The First Name Bolded on the Case Board

Song Juhyeok's name was the first to be bolded on Gray Thread's case board. Pieced together, the material gathered overnight made a plausible case: his access to the high value clinical drug storage, the approval account for delivery addresses, and his access to the refrigerated zone overlapping with Mun Serim's time of death. The team hadn't yet written him down as the culprit, but they raised the first hypothesis, that he might have created a false delivery to divert the drugs and blocked the pharmacist, to an actionable line of suspicion.

Song Juhyeok didn't get angry right away, even after reading the sentence. He set his phone and ID badge on the table.

"Check the time I left the warehouse first."

When Minwoo reached for the phone, Song Juhyeok put his hand over it.

"You can make a copy. But record what I hand over first. And don't bundle it with other material without my consent."

Seojin recorded that request. A wrongly accused victim was setting limits on access and the scope of the material before any apology. If the team had the authority to suspect him, he had the right to control the scope of that suspicion too.

The phone's Bluetooth docking log showed a connection to Song Juhyeok's car from 3:41 to 4:18. At 4:03, the delivery completion time, he appeared not to have left the warehouse. The access log pointed the same way. The first hypothesis, that Song Juhyeok's phone had been at the delivery address outside the warehouse, seemed to hold.

Minwoo said. "What if the docking log was tampered with?"

"That's why we look at other sources," Seojin answered.

The original file of the delivery completion photo arrived from the platform. The camera's serial number in the photo matched not Park Hyeonwoo's delivery device but a test phone kept in the operations room. The photo had been taken at the front door, and the metadata showed it was created at 4:03:17. Song Juhyeok was one of the people who could use the operations room test phone, but that didn't mean he had taken the picture.

Seojin laid the photo's serial number and Song Juhyeok's docking log side by side. The first hypothesis held that Song Juhyeok had manipulated the delivery using his own phone, but the photo had been made on a different device. She requested the access log for the operations room test phone.

Song Juhyeok said. "The test phone can be used by whoever's on night duty."

"Is there a record of who used it?"

"The lock code is shared, so a name might not be left behind."

Seojin wanted to read that as suspicious. But a system that left no record was both Song Juhyeok's responsibility and the very basis of the risk he'd pointed out. If he was the one who'd created a false delivery to divert the expensive drugs, he could have used the test phone he controlled. On the other hand, if anyone could use the same device, the link pinning it on him weakened.

Minwoo read the team's first hypothesis again.

"Song Juhyeok tried to steal the drugs. He faked the delivery photo and blocked Mun Serim in the refrigerated zone."

Seojin cut in. "That the photo was faked hasn't been confirmed yet. All that's confirmed is that the photo file's serial number matches the operations room test phone."

"Then we just find out who used the test phone."

"Before that, we need to check whether Song Juhyeok's location matches the delivery photo."

Minwoo had the security team verify the Bluetooth docking log again. The log only meant the phone had been connected to the car at that time, not that a person had been inside it. The car had been parked behind the warehouse, close to the refrigerated zone where Mun Serim's death was discovered. The possibility remained that Song Juhyeok had left the car and walked off, but there was no link showing he'd carried the test phone to the delivery address.

In the afternoon, the operations room access log for the test phone arrived from the platform. The door opened at 3:58 and closed at 4:06. The person who entered wasn't Song Juhyeok but the night duty staffer Yun Hyejin. Yun Hyejin said she'd never taken a delivery photo with the test phone, but she knew the lock code.

Song Juhyeok leaned back in his chair when he saw the data. It wasn't the face of someone under suspicion, but the face of someone whose suspicion no longer flowed in only one direction.

"The control problem I mentioned was right, wasn't it."

Minwoo answered. "That doesn't mean you're not involved."

"I never said that either. Just don't write down things I didn't do as my responsibility."

Seojin wrote down that request exactly as stated. Song Juhyeok didn't demand an apology. He demanded that the wording of the first hypothesis and his own access restrictions be corrected. It was the moment a wrongly accused victim's voice changed the case's procedure.

Additional analysis of Mun Serim's time of death arrived as well. It hadn't yet been determined whether the hypothermia had come solely from the cold inside the warehouse, or whether she'd been moved from outside and then placed in the refrigerated zone. The trauma to the back of her head could have come from a fall, but considered together with the wheel marks, a collision during transport was also possible.

Seojin deleted the sentence on the case board that read "body moved to refrigerated zone." In its place she wrote "relationship between place of death and place of discovery unconfirmed." The first hypothesis had settled not just on the culprit but on the case's geography, too quickly.

Minwoo said, his face uncomfortable. "Are you saying we were wrong?"

"Yes. At least the sentence we first wrote was wrong."

"If we correct it, Song Juhyeok might use the gap."

"We can't leave a wrong record standing just because of that risk."

