Inside the studio, the air conditioning had been cranked down cold.
That particular tension unique to live broadcast was strung taut across the room like invisible wire.
Every time the camera rail slid, a low mechanical hum rolled along the studio floor.
Beyond the glass of the control room, staff with headsets clamped over their ears traded cue signals with hand gestures and mouthed words, not a second to catch their breath.
And then there was the news desk, framed by the center camera.
Two men in immaculate suits sat facing each other across the table.
One was the anchor of Focus Nine. The man seated opposite him was tonight’s guest.
The bright studio lights poured down from overhead, lighting the guest up like a noon sun.
When the man tipped his head slightly to skim the material he’d prepared, glossy black hair slipped down over dark eyebrows.
Each time those light-catching strands brushed the corners of his eyes, the shadows wavered, faint and shallow.
A high, straight nose beneath a smooth forehead. Lips with an unusually clean, defined line. And behind the silver-rimmed glasses, that wide, cool set of his eyes and the black irises within them were sharp enough to dissect whatever a person was hiding inside.
The glasses covered part of his face, but there was no mistaking it: he was beautiful. And when he lowered his gaze as though lost in thought, something strangely dangerous came off him.
The man who held the eye in so many ways was named Gong Iheon.
Tonight he was appearing on the nine o’clock news as the consulting expert on the case they were covering.
On the large LED panel mounted behind the news desk, a man was captured mid-descent on the steps of a police station, ringed by officers, bound with rope.
The man on the screen had a cap pulled low and a black mask hiding his face. There was no sound, but his hunched shoulders and the hard downward crook of his neck carried every bit of the crowd’s fury all on their own.
Captions were stamped across the screen in bold, unmissable type.
“Professor Gong Iheon, how do you read this case?”
The anchor had finished a short briefing on the case, and now he turned it over for an opinion.
Iheon rested his clasped hands on the table and said nothing for a moment. The bright studio lights flared keenly across the lenses of his silver-rimmed glasses.
“The crux of this case is that the motive for the killing wasn’t simple anger.”
When his lips parted, the voice that came out was low and precisely measured.
“The suspect had been observing the victim over a long period. He kept continuous track of her commuting hours, her routes, even her personal relationships.”
The suspect’s movement routes and CCTV stills from before the crime came up on the LED panel one after another.
Him circling the area near the victim’s residence again and again in the dead of night. Him going in and out of the same convenience store at regular intervals. A movement pattern that lined up exactly with her hours leaving work.
“In terms of criminal psychology, this is close to textbook obsessive relational delusion. What we call ORI, Obsessive Relational Intrusion.”
There wasn’t a tremor in his voice as he laid it out: the type who believes the other person shares some special relationship with him, and who crosses over into violence the instant that belief shatters.
The man’s matter-of-fact expression belonged to someone who had already picked apart dozens of human beings of exactly this type.
Iheon moved smoothly on.
“Once stalkers reach this stage, they no longer register the target as an independent being at all. Put simply, they begin treating the victim as an ‘object of attachment.’”
“So you believe the news of the victim’s marriage was the direct trigger?”
“Yes. News of her marriage wasn’t simply a rejection. There’s a strong possibility it became the moment the distorted relationship narrative the suspect had built for himself collapsed completely.”
“I see.”
“What matters is that preparatory acts were already underway well before the crime itself.”
Iheon’s black eyes, fixed until now on the LED panel, shifted toward the anchor.
“Procuring a weapon. Confirming her routes. Attempting to avoid CCTV. Erasing traces immediately after the act. This is a long way from the patterns you commonly see in a purely spontaneous crime.”
He broke down the truth of the case point by point in that calm, low register, and his credibility climbed with every sentence until your ears opened to him whether you meant them to or not.
“A spontaneous killing usually occurs in a state of emotional overload. Which is why control of the scene tends to break down. Excessive battering, illogical flight, attempts at self-harm, those are the hallmarks.”
The anchor listened to Iheon’s explanation, then asked carefully,
“Professor Gong, are you saying you see this case as premeditated?”
He drew in a short breath and slowly opened his mouth.
“Yes.”
The eyes looking straight down the camera angle had gone cold and hard.
“My assessment is that it falls closer to a planned crime, one executed the moment his fantasy came apart, after long accumulated obsession and a need for control.”
