The Confession Came Too Soon

The confession came too soon.

That was what made it the most dangerous.

At 2 p.m., Mr. Jang from the outside editing company appeared with his lawyer. He admitted to cutting the 17 seconds and said Baek Sangho had paid for it.

"The client contacted me after the accident."

Minu asked.

"You mean the edit was to protect someone's privacy?"

"Yes. A person was exposed in the footage, and he said the family was raising an issue about it."

"Whose family?"

"I don't know that."

Mr. Jang explained how he had received the file, the payment approval, and the number of revisions. He claimed the original order message had been automatically deleted.

"Did Baek Sangho instruct you to commit murder?"

"There was no such request."

"Did you know Han Jaehui was already dead?"

"I was told it was after the accident."

Mr. Jang's confession confirmed the outside editing work. But it was not a confession connected to murder. Baek Sangho had admitted to buying the footage, but what he knew, and when, remained unanswered.

Seojin didn't reach for the sense in Mr. Jang's words. There was neither the condition nor the need to use her ability. The payment record and the cache fragments were already there.

Mr. Jang said.

"I got the call after the accident happened."

At that moment, the payment approval time came up on the screen.

9:49 p.m.

That was before Han Jaehui had moved to the stairwell.

Minu asked.

"You said it was after the accident."

"Yes."

"Then what's this payment at 9:49?"

Mr. Jang fell silent. His lawyer tried to block the answer, but the time had already been recorded.

Seojin built a new timeline. The editing work, the payment approval, the stairwell sensor, the victim's movement. Every device's clock had some margin of error, but even applying the maximum possible error, the payment approval was still at least 7 minutes ahead of the impact.

Minu said.

"The explanation that this was a defamation-prevention edit made after the accident doesn't hold up against the timeline."

"What about the possibility that the edit itself was scheduled before the accident?" Yeoreum asked.

"That would mean the person who placed the order already knew, at that time, that the 17 seconds would need to be erased."

Seojin wrote that sentence in the hypothesis column. An early order time didn't mean Baek Sangho had planned the murder. But the fact that an order to erase the 17 seconds existed before the incident brought down the explanation of a cover-up after an accidental collision.

Each device's clock differed by up to 2 minutes and 40 seconds. Seojin corrected for this against the carrier network time and drew the possible time ranges as bands.

The payment approval band and the stairwell impact band didn't overlap.

"This isn't evidence that the editor lied. It's evidence that the explanation, that he received the order after the incident, is wrong."

Minu wrote the sentence down.

The higher authority demanded an early referral, bundling Baek Sangho's cover-up charge together with the outside editing work. The logic was that announcing it alongside the theory of an accidental collision between Han Gyeongmin and the victim would settle public opinion.

Han Gyeongmin heard this outside the reinstatement review room.

"Are you saying I caused the accident?"

Minu answered.

"That hasn't been established."

"Then why announce it that way?"

"They want to refer the editing work and the physical access first."

"What about the time contradiction?"

Han Gyeongmin brought out the original power logs he had and the Gray Thread timeline comparison chart. Pushing back against an early conclusion could look like a desperate bid to clear his own name, but on the first line of the comparison chart, he wrote, "The possibility of Han Gyeongmin's own responsibility is not ruled out."

"Please keep this sentence in."

"Why?"

"To show that I'm not objecting in order to clear my own name."

Listening to that, Seojin noted that Han Gyeongmin's conduct did not stand in for the truth. Even so, the man who had become a target was the first one guarding the time contradiction.

Minu submitted three things to the higher authority: the admission of the outside editing work, Baek Sangho's payment record, and the time contradiction between the payment approval and the stairwell impact.

"The referral can go through," Minu said. "But the announcement closing the entire case has to be held back."

The higher authority postponed the reinstatement review again. Han Gyeongmin received the envelope holding the review, but he didn't let go of his copy of the comparison chart.

At 5 p.m. that day, Seojin found a log showing that Baek Sangho had tested the eighth-floor CCTV field of view before placing the editing order. It wasn't a server access record. It was a power usage value from equipment that had checked the stairwell door sensor and the camera's field of view.

"Is this premeditation?" Minu asked.

"It's the fact that the equipment operated at that time. The purpose is still unknown."

"Still, it's before the payment."

"Yes. So the next question comes up. Not who tried to erase the 17 seconds, but who foresaw the situation that would need those 17 seconds erased."

Mr. Jang's confession resolved part of the crime. He had done the deletion, and Baek Sangho had paid for it. But that confession ended up shaking the plausible wrong answer of a cover-up after the accident.

Han Gyeongmin left the review room carrying the correction notice and the record of the subcontracting violation. Dabin made him no promise of forgiveness. The two of them still didn't speak for each other's choices.

Seojin placed the payment approval bar on the left side of the timeline and the stairwell impact bar on the right. Between the two bars was a gap of more than seven minutes.

The gap looked too small to matter, but it was enough to break the explanation of an edit made after the accident.

