Chapter Text
Yu Jimin paused at the threshold of Studio 11, her first step angled consciously so that the crime scene entered peripheral view.
A man, fifty-something, was arranged cross-legged on a white platform at the center of the studio. His ribs were framed open with two wooden stretchers, splitting the navy blue of his button-down, and a ring of paintbrushes was fanned from his chest cavity as if he’d erupted in mid-masterpiece. Blood marbled the drop cloth beneath, sticky gradients pooling toward the corners of the canvas. The expression on his face, mouth forced into a grotesque rictus, caught Jimin in return—a half-second’s déjà vu from every gallery opening she’d ever attended, but rendered obscene.
She drew in another breath and stepped into the space. The forensic team then began to work on the perimeter. There were obvious shards of a shattered ceramic mug littered the floor near the body; tea, or what had been tea, dried in brown stains up one sleeve.
Jimin made herself catalog it all: the scattered sketchbooks fanned open to half-formed figure studies, a battered tripod aimed at the corpse with intent, the stench of sweat beneath the formaldehyde of the scene. She narrowed in on the palette knife protruding from the man’s left hand, wrists bound tightly with a twist of canvas primed in red. Artist’s tape, the blue kind probably used by art students, wound and knotted until the skin bulged. She squatted by the platform’s edge, careful not to brush the crime tape that cordoned the installation from the viewing public.
The lead forensic, Ji-yeon, pivoted from her knees and nodded a clipped greeting. “Died sometime between midnight and three. Name’s Park Do Hwan, Chair of Experimental Arts, NAU.”
“Cause?” Jimin angled her head, fighting the old, inconvenient lurch of sympathy for the dead.
“Blood loss. Pericardial puncture with a sharpened brush handle, then the rib cage was opened postmortem,” Ji-yeon said. “Somebody definitely knew their anatomy. And their design for some weird reasons we have yet to find out.”
The irony twitched the corner of Jimin’s mouth. Park’s vitae was tenured and well-reviewed, but his last contributions were largely committee work and creative infighting, if Jimin recalled right, the kind of man who still wore his own exhibition t-shirts under a sportscoat, she guessed. She wiped her palm along the back of her neck, feeling the buzz of caffeine and adrenaline.
Ji-yeon handed up a Ziploc bagged phone, wiped clean but still dappled with thumbprints. “Locked, but no forced entry or struggle. Either he knew them, or they had a key. The admin says nobody’s missing from the department, not as of this morning.”
“Any security footage?” Jimin asked, not looking up from the corpse’s improvised crown.
“Wiped. Network down from 2300 to 0400.”
Jimin’s thumb caressed her own cheekbone, a nervous tic she unconsciously did when things get out of control. She then surveyed the canvases lining the far wall—each one rendered in a brutal style: slashes and smears, wrestling something feral out of pigment and rage. One, right by the corpse, was blank but for a single incision through the linen.
Then, a flashbulb suddenly popped beside her. Aeri, the scene photographer, had arrived. She proceeded to circle the platform twice before locking her lens on the victim’s hands upon arrival.
“She’s going to want a statement,” Aeri muttered, more to herself than to Jimin, but Jimin was used to compulsive narrators.
“Was he married?” Jimin asked, knowing Ji-yeon, somewhere in her notes, had parsed every conceivable next-of-kin scenario already.
“Divorced, no kids. Lived alone,” Ji-yeon replied without pausing on the pronoun. “Neighbors in Hannam, but he’s spent most of his last semester here. Studio’s his whole life, according to the staffers. The last known sighting was sometime after final critique—students said he locked down to prep a new installation, probably this.”
“Extremely committed to the bit,” Aeri said, lowering her camera. Her ponytail swung as she ducked under the tape to snap a close-up of the ribcage spilled open in front of them.
“What about the students? Any with a grudge?” This should be a non-question. Of course there were. There should be. Jimin pursed her lips, the familiar profile assembling in mind: young, gifted, and volatile. She’d taught once—a semester of compulsory ethics at the Police College, before the chief figured out she was cheating the curriculum with stimulants—and half her students idolized creative destruction. It never played well outside the academy, though. Too much ego, too little impulse control.
