⁞⁝⁞⁝⁞ 3 ⁞⁝⁞⁝⁞

 

Someone had gone to the effort of sweeping up the soil before he’d arrived—days after his last encounter with the Kim brothers—but Kyungsoo’s palms were still printed brown after handling only a dozen or so files. Jongdae had taken residency in his father’s chair, which had dirt caked into the grooves of the leather, so Kyungsoo sat on the timber floor as he leaned back against the desk.

“We’ve still got no clue who wedged that wood into the window, just so you know.” Jongdae spoke into the report he held up to his face, leaning to and fro in the chair as it squeaked in time with his movements. “So many people come in and out everyday, and not just us policemen,” he continued, “only a few days ago Kim and Park were having a tiff in here—”

“Stop,” Kyungsoo interrupted. Then, “Repeat.”

“Er, a few days ago Kim Junmyeon and Park Chanyeol were havin’ a tiff?”

“Elaborate.” Kyungsoo rolled over onto his knees, head peeking over the edge of the desk to watch as Jongdae explained. He squinted his eyes, haloed rings of sunlight streaming in through the window. They lit up Jongdae’s outline from behind, blurring his physicality with an affectionate divinity.

“Park borrowed various pieces of farming equipment from Kim, and Kim says one of them was some hunting blade he didn’t get back. He thinks Park pinched it, Park says otherwise.”

“Hunting blade, you say.”

“Got pretty heated over it, too.”

Kyungsoo groaned as he got up off the ground and onto two feet. Patting himself down as he straightened was a useless task, though he only remembered the dirt on his hands after he’d already printed it all over his lower half. He blinked the sunspots out of his eyes.

Jongdae had quietened again, and Kyungsoo was left with his thoughts as he began to idly organize the vetted and unvetted documents stacked on the desk. The thing about working alone in a crime was that a path leading back to one person was deadly. Adding more variables, however, created a web any man or murderer could hide behind. Unfortunately, it relied on knowing what everyone else involved said at all times. This was the aspect that few individuals could manage.

“Tell me more about Kim Junmyeon.” Kyungsoo flicked through grimy manila folders, giving one glance to each before moving to the next. The textured slaps of paper were rhythmic and he noticed with relief that the chair across from him had stopped wheezing.

“Well, he has the second-largest farm in Greyvil,” Jongdae began, “selling veg, poultry, meat and fertilizer in the market. His son—”

“He sells soil, does he. And he had an opportunity to wedge open the window, along with Park Chanyeol…” When he unearthed the folder with the corresponding label, he flipped it open. Completely empty. “Except, according to Jongin, Mr Park is in no shape to be climbing through windows.”

“Listen, you know I’m grateful for your help, Kyungsoo,” Jongdae said. His tone was downturned, and Kyungsoo could hear the “but” before he’d re-opened his mouth. “But as a certified police officer, I’m gonna need a little more than that to base suspicion off-a. Besides, I don’t get why we’re looking through all my father's old files for somethin’ not here. We don’t know for sure whoever did this got what they were looking for, anyway.”

The dirty cover of the manila folder gritted against Kyungsoo’s palm. If anything, Jongdae was the one helping Kyungsoo. Though, once he took a moment to think on it, he knew that wasn’t right either. Jongdae was yet to prove himself at all helpful.

“And yet, I have a feeling they did.” He tossed Kim Junmyeon’s empty file onto the timber tabletop before Jongdae. “I hope you’ll keep up that sense of duty when re-examining your father’s body.”

The folder was flicked open, and the click of his tongue gave notice to Jongdae’s understanding. He kept it in his grip.

“Well, that gives us a who and a how but not a why…” For the first time, Jongdae seemed astute and not limited by his own lacking aptitude. Still, he lost the focused demeanor a second later to stare up at Kyungsoo with a childishly scrunched nose. “Wait, what d’you mean re-examine my father’s body? Why would I do that?”

“To figure out the same thing Mr Zhang did that got him killed, of course,” Kyungsoo explained. He began stacking the rest of the files as he waited for Jongdae to get his thoughts together, and since this action was nothing if not considerate, he indulged himself as he next spoke. “And watch the way you word things, Jongdae, it almost sounds like you’re unprepared to do your certified job.”

“There’d be a lot to say about someone prepared to look at their dead dad’s corpse, I tell you. Even worse than getting shot in the shoulder, I reckon.”

There, the file left unearthed by Kim Junmyeon’s departure stuck out readily. Kyungsoo’s hand was pulled into its gravity unprompted, orbiting through its contents in a cycle.

“Shot in the shoulder…” he said, though entirely distracted. His eyes and mind were on only the printed ink before him. “...Perhaps there’s more to you than I thought.”