Seojin didn't erase the contradiction. The original logs were due for disposal the next day, and the storage location of the equipment Baek Sangho had used for the field-of-view test still hadn't been confirmed.

Mr. Jang's lawyer argued that the order time for the edit could differ from the payment approval time. The explanation was that the payment was a deposit, and the actual file had been received after the accident.

Seojin added that claim to the timetable. An explanation that differed from the current hypothesis had to go on the chart too.

The deposit was paid first. The file was received after the accident. Someone had used Mr. Jang's account.

Each hypothesis required a different record: the account login IP, the file receipt time, whether the payment had been canceled, the render temp file creation time.

Minu filed a request to preserve the outside editing company's terminal. Mr. Jang refused to hand over all the equipment, but said he could submit the case client number and the access metadata from 9:40 to 10:20 p.m.

"The original order message was automatically deleted."

"That fact is also evidence," Yeoreum said. "We separate the data that's gone from the data preserved before it disappeared."

For the first time, Mr. Jang answered without looking at his lawyer.

"I'm not the one who deleted the order message."

"You don't know who deleted it?"

"It was the admin account."

"What about that account's preservation log?"

"The company will take it."

Minu sent a preservation request right away, before the company could take the data, covering only the deletion, access, and admin account change events to be frozen.

Seojin didn't use her ability even after hearing Mr. Jang's statement. There were already questions that could build an independent record, and she was afraid of what word she'd lose if she used it even once more.

In the Gray Thread break room, Han Gyeongmin spread out his copy of the comparison chart.

"If I object, it looks like I'm claiming my own innocence."

"You're allowed to claim innocence," Seojin said.

"But I don't want Han Jaehui's name made public again without my consent."

"I'll put that condition in the record too."

Han Gyeongmin looked at Seojin.

"You don't finish my sentences for me anymore."

"If I finish them, then when I'm wrong, your choice becomes something I made too."

"Even so, people end up waiting."

"I'll record the cost of that waiting too."

Gyeongmin wrote the last line of the comparison chart in his own hand.

"Refuse early announcement. Refuse disclosure of the victim's original statement. Submit the time contradiction."

He knew his reinstatement would be delayed even further. Even so, he didn't leave in only the parts that favored him.

At 8 p.m., the storage location of the equipment Baek Sangho had used for the field-of-view test was confirmed. The equipment wasn't in the facilities company's head office warehouse, but on a shelf marked for disposal in a private storage unit. The subcontracting list Han Gyeongmin had submitted included that storage unit's address, but Baek Sangho's name wasn't listed as the tenant.

Minu said.

"There's a company behind another person again."

"There could be another person behind the company too," Seojin answered.

The equipment's power record ran from 9:38 to 9:42 p.m. That was seven minutes ahead of the 9:49 payment approval for the edit. The estimated time of the stairwell impact, within the correction range, was after 9:56 p.m.

The three numbers fell in the same order.

The field-of-view test. The editing payment. The stairwell impact.

The explanation of a cover-up after the accident no longer held up against the timeline. That didn't mean the person who ran the field-of-view test had planned a murder, either. Someone might have anticipated a situation that would require those 17 seconds, or might simply have been doing something else entirely.

Seojin scaled back the phrase "premeditation" to "equipment use before the incident."

Minu saw the correction and said.

"Isn't that writing it too weak?"

"If I write it too strong, there's no room left to disprove it later."

"What about the question of whether the culprit bought time?"

"I'll leave it in the question column."

That day's confession closed the book on one act, the outside editing. But the order between the physical crime and the editing order had only grown further apart.

Han Gyeongmin went home carrying the envelope holding his review. Dabin didn't reach out to him first. Deferring forgiveness was also an action she had chosen.

Seojin wrote in the rebuttal column of the gray chart.

"Independent record to explain why the editing order time came before the stairwell impact."

As midnight drew closer, the remote logs kept shrinking. Before any sentence declaring an early resolution went out, the remaining contradiction had to be preserved. Minu left the last column of the chart blank. Before confirming who had made the file, they needed to confirm who had left the door open for that file to be made at all. The outside editor's words were partly true, but partial truth couldn't cover the whole responsibility.

Gyeongmin returned the list of questions without signing Mr. Jang's statement. The payment approval time, the equipment intake record, the access location of the account that had received the original file. All three items still had no answer. Reading through the paper, Mr. Jang, for the first time, asked something instead of making an excuse.

"If you confirm that, does what I did change too?"

"It doesn't change. It gets more precise."

Outside, a delivery truck's reverse warning beeped. Dabin closed the window, and Minu called out the storage unit's seal number again. The four minutes before 9:49 had now become the next door into the case. Before locking the door, Gyeongmin checked with Mr. Jang one more time. Telling him he didn't have to answer was what held him there the longest. In the end, Mr. Jang wrote down the storage unit number. That number pointed to a place that needed to be confirmed before any new suspect did.