Three Days After the Message

Song Juhyeok did not come into Gray Thread for three days after receiving the trade message. He passed along only the amount of time the protection agency and the outside reviewer needed, and said nothing about Adil's location. Minwoo read that silence as obstruction of the investigation. Seojin thought they first had to establish whose choice the silence actually was.

On the morning of the third day, Song Juhyeok opened the door to Gray Thread. He held two envelopes in his hand.

"I won't tell you where Adil is."

Minwoo responded immediately. "The sender of the trade message demanded that location as payment. If you keep pretending you don't know, we lose the material."

"So I brought other material instead."

Song Juhyeok set the first envelope on the table. It was a lease record for the place where the operations room's test phone had been kept. He said he had used a slot in an outside equipment storage room, not the company's official storage. The test phone had never been recovered after the incident, and the storage room's entry log still existed.

The second envelope held the original log from his own vehicle, the source file for material Gray Thread had only ever received as a hash. He handed over the whole stretch untouched, the vehicle leaving the back of the warehouse at 03:59 and returning at 04:04.

"Why give it to us now?" Seojin asked.

"Because I confirmed that the sender of the trade message knows I have the originals. If we secure the test phone's location first, we can block that person's access."

"So you decided the order of this investigation yourself, with the material in your hands?"

"Yes."

There was no apology in Song Juhyeok's answer. Even after his lie had come to light, he kept moving ahead of what the investigation team expected. Instead of handing over the protected person's name, he offered the storage room and the vehicle originals that the real culprit could reach. That choice was fair, but it could also buy the real culprit time to react.

Minwoo took the vehicle originals and said, "Until we verify this material, we're not sending anyone to the test phone storage room."

"Then the storage room could be emptied out."

"We'll find a way to preserve the entry log without confirming the location you named."

Song Juhyeok shook his head. "I've already accessed it."

He knew where the storage room was, and he could lock the door himself with his company's administrative authority. But if he moved on it directly, a Gray Thread mark would be left on the storage room's seal, and someone could see that mark and move the material. Seojin calculated the risk.

"It's better to send just the storage room's original entry log to the outside reviewer first, and go to the site jointly with the protection agency."

Song Juhyeok did not agree to that condition. He said that if they went to the site before the protection agency was ready, material connecting to Adil could be exposed.

"So you're saying no one goes?" Minwoo asked.

"I'll seal it myself, for now."

Minwoo stood up. "Are you saying you'll monopolize the evidence?"

"No. I'll send the outside reviewer the exact time and hash of my own sealing."

"We have the authority to verify that process."

"Verify it. Just don't ask questions aimed at finding out Adil's name."

Seojin laid out the authority chart between the two men. Song Juhyeok demanded the right not to hand over the protected person's identity, and the right to take temporary sealing action. Gray Thread held the right to independently verify physical evidence. Recognizing both authorities meant there was no way around it: Song Juhyeok would seal first, and Gray Thread would only view the site after verifying through the hash and entry log.

Yeoreum drew up the condition. Song Juhyeok would enter the storage room but not move anything. He would send the outside reviewer footage from before and after entry, plus a wristwatch timestamp, at the same time. Gray Thread would not access any document that could connect to Adil, and would only secure the test phone's seal number and the vehicle log.

Song Juhyeok read the condition and signed it. Minwoo voiced his displeasure, but this time he did not push back against it. The order of the investigation had been changed by Song Juhyeok's refusal to consent, and that change was, in this moment, being brought under control through the record.

At two in the afternoon, Song Juhyeok went to the outside equipment storage room. Seojin and Minwoo watched his movements on live footage. Inside the storage unit were the test phone, part of a packaging label from refrigerated medicine, and a worn pair of delivery gloves. Song Juhyeok looked at the label but did not touch it with his hand. He read the seal number and closed the door.

At that moment, another person appeared at the end of the storage room hallway. Their face was hidden by a cap, and they held a document envelope. Song Juhyeok did not approach them. Instead he cut the power to the storage room. The camera feed went dark for a moment, then came back.

Minwoo shouted, "Why did you cut the power?"

Song Juhyeok answered over the call. "I blocked remote access. If I chase the person, the storage unit could end up open."

He did not go after the person in the hallway. Instead he sent the outside reviewer the time of the shutoff and the seal number. The person at the end of the hallway vanished, but the test phone stayed inside the storage unit. Song Juhyeok had, in effect, saved one piece of evidence at the cost of losing one person.

Minwoo was furious at the choice. "If you'd chased them, you could have caught them."

