The 4:03 Alert That Lit Up Gray Thread

The 4:03 a.m. alert turned on every light in Gray Thread. The photo the delivery platform sent showed only an empty entryway and a refrigerated medicine box sitting on the floor. No one was in the frame, and the door was closed. Below the photo it read "Delivery completed normally," but a separate list still held a token that had been canceled at the same moment.

Seojin didn't zoom in on the screen. She hit the original preservation button first. Zooming in could make the app generate a new preview. Minwoo grabbed the keys to the response vehicle, and Yeoreum requested that the platform preserve the original log and the delivery driver's bodycam file at the same time.

"Should we put the word empty house on the case board first?" Minwoo asked.

"No one showing up in a photo isn't the same as a house being empty."

Seojin wrote down "unconfirmed person, entryway photo." The delivery item was refrigerated medicine, and the completion time was logged as 04:03:17. The cancellation token had been issued at 04:03:17.4. The difference past the decimal point could be a system clock error, but the fact that both tokens existed at nearly the same moment had to be preserved as it was.

Dabin didn't come to Gray Thread right away even after getting the new case alert. She asked that her guardian agency be sent the options first, and Seojin separated out the material related to the underage informant from the case overview before passing along only what was necessary. The rule from the first case had become the first procedure for the next one.

At five in the morning, the team headed for the delivery platform's refrigerated logistics warehouse. The pharmacist was Mun Serim. When a warehouse worker found her, she was collapsed on the floor inside the refrigerated section, and one medicine box was missing. She had died before anyone classified the case as an accident or a disappearance, but the case board listed "mismatch between the delivery completion photo and the body's location" ahead of "death."

The door to the warehouse's refrigerated section was half open. Inside, there were marks on the floor where moisture had frozen and thawed, and a scrape at palm height marked the wall beside the door. Seojin confirmed the observer and the time before taking any photos.

"05:22. First to find her, Park Hyeonwoo. Door open 20 centimeters."

The warehouse worker said he hadn't opened the door any further. Minwoo moved toward the body, but Seojin pointed at the wheel marks on the floor first. A track about the same width as a refrigerated medicine box ran from inside the warehouse toward the door, then stopped. At the point where the track disappeared, moisture and small pieces of black rubber were mixed together.

"Could this be a trace of someone dragging the box out?"

"It could still be a trace left by moving refrigeration equipment."

Song Juhyeok was the warehouse manager. When Gray Thread arrived, he pulled out the access log and the refrigerated section's temperature record first. When Seojin asked for the original bodycam file, he said the security team kept it.

"Let's confirm the delivery driver's name and device number first."

"We need to check the original."

"The original has to go through the company's security procedure before it can leave."

Song Juhyeok's tone stayed calm, but with every sentence he shifted who owned the material. Seojin didn't write that he was lying. She recorded, "attempting to limit ownership of the original to company procedure."

Minwoo asked the manager, "Where is the delivery driver right now?"

"He's probably off work by now."

"What about the bodycam?"

"It could still be uploading."

"The completion photo already went up, though."

Song Juhyeok didn't answer. He turned the page of the temperature record instead. Between 03:58 and 04:06, it showed the refrigerated section's temperature spiking twice. That kind of change could happen from a normal door opening, but it overlapped with the delivery completion time.

Seojin compared the angle of the scene photo with the angle of the app photo. The app photo had been taken looking up from the lower left of the entryway, and the delivery driver's final bodycam frame hadn't come in yet. There was no moisture mark on the entryway floor. If the medicine box had been moved from the warehouse, moisture might have been left behind, but she couldn't draw a conclusion before checking the state of the cold packs.

At seven in the morning, the delivery platform responded to the preservation request. The original event behind the completion alert existed, but the bodycam's original audio file was in "sync pending" status. The app held the delivery completion photo and two tokens, and the entity that generated the second token wasn't listed.

Minwoo glared at the screen. "You don't know who created the token?"

The platform representative said it could be a system error. The canceled token hadn't invalidated the normal one, and both events remained on the server. Seojin changed her question.

"Can you confirm whether both tokens came from the same device?"

"We'd have to request the device identifier."

"Please log the time you make that request."

Seojin wrote down the time of the request and the representative's name. A gap didn't only mean material had disappeared. Who had been asked for what, and what answer had gone unreceived, that was part of the case too.

Song Juhyeok looked at that record and pressed his lips together. He said it was unlikely the delivery driver had handed the medicine directly to the pharmacist, Mun Serim. Early morning deliveries were left at the door, and Mun Serim didn't go home on days she worked at the warehouse, he said.

