The Message That Reached Dabin

A little after 2 pm, a message arrived on Dabin's phone. The sender's number wasn't saved, and the message was short.

'I'll give the USB back. In exchange, send me the name of the child you're hiding.'

Dabin didn't turn off the screen right away. Seojin sat in the chair across from her, not trying to read the message, watching only Dabin's hand. Her finger was pressing the edge of the screen. When Minwoo said he'd handle the negotiation as a police officer, Dabin shook her head.

"I'll answer."

"The other side is probably waiting for the investigation team."

"That's exactly why it can't be you. If you answer in my place, the person guarding the child's name changes again."

Yeoreum laid out the options on the table: not responding, demanding proof that the USB existed, or immediately opening the storage box to seize it. She slid the papers listing each risk toward Dabin. Dabin read all three for a long time. Minwoo rested his hand near "seizure," but Seojin watched that hand. In the end, Minwoo withdrew it.

"They said they'd post it in an hour," Dabin said. "Before that, we need to confirm the USB actually exists. And I won't put a name into any condition."

She opened the reply the investigation team had drafted for her. 'You must prove the evidence exists. A minor's identity cannot be traded.' Dabin deleted the sentence. Then she wrote her own.

'Show me the file is real. I won't send a person's name. Put it in the storage box and send me the number, and I'll tell you the next condition.'

Minwoo said, "If you push that hard, they might destroy it."

"If they want to destroy it, they won't wait for any sentence from me."

Dabin pressed send. The reply came five minutes later: a storage box number, a photo of a sealed black case, and part of a file list. The file names were blacked out, but the creation date was the day before the murder. Baek Sangho kept demanding the name to the very end.

Seojin zoomed in on the photo. Beside the case sat a receipt stamped with a blue triangle. The last four digits of the customer number matched the payment confirmed back in chapter 16. But a photo could be doctored, and the number could be a copy from a different payment. She told Dabin that first.

"The photo raises the likelihood it exists. It doesn't prove ownership."

"I know. That's why I'm not opening the box."

Dabin passed the storage box number to a third party organization. She asked the person in charge at an institution she'd chosen herself to take joint custody, while the investigation team secured only the entry footage and the payment token. She added, on her own, that protecting a name and hiding evidence were not the same thing.

At two thirty in the afternoon, Baek Sangho was already waiting in the interview room. He leaned back in his chair and, seeing Seojin, curled the corner of his mouth.

"You'd finish this fast if you just listened to the raw voice. Why don't you?"

Seojin set the gray sheet in front of him. She left the ability use column blank.

"Finishing and getting it right aren't the same thing."

"You can tell what I'm hiding, can't you?"

"It just feels like I can."

Baek Sangho paused for a moment. He opened his statement with account theft. He said the message wasn't sent by him, and that someone had borrowed his name for the storage box number. Seojin didn't cut in. Instead, she made separate note of the spacing at the ends of his sentences and his habit of running "return processing" together as a single word.

Minwoo brought out the payment token chart. The account that had reserved the storage box was registered under Baek Sangho's name, and part of the customer number on the payment method matched the receipt in the photo. Baek Sangho claimed several employees at the facility company could use that account. The emergency key GPS records that Gyeongmin had brought showed only Baek Sangho's work hours the day before the incident.

"It's a shared account," Baek Sangho said. "You can't tie a person to that."

"That's why we're not tying it to one account," Seojin answered. "We're recording sentence habits, payments, access times, and equipment tests separately."

Baek Sangho's expression hardened for the first time. He looked at Seojin's notebook and asked.

"You're this confident without even using your ability?"

"It's not confidence. It's making it so that if I'm wrong, I can find exactly where the chain broke."

Outside the interview room, Dabin was on the phone with the storage box management authority. Han Gyeongmin knew that entering the company's admin code could remotely lock the box, but he didn't use that access. Instead, he set up a camera in front of the entrance and asked the facility staff to make sure no one touched the case until the institution employee Dabin had designated arrived.

"Wouldn't it be safer to just cut the power?" Minwoo asked.

"If we cut the power, it's on record that we're the ones who did it. Right now, the fact that we haven't opened it matters more."

Gyeongmin also signed the checkbox admitting his own lapse in oversight. The moment that signature was done, the storage box's screen flickered. The words 'remote reset request' appeared, then vanished. The requesting account was under Baek Sangho's name. Dabin photographed the screen and immediately sent the same footage to the third party institution's staff.

In the interview room, Baek Sangho's phone rang. He flipped it face down, but Seojin watched the moment he changed his question, not the ringtone.

"Did Dabin open the storage box?"

"Why are you asking that?"

"Because I need to confirm the USB is in my hands."

"Didn't you say your account was stolen?"