“Experimental Arts kids are a breed,” she said aloud, letting the words free-fall into the hush. “Anyone obsessively competing for Park’s blessing?”
Ji-yeon pointed with her chin to a battered wallboard on the studio’s edge, its surface obscured by post-it notes: names, dates, fragments of aggressive commentary. Jimin sidestepped past the biohazard cones, reading the detritus. She recognized half the surnames from the applicant roster of last year’s Leeum show—a hungry cohort, some already jockeying for gallery placements, all of it winnowed through Park’s critique. She flicked her phone camera over the wall, indexing the constellation of minor vendettas.
“You’ll want to talk to the prodigy,” Ji-yeon said. “Kim Minjeong. She was here last night. Mi-seon, the janitor, caught her tearing up in the stairwell around eleven.” Jimin made a noncommittal noise in her throat, still considering her response.
“Where is she now?”
“Faculty lounge. With the guidance counselor.” Ji-yeon seemed about to add something else, but thought better of it. She sealed up her kit and joined the rest of her team at the far end of the studio, leaving Jimin.
Jimin lingered on the body. The clean cuts, the lack of excessive blood spatter—whoever did this was either practiced or had studied enough murder to imitate it. The coronation effect, too. It felt almost... reverent, in a way she couldn’t articulate even to herself, which was annoying. She traced her finger along the edge of the nearest sketchbook. It was splayed open to a series of small gestures in cheap graphite, like the foundational exercises she remembered from her own adolescence: hands, lips, crowns of ears, a knuckled thumb pressed in anger. No violence, though, not even the suggestion; each contour was carefully shaded. Jimin took a quick snapshot for her notes.
Then, her phone vibrated. A message from the precinct psychologist, already asking for access to the crime scene for a “contextual immersion.” She ignored it, tucking the phone away. For now, the only relevant mental state was her own.
She stepped around the blood’s slow, arterial reach and found herself at the threshold to the guidance office. The door was propped by a battered hardcover, Theories of Aesthetic Distance, serving as makeshift wedge against a self-closing hinge. Jimin palmed it aside and sidled in.
Kim Minjeong sat at the center table—elbows pressed together, hands knitted under her chin. Her hair was a glossy, pin-straight sheet, parted just off-center, immaculate but for a crumple at the crown where fingers had clutched.
Across from her, the guidance counselor, who's a thin woman, hovered, phone screen aglow. Both looked up at Jimin’s entry, and a brief triangle of tension formed, each waiting for the other to say something first.
“Minjeong-ssi?” Jimin said, trying for warmth. She has to handle this delicately. She gestured to the seat beside the girl, who responded with a bob of the head. Jimin slid into the chair, feeling the molded plastic flex beneath her weight, and scanned Kim Minjeong’s face for the microfractures—those leaks of rage, relief, or guilt that always outpaced speech. None of them showed though, or as she thought. For now. Minjeong’s eyes shimmered, her pupils were blown, irises limned in a ring of pure black. She waited, her hands clutched tightly.
“You’ve had a rough morning,” Jimin started, softening her voice because that always worked, especially with possible witnesses. “But I need to ask you some things about last night.”
Minjeong nodded. Her mouth opened, then closed, like she was about to say something different. “But they said I could go home after this.”
“That’s right. This won’t take long, I promise.” Jimin ignored the stink of emotional triage from the counselor and leaned in until the edge of the table pressed a tidy indent into her forearms. Up close, Minjeong’s skin was pale.
“Tell me what happened after your critique with Professor Park,” Jimin said when the silence became unstable.
“I finished cleaning up at...ten-thirty?” Minjeong’s gaze flicked to the counselor, then back to Jimin. “He wanted to talk about my portfolio. He was—” She paused, her voice trembling and her eyelids softly closing with every blink. “—he was disappointed. He said my new work was derivative so I stayed to redo it.”
“Anyone else in the studio with you?”
“No, just us,” Minjeong said. “Everyone else left after critique. I think some of them went to get drinks. I—I don’t know.” Jimin nodded, obliging the statement.
“How long did you stay?”
