One More Name on the Case Board

Yun Hyejin's statement came in, and the number of people on the case board grew. Song Juhyeok knew about the refrigerated storage box. Yun Hyejin had touched the test phone and the storage box. Park Hyunwoo had been standing in front of the empty house with the delivery device. All three had been close to the equipment at the time of the incident, but none of them could account for the movement of the photo, the token, and the medication all at once.

Instead of narrowing down the people, Seojin split apart the actions: the switching of the medication, the creation of the photo, the reissuing of the token. She decided to build a second hypothesis on whether the three actions belonged to the same hand or different hands.

Through the protection agency, Song Juhyeok confirmed a channel through which Adil could reach out on his own. He did not pass Adil's name to Gray Thread, and Seojin did not ask for it. Instead, she decided to check who had suffered a loss while Song Juhyeok was protecting him.

The first loss fell on Park Hyunwoo. Because of a cancellation token that didn't exist on his delivery device, he came under suspicion as the party behind the completion manipulation. The platform suspended his account, and he lost a full day's delivery pay. Because Song Juhyeok had hidden the fact that he'd asked Park Hyunwoo to make the delivery for him, Park Hyunwoo had no way to explain why he'd been suspended.

Park Hyunwoo came to Gray Thread and looked at Song Juhyeok as he spoke.

"Don't tell me you protected me. I was treated like a thief all day."

Song Juhyeok didn't apologize right away. Without bringing up who he'd been protecting, he said he would submit documents correcting the platform suspension and the lost pay.

"I can't tell you why I made that delivery. But I'll put on record that you took the loss for a token you didn't issue."

Park Hyunwoo shook his head. "Not just a record. I need to see the correction statement myself."

Seojin added that request to the rules of Gray Thread: the team would not explain a loss on behalf of the person who suffered it, and the person had to be able to review the correction wording themselves. Park Hyunwoo signed after confirming the sentence stating that only a normal completion token had been issued from his device. The original source of the cancellation token was still blank.

The person Song Juhyeok's lie had protected and the person who'd taken the loss were not the same. Even once the purpose of the protection was confirmed, Park Hyunwoo's suspension and lost pay didn't disappear. Seojin put both facts on the same table, but she didn't let one serve as a pardon for the other.

Minwoo built a second hypothesis about the crime inside the case. Song Juhyeok had left the delivery to Adil, and someone had used that fact to create the photo on the operations room test phone. Afterward, an external cleanup service reissued the token, shifting responsibility onto Park Hyunwoo's device. This hypothesis accounted for both Song Juhyeok's protective motive and the separation between the photo and the token.

Seojin immediately drew up questions to disprove it. Did the delivery equipment Adil used match the power records of the refrigerated storage box. Did the timestamp of the photo's creation match the user's access record on the test phone. Did the external service's approval path connect to the company account's permission table. If even one of the three questions came back wrong, the hypothesis would need revising.

Song Juhyeok sent the protection agency material that could answer the first question. Adil's identity was masked, but the delivery equipment's identifier and the refrigerated storage box's power usage remained. The equipment woke in front of the storage box at 04:01 and shut off again at 04:02. It matched the phase change range on the cold pack label.

Yun Hyejin was uneasy about the second question. She said she'd only turned on the test phone briefly, but there was a record showing the screen had woken at the exact moment the photo was created. There remained a possibility that the person who turned on the screen and the person who took the photo were not the same.

"I can't prove I didn't take the photo," Yun Hyejin said.

"Failing to prove it isn't the same as admitting to the crime," Seojin answered.

Yun Hyejin bit her lip at that. She didn't say why she'd gone into the operations room. She only admitted that Song Juhyeok had asked her to check the test phone. But Song Juhyeok said he had never told her to take a photo.

The two statements contradicted each other, but it wasn't clear whether the contradiction came from covering up a crime or from silence meant to protect someone. Seojin refused to force an interpretation onto that difference, and instead reanalyzed the test phone's sensor data and the wristband photo.

In the photo's first frame, the wristband was visible, but the shadow of the hand that had taken the photo was actually two shadows. One was the hand holding the camera, the other was a hand pushing a box in beside the front door. The shapes of the shadows couldn't be cleanly separated because of the lighting and a lens flaw, but the hypothesis that one person had set down the box and immediately taken the photo grew weaker.

Minwoo spoke. "There could have been two people."

"That's possible. But two shadows don't confirm two people."

"If you keep talking like that, nobody ever becomes the culprit."

"To become the culprit, the action has to be confirmed before the person."

