His memory was like a strip of film cut to pieces.
However hard he tried to retrace how it had come to this, his head stayed dark, a screen with the power cut, throwing up nothing at all.
When they’d moved from the kitchen to the living room, he had no idea. And not onto the sofa, either. The floor. Scattered all around them were the things that had been sitting dead still for a good half a year.
The table shoved askew, the vase knocked over, the flowers dried into brittle sticks, books flung open wherever they’d landed.
In front of his blinking eyes, a scene that could no longer be undone was already playing out.
Her narrow waist was arched at a dizzying angle, like a cat stretching, and her cunt, frothing with pale cum, was swallowing his thick cock whole with room to spare.
Through the slick, wet sounds filling the room, Jei ground her right cheek into the rug on the floor and sobbed like she was coming apart.
“Fuck...”
And then the memory cuts out again.
By the time it picked back up, he was already doing something else to her.
He pried those raw, split lips apart, forced his cock into her mouth, and worked himself in and out.
He thinks he might even have wiped her chin, slick with the saliva she couldn’t swallow, and smiled lazily while he did it.
The way she choked and gagged, unable to breathe. Her face a ruin of tears and snot.
Was I glad to see that lovely face wrecked?
Or was I glad that I looked at it and didn’t stop?
When he opened his eyes again, he was in the bedroom.
A pale wash of dawn light was seeping in through the gap in the curtains.
When they’d moved from the living room to the bedroom, which of them had collapsed onto the bed first, he couldn’t remember a thing.
Only that the crook of his arm was hot.
Iheon lowered his cold eyes.
Jei was in his arms. Her exhausted face buried against his chest, barely managing to breathe.
His arm was wrapped around her waist without a single gap. Like a man terrified of losing her.
It was laughable, the state of him.
That after a whole night of breaking her, driving her, doing things no sane man would do, he’d ended up falling asleep holding her like this.
“Crazy bastard...”
Disgust rose in his throat. Just then Jei’s breath brushed the skin below his collarbone. At that faint bit of warmth, the strength flooded back into his arm.
It was instinct. The sickening, pathetic instinct that would never, ever let this woman go.
As if to sever that instinct by force, Iheon shoved himself upright and off the bed.
The shower didn’t take long. Iheon stood under the cold spray with his eyes shut for a while.
His skin went numb with the chill, and still the feel of that night, seared into him everywhere, refused to wash off.
He raked his wet hair back carelessly and stepped into the dressing room.
He grabbed whichever dress shirt came to hand off the shelf and pushed his arms through the sleeves. Buttoned it all the way to the top.
He fastened his watch, pressed the cuffs flat with his fingers. Pulled the knot of his tie neatly tight, then shrugged on his jacket.
The man in the mirror looked immaculate. Which made him all the more revolting.
Without once looking back at Jei, who’d dropped into sleep like she’d fainted, Iheon picked up his briefcase and left the house, fast.
By the time he reached the university, Iheon was already wearing his usual face.
Not a trace anywhere that might hint at what had happened in the night.
Ten o’clock in the morning, on the dot.
Iheon stood at the front of the lecture hall and looked out at his students. Cool-headed, composed, exactly as he always was.
He clicked the remote, and a single photograph came up on the screen at the front of the hall.
A two-storey house with its roof half caved in and its window frames burned black, nothing left but a gaunt skeleton.
Every eye in the room fixed on the screen.
Standing beside the podium, Iheon clicked the remote once more. The next slide laid out a brief summary of the case.
“Today’s case is an arson murder.”
Iheon’s calm, dry voice bored into the ears of the students gathered in the hall.
“That said, just because someone set a fire doesn’t mean fire is the offender’s core motive. Fire can be the goal. It can be the means. It can be the message. Or it can be an act after the fact, to cover up the crime.”
A blue marker in hand, he walked to the large whiteboard beside the screen. His shirtsleeves were rolled back neatly enough to bare his wristbones, thick veins standing out sharp across the backs of his hands.
