“Where are the contrary twins?” Jin asks Namjoon as he takes a seat opposite him. Namjoon shrugs in response, but only after he’s taken a sip of his drink.

“Hoseok told me he’s on the way. As for Yoongi, I haven’t the faintest idea,” he answers.

Just then, a chirpy voice calls out to them, “would you look at that! They started without us.”

Considering that they’re each nursing their own beers, Namjoon can guess that he and Jin didn’t get much of a head start on them. Which causes him to roll his eyes at Hoseok’s mock reprimand. “You two were probably right behind us.”

“Maybe,” Hoseok says with a grin, which is the direct opposite of Yoongi’s scowl as they both sit down. “Lecture ran a little late, but I came with this guy.” He points to Yoongi, whose brows furrow even deeper at the comment.

“He bumped into me at the door,” Yoongi corrects Hoseok. “So where’s Jungkook?” Ignoring the former’s dirty look, Hoseok asks the other two men who work more closely with the detective.

“He’s taking time off. Indefinitely,” Namjoon informs them, his tone dark although he keeps his face impassive. The mood at the table turns somber at the announcement.

"It can't have been easy having your best friend become a serial killer, then have it blamed on you," Yoongi remarks into the mug in his hand.

"You can't blame Jungkook though," Jin pipes in. "Friends drift apart all the time. It's hardly something to kill others over."

"I don't blame him in the slightest, but that doesn't mean Jungkook doesn't blame himself. Actually, I can't even imagine how I'd feel if my friend did anything to warrant a life sentence."

"He did elude us for quite a while, didn't he?" Namjoon's rhetorical question makes everyone think back on the chase that ended several months ago. "Hey, do you think that Jimin actually wanted Jungkook to catch him?"

"Why do you say that?" Hoseok's brows knit together, thinking of the possibility.

"Well, we wouldn't know it, and I'm not sure at what point Jungkook realised, but apparently the locations of all the first victims were places that he and Jungkook used to visit, or had some significance to them," Namjoon explains.