“Until a little before eleven. I was supposed to meet my friend, but—” Minjeong stopped. “—I couldn’t get the paint to dry. So I stayed later, maybe ten minutes? Then I left. I saw the janitor on my way out.”
“Mi-seon. The janitor.” Jimin jotted, circling the point.
“Did you see Professor Park again after that?” Minjeong shook her head, perhaps a little too quick. “He was on the phone, behind his office door. It sounded like he was arguing.” She wet her lips. “He didn’t let me in.” She drew a slow breath, and her gaze darted to the molding on the back wall, as if a memory slithered there, ready to wriggle loose if examined too closely.
“I thought he was yelling at his ex-wife. She calls sometimes, looking for money. Sometimes she yells back.”
“Did you hear what he was saying?”
Minjeong’s lashes flickered. “Nothing special. Just cursing. Sounded like he was calling someone useless, or stupid. He does that a lot, you know.”
“I do, actually,” said Jimin, and Minjeong’s mouth tugged in a brief smile.
The girl seemed to shrink into herself. Behind her, the guidance counselor’s knuckles went white around a mug. Jimin recognized the stance; a civilian bracing to scold the authorities for inflicting further trauma. She ignored her. She's used to it by now.
“Minjeong, I need you to picture the studio for me. Who else might’ve come by? Anyone at all?” Jimin watched for that tiny delay before the answer, the micro-pause that said, wait, how much should I say? But Minjeong’s reply was almost too smooth.
“No one came. The hallway was empty when I left. You can ask Mi-seon—she’ll say the same.”
Jimin considered the angle. “Is the janitor usually there that late?”
Minjeong shrugged. “She always does the floors at night. Likes to listen to radio I think.”
Jimin nodded, jotting an asterisk. There had been no music in the hall, just her own footfalls echoing over tile, broken by the wet slap of mop. If she squinted, she could almost reconstruct the girl’s last moments inside the building. The crime scene’s hush felt plausible from this vantage.
“How was Park with you, last night?” Jimin pressed, watching for cracks. “Did you two argue about your work?” She let the silence hover, disciplined herself to wait.
Minjeong’s fingers, laced so tightly they’d gone translucent, trembled. “He—he didn’t like what I made. But he never does.” Her face managed the perfect geometry of earned suffering; somehow both a child and someone who’d already outgrown childhood. “It’s not like I expected approval.”
“You ever see him get angry? Throw things, hit anyone?”
“No. He just—he had a way of looking at you. Like you were something he was waiting to scrape off his shoe,” Minjeong said. Each word was almost rehearsed to the point of transparency if you knew where to look—which Jimin did.
“Did he ever threaten you?” Jimin asked, pushing a little further.
Minjeong hesitated, then shook her head, hair falling forward to screen her face. “No. He just made me feel stupid, sometimes. Or invisible.”
The guidance counselor shot a sidelong glance at Jimin, lips thinning. Jimin pretended to be interested in her own notes; she could already see the form letter composing itself in the admin’s head, phrased in terms of “safeguarding learning environments” and “emotional support.” In her experience, the real emotional work began only after the police left. She would not apologize for her priorities.
“Did you notice anything weird on your way out last night? Doors propped open, lights on in the stairwell that shouldn’t have been?” She kept her tone idle to avoid scaring the younger girl.
Minjeong’s mouth pressed flat. “No. Nothing was open, nothing weird. I just left.”
The guidance counselor shifted, making the chair groan. “Detective, the university takes student safety very seriously—”
“Of course,” Jimin agreed, but kept her focus on the girl. “One more thing, Minjeong. Your hands.” They crouched pale and trembling on the table, knuckles like pearls threaded loose. “You’re right-handed?”
A nod, this one automatic.
“I notice a cut, here.” She tapped the inside of her own wrist, matching the girl’s faint, already cauterized scrape. “Did you get that last night?” Minjeong stared at the injury as if seeing it new. “Maybe? The palette knives are old, sometimes the paint gums up. I must’ve nicked it cleaning up.” She flexed her hand, studied the cut. “It didn’t bleed much.”
Jimin tracked every tic, every shift in Minjeong’s posture albeit small. So much of adolescence was about learning how to lie—how to modulate pain, rationalize impulse, disguise intent. She’d forgotten how bright a performance it could be when you stopped believing in adults.
