Lunchtime. The Violent Crimes team's office, Yeongdeungpo Police Station.

Slurrrp~ slurp!

Park Jeongho shoveled jjajangmyeon into his mouth, glaring at the monitor.

He'd spent all night going through CCTV from around Daerim-dong, and his eyes were bloodshot.

Play! Stop! Rewind! Play again.

He couldn't even remember how many times he'd run the same footage.

"Fuck…… where are you."

He stirred the noodles with his chopsticks, but his eyes never left the monitor.

The clue to a crime is always left somewhere near the scene!

He'd hammered that investigator's maxim into his head and stuck with it all night.

Besides, Park Jeongho was a veteran detective, twenty-five years in.

He couldn't shake the hunch that if he dug around Ri Seongcheol's loan-shark office, something would turn up.

He went over the minutes before and after the incident even more carefully.

Pedestrians, cars, parcel vans, delivery bikes, and so on.

Countless movements flickered past on the screen. He was grinding through it one more time when it happened.

"Huh……?"

Park Jeongho's chopsticks, on their way to his mouth, stopped just short of it.

The corner of the screen!

The footage came from a CCTV camera on a private house deep in an alley; they'd only gotten hold of it yesterday.

It had caught an old motorbike turning into the alley.

"Hold on. What's this?"

Click. Pause.

Park Jeongho leaned forward. The rider was wearing a black full-face helmet.

Forget his face; you couldn't even make out its outline.

What he could make out, though! He was small! Sitting on the bike, he wasn't tall at all.

The rider gave off a short, solid kind of presence.

It was a split-second shot of him riding past the house.

"……" He'd seen that silhouette somewhere. Park Jeongho's eyes sharpened.

He zoomed in on the still. Then he played it again.

A man in a black helmet, riding a motorbike!

His build looked ordinary at a glance, but it was unusual. Kim Cheolsu, whom he'd run into briefly at the survival-training ground in Goseong! Park Jeongho hadn't missed that body of his back then; he'd…