Seojin showed Song Juhyeok the correction before anything else. The hypothesis that he had created a false delivery to steal the drugs and killed Mun Serim would be discarded, replaced with the question of confirming how the operations room test phone and the delivery token had been generated. After reading the sentence, Song Juhyeok added one item.

"The correction notice must state that the Bluetooth docking log Song Juhyeok provided was used to disprove the hypothesis."

Minwoo looked at that item and said. "Can we leave your name out?"

"If you leave out the fact that I provided the material, it'll look later like I changed my story."

Seojin put that sentence into the correction notice. It wasn't to lessen the blame for the wrongful suspicion, but to record the credit of the person who'd provided the material.

That evening, the team recovered the photo list from the operations room test phone. There were three test images taken before and after the delivery photo, and the last one showed the barcode on a box of refrigerated drugs. The person who took it wasn't visible in frame, but an old blue band was visible on their wrist. Song Juhyeok didn't wear a band like that. Yun Hyejin did, but that alone wasn't enough to say she'd taken the photo.

Seojin didn't raise the wristband to a line of suspicion. She recorded it only as a physical detail of the scene, to be compared against other footage. Not putting a new culprit in the place where the first hypothesis had collapsed was the core of this correction.

At nine that night, Minwoo and Seojin entered the team's wrongful suspicion into the official record. The correction notice laid out, in order, the first hypothesis, the disproving material, the time it was discarded, and the time Song Juhyeok was informed. Minwoo paused for a long time in front of the signature line.

"It goes out under my name."

"The first hypothesis went out under your name too."

"You need to sign it as well."

Seojin nodded. She didn't hide the record of having suspected Song Juhyeok based on the ability output "empty house." But she wrote, alongside it, an explanation that the word had carried no subject, no tense, no truth value, and that the actual disproof had come from the Bluetooth docking log and the photo serial number.

After receiving the correction notice, Song Juhyeok didn't demand that all his access be fully restored. Instead he asked that his own access to the operations room test phone and the refrigerated zone entry log be restricted, and that an outside reviewer be allowed to see that material directly.

"If I look at it again, I might read it however I want to."

Seojin recorded that. A wrongly accused victim wanted rules for oversight more than an apology.

After the correction notice was posted, the bolded name disappeared from the case board. Two questions remained in its place. Who had made the delivery completion photo with the operations room test phone. And where had Mun Serim actually sustained her injury.

Seojin finally put the ability record with the word empty house written on it into a separate envelope. The word had pushed the first hypothesis forward, and an independent record had brought that hypothesis down. Only by keeping the whole process on record could the next misreading also be corrected. The next morning, Song Juhyeok signed a statement in front of an outside reviewer restricting his own access to the material. Instead of asking to have his reputation restored, he asked that Gray Thread move the operations room test phone into the evidence locker and keep the company's system administrators from wiping it remotely.

Minwoo said. "You're the administrator. Why give up your authority?"

"Because I am the administrator. It's not enough for me to just say I didn't delete it."

That line stayed in Seojin's notebook for a long time. Song Juhyeok wasn't someone who wanted to be declared innocent. He was someone who reduced the control he held so that it couldn't become grounds for suspicion. But she didn't use that behavior as proof of innocence either.

The last three photos from the operations room test phone were kept under a separate hash. The blue wristband wasn't enlarged, but was added to a list to be checked against the original footage. Yun Hyejin said she hadn't taken the photo, but admitted she'd been in the operations room from 3:58 to 4:06. Her statement was also recorded and left as a question that could still be disproven.

As she read through the public correction notice, Seojin fixed one more sentence. Instead of "Song Juhyeok's culprit hypothesis was wrong," she changed it to "the hypothesis was discarded because no independent record confirming Song Juhyeok could be found." It was so that no one's innocence would be declared as a feeling, but recorded as the state of the evidence.

After signing that correction notice, Minwoo didn't fold away the first page of his own report. He said the discarded hypothesis should stay in the original record file too. Seojin noticed that this was a change from the Minwoo of before, but she didn't call it a restored relationship. Still, the state in which they could each write the opposing hypothesis in the other's report had moved up a notch.

That night, a message came to Song Juhyeok from an anonymous account. "I know you handed over the material." He debated whether to forward it to Gray Thread, then first pressed preserve original on his own phone. Then he contacted Seojin and said, "Explain my options, whether I keep it myself or hand it to the agency."

Seojin didn't exaggerate the fact that he hadn't hidden the message as proof of cooperation either. Instead she sent him the details of the preservation officer and the protection procedure. A wrongly accused victim's trust didn't come back with a single apology, it was rebuilt through the process of deciding together who would hold dangerous material and under what authority.

A new sentence remained on the case board.

"The first hypothesis has been discarded. The reason for discarding it is not a declaration of Song Juhyeok's innocence, but the independent disproof from the docking log and the test phone serial number."

Seojin saved that sentence and moved the cursor to the wristband in the operations room photo. She still didn't know whose it was. But now, the team wouldn't fill that blank with a culprit's name.