Baek Sangho didn't answer. Minwoo printed the remote reset failure log and set it in front of him. Baek Sangho read the time on the log but didn't sign it. A choice still remained for him: stay silent, or explain why his account knew about that storage box at all.

Dabin read out the seal number in front of the storage box. The third party institution's representative repeated the same number back. Han Gyeongmin filmed the whole process, and Minwoo confirmed that the recording device's clock was synced with an external server. Seojin watched the record and still didn't relax. Whether the evidence was safe and what the evidence actually contained were still two different questions.

As evening came, Baek Sangho sent a new message.

'If you don't send the child's name, I'll expose why you changed your sister's timeline.'

Dabin stared at the screen for a long time, then pressed preserve instead of deleting the message. She didn't explain the reason to Seojin. Seojin didn't ask either. Holding off the question wasn't indifference this time. It was letting Dabin decide for herself how much she was willing to say.

Seojin went back to the interview room and checked the ability use column on the gray sheet again. It was still blank. Instead, four lines remained: the typo in the message, the storage box payment token, the emergency key GPS, and the failed remote reset. The four lines didn't complete Baek Sangho's motive, but each pushed, from a different direction, toward the fact that he had acted as the one driving the deal.

Baek Sangho spoke through the glass door.

"If you listen to those 17 seconds, you'll know."

Seojin didn't open the door. From the far end of the corridor came the sound of Dabin signing the third party institution's seal confirmation. After that sound stopped, the storage box screen showed a second failed reset on Baek Sangho's account. While guarding the storage box, Dabin said her sister's file might contain not just the child's name but a record of how the safety inspection had been passed and who had stayed silent about it. She also admitted that her wish to protect the name had made her lie about the time, and that as a result, Gyeongmin had been cast as the culprit.

"I was wrong. That's true. But that doesn't mean I have to hand over the child's name."

"You're right. Being wrong and having something worth protecting don't cancel each other out."

Inside the interview room, Baek Sangho claimed the shared account again. Minwoo wrote the claim down exactly as stated, then asked why, if it was a shared account, the emergency key test had run twice at a specific time the day before the incident. Baek Sangho said it was a routine inspection. Gyeongmin's work log showed no routine inspection. It was possible he'd simply left it off the log, but the person who'd have to admit that omission had already submitted his own statement of management responsibility.

"Who edited the work log?" Minwoo asked.

"I don't know."

"Then why did you say it was a routine inspection?"

Baek Sangho fell silent. No confession came, but one alternative explanation had collapsed on its own. Seojin fixed the moment in writing. 'No independent work log supports the term routine inspection. The speaker offers no basis for the claim.'

Yeoreum sent the materials to the outside reviewer and left the ability output off the submission list. The gap Seojin had felt in the raw voice could become a clue that redirected the investigation, but a sense with no independent verification could be attacked by the other side as procedural contamination. Seojin raised no objection.

"This time, not using it is the right call."

Minwoo looked at her. "Last time you used it and didn't even record it."

Seojin didn't answer right away. She set a new form on the desk: whether the ability was used, the output word, the word lost, and the time independent verification was received. From now on, she decided not to leave even the days she didn't use it blank. The choice not to use it also changed the course of a case.

At ten at night, a confirmation came from the third party institution that the storage box's joint seal was complete. The USB hadn't been opened. Only the case's outer hash had been recorded. The file names and contents remained undisclosed. Even so, the creation time and the most recent access time lined up with the timeline before and after the murder. The failed access on Baek Sangho's account wasn't content. It was a trace of action.

Dabin read the confirmation and added a line beneath her own signature.

'Whether this is disclosed in the future is up to the informant herself or the protective institution's judgment.'

Gyeongmin said nothing when he saw that line. He could have apologized first, but Dabin wasn't ready to accept it yet. Seojin didn't force that distance to close.

The clock in the interview room passed eleven. Baek Sangho never explained what the USB actually was. Instead, he said Dabin's name over and over, trying to turn her lie into an obstacle for the investigation. Minwoo didn't argue back. He simply marked which part of the official record needed correcting. Words that attacked a person's secret and evidence in a case couldn't be weighed the same.

Seojin tied together the four independent records one last time. The emergency key tests had increased during Baek Sangho's solo work hours. The payment token connected to the storage box through an account he managed. The remote reset had failed on Baek Sangho's account. The USB's outer hash matched a bundle of files created the day before the incident. No single line proved the murder on its own, but the range of alternatives that could satisfy all four lines at once kept narrowing.

Baek Sangho called out to Seojin through the glass.

"You're doing this for family too, aren't you."

Seojin didn't answer. She didn't want to turn her own want into evidence. She wrote down the time of the second failure still showing on the storage box screen. The next step wasn't to open the raw voice and expose a person. It was to check how the records already secured filled in each other's blanks.