“Victoria, you fabulous, delightful, beautiful woman,” Jongin wheedles, stopping in front of Victoria’s desk the following day.

She appraises him, amused. “Oh god. What do you need now?”

“You know those evidence pictures you brought me yesterday?” he asks, leaning close over the desk and lowering his voice lest they be overheard.

Her expression grows more wary and less amused now. “Yeah, what about them?”

“There’s something I need,” Jongin says plaintively.

She shakes her head, holding up her hand to stop him before he can even finish his sentence. “Oh no. No way. You may be a cutie-patootie, but I’ve already put my neck on the line for you once.”

“But Victoria, you’re the only person in the entire precinct who can get away with stuff like this,” Jongin practically begs. “If I were to try it, the Chief would fire me on the spot.”

“Because it's incredibly illegal, Jongin,” Victoria points out. “Getting case files is one thing, but taking evidence from the evidence locker is an entirely different matter. That’s not just losing your job, kiddo. That’s going to jail.”

Jongin looks at her helplessly. She’s really his only hope to getting the key out of the evidence locker.

She shakes her head again. “I’m sorry, love. I like you. I really do. But I can’t lose my job and go to jail over whatever it is you’re digging around in. I’m sorry. I can’t help you this time.”

Jongin tries one more time. “I’ll do anything, Victoria. Anything you want, I’ll do it.”

“Sorry, love,” she says, and she’s smiling again, half exasperated and half amused. “You’ve got nothing that I want.”

Jongin has to cut his losses, and he returns to his office in low spirits.

“Kid,” Victoria calls after him. He’s half-hoping that she’ll change her mind about helping him, but he should have known better. “I don’t know what it is you’re getting yourself into, but here’s a little advice: stop. Whatever it is, it’s not worth losing your job and possibly going to jail.”

Jongin thanks her, but he knows it’s not that simple. Finding out what happened to Kyungsoo is worth going to jail and losing his job, at least to him.

His problem now is getting into the evidence locker to retrieve the key.

Jongin has been at the precinct long enough to know the layout by heart now, even if he’s never been to certain parts of the building. The evidence locker is off a corridor at the back. The door to the corridor is locked, with only a handful of people around the precinct having a key. Not only that, but the corridor is in the direct line of sight of the Chief’s office. Even if he does manage to get the key, it’s practically a suicide mission with the Chief there.

But Jongin has a goal and he’s not going to let this little setback stop him. So he focuses on the first step: getting the key to the locked corridor where the evidence locker is located.

Though he knows there are several people with keys to that corridor, he only knows two for sure: the Chief and Victoria. Getting the key from the Chief is absolutely out of the question, so he focuses on Victoria’s. He knows she won’t give it to him if he asks – she’s already said she won’t help him with this – so he decides, as much as he hates it, that he has to steal it from her.

He tricks Sehun into helping him out. Sehun and Victoria have always been close, so it doesn’t take much. When they all gather one morning to head to Club Espresso for their usual coffee, Sehun invites Victoria to come with them.

“Oh, thanks love, but I can’t leave the desk unattended,” she says.

“Jongin can stay for you,” Sehun says. “He doesn’t want coffee this morning. Besides, everyone loves looking at his pretty mug when they come in the door.”

Thankfully Victoria doesn’t seem suspicious in the least. “Fine, fine. But we have to hurry or the Chief will have my hide.”

Jongin politely waves them out the door, waiting until the car pulls out of the parking lot before yanking open each and every one of the drawers in Victoria’s desk in his mad search for her keys.

The biggest problem is that Victoria has a lot of keys. A lot. The precinct was built well before everything became electronic, so there are keys everywhere. Scattered on her desk, hanging on hooks on the wall, piled up in drawers. Even with a vast majority of the keys labeled in tiny, meticulous handwriting that can only be Victoria’s, it seems like a pretty hopeless task to locate the one key that he needs in the brief amount of time that he has before Victoria and the others get back from their coffee break.

He is still rifling through the plethora of keys, some on rings and some just out loose, when the police cruiser they’d taken to Club Espresso pulls back into the car park. Jongin curses under his breath, slamming the drawers that he’d been rifling through closed. He hasn’t found the key yet, and it looks like he’s out of time.

He’s about to get up when he notices a set of keys hanging on a hook just beside the desk. They’re all immaculately labeled in Victoria’s pretty handwriting. He snatches the ring off the hook and begins scanning the labels on the keys. These are the keys for the records room, the off-limits places around the precinct. His heart is pounding; he might have hit the jackpot with these.

And there it is. A key labeled evidence corridor. He can hear the voices of his friends coming closer, nearing the front doors; Chanyeol is laughing raucously at something someone said. Jongin’s fingers are shaking as he struggles to get the key off the ring. He has barely managed to get it free and replace the ring on the hook when everyone comes in, carrying their cups of steaming coffee, still chuckling over whatever Sehun had said.