Jimin then closed her notebook, her gaze lingering on Minjeong’s face—the delicate flush across her cheekbones, the way her lashes cast feathery shadows beneath eyes still glassy from tears. “Thank you, Minjeong. You did well.” The guidance counselor’s chest deflated visibly, crisis averted. “We’ll call if we need anything else.” Jimin’s voice softened almost imperceptibly. “And if you remember something, even something small, you can reach me anytime.” She slid her card across the table; Minjeong eyed it but didn’t touch. As the girl stood to leave, Jimin’s eyes followed the movement, catching for a half-second too long on the pale curve where the uniform skirt met the knee.
When the girl left, trailing the counselor, Jimin waited for the shiver that ran up her spine, the echo of performances past. Teenagers like Minjeong either broke all at once or never at all. Jimin was still undecided which this one would be.
She stood, rolled her shoulders, and stretched the ache out of her hip. On her way to the door, she caught the guidance counselor’s stare, a look that tried to blend accusation with gratitude, and landed somewhere in the neutral middle which out of politeness, she offered a nod in response, before stepping into the corridor.
Her phone buzzed again, this time a call from Aeri. Jimin accepted it on the second ring. “You busy?” the photographer asked, not waiting for pleasantries.
“Hit me,” Jimin said, walking the empty length of the hallway. On the left, a cluster of student self-portraits stared out from a corkboard, all of them distorted in the heroic proportions that every art student seemed to believe made them special.
“Autopsy’s done,” Aeri said. “Ji-yeon’s got the summary, but you’ll want to see the photos.” There was a shuffle, the sense of her shifting the phone to her other shoulder. “And you’re going to love this—remember the cut on Park’s palm, the one from a few months ago? The tissue around it is pink, healing. But last night, someone sliced it back open. Not even an hour before he died. Like they were making sure to bleed him.”
Jimin grunted, mouth drying at such violence. “Staged for effect?”
“My bet? Full-on performance.” Aeri paused, as if chewing it over. “He bled over the palettes, the sketchbooks, even the sleeves. There’s a pattern, like—” she hunted for words, “like lines left by a brush. Or a stylus. Your artist did it on the way to killing him.”
A door clanged in the distance, echoing through the empty concrete. Jimin stopped, running her thumb along her own nail, letting the silence settle as Aeri’s words did the same.
“Anything else?” Jimin asked.
“You’ll love this part too. The canvases—they’re clean of fingerprints, but someone pressed a print into the drying paint on the one with the slash.” Click of tongue through the line. “It’s partial. Forensics is working it, but Ji-yeon says it’s too small for Park’s hand.”
“Small?” Jimin frowned, mind already rerouting old evidence. “Like a woman’s? Or a child’s?”
“Hard to say. But my money’s on a teenager.” Aeri’s voice dipped lower. Uneasiness. Jimin rarely heard that from her. This one is a hell of a ride. “And Ji-yeon’s not saying this over the air, but the way the ribs were opened—she thinks the killer knew what they were doing, or learned it somewhere. Too clean,” she finished.
Jimin ended the call and stood still, letting the emptiness of the corridor amplify her thoughts. The building was slab-cold, painted in the same sickly palette as every university she’d ever been paid to visit or interrogate. She watched her own reflection ghost past the glass trophy case: slouching, blue-jacketed, more exhausted with every hour. Not a day one, at least in comfort.
Ji-yeon waited in the main forensics office, perched on the edge of a battered drafting table with her gloves half off.
“The girl?” Ji-yeon asked, by way of greeting.
Jimin shook her head. “Says she left before eleven, saw nothing, did nothing. Standard issue trauma. The counselor was more shaken.”
“She’s probably seen too much of this place.” Ji-yeon’s tone was withering, but Jimin picked up an undercurrent of sympathy she would have bet her badge against. The forensics chief slid a printout across the table: a photo, the victim’s hand splayed awkwardly, every crease and furrow rendered in unflinching grayscale. There was the pale whip of the reopened scar, not quite jagged—more like a line drawn with purpose than a clumsy slip.
Jimin tapped it. “You buy the performance angle?”