"That person could have been Adil."

"They could have been the real culprit."

"That's why I protected the storage unit."

Seojin did not decide which of the two men was right. Song Juhyeok had made a choice that could let the culprit slip away in order to protect the person he was shielding, and that choice ran counter to the investigation team's goal. But because the test phone and the vehicle log remained, the case's physical evidence had been preserved.

The test phone recovered from the storage unit turned out to be a device with a sensor defect. Its serial number matched the photo file, and a record showed the screen waking at 04:03. But there was no face and no voice belonging to whoever had taken the photo. The vehicle's original log showed the stretch where Song Juhyeok left the warehouse at 03:59 and returned at 04:04. It raised the likelihood that he had traveled as far as the empty house, but it wasn't proof that he had used the test phone.

Song Juhyeok showed Seojin a stretch of the vehicle log without covering any of it. Inside it, the window when Adil could have gotten into the car overlapped with the window when someone could have moved the medicine. He submitted it knowing the material worked against him.

"Why hand over this much?"

"If I hide it, all of you will turn Adil into the culprit. If I give you everything, you'll find where Adil is."

"So these two envelopes are what you chose to give?"

"They're the line I can hold."

Seojin respected that line, but she did not forget the cost of Song Juhyeok's lie either. Park Hyeonwoo's suspension, Yun Hyejin's suspicion, the delay in the investigation, all of it had come out of his choices. Protecting the person he was shielding and not shifting responsibility onto someone else were demands he had to meet at the same time.

That night, a failed access log for the storage room turned up on an outside service's admin account. Whoever had been at the end of the hallway had failed to open the door, and the log matched the time Song Juhyeok had cut the power. The person's identity was still not confirmed, but the fact that they had tried to recover the test phone was now on record.

Seeing that, Minwoo did not apologize to Song Juhyeok. Instead he drew up the next procedure for jointly sealing the storage room. Song Juhyeok would exercise sealing authority with the protected person's information masked, and Gray Thread would review the hash and entry log of the physical evidence. No one would take the originals alone.

Seojin noted in the meeting record that Song Juhyeok's refusal to consent had changed the order of the investigation. The change had been fair, but it had also given the real culprit time to react. Even a fair process carried a cost.

Song Juhyeok said one last thing. "Next time, I'll speak first. But I still won't say where Adil is."

Minwoo answered, "We'll move knowing that condition."

That night, the power on the test phone left in the storage room turned back on. Someone attempted remote access, and on the sealed screen, the words "New photo syncing" flashed briefly. The test phone still held the case's last piece of evidence. After the failed remote access was confirmed, Song Juhyeok did not go back into the storage room. He suspended his own administrative authority and asked that only the outside reviewer be given access to open the test phone's power log. The man who had personally controlled the site to protect someone was now the one setting down his authority so that he could no longer be the one in control.

Minwoo did not ask, watching this, "Can we trust you now?" Instead he built a single table out of the storage room's entry record and the vehicle log, cross checking the times Song Juhyeok had provided against the times the outside server had recorded. The two records supported movement around 04:03, but they still said nothing about where Adil was.

Seojin logged the test phone's "new photo syncing" message in the evidence list. It wasn't yet clear whether that meant a file had been newly created, or whether the remote service had simply pulled up an old photo again. She confirmed the seal's state before the original could be altered, and without playing the screen herself, handed the device image over to the outside reviewer.

Watching the process beside her, Song Juhyeok said, "If I watch the footage, I'll end up trying to find the person I remember."

"Is that why you won't watch it?"

"Yes. Finding that person isn't my goal this time."

The remark signaled that his way of protecting someone had changed, but it wasn't proof that he had actually made the right choice. Seojin still kept the person's safety and the responsibility for the crime on separate ledgers.

As the night wore on, the outside reviewer extracted two image hashes from the test phone. One was the photo of the front door taken on the day of the incident. The other was a file generated through the remote sync after the incident. The second file never appeared on screen, and its contents were never opened. Still, the fact that someone had tried to wake a sealed device back up remained as pressure for the next stage of the investigation. Seojin wrote down the storage room's seal number alongside the time of the remote sync. The evidence remained, and the culprit still hadn't surfaced. The blank space left by Song Juhyeok's refusal to consent stayed exactly where it was too. Even as Minwoo drew up the next seizure list, he still didn't make a column for Adil's name. This time, a list without that column wasn't a limit on the investigation, it was a condition of it. The blank stayed unerased, and carried over into the next review.