“Was it busy?” Victoria asks sympathetically, coming around to her desk and setting the coffee cup down on a napkin.

Jongin prays to whatever god might be out there that she doesn’t notice anything amiss on her desk. “Nah, it was boring. Nobody came in and nobody called. I wish I had your job. You don’t have to do much, do you?”

“You might want to step away before she kills you,” Luhan suggests with a chuckle. “Insulting her job might be a dangerous thing to do.”

“Victoria has the hardest job of all around here,” Sehun agrees, slinging an arm around her.

Jongin holds up his hands in surrender, managing to slip the key into the pocket of his trousers along the way. “Okay, okay! I take it back!”

“Damn straight,” Victoria laughs. “Now all of you get lost. I’ve got work to do.” And she shoos them away.

Jongin is more than relieved to get away, closing himself up in his office, trying to calm his racing heart. With his luck, Victoria will notice that something is missing right away. His only hope is that he can get into the evidence locker before she confronts him about it.

He plans his big break-in for that night. The sooner he can get the key from the photograph the better. He needs to replace the stolen key on Victoria’s key ring before anyone else finds out about it.

Now his main obstacle is the Chief. The door to the corridor he needs access to is directly across from the Chief’s office, and Jongin knows that Chief Wu often stays at the precinct long after everyone else has gone home. And once it gets late, he leaves his office door open so he can hear what’s going on in the building. It’s going to be impossible to get into the corridor with Chief Wu in his office.

He could always wait until the Chief goes for a bathroom break, but he figures it will probably take him a bit of time to locate the key he needs, and he can’t risk coming out of the corridor when the Chief is back in his office. He needs a distraction, something that will keep the Chief out of his office for at least half an hour.

Apparently luck is on his side today.

He’s heading out of his office, thinking that it’s too risky to try and break in tonight, when he runs into none other than Chief Wu and his partner, Minseok.

“There you are,” Chief Wu says, and Jongin cringes. What if he’s been found out? Did Victoria realize the key is missing and rat him out? Is he about to get fired? Or worse, arrested?

“Yes sir?” Jongin forces himself to stay calm. “You were looking for me?”

“Yeah.” As usual, the Chief is brief and to the point. “We’ve just gotten a call regarding a drunk accosting women down at the mall. I’d like someone with a bit more experience than you on it, so Sergeant Kim and I are going to check it out ourselves. Can you stay and answer the phones? Just until the night receptionist arrives? She should be here in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

Jongin resists the urge to jump for joy. This is just the opportunity he needs. He checks his watch theatrically. “Twenty minutes? Yeah, I can do that. I’ll just call my girlfriend and tell her I’ll be late.”

Chief Wu claps him on the shoulder. “Good man. Let’s go, Kim.” And he and Minseok head off.

Tossing his belongings back into his office, Jongin makes a beeline for the locked corridor by the Chief’s office, digging the key out of his pocket as he goes. His hand is shaking so much that he can hardly put it in the lock, but eventually he does and it clicks open. He slips inside.

It’s dark and musty inside; it’s obvious that not many people come to look at evidence from cold cases. Luckily for him, everything is labeled meticulously in Victoria’s neat handwriting that he has come to recognize so well. He finds the box containing the evidence from Kyungsoo’s case with relative ease, and he reminds himself to thank Victoria at some point for her almost obsessive need to label everything properly.

Inside the box he finds what he’s looking for, among a few other things the original investigation team thought might be important. He picks the key up. It’s small and silver, fitting into the palm of his hand almost the exact way it had the last time he’d held it, back when he was just a kid, his head full of dreams. He stares at it for a long moment, but a car honking from outside brings him back to his senses. Now that he’s got what he’s looking for, he needs to get out of there.

He replaces the evidence box the way and leaves the corridor, locking it behind him. He’s just replaced the stolen key on the ring at Victoria’s desk when the night receptionist comes in.

“O-oh, hello,” she stammers, the way she always does when she comes face-to-face with Jongin. “I-I didn’t know you’d still be here.”

“Hi Krystal,” Jongin replies, smiling genuinely. “The Chief and Sergeant Kim had to go do something, so Chief Wu asked me to stay here until you arrived.”

The girl, Krystal, blushes. “T-thanks. I’ll take it from here.”

So Jongin retrieves his belongings from his office and leaves, his fingers curling around the little key in his pocket.

Now he just needs to get to the thing that this key unlocks. 

Thanks so much for reading! I'm sorry for the cliffhanger last chapter, and for the one this chapter. And for all the many more that will probably come in the future >.<

Also, thanks to everyone who guessed what the key goes to! Some of you got it right, which is quite impressive! A lot of you guessed that it was the key to Jongin's heart, which was hysterical. I rolled like a buffalo haha. You'll find out for sure what the key goes to in in the next chapter ^^

Love you guys!