Ji-yeon snorted. “Please. It’s more staged than a biennale.”
Jimin studied the hand, her own thumb tracing the ragged line on the printout. She remembered Park’s reputation: king of critique, destroyer of egos. No shortage of grudges in the studio. But the cut itself—she’d seen the like, once, during her internship in the West. A teenager's idea of performance art, or an attempt to set a scene for the wrong audience. She shook out her wrist, feeling the pulse of old scars under her sleeve. Sometimes it took one to spot the other.
Ji-yeon gestured at the folder. “Check the tox and the fibers. There’s more, but you’ll want to see it for yourself.” Jimin pocketed the print and followed the signs to the evidence bay, a narrow, fluorescent-lit corridor lined with wire mesh lockers. She signed herself in, boots scuffing over pitted linoleum, and found the bin marked PARK, D. The forensics kit already had bloodied brush handles, boxed and logged; shreds of primed canvas, sealed flat; the palette knife, edge still crusted with pigment and a fuzz of blue thread, caught and knotted just under the hilt. Artist’s tape residue.
She filed that away, then lifted out the canvases. The top one was the slash canvas. Up close, the wound was jagged, the fibers of the linen fraying outward, as if the blade had last-minute jitters on its way through. The partial print was there, ghosted in blood—a fingerprint, delicate, incomplete, more pattern than identity. She looked for the spiral, the bifurcation of loops, just like the analysis taught, and felt her scalp tingle at the memory of her own prints, taken after that semester in the West, pressed coldly onto a police blotter as if she’d ever be more than a footnote.
Other canvases followed: some with angry swaths of color, a few unfinished—blank grounds, a grid of preliminary marks. None showed violence, but Jimin saw the progression. Whoever did this had moved from art to murder with precision. The gap between the last brushstroke and the first cut was less a leap than a glide.
She then boxed the canvases back up, then double-checked the chain of custody on the bloodied mug shards. No stray hairs, but a fine powder dusted one edge; she scraped it with the end of her cuff and brought it to her nose. Chalk, or pastels. Not the kind Park favored, but cheap student grade.
She was halfway through documenting the kit when her phone chimed. It was an encrypted campus message, not from police: NAU security, flagged urgent.
She read the body of the message twice, then once more out loud: “Possible breach in Studio 11. Unauthorized access logged at 02:41.” The timestamp landed square in the blackout window Aeri mentioned. Jimin winced, her mind biting down hard on all the implications.
She dialed the security desk, let the familiar ring pattern soothe her for a beat.
“MPA,” said the night dispatcher—voice deep and a little bored, maybe a grad student pulling a double.
“Detective Yu Security,” she said by instinct, then corrected, “Detective Yu, for Studio 11. I need log access and a full entry-exit list, especially between 2300 and 0400 last night.”
The dispatcher fumbled for a beat—hollow tapping, a keyboard clack—then replied, “You’ll have a push from our system in two minutes, Detective. Can you confirm your clearance level?”
Jimin rattled off her badge digitss. “And get me footage if it’s cached? Even with the blackout.”
“It’ll be in your inbox,” the dispatcher promised, almost deferential.
She hung up, squeezed the bridge of her nose, and leaned against the mesh caging. Jimin straightened and rolled her spinning shoulder until the tendons thudded into place. She did not head back to the precinct, not yet. She followed the impulse to walk the studio halls again, this time in reverse: backwards from the aftermath, all the way to where a teenager might have started her night, if she’d wanted to make something permanent.
Studio 11 loomed a few stories up, and she took the stairs—painted twice over but flaking, and the rails sticky with a decade’s worth of hand bacteria and rage. On the second landing she found a smear of blue, not entirely dried. She squatted, scraped her penknife along the edge, and tried to imagine herself as a teenager, seventeen and already famous for knowing how to cut corners. Not her style, but she could respect the ambition.
At Studio 11, the crime tape had slumped, falling in scallops along the threshold. Her rubber soles stuck to the floor with every step, as if protesting the revisit. The room had been aired out, the smell of blood bled into disinfectant already after the cleaning team did their job. The dropcloth still lay in a slow, sticky rumple. The white platform, already flecked with lint and foot grit, looked smaller without the body. Jimin’s eyes mapped the vector from the workspace to the wall where that last, slashed canvas hung, its vertical wound gaping like a fossil unearthed for scrutiny.