There were plenty of words people used to describe Gong Iheon, but to define him in just two lines: he was a professor of criminal psychology at Hanguk University, and South Korea’s youngest profiler.
With the live broadcast safely behind him, Iheon went down to the underground parking garage and got into his car. He turned the key, and a heavy, hushed engine note welcomed him.
He didn’t switch on the radio, didn’t put on music. He simply pulled out of the HJBC station garage and merged onto the wide-open road.
Late at night, Yeouido was still bright with the lights of buildings that hadn’t managed to fall asleep.
When he turned onto the Olympic Expressway, the black Han River unspooled alongside his window. Unlike the dark water below, where the bottom was nowhere to be seen, the surface rippled and shimmered in five colors.
“Haa...”
Gripped by a stifling feeling he couldn’t name, Iheon rolled the window all the way down. The river wind that shoved its way into the car was lukewarm, nothing like the chill of the studio.
Iheon kept his eyes far ahead, following the flow of the car in front with its taillights glowing red, and chewed back over the broadcast in his head.
When he was explaining another person’s obsession, another person’s intent to kill, he was more lucid than anyone alive.
To a profiler, a criminal was not some incomprehensible monster.
Most criminals spend years building a dark room inside themselves.
A room filled with deprivation and rage, inferiority and self-pity, twisted attachment and hate.
And then, at some point, they lock a victim inside that room.
Sometimes they call it love. Sometimes revenge. Sometimes fate. But it’s nothing more than warped desire finding an outlet.
Iheon analyzed criminals. He never pitied them.
“Tsk.”
The sound escaped him all at once, half a sigh. With the hand he’d rested on the window frame, he twisted at the knot of the tie sitting neatly below his collar.
He’d read and dissected the minds of countless criminals.
And for all that, there was one woman whose mind he couldn’t read, and it made him feel utterly pathetic.
Before he knew it, the car had passed the south end of Banpo Bridge and was turning toward Seorae Village.
The wide-open road narrowed bit by bit, and instead of the lights of office towers, the shadows of roadside trees fell across the windshield.
His house stood past the center of Seorae Village, at the far end of the hill road that ran up beneath Montmartre Park.
A moment later, a detached house revealed itself under the night sky, trumpet creeper spilling in lavish bloom over the wall.
Iheon parked in the private garage, cut the engine, grabbed his briefcase, and got out of the driver’s seat.
He opened the gate and crossed the small yard, driving his shoes down hard against the ground as if the force of it could erase the thoughts that kept chaining themselves one to the next.
Right up until he’d stomped to the front door and reached for the keypad, he was still refusing to think about her.
What was there left to cling to, over a woman who’d walked out without a single word?
Half a year. That was how long he’d spent brooding over the wife who had vanished into thin air one day, without warning.
And as if that weren’t enough, two months ago she’d suddenly sent him divorce papers.
No apology. No explanation for why she would go this far. Just one sheet of paper, and nothing else.
The countless question marks carved into his head had long since turned into resentment with nowhere to go.
Iheon opened the front door, his face gone cold as ice. As it swung in, the sensor light on the ceiling clicked on.
“...”
He’d opened that door with his own hand, and still he stopped dead where he stood, unable to step inside.
Because a pair of shoes had caught his eye, sitting in a spot that was supposed to be empty.
Black sneakers, familiar and unfamiliar all at once. Barely half the size of his own.
He tore his eyes off the sneakers and glared past the inner door, down the hall. The faint light was spilling out of the kitchen that faced the living room.
Iheon’s eyes narrowed into something vicious.
When he listened, he could hear a knife working against a cutting board inside a house that should have been dead silent.
Chop, chop, chop, chop.
What exactly is she playing at?
His jaw tightened. His back teeth ground together hard enough to crack.
Iheon walked into the house without taking off his shoes.
His strides rang out, quick and heavy, and behind him the front door slammed shut with a thud.
The bubbling of a stew on the boil and the rich, earthy smell of doenjang drew closer, and then he was looking at the woman calmly setting the table for dinner.
Rage shot through him so fast his eyes ached with it.
“You’re back? You’re late.”
Doenjang is Korean fermented soybean paste, the base of a common home-cooked stew.
