That was the email in full. Every other message said exactly the same thing.
There was only one thing the bastard was trying to say.
What is my sin, for killing three devils?
It snagged on something, oddly. Too oddly to dismiss as the gibberish of some brain-dead lunatic.
“Well?”
Jei asked him what he thought.
“What do you think?”
“To me it reads like a confession. Some killer’s confession.”
“It could just as easily be showing off. Who am I? — one look at the subject line tells you that much. He’s far too confident that he’ll never be caught.”
“You think so?”
“There’s a line in the Bible that says much the same thing.”
Iheon spoke without lifting his eyes from the screen.
“Second Corinthians, chapter eleven, verse fourteen. Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”
The type who dressed murder up as salvation almost always believed himself more exalted than anyone alive.
“Repulsive self-love.”
He pulled his gaze off the laptop screen, straightened from his bent-over stance, and went on.
“And the worse the specimen, the more desperate he is to prove what he’s capable of.”
Which wasn’t to say Jei was wrong about it reading like a confession.
Just as she’d said, the bastard was in the middle of owning up to his sins.
What Iheon wondered about was something else entirely.
Why Lee Jei, of all people?
Whether it was a tip-off about a murder or a confession of one, was there some reason it had to be Lee Jei?
Toss one halfway plausible tip-off out there and any number of outlets would come running like dogs to a bone.
It was a world drowning in garbage articles that had never been verified in the first place.
“Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”
The crease between Iheon’s brows cut deeper than before.
“If he sent it to your personal address instead of the tip line, he knows you quit your job. Which means he did his homework on you beforehand...”
“Probably.”
Which made the question impossible to let go of.
“If I’m right and he wanted to prove something to somebody — his ideals, his ability, whatever it is — then why you?”
If he wanted to confess to murder, he could turn himself in to the police. If the point was spectacle, broadcasting it to the world, he could pick a more sensational outlet.
His mind, racing, assembled a single hypothesis.
The address the bastard used was send-only. She couldn’t even reply, and still he’d sent dozens of emails. For months on end.
And she wasn’t even a working PD anymore.
Even so, he’d gone out of his way to choose Jei.
Why.
Unless there was some particular reason, his behavior didn’t add up.
So what was that reason?
The reason it had to be Lee Jei.
Could it be he has some role in mind for her?
What was it that only she could do? Nothing came to mind.
Iheon fixed his eyes on Jei’s face and studied it.
“Are you sure there’s nothing else you’re keeping from me?”
For an instant, something awkward flickered through those brown eyes. Which meant there was something she was hiding.
“Lee Jei.”
He said her name, low. Jei turned her face away from his gaze and pressed her lips together for a moment. She worried the inside of her cheek, hesitating over whether to speak.
Once, he would have assumed she was simply thinking it over. Choosing her words with care. Refusing to say out loud anything she wasn’t certain of.
Not anymore.
Given everything he’d been through, Iheon couldn’t read Jei’s silences that generously. And his patience had reached its limit.
“Whatever it is, if there’s something, say it now. I’ll pass on having the truth shoved at me after the fact.”
After a brief hesitation, Jei pulled her phone from her back pocket and set it on the table. Face down, screen hidden. Then she stole a glance at Iheon.
One look at that unyielding expression — this is as far as my patience goes — and she let out a small sigh. The mood wasn’t one she could get past with a nothing, really.
Iheon didn’t press her. He only watched her, his gaze gone utterly cold.
“I wasn’t trying to hide it. I just wasn’t sure how you’d take it, so I held off for a bit.”
Mumbling her lame excuse, she turned the phone right side up. Her fingertip tapped in the passcode, and she opened her messages.
“This came yesterday...”
The moment Iheon’s eyes slid to the phone, a short breath tore past his lips.
What was on the screen wasn’t text. It was a photograph.
A photograph of Jei, standing at the front gate beneath a riot of trumpet-vine blossoms.
The enormous suitcase in the frame with her suggested it had been taken the very day she came home.
“Muerte knew my phone number. He even knew this house. For all I know, he’s been following me the whole time.”
“And you’re telling me this only now?”
