The news of Director Go Myung-hwan's death reached Park at dawn, delivered by a junior officer who had drawn the short straw and been assigned to work the overnight shift in the department's communications room. The officer's voice on the phone was shaky, the voice of a young man who had not yet learned to deliver bad news without feeling it.
"Sir, there's been an incident at the Way of Peace Nursing Home. The director, Go Myung-hwan, was found dead in his office approximately two hours ago. The responding officers are saying it appears to be a suicide. They found a note."
Park sat up in his chair, the fog of exhaustion that had settled over him during the long night of interviews evaporating instantly. He was still at the station, still processing the dozens of witness statements that had been collected during the Festival of the Lost. The crowd had not dispersed until well after midnight, and even then, people had lingered in the square, reluctant to return to homes that now felt emptier than they had before.
"What did the note say?"
"It's being transcribed now, sir. But one of the officers said it mentions the drug trials. It mentions Kurosu Pharma. And it mentions you."
Park was already reaching for his coat. "Don't let anyone touch the scene until I arrive. No one from the nursing home, no one from the health department, no one from Kurosu Pharma. Understood?"
"Understood, sir. But there's something else." The officer hesitated. "Captain Yoon has been informed. He's calling in the case. He says the investigation has exceeded its original scope and needs to be reassigned to a special unit."
"Tell Captain Yoon I'll speak to him when I return. And tell him that if anyone moves Go Myung-hwan's body before I examine the scene, I will hold him personally responsible."
Park ended the call before the officer could respond. He grabbed his keys and his weapon and was halfway to the door when his phone buzzed with a text message from Hana: "Go is dead. Just heard from a source at the health department. Meet me at Way of Peace."
The drive to the nursing home took fifteen minutes through streets that were still littered with the remnants of the Festival—discarded lanterns, burnt-out incense sticks, wilted flowers that had been trampled underfoot by the departing crowds. The city was waking up slowly, its residents emerging from their homes to clean the streets and prepare for another day of ordinary life. None of them knew that a man had died during the night, or that his death would unravel secrets that had been buried for years.
The Way of Peace Nursing Home was cordoned off with yellow police tape when Park arrived. Two patrol cars were parked at the entrance, their lights flashing in the gray morning light, and a small cluster of staff members had gathered on the sidewalk, their faces a mixture of confusion and poorly concealed relief. They had known Go Myung-hwan for years. They had watched him cut corners and falsify records and accept deliveries of crimson capsules that he claimed were vitamins. They had said nothing, either out of fear or out of necessity, but now that he was dead, the fear was lifting. The necessity was evaporating. The silence was beginning to crack.
Hana was waiting near the service entrance, her camera slung over her shoulder and her expression grim. She had been awake all night, Park knew, following up on the leads that had poured in during the Festival. Her eyes were rimmed with red, but her voice was steady when she spoke.
"The responding officer is a man named Sergeant Kang. He's one of yours—one of the ones who owes you a favor. He called me as soon as he saw the scene. He thought I should see it before the special unit takes over."
"What did he tell you?"
"That Go was found in his office at approximately four in the morning. The night staff heard a crash from the second floor. When they went to investigate, they found the office door locked from the inside. They had to break it down. Go was slumped over his desk, a single gunshot wound to the head. The weapon was on the floor beside his chair—a revolver registered in his name. The note was on the desk, handwritten, addressed to no one in particular."
"Suicide," Park said, the word tasting wrong in his mouth.
"Apparently. But there are problems with that narrative." Hana pulled out her phone and showed him a photograph. "Sergeant Kang sent me this. Look at Go's hands."
Park studied the image. Go Myung-hwan's body was slumped forward across his desk, his arms outstretched, his head turned to one side. The gun was visible on the floor beside his chair, a dark puddle of blood spreading outward from his right temple. But it was the hands that drew Park's attention—specifically, the right hand, which was splayed across the desktop with the fingers curled inward, as though Go had been trying to hold onto something.
"There's no gunshot residue on his right hand," Park said slowly. "If he fired the weapon himself, there should be residue on the web between his thumb and index finger. There should be powder burns on his palm. There's nothing."
"That's what Sergeant Kang thought. He called the medical examiner independently—Dr. Yoon is on her way now. But Captain Yoon has already issued a preliminary statement calling it a suicide and suggesting that the note provides closure for the investigation."
"Closure." Park's voice was bitter. "He means it provides an excuse to close the case before it reaches Kurosu Pharma."
They entered the nursing home through the service door that had become, in the weeks since this investigation began, their private entrance to the building. The hallways were empty, the residents confined to their rooms by the police presence, but Park could feel their eyes watching through cracked doorways. The old and the dying, the forgotten and the discarded, waiting to see if the system would finally deliver justice or if it would once again protect the powerful at their expense.
Go Myung-hwan's office was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor lined with framed certificates and faded photographs of the nursing home in happier times. The door had been forced open by the night staff, the frame splintered around the lock. Inside, the scene was exactly as Hana had described it: Go's body slumped across the desk, the gun on the floor, the note placed carefully beside a half-empty bottle of whiskey that Park suspected had been added to the scene after the fact.
Sergeant Kang was standing near the window, a middle-aged officer with a tired face and the demeanor of someone who had seen enough to know when he was being lied to. He nodded at Park as he entered. "Detective. I'm glad you're here. Captain Yoon called three times in the past hour, telling me to release the scene to the special unit. I've been stalling."
"You did the right thing." Park approached the desk, careful not to disturb anything. The note was written on a sheet of the nursing home's letterhead, the handwriting shaky but legible. He read it in silence, Hana reading over his shoulder.
