Suspect Seo Ihyeon

11:05, Kang Taejun took my coat first.

Separate the objects before you detain the person. That was his method. Coat, bag, handheld terminal, new recorder, wristwatch. The Q-13 key at my neck was left for last. He did not take it right away. He reached out, stopped, and looked at my face.

“Is this an item of evidence, or something worn on the body?”

“It belonged to the dead.”

“That classification was not in the question.”

“If you take it off now, I stop cooperating.”

Kang Taejun did not process that as a threat. He recorded it instead. `Q-13 chain, retained in current state at subject’s refusal.` Procedure saves a person sometimes and tightens around one other times.

The coat was spread open on top of the locker. I looked at the inside pockets. There should have been nothing. All I had put in were a pen and a handkerchief. Kang Taejun checked the right inner pocket, the left inner pocket, and the bottom seam, in that order.

A small metallic sound came from the left inner pocket.

It was a management key.

Not Yun Haewon’s. The same shape, a different number. A spare key for security management. There was a fine scratch on the grip, and the small label was half peeled away. I had no memory of ever seeing that key.

“Explain.”

“I never put it there.”

“Is the memory missing, or the act?”

Kang Taejun split memory from act. Without saying a word about the loop, it was the way to press me most precisely.

“I did not put it there.”

“Who did?”

I thought back to the deputy director’s office. Baek Somyeong’s camera, Yi Juwan’s file, the closed drawer. Yi Juwan came close to my coat once. It was when he moved beside the desk saying he would seal the envelope. But I could not say I saw it. Naming a person because a hand brushed past in a remembered scene turns into the kind of unfair deduction I hate.

“I do not know yet.”

Kang Taejun put the key into a clear bag.

“Yet sounds like you will know later.”

“It means I will check later.”

“There are fewer reasons to let you do that checking alone.”

Yi Juwan was standing outside the storage room door. He did not come in. Not coming in was the more precise position. Not an official observer, not someone passing by, and close enough to say he had seen it if he ever needed to. From outside the frame of the door he looked only at the clear bag holding the key.

“Will you write the owner on the evidence list, or the place it was found?”

Kang Taejun did not even turn his head.

“You will be notified once the official procedure begins.”

“It looks like it already has.”

“Looking that way and beginning are different things.”

Yi Juwan did not dislike that. If anything he waited a moment, like a man who had just heard his own language.

“Seo Ihyeon. Everything you explain now can be used against you later. Silence can be read against you too.”

“Is that advice, or a warning?”

“Both have a cost.”

He did not look at my coat. He avoided it so completely that the feeling of having looked stayed behind anyway. I could not name him. He knew that. A person who creates the chance for access does not have to leave a hand behind. Whoever voices the suspicion first takes the loss.

Kang Taejun shut the door. Yi Juwan did not resist. His silhouette stayed on the glass of the closed door for a moment, then was gone. Even that short scene could not become evidence. But it did become an action to check later.

11:20, the wall clock in the interview room followed the central network.

I checked the time before my wristwatch was taken. Central 11:20:00, wrist 11:21:03. Kang Taejun knew about the gap. He did not write down only the central time. He wrote my wristwatch time beside it. That was after Go Yura had confirmed it for him.

“23:52, Q-13 access log.”

He pushed the first page across. My name was not on it. The user name was still logged under the credentials of Seo Doyun, processed as deceased, and the access terminal was the D-13 audit partition. That much matched what I already knew. The problem was the second page.

“Contact record with Deputy Director Yun Haewon. 23:48, outside the deputy director’s office. 23:56, the approach to the calibration room.”

“I met her once.”

“Which one?”

“23:48 is real. 23:56 is not.”

“Why?”

There was an answer to that question. At 23:56 I was in front of the D-13 audit terminal, muting an alarm and watching the copy rate on the original. But saying that brings the nine minutes of the first day out with it. Yun Haewon’s call for help before she died, and my choice. The choice I still had not spoken aloud.

“I was somewhere else.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Not with the current records.”

“Then the records in front of me are the current records.”

Kang Taejun was not some stupid obstacle. He drew the most reasonable conclusion the records allowed. A person holding Q-13 credentials. A person with a management key found in her coat. A person using an error in the central network as a pretext to move her own alibi and someone else’s movements. And a person who names the dead in advance.