She paced a lap of the perimeter, trailing fingers along battered plywood and corrugated privacy screens. Each pass brought a flicker of memory from her own days in residual spaces—sleeping on cots between riot shifts, post-bender mornings in abandoned classrooms. Nothing had ever felt un-haunted after a death, no matter how many times the cleaning crews sprayed and wiped.
At the platform, she took her time, eyes peeling for new evidence, knowing the first forensic sweep always missed details that were less evidence and more ambiance. She hovered at the edge of the platform, crouched where the sticky bloom of blood had first met the canvas. Even cleaned, it radiated a certain kind of feeling, the kind that made her skin want to crawl away from the flesh.
She traced the shape of the installation as though Park were still there: the splayed arms, the fan of brushes, the ribs like a split hull. What had she missed the first time? In her mind, she replayed the crime scene photographs until they flickered into the room’s grainy present. The angle of the paint-mottled mug—an accident, or carefully staged? The tripod’s crossbeam had been knocked askew, a centimeter off from the grid of tape residue marking the floor beneath it. Out of place, or exactly so?
She knelt and swept her phone’s flashlight over the platform with the patience of a forensic entomologist. A faint scrape—fainter than the others, easy to miss—ran parallel to the outer edge. Not a gouge from the palette knife, but the merest suggestion of metal. Scissors, maybe. Jimin rotated, following the line of sight to the battered tripod. One leg bore a fine, silvery nick, as if it had been used to lever up something heavy, or to prop a body into place. She pocketed the detail, a pebble in her mental shoe.
She circled the room again, half-waiting for the next clue to reveal itself, knowing that sometimes the only thing you could do was marinate in the scene until the pattern came loose. The old trick: change your vantage point and your brain would do the rest. She crouched, then stood, then stepped up onto the platform itself. The view from here was religious. The fan of brushes, the blank wall behind, the wall of canvases, and beyond that, the void of the emptied gallery space. For a moment, Jimin just stood, letting her eyes unfocus, letting the headache at the base of her skull radiate outward until it blurred the edge between her and the scene.
She could almost see it: a girl—no, a teenager, barely more than a silhouette in the blown-out afterimage of memory with hands pale in the studio lamplight, hair slicing through canvas. Not rage, not even hate. Just a kind of focus that reminded Jimin of a time she’d carved her own initials into the underside of her mother’s piano bench, not to vandalize but to prove she existed. She felt, absurdly, a ripple of kinship.
She hopped off the platform, landing with a jolt that spiked through her heel. On her way out, she paused at the edge of the door and pressed her palm flat against the wood, feeling the memories of the decades-old walls run up her arm. She closed her eyes. For a second, she let herself be seventeen, desperate to leave a mark that would outlast the next day’s cleanup. Then she left, locking the tape behind her, the echo of her own footsteps following her down the stairwell.
The café was one of the few on the perimeter of the university that hadn’t been colonized by undergrads with laptops or parents with bored children. Jimin spotted Aeri immediately, hunched in a corner, her camera bag slung over the adjacent seat as if daring anyone to try for it. She’d already drained half her coffee and was picking at a pastry by the time she got there.
Aeri waved her over, expression unreadable behind the battered phone screen. She’d quit smoking years ago, but there was nicotine in the way she rolled her thumb over her bottom lip, as if lighting a ghost cigarette.
Jimin slid into the opposite chair. “Got your message.”
Aeri nodded at the battered phone between them. “I did some digging on the security logs. There’s a camera in the north stairwell, Studio 11 access. Supposed to be dead for the night, but someone rebooted it at 02:42.” She pulled up a grainy, blue-lit still—motion-blurred, the figure so frail it was almost a negative space in the frame. “That’s your ghost.”
Jimin leaned in. It was the right height for Minjeong, but the gait was wrong—too brisk, simply not enough to match her's. The oversized hoodie and drawstring backpack made the shape even harder to pin. Genderless, just movement. Like it belonged to anyone, and no one. That was what Jimin hated about security footage, and simultaneously loved: its flattening effect. You thought it would deliver answers, but mostly all it did was sand identity down to nothing but pattern and need.