“There wasn’t exactly an opening, was there? You might have resented me, you might not have wanted to look at my face — I could hardly blurt out that someone seems to be following me with no lead-up and no explanation.”
“This is your safety we’re talking about. I don’t care what I was saying or how I was feeling, you should have at least opened your mouth!”
“Which is what I’m doing now...”
“Hah.”
A sneer that was nearly a laugh broke out of him, and Iheon raked his disheveled bangs back off his forehead. The skin around his eyes screwed up, displeasure written all over it.
“When we trust each other this little, what more is there to say?”
“I’m sorry.”
“...”
“I was wrong. I won’t do it again.”
“I don’t need an apology that’s only words. Prove it with what you do. Deceiving me, wasting my time — there won’t be a second time. Keep that in mind.”
“Okay.”
Jei didn’t tack on another excuse. She just kept her lips clamped shut and lowered her head. And for now, Iheon had no intention of pushing her further. The water was already spilled, and badgering her wasn’t going to conjure trust that had never been there.
Iheon let his shoulders slump and dropped limply into a chair at the table.
He was angry at Jei for having not one shred of caution in her, and that anger stood. But something mattered more than that: the bastard knew exactly where she was.
If Muerte’s emails were true, then the sender was a murderer. Which meant a murderer was circling the ground around Jei.
Iheon reached out and picked up Jei’s phone from the table.
In the photo, Jei was looking up at the wall beside the front gate. She stood under a stretch of it where the orange trumpet vine hung in heavy clusters, like ripening fruit.
The composition was close to a profile shot. Not straight on, and not fully from behind either.
He zoomed in on the screen. The line of Jei’s shoulder, the position of her suitcase, the angle of the gate against the wall. And at the edge of the frame, faintly cropped away, the shadow of the alley directly opposite.
Iheon studied the photo for a long while, then spoke in a low murmur, almost to himself.
“How did you get home yesterday? What did you take?”
“A taxi.”
“And nothing struck you as unusual when you got out of it?”
Jei combed back carefully through yesterday.
The driver had been kind, getting out from behind the wheel to lift her suitcase out of the trunk and carry it all the way to the front gate.
After the taxi pulled away, she’d stood there taking in the mood of the alley she hadn’t seen in so long.
The back street was lined with high-end houses, each built with its own character, and it had been quiet, not a single person coming or going.
If anyone had trailed the taxi into that alley, she would have noticed them at once.
“Nothing that really stands out, I think.”
Iheon turned the phone screen toward her.
“This wasn’t shot from a distance. Going by the angle, it’s from the alley straight across. And the fact that it feels unhurried means he didn’t need to rush the shot.”
“Which means...”
“He wasn’t following you. He was waiting.”
The color drained out of Jei’s face. Iheon set the phone down and spoke with absolute certainty.
“He either knew in advance that you’d be coming here, or he waited until you did.”
“How could he know?”
“Good question. How could he? I didn’t even know my own wife was coming back.”
At that cold little retort, Jei quietly shut her mouth.
Since there was no telling when she’d been pinned down, it was a question nobody but the culprit could answer.
What was certain was that he had deliberately timed the photo to the day Jei came home, and then sent it.
It was a threat of a kind.
“He wants you to find out, I’d say. Just like the subject line.”
“Who he is?”
“And why he did all this.”
He had chosen Jei as the means of proving himself the saintess who had slain three devils. And on the stage he’d built, he meant to hand her a part to play.
How large a role it was, there was no knowing. But the purpose was plain.
“If there’s one small mercy, it’s that he won’t do you any real harm as long as you’re useful to him, but...”
“And if I turn him down?”
“A man who’s laid out a board this carefully isn’t going to back off meekly. If anything he’ll fixate harder. And we can’t rule out that he’ll come at you even more directly than this.”
Iheon knew all too well how far criminals would go, without a flicker of hesitation, to get what they wanted.
“You know what, Iheon? I think I might know why Muerte picked me.”
Iheon cocked one eyebrow. Meaning what?
“I’m fairly sure it’s because of you.”
“Because of me?”
“If there’s one thing that sets me apart from every PD still on the job, it’s that I have you. Gong Iheon, the man who holds the title of South Korea’s youngest profiler.”
