The Key in My Coat

At 22:40, Kang Taejun stood me against the wall outside the meeting room.

He didn't cuff me. Instead he placed a security officer on my left and an open camera on my right. It was a way of binding position rather than hands. Hong Sangwook had been moved to the infirmary, and Oh Sejin, even while applying pressure to stop the bleeding, couldn't pull her own wrist out of the camera's frame.

"Your right to make a statement is guaranteed."

Kang Taejun said.

"What about my right to move."

"None."

He set a blank sheet in front of me. Three columns were drawn on it. Owner / Actual possession / Location found. It was a form for correcting the sentence I had gotten wrong in Chapter 13.

"You proposed this, Ihyeon. Write it."

I wrote my name in the first column. In the second column I wrote, believed to be inside the coat in storage. In the third column I wrote, Hong Sangwook's right hand. The word believed weakened the second column. But writing a weak column as if it were strong would make it a lie.

Kang Taejun looked at the paper and said.

"This time we go by objects, not memory."

Below that he drew another set of columns for time. Last confirmed / Sealed / Found. The last time I had confirmed the key was before 18:00. It was sealed at 18:42. It was found at 22:33. That left a gap of nearly four hours. A gap looks larger when no one knows who made it.

"The last time you personally touched the coat."

"Around 17:50. Before I moved Deputy Director Yun Haewon to the security office."

"Drop the 'around.'"

I traced back through my memory. The glass door of the security office, Yun Haewon's wet right shoe, the moment Lee Juwan stood in front of Door 7. Somewhere in between, I took off my coat. The clock on the storage locker read 17:53.

"17:53. In front of the storage locker."

Kang Taejun wrote 17:53 / self-reported. It wasn't that he believed me. He was just attaching a source.

At 22:55, the seal line on the storage room had not been broken.

That fact wasn't in my favor. An intact seal didn't mean the key couldn't have gotten out. What mattered more was who had touched it before the seal. Inside the storage room, my coat sat in a clear plastic bag. Kang Taejun's signature and a time were written on the outside of the bag. 18:42.

Go Yura carefully turned on the camera.

"Let's start with the footage from before the seal. It's saved locally too. I don't want to trust the central network."

"Drop the phrase 'don't want to trust.'"

Kang Taejun said.

"Because the central network's errors reproduce."

Go Yura corrected herself right away. She liked casual language, but in front of the record, she knew how to fix it.

One seam of the coat's inner pocket had come open. It wasn't torn. A single thread had pulled loose, and the inner fabric was folded slightly. It was the mark of someone pulling the fabric along with whatever they took out of the pocket.

There were three entries logged for the storage room. 18:07, Baek Somyeong. 18:19, Lee Juwan. 18:42, Kang Taejun. Baek Somyeong had come in with the excuse of a camera battery. In the footage he stood two steps away from the coat, his lens pointed at the envelope box. Lee Juwan was different. He stopped in front of the coat, changed his gloves, and lifted the plastic. Kang Taejun sealed it last.

"Why did Baek Somyeong go in."

Go Yura asked.

"He goes in whenever there's something to shoot."

My answer was too broad. Kang Taejun cut it off immediately.

"State it by function."

"Filming the envelope box. No access to the coat."

He wrote down that sentence. It didn't mean Baek Somyeong was innocent. It meant that on the physical route the key had taken out, he was still two steps outside of it, at least for now.

In the footage, Baek Somyeong shifted his body when he saw his own face reflected in the envelope box's glass. Because of that shift, the coat briefly entered the edge of the frame. The pocket was flat. Whether the key was there or not couldn't be seen. But at least at that time, the coat's plastic covering hadn't been lifted.

"Not being visible doesn't mean it wasn't there."

Go Yura said it first.

"Good line."

Kang Taejun wrote that down too. Evidence deceives more often through what isn't visible than through what is. This time, the right move was not to write off the unseen key as nonexistent.

"Someone turned the coat over while filming the evidence."