That was me.

“If I said loop, would you believe me?”

Kang Taejun stopped his pen.

“Do you want that word entered as testimony?”

I closed my mouth. He did not record my evasion. Instead of recording it, he asked again.

“Seo Ihyeon, is what you are hiding a fact the case needs, or a fact that hurts your own defense?”

“Both.”

For the first time his eyes narrowed. Not the face of a man who had heard a good answer, the face of one who had heard a usable one.

“Then we start with the side that hurts your defense.”

11:40, I used the 63 second error as a rebuttal.

It was too narrow to call a rebuttal. If the 23:56 record for the calibration room approach was on central network time, then the real time was either 23:57:03, or a value produced after tampered calibration. A 63 second error does not void everything. It only breaks the absoluteness of one line.

“Only records dependent on the central network run late. They do not match independent devices. Go Yura reproduced it.”

“I know.”

“Then the 23:56 log has to be corrected too.”

“Even corrected, the second meeting itself remains.”

Kang Taejun turned the page. There was a screen capture. Corridor CCTV. A black coat similar to mine. Yun Haewon’s white shirt. Low resolution, the face unclear. Central time 23:56:12.

“You cannot conclude that this is me.”

“I did not conclude it. That is why this is detention.”

“Detention and conclusion are sitting too close together.”

“In a case where people can die, they do.”

He did not use procedure as a shield. He did not hide the violence procedure carries, either. That made him harder to slip past. I could not say he was wrong. All I could do was narrow it toward the records being wrong.

“At 23:56, where was Deputy Director Yun Haewon?”

“Why are you asking?”

“If the deputy director was not actually at that location, then both sides of the second meeting log are fabricated.”

Kang Taejun did not call Yun Haewon right away. First he wrote my words down. `Subject claims both sides of the second contact log may be fabricated.` The stiffer the sentence became, the safer my words got, and the further away.

“The deputy director may try to help you.”

“You do not have to believe her. Just confirm her position.”

“While we confirm it, you stay here.”

“I expected that.”

“Expected.” Kang Taejun repeated it back.

I swallowed the word I had gotten wrong. The sense that I know too much turns me into a suspect every time. An information advantage was not a weapon, it was a fingerprint.

Kang Taejun ordered a security officer to confirm Yun Haewon’s location. The speaker had not been switched off, so part of the call carried through. Yun Haewon said she had been in the corridor outside Hong Sangwook’s office after 23:50, not at 23:56. But that was Yun Haewon’s account. It needed confirmation from Hong Sangwook’s attending staff, and the central CCTV ran into the 63 second problem all over again.

“The deputy director’s statement favors you,” Kang Taejun said.

“Which is why I have to be more careful.”

“You doubt a statement in your favor?”

“The deputy director tries to save people, and she also tries to move them.”

He wrote that sentence down.

“That is how you describe a victim.”

“She is a living person. Call her nothing but a victim and you lose what she has done.”

This time Kang Taejun did not argue back immediately. He knew as well as I did that Yun Haewon was hard to leave standing as a pure victim. But that fact did not make me innocent.

12:00, I could see my coat through the observation window of the storage room.

Kang Taejun did not take me out of the interview room. He brought the storage room CCTV up on the observation window screen instead. The coat and the bag were each in a clear box. The management key was inside a separate evidence bag. Only after seeing that arrangement did I recalculate the scene in the deputy director’s office.

In that office Yi Juwan had been on my right. Baek Somyeong by the door. When Yi Juwan opened the file and stood in front of the drawer, my coat was hanging on the chair behind the desk. He said he would seal the envelope and moved half a step toward the chair. At that moment my eyes were following Baek Somyeong’s camera.

I did not see whether a hand brushed past.

Speak about what you did not see as though you saw it, and only Yi Juwan ends up in a good position. He is the kind of man who waits for that error.

“Who had access?” Kang Taejun asked.

“There is a possibility. It is not confirmed.”

“The name.”

“If I say it now, it is conjecture.”

“Conjecture gets recorded too.”

“If the man is a lawyer, he will turn my conjecture into a complaint before anything else.”

Kang Taejun heard me out and paused for a very short moment.

“Auditor Yi Juwan.”

He said the name I had not said. I did not deny it. Denial would have become a different lie.

“He had the chance for access, but I did not see him put it in.”