"To whom it may concern," the note began. "I, Go Myung-hwan, accept full responsibility for the unauthorized drug trials conducted at Way of Peace Nursing Home. The decision to participate in the Soma-X program was mine alone. I was approached by representatives of Kurosu Pharma who offered research grants in exchange for access to our residents. I accepted these grants without informing the families or the health department. When residents began to die, I falsified their medical records to conceal the true cause of death. I did this not out of malice, but out of a misguided belief that the research would ultimately save more lives than it cost. I see now that I was wrong. The guilt has become unbearable. I can no longer live with what I have done."
Park read the note twice, then a third time. The words were damning—an unequivocal confession that placed the blame squarely on Go's shoulders and, by implication, shielded Kurosu Pharma from direct culpability. It was exactly the kind of note that someone in Lee Hiroshi's position would have wanted to find, and that very fact made Park deeply suspicious.
"The phrasing is wrong," Hana said, echoing his thoughts. "Go was a bureaucrat. He spoke in memos and budgets. He would never have written something this personal, this emotional. And look at the signature—it's too neat. Go's hands were shaking the night we confronted him. He was terrified. This signature was written by someone who was calm and deliberate."
Park turned to Sergeant Kang. "Who found the body?"
"Two orderlies from the night shift. They heard a crash around four in the morning. When they reached the office, the door was locked. They had to use a fire extinguisher to break the lock. The room was empty except for Go's body."
"Empty? No signs of anyone else being present?"
"The window was closed, but it wasn't locked. The fire escape is accessible from this floor. Someone could have left through the window and climbed down before the orderlies arrived." Sergeant Kang paused. "There's something else. The orderlies said they heard a car leaving the parking lot about five minutes before they found the body. They didn't think anything of it at the time, but they mentioned it to me just now."
Park made a note. "Get the security footage from the parking lot. If someone left in a hurry, the cameras might have caught their license plate."
"The cameras were disabled," Sergeant Kang said. "Someone cut the power to the security system about an hour before Go died. The backup generator didn't kick in until the orderlies forced the door."
Of course. The scene had been arranged with the meticulous precision of professionals who had done this before. The locked door, the suicide note, the whiskey bottle, the disabled cameras—every detail had been designed to create a narrative that would satisfy the authorities and close the case before it could reach the true architects of the conspiracy.
Dr. Yoon arrived twenty minutes later, her medical bag in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. She surveyed the scene with the practiced eye of someone who had examined hundreds of bodies and learned to trust nothing except the evidence they provided.
"The gunshot wound is to the right temple," she said after a preliminary examination. "The angle is unusual. Most suicides by gunshot to the head place the weapon against the temple at a perpendicular angle. This wound angles slightly upward, suggesting the gun was held by someone standing over the victim rather than by the victim himself. But that's not conclusive. I'll need to examine the weapon and the hands more closely before I can determine manner of death."
"Captain Yoon has already declared it a suicide," Park said.
"Captain Yoon is not a medical examiner." Dr. Yoon's voice was sharp. "And he is not the person who will be testifying in court. I need at least twenty-four hours before I release my findings. If anyone tries to pressure me to release them sooner, I will include that pressure in my official report."
Park felt a surge of gratitude for the small, precise woman who had been cutting open bodies for the Namhae police department for fifteen years. She had seen everything—corruption, cover-ups, the way the system protected the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable—and she had never once compromised her commitment to the truth.
"There's something else you should see," Dr. Yoon said. She lifted Go's left hand, which had been curled under his body, and turned it palm-up. The fingers were stained with dark ink, the kind of smudges that came from writing rapidly on paper. And clutched in the dead man's grip was a crumpled piece of paper, so tightly held that the responding officers had missed it entirely.
Park took the paper and smoothed it out on the desk. It was a fragment of a larger document—the corner of a page torn from what looked like a financial ledger. The fragment contained only a few words, written in Go's shaky handwriting: "Kurosu transfer - Phase Three - 500 million won - authorization required - Lee Hiroshi."
"Phase Three," Hana said, her voice barely a whisper. "Go mentioned Phase One and Phase Two in his confession. But Phase Three? The trials are still ongoing. They're planning to expand."
Park stared at the fragment in his hand. The note that had been left on Go's desk was a decoy, designed to satisfy the authorities and close the investigation. But the real message—the one Go had died trying to preserve—was this torn corner of a ledger, hidden in his own clenched fist, a final act of defiance from a man who had been complicit in atrocity but had drawn the line at letting the atrocity continue.
"The special unit will be here within the hour," Park said. "When they arrive, they'll take control of the scene. They'll accept the suicide narrative. They'll bury this fragment and everything else we've found."
"Then we don't let them," Hana said. "We take what we have and we go public. We tell the families what Go wrote, what the fragment says, what Kurosu Pharma is planning. The Festival proved that people will listen. We just need to make sure they keep listening."
Park looked at the body of Go Myung-hwan, slumped across his desk in the office where he had spent years turning human lives into line items on a balance sheet. He had been a villain. He had been a collaborator. And in the end, he had been a victim of the same system he had served, silenced by the same people who had used him.
The fragment of the ledger was still in Park's hand, its torn edge rough against his fingers. Five hundred million won. Phase Three. Lee Hiroshi's name, written in the shaky hand of a dead man who had finally decided to tell the truth.
Outside the window, the sun was rising over the port of Namhae, casting long shadows across the water. Somewhere in the mountains, Lee Hiroshi was waking up in his glass tower, drinking his green tea, looking out at the fog that hid him from the world he had helped to poison. He did not know that Go Myung-hwan had kept one final secret. He did not know that the truth was already on its way to him, carried by a detective who refused to stop and a journalist who had rediscovered her purpose and a caregiver who had risked everything to make sure the dead would not be forgotten.
The war was far from over. But for the first time since the investigation began, Park felt that they might actually win.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!