Clean, sharp handwriting that mirrored his blunt nature went up on the board, one line after another.
MO[1], Staging[2], Signature[3].
He rapped the surface of the whiteboard twice, like knocking on a door, and turned back to the students.
“First, MO. Method of operation. How they got in, how they subdued the victims, tool use, escape route, attempts to remove evidence, and so on. MO is learned. If it fails, it changes. If it works, it repeats.”
The next slide brought up a floor plan of the house. Entryway, living room, kitchen, master bedroom, small bedroom. A red mark sat between the entrance and the rooms.
“There’s no sign of forced entry at the front door, and the point of origin is well placed to cut off the victims’ routes out. From this, we have to build at least three possibilities.”
The students’ eyes moved between the floor plan and Iheon at the podium. On a few faces, tracing the red mark, understanding arrived a beat late.
“One, the victim opened the door for them.”
A long index finger straightened out of his closed fist.
“Two, the offender had a means of entry. Three, the offender broke in beforehand and waited.”
His middle finger and ring finger unfolded in turn.
“So it’s the work of someone the victims knew?”
Iheon didn’t answer the student in the front row right away. He only shifted his eyes and held them on the questioner for a moment.
That brief silence alone seemed to press the air in the hall down a notch. A beat later, his lips parted.
“The odds are high.”
But.
“High odds, and nothing more. The most dangerous thing in profiling is jumping to certainty.”
The screen changed, and a forensic photo of the victim came up. A few students winced before they could stop themselves.
Iheon took in the reaction with a single glance and didn’t alter his expression by so much as a hair.
“These are ligature marks left on the wrist of a burn victim. The binding used was a stocking.”
With the tip of the blue marker he pointed precisely at the area flagged in the photo.
“For now, I read this as MO. A means of subduing the victim and preventing escape. That said, if the same method repeats in other cases, we could examine the possibility that it’s a signature.”
The next slide held a CCTV capture. A blurred figure in a black raincoat stood at the end of a road.
“And last, post-offence behaviour.”
Iheon indicated where one figure stood on the screen.
“The same individual was caught again near the scene after the fire was reported. The location doesn’t match an escape route. It’s possible he wanted to confirm whether the fire had spread properly, whether any evidence was left, whether the victim was dead.”
There was no hesitation in the eyes that swept across the lecture hall. The students they landed on looked away or shifted in their seats. His gaze lingered nowhere for long, yet nobody escaped it.
“To sum up, the offender profile for this case has to be built around victim selectivity, knowledge of the building’s interior layout, subduing of the victim, and post-offence re-confirmation.”
He clicked the cap back onto the marker. It was a small sound, but in the breath-held hall it rang out unusually clearly.
“By next class, analyse the offence behaviour in this case. Lay out what each individual action was chosen to accomplish, with your reasoning attached.”
A sigh that came close to a groan of protest broke out among the students.
A faintly arrogant gaze travelled slowly from the front row to the back of the hall. As if he had anticipated every ounce of their complaining.
“I don’t need words like pitiful, horrific, or cruel.”
Rather than looking annoyed, Iheon drew one corner of his mouth up, lazily.
“That isn’t analysis. That’s just sentiment.”
The moment he finished speaking, the students gathered their bags with daunted faces and rose from their seats one by one.
Watching those slumped shoulders file out, Iheon held his smile a little longer than before. There was no warmth in it, only mischief.
That smile didn’t last long either. Because someone stepped in through the rear door the students were pouring out of.
[1] Modus operandi: the way an offender carries out a crime. The actions chosen to make the crime succeed, such as entry, subduing the victim, use of tools, escape, and removal of evidence.
[2] The act of an offender deliberately arranging a scene in order to confuse the investigation or make the nature of the case appear different from what it is.
[3] Repeated behaviour that isn’t strictly necessary for the crime to succeed, but which reveals the offender’s psychological needs or fantasies.