"Then why is the address Mun Serim's house?"

"Because that's what was entered as the delivery address."

"Who entered it?"

Song Juhyeok pointed to the order management team. But the original order form wasn't shown right away, for security reasons. Seojin recorded that answer as it was too. The manager had known the dead pharmacist's home address, and he didn't explain why the delivery address had been set to that location.

At nine in the morning, the forensics team examined the body in the warehouse. Hypothermia and trauma to the back of the head were both present, and it was hard to attribute the trauma to time spent in the refrigerated section alone. Seojin didn't settle on a cause of death yet. She preserved the moisture and wheel marks around the body separately.

A delivery scanner and a torn label were found in Mun Serim's locker. Only the medicine code remained on the label, the recipient's name had been torn away. Song Juhyeok said the label had torn during delivery, but Seojin didn't write that down until she could confirm whether the tear direction came from being peeled by hand or caught in a machine.

Minwoo said, "There's medicine at the house, and the pharmacist died at the warehouse. Did someone separate the body from the delivery?"

"That's a good question. But don't write down yet that someone separated them."

Seojin corrected the first line of the case board.

"The empty entryway captured in the delivery completion photo had medicine in it, and the pharmacist died in the warehouse's refrigerated section at the same time. Confirming the gaps in the bodycam's original audio and the original completion alert."

Song Juhyeok read that line and said, "The company is still classifying this as a missing persons case."

"If that classification changes, does the scope of original preservation change too?"

"The procedure could be different."

"Then what material are you preserving right now?"

Song Juhyeok pointed at the refrigerated section's temperature record instead of answering. Seojin got the impression that he was protecting the company's classification before the case's questions, but an impression wasn't evidence. She wrote only, "disagreement over the order of material disclosure."

At eleven in the morning, the delivery driver Park Hyeonwoo returned to the warehouse. He said the bodycam footage from 03:50 to 04:12 hadn't uploaded automatically. The camera still held footage from the moment the completion photo was taken, but the audio track was empty. Park Hyeonwoo remembered not being on a call with anyone during that time.

"I took the photo and set down the box."

"Was there no one at the door?"

"There wasn't."

"And no sound came from inside the house?"

Park Hyeonwoo shook his head. His words trailed off, then he said one more cancellation token had popped up on the delivery app after he took the photo. But he had no memory of tapping it.

Seojin looked at the empty stretch in the bodycam's original audio file and thought of her ability. If there was a missing word, she might be able to tell what had disappeared. But the preservation status of the original hadn't been confirmed yet. Using it now risked mistaking a contaminated copy for the original.

She left the space for using her ability blank and wrote down first who was responsible for preserving the bodycam original and the app event. The case was starting from a gap in the record, not from the shock of the body itself.

When night came, Song Juhyeok handed Gray Thread a security agreement. It stated that the bodycam file and order records couldn't leave the company without its consent. Seojin read it and didn't sign.

"Ownership of material and the duty to preserve evidence can't be handled in the same sentence."

Song Juhyeok's eyes wavered for the first time. He didn't disclose the code for the medicine box missing from the refrigerated section or Mun Serim's personal order records. Instead, he asked them to wait for legal review by tomorrow morning.

Seojin calculated the preservation deadline. The app event already had an original request filed against it, but the bodycam's original audio was still sync pending. The record from 4 a.m. could be automatically deleted at the same hour the next day.

Minwoo put on his coat. "If we wait until tomorrow morning, it'll be too late."

"We need to confirm tonight whether the original is really the original."

Seojin stepped outside the warehouse and breathed in the cold air. The receipt stamped with a blue triangle and the duplicate delivery token could be traces of the same tool, but for now they only resembled each other on the surface. She didn't write Yun Junho's name on the case board.

Instead she wrote the first question in large letters.

"Why was there neither refrigerated medicine nor a person in the empty house captured in the delivery completion photo, when the pharmacist was found dead in the warehouse at the same time?"

Below it, she added a second line.

"Are the 04:03:17 completion token and the 04:03:17.4 cancellation token two records of the same action?"

Seojin hit save. The preservation request status on the screen still read "pending." In the car, Minwoo read the delivery driver's statement again. Park Hyeonwoo had written that he stepped back three paces from the entryway after taking the photo, but the bodycam's final frame showed a shadow four paces back. The one pace difference could be a measurement error. Seojin moved that gap to the next verification question too.

"Before whether someone was there, let's confirm what the camera actually saw."

The preservation request status changed to "received" at that moment. The original hadn't been secured yet, but a trace remained that someone had received the request.