“North stairwell?” she asked, out of habit, though of course she heard the clue the first time.
Aeri snorted. “No keycard swipe and not even a pressure plate. Whoever it was knew the angles, kept their head down, even blurred their own face passing the lens—upped the motion, so the AI flagged it as faulty.” She scrolled to another freeze-frame, zoomed in on the backpack. “But that,” she said, “that’s a Crimson badge. Visual Arts scholarship, last year’s Sakura cohort.”
Jimin eyed the blood-red slip of satin, partially visible in the bounce of the blurred figure’s walk. “Could it be planted? Or just an accident?”
“Not an accident. They wanted you to see it. All the other badges were inside forensics. The only way this one’s out is if someone walks it off campus.”
Jimin nodded, tucking that away. She looked again at the freeze-frame: the badge, the hoodie. No bravado; not even fear. Pure vector, like the body was plotting a route and the head was just along for the ride.
It reminded her of a night in Daegu, years ago, when she’d trailed a suspect through six blocks of back alleys and wound up following her own reflection in a closed-circuit feed, chasing herself in ever-tightening circles until she couldn’t tell the hunter from the haunted. Jimin blinked the memory away and focused on the capture.
“Any way to tell which badge it is?” Aeri sipped her coffee, considering. “Maybe. If it’s last year’s cohort, they’re all on file. But the colors get rotated in spring. You’d have to see it in color, or get close.” There was a pause as Aeri reviewed the screen, then she held it up to her own eyes, squinting. “Could be Minjeong’s, but she wasn’t in last year’s intake. She’s younger.” Eyebrows arched, not quite a question.
Jimin sipped her tea, the flavor hanging on her tongue. Sakura cohort meant scholarship kids, the ones who were trouble for admissions but spectacular at the press events. She’d seen enough of them over the past decade to know how the game worked. She made a note—get the full roster and check for disciplinary flags, anything that might bloom under the right amount of pressure.
She let the silence yawn between them, put off by the taste of her thoughts. “Anything else?”
Aeri’s gaze flicked to the door, then back. “Ji-yeon thinks you should see the body again.”
“Why?” Jimin braced herself, savoring the sluggish burn of caffeine as it hit the pit of her stomach. “I’ve seen enough.”
“Because she says there’s something off. Something about the pose. The hands she mentioned.” Aeri traced the memory of a cigarette in the air. “She couldn’t put it in the report.”
Jimin nodded, rapping her knuckles on the Formica tabletop. She’d learned early that forensics only called you in person when it was something that wouldn’t survive the translation to digital. “Thanks.” She stood, stretching out her back, and left.
It was a mercy that the morgue was in the basement, two stories down from the living. Fewer people to brush past in the elevator, less chance of the day’s evidence sticking to her coat. On the way, Jimin caught herself checking her own reflection in the elevator’s warped steel, the colorless hollows under her eyes and the dried flakes of blood, not hers, caught in the ridges of her left thumbnail. She pressed her lips together and watched the doors shudder closed.
Ji-yeon unlocked the autopsy suite with a thumbprint and a muttered curse. The body lay on the center gurney, zipped to the chin in a bag that was, in its own way, more respectful than the dais in Studio 11. The forensics chief didn’t dress it up for her.
“Show me,” said Jimin, voice dulled by the institutional hum of the refrigerator compressors.
Ji-yeon peeled down the bag and rolled back the sheet. “You see it?” she asked.
The hands were the focus, splayed forward as if caught in some fetal moment of revelation. Ji-yeon extended one, palm-up, and pointed with a bare-knuckled finger. There, a faint ridge traced not just along the reopened scar, but in a starburst pattern, each line radiating out like a child’s sketch of a sun.
Jimin blinked. It was subtle, almost invisible under the fluorescents, but the lines were definitely intentional. These were drawn, pressed in with intent. Her stomach did a slow, involuntary somersault as the idea landed, that someone had signed the murder, not in blood, but in the topology of the flesh.
