"Loyalty!"

"Skip it……! Bad luck's been on me since I got out of bed."

Flash! Flash! Flash-flash-flash!

Forensic officers had their white coveralls pulled up over their heads.

All of them wore blue nitrile gloves and shoe covers and moved quickly.

Some had their kits open off to one side and were collecting evidence; the rest went on firing camera flashes and putting the scene on record.

A middle-aged man with a badly tired face came in slowly between them.

This was Senior Inspector Park Jeongho, head of the Violent Crimes team in the CID at Seoul Yeongdeungpo Police Station.

He had worked late the night before and barely made it home as it was getting light. One or two hours' sleep, and there was a call again first thing.

"You're going to be the death of me."

The tiredness had piled up and it came out of his mouth, but his face changed the moment he stepped into the scene.

Twenty-five years, all of them in Violent Crimes.

The entrance he had come through. The first marks on the walls and the floor. Fittings knocked over and scattered everywhere. The direction the blood had sprayed.

Park Jeongho's eyes moved over the scene fast, and it looked like a glance and wasn't one.

"Chief."

Lee Sangmin, the senior detective on the team, came up to him.

"What have we got?"

"We'll need the autopsy for anything exact, but time of death looks like around midnight last night."

Park Jeongho looked around him without any particular expression.

"All this went on and nobody called it in?"

"It's a market alley. There's almost nobody here at night, and it's a noisy street to begin with."

"Haa."

Park Jeongho let out a long, deep breath.

"Ri Seongcheol, you little shit. I told you to live decent."

Ri Seongcheol was not an unfamiliar name to the detectives on the Violent Crimes team.

He was a Joseonjok loan shark who had worked the district for a long time.

He was famous enough that Yeongdeungpo station kept a file of its own: the lineages and the…