“Yes, well, I am actually quite—”

“I’m leaving.” Kyungsoo made his way to the exit, throwing the words over his shoulder like an afterthought. “And I’m taking this with me.”

“—interesting.”

 

⁞⁝⁞⁝⁞

 

“Interesting, indeed.” The closed file flopped onto the table, the adjacent reading lamp swaying like the spotlight of a helicopter from the force of the drop. It would have slid downhill if not for Kyungsoo’s assured pressure atop. “For someone of your nature, shooting a gun haphazardly seems a little discordant.”

Kim Minseok held his current read to his chest as he looked up from his seat. There was a tremulous obstinance to his stare. A child’s attempt at confidence.

“It was.” He straightened his back immediately, but the sudden dimple that appeared clued Kyungsoo in that he was biting his cheek. “A once-off offense I wasn’t dumb enough to repeat. What interest that is of yours, I have no idea.”

“Well, it can become the interest of an official police inquiry instead, if you’d prefer it.”

“Please, have a seat.”

Kyungsoo rolled his eyes, taking his seat opposite the boy whose temper was one prod away from breaking through the surface tension of his manicured facade.

“You were discovered by the Sheriff to be shooting recklessly along the border of your father’s property.” With the way Minseok stared at the manila folder between them, he certainly knew what was written about him within. “Proficiency with a gun… is a surprising discovery, seeing as Mr Zhang was shot in the chest.”

“What?” The nasal exclamation was quick and sharp, a single whip of a snake’s tongue. Minseok dropped his book to his lap, scrubbing his gloved hands over his face repeatedly until it turned red. “No—I’m not—the word proficient would have never been used.”

He was of course correct. The late Sheriff Kim had emphasized the sloppy and mad manner in which the shotgun was slung around as a crying teenager pulled the trigger and reloaded with heaving abandon. Minseok had clearly been in the midst of a rampant breakdown at the time. What could have happened had the Sheriff been the cause of another tantrum was what interested Kyungsoo particularly. Perhaps murder, if he were angry enough. The multitude of stab wounds the first victim had suffered surely pointed to rage.

“It says you were upset over being teased by other children.”

“‘Teased’ is such a patronizing word, isn’t it?” Though the rubbing had made his face flushed, it still did nothing to stop the misty glaze over his eyes. He stared at Kyungsoo imploringly. “Do you know what it’s like to always be pushed around, to have ugly words thrown at you wherever you go?” he asked. “Do you know how angry you get after years of having your school books stolen and your clothes muddied?”

Kyungsoo didn’t say yes. He knew Minseok didn’t want to hear it; didn’t want his point thwarted. He let the kid marinate in his despondency, in his desperate resentment, a moment longer.

“And so,” Kyungsoo began again, looking around the room though nothing had changed since his last visit. “He made you turn the old silent cinema into a library. A safe haven.”

“Community service,” Minseok added. His body had slumped forward out of his usual erect carriage, elbows digging into the redwood table. “The safety it provided was a serendipitous byproduct.”

This time he was quite wrong. The Sheriff had clearly outlined such intentions in his report. Kyungsoo didn’t think it would change anything if Minseok knew, and so never bothered to correct him.

"Do y—they—am I going to be taken to the station?" Minseok's gloves yet again obstructed the majority of his face, though the glassy shine of his eyes peeked through the trembling cracks. "Zhang—I can't—I think I'm going to be sick."

Kyungsoo remained shrouded in the surrounding silence as Minseok's breathing evolved into an erratic storm. His constitution was unreasonably weak, and Kyungsoo thought it would be far too flattering to even entertain the possibility of his behavior being a performance.

The report had stated the gun Minseok used to be a twenty-gauge shotgun, whereas Mr Zhang had been shot by a forty-five caliber, at best. The firearms were quite different, and so Kyungsoo saw no connection between Minseok and the murders via weaponry. Moreover, it was a gamble whether Minseok would have been able to make it to the station before keeling over in a messy puddle of his own nerves or not.

Minseok continued to shiver as though shaking away his shadow could somehow reveal the world from all its darkness. Yet there he sat, in a jaded room with nothing but hollow pages and printed words, only one lamp lit to serve as a lighthouse for deliverance of demure sanguinity, should there be any lurking in a charcoaled crevasse. It was then that Minseok's loneliness crept up along Kyungsoo's fingertips, curled around his wrist and pulled with all its frigid weakness.

A ringing chattered around the room, dulled through the fog of still air. Minseok froze, and made no move to acknowledge it other than that. It stopped. When it started again, Kyungsoo retreated from the reading room to the foyer. There, the rotary desktop phone stood, its handset trembling as it chimed in a desolate corner.