Go Yura paused the footage. The hand on screen wore a glove. A gray stripe showed at the end of the sleeve.

"Lee Juwan."

Kang Taejun said the name. It wasn't a conclusion. It was a summons.

At 23:10, in the interrogation room, Lee Juwan asked for the envelope first.

"Before I give a statement, I want to confirm whether Director Hong Sangwook is alive and the scope of this item's admissibility as evidence."

"Answer the question and I'll confirm it."

"The order is wrong. I need to know what procedure my answer feeds into."

Kang Taejun didn't pull out a chair. He asked standing.

"Did you take the master key out of Ihyeon's coat."

Lee Juwan didn't choose a lie. He chose a narrower sentence.

"I found it."

"Did you take it out."

"I separated it, briefly."

"Who did you return it to."

"I separated it to preserve its admissibility."

"Who received it."

"That question confuses the act of assault with the movement of the key."

He was a man who turned emotion into cost. The moment his own actions might connect to the knife that had stabbed someone, he cut his sentences down to procedure. Kang Taejun didn't follow him there.

"I didn't ask about the assault. I asked about the key."

Lee Juwan's lips thinned.

"I saw the key inside the coat. It was after the envelope's recipient had been changed, so there was a risk of evidence contamination. That's why I took it out and photographed it, and meant to keep it separately."

"Did you keep it."

"At that point, Director Hong called me over."

"What about the key."

For the first time, he delayed his answer. The delay left a gap.

"It left my hand."

"To whom."

"An unconfirmed hand."

That sentence was too convenient. But even a convenient sentence becomes a liability once it's on record. Kang Taejun wrote it down exactly as it was.

"Does 'unconfirmed hand' mean you saw it, or that you didn't."

I asked.

Lee Juwan glanced at me once, then turned his eyes back to Kang Taejun.

"I won't answer Seo Ihyeon's question."

"I'll make it my question," Kang Taejun said. "Did you see it."

"I saw the hand."

"What about the face."

"I didn't see it."

"Location."

"In front of the storage room door. Right after Director Hong called me over."

"Did that hand take the key."

"The thing that had been in my hand was no longer in my hand after that."

Kang Taejun stopped his pen.

"That's not an answer."

"It's outside the range where an answer is possible."

To the end, Lee Juwan kept cutting the subject out of his sentences. He never said who took it. He never said it had been taken from him. He never wrote a sentence admitting he'd handed it over himself. That one empty subject was the person who had to be caught before the attacker.

At 23:25, I appeared on the control room screen.

More precisely, it was an arm wearing my coat. Frame 3127 from the storage room camera. There was no one in the frames before or after. Only in that single frame, 3127, did a sleeve appear, seeming to push a key into the inside of the pocket.

"Stop."

Go Yura's hand froze.

Kang Taejun didn't look at me. He looked at the screen.

"Two seconds before and after."

The footage advanced slowly. In frame 3125, the coat hung inside the plastic. Frame 3126 was the same. In frame 3127, a hand entered. In frame 3128, the hand was gone, and the plastic's folds were unchanged. If a person had actually come in, the plastic should have moved. It hadn't.

"Is it a composite."

Baek Somyeong asked from behind. Go Yura shook her head right away.

"Not yet. Calling it a composite makes it sound like I already know how it was done. What we're seeing right now is that one frame's timestamp doesn't match."

She pointed at the numbers below the screen. The other frames followed the central timecode in sequence, but only frame 3127 had a local buffer number stamped first. The shadow's direction was also different. The folds in the fabric that looked like my sleeve didn't match the lighting in the frames before and after.

Lee Juwan said.

"Then that frame isn't my responsibility."

"That's too quick to say."

I said.

He looked at me.

"This footage is bad for you."

"That's exactly why we have to look at it more slowly."

At 23:45, we split things into three timelines.