That afternoon, Nari came to Gray Thread. She didn't turn on the recorder, just set it on the desk. When Seojin's eyes went to it, Nari turned the recorder off and showed her the screen.

"This time, I'm trying not to be used only as a source."

Nari had brought material showing that the delivery platform's external cleanup service had also been used in the past to clean up press misreporting. The material had only the service's name and its contract terms, no actual account user. Nari said she'd confirmed, from a senior reporter's old notebook, that the same service had recurred right before correction articles for those misreports.

Seojin wanted to ask about the Junho case, but Nari drew a line first.

"That notebook is still mine. Look only as much as you need to confirm the contract structure of this case."

"Can I copy it?"

"Not the original. I'll read you only the pages where that service's name appears."

Without opening the book, Nari wrote down only the page numbers and fragments of the sentences in a separate confirmation sheet. To avoid using her as a mere source, Seojin recorded the ownership of the material and the scope of what had been disclosed. Nari's material showed old traces of the external service's use, but it wasn't proof that it matched this case's token issuance.

Song Juhyeok's face hardened when he saw Nari's material. He knew the service's name, but he hadn't said so.

"Do you know this company?" Minwoo asked.

"It was written in the contract."

"Then why didn't you say so?"

"If I said so, Nari's material would end up disclosed too."

Nari spoke to him. "That's for me to decide."

Song Juhyeok fell silent. The way he had controlled things to protect someone had ended up covering over another person's right to choose too. He got a written confirmation from Nari that he wouldn't disclose her material, and from his own contract he provided only a hashed copy of the cover page where the service's name appeared.

That evening, Park Hyunwoo received notice that his platform suspension had been lifted. But the lost pay still hadn't been paid out. He didn't say anything about forgiving Song Juhyeok. Instead, he demanded that the lost pay and the suspension period be included in the correction statement. Song Juhyeok accepted that.

Seojin revised the second hypothesis on the case board: "Song Juhyeok made the delivery in Adil's place to protect him, and in the process, it became possible for the external service to shift responsibility elsewhere." But beneath that sentence, she added: "No evidence that Song Juhyeok knew about the external service's crime."

Minwoo included that limitation in the report. Instead of placing the person who benefited from the crime and the person with a protective motive on the same line of suspicion, he decided to check the access rights for token issuance and photo creation separately.

At eleven that night, the past permission table for the external service contract revealed that one account had been newly activated on the day of the incident. The account owner wasn't a company employee but a contracted agency. It didn't connect to the name of the person Song Juhyeok had been protecting, but it strengthened the idea that the external service had been a channel through which responsibility could be passed off.

Seojin sealed Park Hyunwoo's correction statement separately, and recorded only the service's name without disclosing Nari's notebook pages. The reason for protection and the cost of responsibility stayed in different documents.

Finally, she said to Song Juhyeok.

"Part of the reason you protected Adil has now been confirmed. But that reason doesn't stand in for the responsibility of whoever issued the token."

Song Juhyeok nodded. "So I'll hand over the next material. Only this time, not through me. Through the protection agency."

The second hypothesis hadn't confirmed the culprit, but it had placed the loss created by the lie of protection and the external service's shifting of responsibility on the same timeline. The case's question had now shifted from who made the delivery to who had used someone else's access rights to divide up responsibility. The next day, the external reviewer cross-checked the timing of the service account's new activation against the access time on the operations room test phone. The two records fell within the same approval system at 04:00, but they didn't point to the same user. The account belonged to the contracted agency, while the test phone was inside the logistics warehouse.

Minwoo suggested they find the person connecting the two, but Seojin said the only link so far was the permission table. Having authority created the possibility of use, but actual use had to be established by a log. If that difference went unrecorded, the same error as the first hypothesis could repeat itself.

Through the protection agency, Song Juhyeok sent additional material: photos of the remaining battery on the equipment Adil had used and of the cold pack label. No person appeared in the photos, only the timestamp and the equipment number remained. This material reinforced the fact that the medication had briefly moved out of the warehouse's refrigerated storage box, but it didn't connect to whoever had issued the token.

Even after reading the correction statement, Park Hyunwoo was still angry at Song Juhyeok. While accepting the statement, he said, "Next time, don't decide things in my name without asking." Song Juhyeok wrote that promise into the record. Protection couldn't be sustained by taking away someone else's choice.

With the recorder off, Nari said to Seojin. "While you're all looking for the culprit, I'll decide for myself who gets to see the material I have."

Seojin nodded. "Even if that decision slows down the investigation, I'll record the reason it was slowed."

Hearing that answer, Nari put the notebook back in her bag. Having information in hand didn't mean it automatically belonged to the investigation team.