It was a gorgeous piece of work, the body made of a wood so dark the grain was lost in its depth of rich purple. Definitely from the twenties—half a century old. The dull brass accents shone like a veteran's badge and the metal die-cast handset weighed cold in Kyungsoo's palm, soulless for the longest time.

Kyungsoo lifted the receiver to his ear, giving no notice to the cheap pinewood table the telephone had been discarded to, instead watching as the diaphanous veil of cobweb shadowed his movement. He didn't bother with a greeting.

"Hello?" the voice called, anxiousness not the passenger but the driver of the tone.

There had been excitement, he realized, from a vintage phone ringing in the middle of an all but abandoned theater. He only noticed it as he felt it drain from his body entirely. Kyungsoo clicked his tongue at the mundane turn of events.

"Jongdae," he said, and left it at that.

"Oh thank the Lord it is you, Kyungsoo." A burst of air crackled the speaker by his right ear, earning a wince and not much else. "I took a chance on you being in the library, seeing Jongin said you like to dally there," Jongdae continued, "though he also said—er, anyway, it don't yet matter seeing as nothing’s confirmed and I’d think you’d be buzzin’ busy with the file you took with you."

Jongdae laughed as he always did when he was nervous and knew it was showing. It was a good sign for Kyungsoo, and not because he received pleasure from hearing Jongdae express joy. It meant that the policeman was finally going to get to the point.

"Anyway," he repeated, "I, er, looked over my father's body as you suggested. Gotta say, I don't know even a trough's fill of medical stuff." Another laugh, and at this point Kyungsoo turned to the stained glass windows by the entranceway, watching fingers of light pulling at the patched-up boards that covered them. "But, er, the holes got this funny dent in the side of them… could be from a nail notch."

"Or from almost anything else," Kyungsoo added. The rays of the sun tore through the cracks like daggers, but the dust that lit up from them floated and spun a dance of peace and inertia.

"Well, yeah. But with the width of 'em, and if it really is from a nail notch, it'd match the knife Kim and Park were arguing about."

Kyungsoo smelled the stale dust as he stood in Jongdae's uncertain pause, hearing nothing but distant whines of leather and the call of a lone magpie. Perhaps he was impatient, but perhaps impatience was just what the stagnant town needed.

"You're going to meet me somewhere," he told Jongdae, before removing the handset from his facial proximity. He turned back to the inky doorway he was familiar with by now, calling out into its depths, "Minseok!"

 

⁞⁝⁞⁝⁞

 

Speculation was possibly Kyungsoo's worst strength. He preferred to say all related traits were due to his observant nature, but observing was removed. Scientific. Kyungsoo's oftentimes hands-on approach could not always be so clinical.

The blood-orange sun sank closer to the horizon, a stop sign burning its warning against the headlights of ignorance, as Kyungsoo strode straight to the pub from the library with nothing short of conviction. After all, distance was never covered by hesitation.

Jongdae hadn’t yet arrived, and so Kyungsoo made his way inside alone. The door rattled as it closed behind him and the humid fog of beer and airborne sweat overwhelmed him at once. It took him a few moments to re-orientate himself, a few more to spot the straw hat he was looking for.

No one was sitting with Kim Junmyeon, his head tipped low as he hunched over his drink on the bar. Had he not seen the way his heels tapped against the footrest of the stool, he’d have thought Junmyeon was asleep. He very much wasn’t though, and with the joyous rambling around them, Kyungsoo belatedly realized sleep was probably impossible anyway.

“Indulge me, won’t you, Junmyeon.” Kyungsoo brushed beside the man to take the seat next to him. Junmeyon raised his head only enough to make his confusion visible from under the brim of his hat. “Join me for some fresh air.”

Once outside, Junmyeon leaned against the pub’s wall, his squinted eyes all but lacking their usual asperity. His continued silence warned of his lacking mood for conversation, though Kyungsoo wasn't one to care for others' moods.

"You seem perfectly undisturbed in my private company," he said. The last rays of golden heat stretched in a languid haze over the pair, the lights from inside the pub beginning to glow brighter than the outdoors. A prelude of chilled air murmured over Kyungsoo's arms and he rolled down his long sleeves, taking his time to brush out the wrinkles and re-button his cuffs. "Well," he amended, "no more disturbed than ordinary."

"Were you expectin' me to be afraid of a city slicker?" For the first time, Kyungsoo heard Junmyeon's laugh. It was a rasping sort of noise, the sort only pipe-smokers could ever replicate. "You ain't got your hands dirty a da