Go Yura shrank the problem frame instead of enlarging it. Enlarging it showed only the hand. Shrinking it showed the space where the hand should have been. The coat's plastic before and after the frame stayed the same, and there was no human shadow in the floor's reflection either. If the camera had actually seen a hand, there should have been a reflection. If the hand had been inserted afterward, there might be no reflection at all. It still couldn't be said which of the two it was.

"What's the path the footage traveled through."

"From the facility camera to central storage, and at the same time to the storage room's local buffer. Normally the central timecode takes priority."

"Why does only the problem frame have local numbering take priority."

Go Yura bit her lip.

"I don't know why. But there's a trace of the order being switched. It's like one book on a shelf has a different call number than all the rest."

"You don't know who put that book there."

"That's right."

She admitted it right away. The moment a technician says she doesn't know is something the reader needs too. Leaving a boundary of the unknown is what makes the next experiment possible.

Before the seal. Lee Juwan's access. After Hong Sangwook's call. Between the same time in the previous loop I remembered and this loop, there were two differences. Lee Juwan had received Hong Sangwook's envelope, and he had accessed the coat. But that didn't mean he had put the key into Hong Sangwook's hand.

Kang Taejun drew three lines on the whiteboard. The person who took the key out. The person who passed it on. The person who put it into someone's hand. Written as one line, it would have been simple. Split into three, the suspects scattered.

"Do you see me as the attacker."

Lee Juwan asked.

"No. For now, you're the one who moved the key."

Kang Taejun's answer was dry. Lee Juwan's face showed he didn't like that classification. It sounded smaller than attacker, but it might be a name that lasted longer.

Lee Juwan let out a small breath. It could have been relief, or the sound of him restarting his calculations. I wrote down neither. Rather than the meaning of the sound, I watched what he did right after. He didn't touch the inside of his jacket. He didn't take out his phone. Instead he looked at the evidence box that held Hong Sangwook's envelope.

It was the look of someone thinking about the terms of a deal before his own innocence. That didn't mean he was the attacker. Lee Juwan wanted evidence he could use no matter the outcome. The key was evidence to him, and Hong Sangwook's blood was too high a cost. But too high a cost wasn't proof that he'd stepped back either.

In front of the board, I looked at my coat's sleeve. The sleeve on screen resembled mine. But resemblance wasn't evidence. I borrowed the words Kang Taejun had used earlier.

"Let's not record resemblance. Let's only record the sleeve's folds, the shadow, and the buffer number."

Kang Taejun nodded briefly.

At 23:58, Go Yura saved the problem frame separately.

She stopped her hand while naming the file.

"If a frame uses a local buffer number instead of the central timecode, it means the order the camera saw things and the order they were saved have split apart."

Go Yura didn't copy the problem frame. She made a hash of the original first. Normally she was someone whose explanations came before her actions. Today her hands moved first. After attaching an independent camera, she saved the same footage separately from the central network.

"What if we look at it again tomorrow under the same conditions."

I asked.

"If the input is the same, the same trace should show up. If it doesn't, then I was wrong."

"Are you ready to record being wrong."

"I still don't want to, but I have to."

That answer was very Go Yura. Quick and honest, and she pressed the button anyway.

"Why does it split."

Kang Taejun asked.

"To know that, I have to look again under the same conditions. I'd need to split the sections where the input didn't change from the ones where it did."

That took us back to the generator and the cup in Chapter 10. Same input, repeated result. Changed input, a different accident. This time it was a frame instead of an accident.

Whether Hong Sangwook survived was still shut inside the infirmary. Yun Haewon had seen the route created by her own envelope design and had kept her mouth closed anyway. Lee Juwan had admitted to taking the key out, but he had left the hand he passed it to empty.

The hand in the CCTV wore my sleeve. But only that single frame carried a different timestamp.

Saying I hadn't done it was now worth very little. I had to show why the frame hadn't repeated. Before innocence, I had to reproduce the conditions.

Kang Taejun didn't turn off the screen. An experiment could begin even while suspicion stayed in place.

In front of that screen, for the first time, I looked at my own coat as a piece of evidence. Saying it was mine was no longer a defense.