“I will write it that way.”

He wrote it. That sentence, at least, was fair. It does not conclude that Yi Juwan framed me. It does not claim the key teleported, either. Access opportunity and unconfirmed. For now, that was the limit.

“And Baek Somyeong?” Kang Taejun asked.

“She had a camera. She did not come near the coat.”

“Did you see that?”

“Within what I could see.”

“What you could see.”

He went back over it again. I nodded. What I did not see has to be left blank. Baek Somyeong was trying to shoot the reflection in the drawer, and Yi Juwan was taking out the seal. Both of them moved according to their own appetites. But the chance to touch the coat was larger on Yi Juwan’s side. Between larger and did it, there was a distance wide enough to fit one interview room.

Kang Taejun rewound the footage. Not the storage room feed, the corridor outside the deputy director’s office. Central network record, so the 63 second error came attached. The frames showed Yi Juwan moving half a step toward the chair where my coat hung, but the desk hid his hands. Baek Somyeong stood at the door with her camera. Yun Haewon had not come back yet.

“Obstructed,” Kang Taejun said.

“Yes.”

“Behind what is obstructed, there might be your innocence, or there might be the crime.”

“Which is why I am here.”

He froze the footage. On exactly the frame where Yi Juwan’s hands could not be seen. My least favorite kind of evidence. Insufficient, and impossible to throw away.

12:10, Kang Taejun brought out the last page.

The paper was newer than the other two. The smell of printer ink was still on it. Across the top it read `Q-13 access linked contact log`. Central time, user, location, and counterpart, one line each.

He pushed the paper in front of me.

“You met Yun Haewon twice before her death.”

I did not ask whose death `before her death` referred to. Yun Haewon’s death. The death of the first day. The death where trying to stop it got someone else killed. Kang Taejun believed none of those, and still picked the single most damaging sentence.

The log held 23:48 and 23:56.

I looked at the seconds on the 23:56 line. Twelve seconds. Correct the central network by 63 seconds and it becomes 23:57:15. Yet on the same page the Q-13 access start was stamped 23:57:03. I cannot be in two places twelve seconds apart. Apply the central network error or leave it out, either way a contradiction remains.

“This line was made later.”

Kang Taejun looked at me.

“Grounds.”

“Apply the same correction standard and I overlap in two places. Do not apply it and the contact log was created before the Q-13 access. It is not that one of the two is wrong. One line was made under a different rule.”

He did not take the paper back. He left it there in front of me. So I could look longer. That was a small permission.

“Are you claiming it was fabricated?”

“Fabrication is the strongest possibility.”

“By whom?”

I did not answer. I thought of Yi Juwan, and of Yun Haewon, and of an envelope with no name on it yet. The Q-13 watermark. Twelve envelopes. The first authentication line. And the management key that had been inside my coat.

“I do not know yet.”

Kang Taejun set his pen down.

“That is the third time you have said you do not know.”

“Better than saying I know what I do not.”

He did not reply. He locked the interview room door instead. The yellow indicator turned red.

When the red indicator came on, the recording lamp on the wall lit with it. From here my words are stored as testimony, not defense. I saw that light, and Kang Taejun knew I had seen it.

“One last question,” he said. “On the first day, when did you hear Deputy Director Yun Haewon’s call for help?”

The question was too precise.

I did not steady my breath. Steadying it looks like emotion. I folded my fingers under the table instead. 23:55:02. Alarm. Mute. Copy rate 89. The numbers I had never spoken came up in order.

“That question is directly related to this case.”

“Which is why I am asking.”

“Answering it requires other testimony.”

“Not answering it strengthens the grounds for detention.”

He offered me options, and both were narrow. In a present where Yun Haewon is alive, Kang Taejun is alive, and O Sejin is alive, the nine minutes I hid still sat there like a dead record. A dead record cannot save anyone. But pull it out too fast and everyone looks first at the person I killed.

“I will not answer that now.”

Kang Taejun wrote that sentence down. He did not accuse me. That was worse. With the emotion stripped out, he turned my silence into evidence.

“Seo Ihyeon. From this point you are in official detention.”

The 23:56:12 on the paper stayed in my eyes. The number is narrow, but for someone that narrow gap was enough. Making me a suspect took a gap smaller than 63 seconds.