceiling, and partly because they hung forlornly open, the two black iron frames cutting slices out of the Seoul skyline.
Ha-neul walked over, taking in the rest of the room along the way: cream colored walls and dark hardwood floors, bed on the right side of the door, a desk and cabinet on the left, bookshelves filling the remaining wall space. Nak-bin stayed silent near the doorway, letting him form his own impressions. He stopped in front of the windows, and looked down. The walls of the tower were polished grey stone, too smooth to be climbed. On the ground five floors below, drawn on the smooth grass, was a white chalk outline of a man’s body.
He pulled the window frames closed and stepped back. “Why are they going with suicide, instead of an accident? This ledge is dangerously low.”
“The position of the body was a bit too far from the base of the tower for someone who accidentally tripped. Forensics did a few simulations, and concluded that it was more likely that Lee Han-gyul jumped out, with significant force.”
“Motive?”
Nak-bin shrugged. “Still looking, but the current favorite down in headquarters is that the good judge somehow learned that those papers were about to be released.”
“I thought we only found those during the investigation of his death?” Ha-neul looked back at the door. “Were those iron bars drawn when he died?”
“Yup. The door was barred from the inside. The police had to ram it open to get into this room. And before you ask, Lee Han-gyul usually slept with the windows shut as well. His fingerprints were on the latches.”
Everything looked like an open-and-shut case of suicide, or failing that, an accident. But Nak-bin was worried.
“Were there any unexplained fingerprints in this room?”
“None.”
Ha-neul walked away from the windows and started going clockwise through the room. Everything was supposed to have been left in their original positions by the police. The books and papers on the desk were neatly organized; all right corners aligned without so much as a stray pen left lying around. There was a framed picture of the judge standing with a young woman propped on the desk, both smiling; it was the only personal touch in the study. He moved to the door and closely examined it, noting the solid construction and how closely it fit into the door-frame. He doubted one would be able to slide a knife’s edge under the door, when it was shut.
The nightstand with its fancy electronic alarm clock was similarly neat as a pin, but the bed covers were thrown back haphazardly, and Ha-neul could still see a slight indent in the middle of the pillow. He frowned. Lee Han-gyul had presumably jumped sometimes around two a.m in the morning. But this looked like the man had pulled himself out of bed in order to do so, after already settling in for the night. That was odd.
Ha-neul pulled up the covers from the bed and looked underneath. There was a dim square shape in the back; he reached under and drew it out. It was an empty cardboard box, about the size of two shoe-boxes laid side by side and completely ordinary in every way.
“Did we leave this behind?”
“No, we found it there under the bed while we were going over the room.” Nak-bin’s voice was a bit too casual.
Ha-neul ran a gloved finger across the floor underneath the bed. No dust; aside from being a neat freak, Lee Han-gyul had very conscientious housekeeping.
“This floor must have been cleaned pretty recently.”
“Four days ago.” The day before his death. “Lee Han-gyul had guests over for dinner the night before the morning he died, so he had the house cleaned that morning.” Nak-bin looked at him. “I talked to the cleaning service, and they’re positive there wasn’t anything under the bed when they dusted and they didn’t put it there. And before you ask, there were no fingerprints on the box. At all.”
“Wait, what? That makes no sense.” Ha-neul stared back, his mind racing. “The cardboard’s smooth enough to take a print. If Lee Han-gyul brought it up, his fingerprints should be on it. Even if he didn’t, there should be partials and smudges from whoever handled it before. Fingerprints can remain for years on cardboard. ” He turned it over in his head, not liking the conclusion he came to. “Nak-bin, the only way that box would have no prints whatsoever is if someone had tried to make it so.”
Nak-bin let out a held breath. “And here I thought I was the only one who found it odd.”
“You didn’t bring it up with Byun-sunbae and the others?”
“I did. But well, Lee Han-gyul fell from a tower room that was locked and barred from the inside. Everything points to him being alone when he jumped or fell. You’ve seen the door. Byun-sunbae might have taken note if it had been a weapon under the bed, but it’s just a cardboard box. He thinks the pair of cleaners wore gloves and left it behind and won’t admit it.” She shrugged. “They only wear gloves for washing down kitchen and bathroom surfaces and not for sweeping or dusting, but who am I to argue with a direct superior?”
Ha-neul thought about it. Nak-bin was basically telling him that her hands were tied, but as someone not officially assigned to the case he was free to go chase wild theories and not take a career hit when they don’t pan out.
Except for this one tiny detail, everything pointed to Lee Han-gyul’s death being a suicide or an accident. There was no way it could be murder.
“You know, there’s probably some ridiculously simple explanation for this,” Ha-neul said. “Still, could I take a look at the guest list from that dinner the night before he died?”
“I have it here,” Nak-bin said, and pulled up something on her phone for him to see. “His assistant Han Jae-yoon and daughter Lee Ha-kyung were also at the dinner, but these were the guests.” The list was only five names long:
Ahn Dong-min
Im Ga-young
Son Jong-hak
Son Dam-bi
Jo Young-jae