“Print that for me,” Jimin said, and Ji-yeon obliged, rolling the fingers onto a sheet. The flesh yielded, then sprang back, the ridges blooming under the ink. Jimin watched, leaning in, unwilling to blink. There—a tiny loop, offset from the rest, a signature not of accident but of authorship.
She pocketed her copy, thanked Ji-yeon with a nod, and left the evidence suite at a jog. She wanted coffee to flush all this out. This was way too heavy for her now as she felt the exhaustion creeping up her neck. Such a shocking crime, so unanticipated for such a boring job she's had for years now.
The world outside had cooled, dusk slouching in by the time she got out. She stood at the edge of the parking lot, feeling the chill bite through her shirt, and scanned the perimeter. A cluster of parents clustered near the playground, a few giggling toddlers in puffy vests darting like pinballs around the knee-high hedges. Tucked behind the glass wall of the café, a child sat rigid and alone at the farthest table, crying.
She then drifted back toward the café, letting herself pretend she was just another after-hours regular. The barista, bored out of her mind, did not even twitch as Jimin slipped past the counter and slid into a seat beside the window.
The child she saw had stopped crying now but was still breathing in these uneven, snuffling gulps of air.
Jimin watched her for a beat. The girl—eight, maybe younger, soft-cut features straining toward composure—kept her eyes fixed on the outside, ignoring the reflection that shadowed her in the window. She was still in her uniform, the kind sold three-for-one at MegaMarts, a little pink bear badge pinned crookedly to her breast pocket. A backpack sat on the floor beneath the chair, unzipped and bleeding paper and wrappers in a loose fan. One of the straps had been chewed nearly through.
Jimin didn’t approach, because maybe the child was waiting for her mother. She waited out the minute, then another.
When the girl finally turned, her eyes were red-rimmed, lashes clumped into misery. She caught Jimin’s gaze and then immediately dropped it, as if fearing an aftershock, but the glance had been long enough for Jimin to see it. Above her collar, a faint ring of pink pressed into the skin—someone had gripped her there, hard, but not quite hard enough to bruise, but the grip had left an imprint. She knew it wasn't her business to pry but it was concerning her, bothering her for some reason. For the years that she's had this job, she has always been an advocate, especially for protection against the weak. Their mission and vision. Those who could not protect themselves, must have a voice representing them—a savior in trying times.
Jimin let the seconds trickle by until the girl’s breathing dulled from sob to sniffle, then reached into her own pocket, fishing out a lollipop that had been rolling around for weeks. She held it in her palm, an open offering. Not looking directly at the girl but just off, letting the choice drift. Not that she can do anything much than that.
The tactic seemingly worked, and the girl’s eyes found it, then flicked to Jimin’s hand, then up to her face, then away.
Jimin then slid the candy across, slow, as if negotiating a treaty. “It’s lemon,” she said, softening her voice to not scare the girl away. “If you like that better.”
The girl took it then unwrapped the lollipop. The mother arrived minutes later, her own uniform of nurse’s scrubs, ponytail askew, phone clamped to her ear. She dropped a hand on the girl’s shoulder and steered her out, never quite seeing Jimin, never quite seeing anything except the next errand, the next task to be crossed off a list.
The girl looked back, one last time, the lemon lollipop suspended like a coin toss in her palm, before the mother’s arm swept her away.
Jimin watched them for a moment.
She then caught herself, forcing her attention back to her phone, thumb scrolling past the image they caught in the stairwell via CCTV, past the recitation of evidence. A lot has happened today but she she had to keep going. She tried to focus on the case she's handling, but then came in another image, an image of the girl, Minjeong, with her dark hair and thin, bruisable wrists—kept refracting through every new fact she learned about the case. The more she tried to overlay the two, the more the boundaries confused her.
Minjeong in the guidance lounge, Minjeong by the door, Minjeong with her hands folded tight and her voice quivering over the syllables of her own name. Even now, Jimin could see the curve of her calf below the pleated hem of her skirt, the sliver of thigh so pale it looked painted on, the way her socks were always just slightly mismatched, left lower than right.
She then decided to tell herself she was collecting detail for the report. She did not admit, even to herself, why it burnt into her mind.
Focus on the case, Jimin.