The Symbol Of Darkness

㉘Gift

 
The police station was fairly quiet in the early hours of the sunny morning. The violent crimes unit one was seated at their desks by Jungkook’s request. He had informed them yesterday that Taehyung would send him the address of Jin Mo’s side hideout, and he asked them to come early to work. 

They had also surveyed the footage of the CCTV in Daegu and managed to track Jeosun’s moves to a degree. Jeosun had died after he visited the station Ju Hyun — the detective who was in charge around the time Taehyung’s parents were murdered — once worked at. But unfortunately, they found nothing significant that would give them a lead. 

  
Jungkook tilted his head back as he massaged the sore muscles of his neck. Slumping over the screen of his computer every day and sometimes for many hours always gave him a stiff back and nape. 

He took a puff of air and held it for a couple of seconds, then vacated his lungs with a sigh. He aimed his sight at the screen again, bracing his forearm on his desk, and carried on reexamining the footage in case they missed something. Which was unlikely, but he had to do something at least. 

His attention steered towards a form that bobbed into the enclosed space of their unit’s workplace, and he could only slap a hand over his face, already able to feel the frustration of his mother’s nagging. 

“Jungkookie!” Sa Rang called as she trod closer. “Hello, boys.” She smiled at them once they all greeted her, and she leaned to plant a kiss on Jungkook’s cheek. “How are you? Why didn’t you tell me you were sick? Why didn’t you come home? Why did I find out about this from your father instead? Why—”

“God, mom,” he grumbled with a vexed moue. “I’m fine now. I didn’t want to worry you for no reason.”

“You should always come to me when you’re sick. I made you soup.” She set the bag she was holding on the desk then. “Your father told me you didn’t go home yesterday. Where did you go?”

Jungkook avoided her eyes in sudden unease. “Um, to a friend.”

Sa Rang squinted her vision at him. “What friend? You don’t have any friends.”

Seung Ho nibbled his bottom lip to choke back his snicker, but he did a rather poor job since Jungkook, of course, heard it and soured the mirth in his countenance with a glare. 

“I do now. I have one friend.”

Sa Rang studied him as she raked her brain to produce the slightest idea of who could this mysterious friend be. “You don’t mean... that man?”

Jungkook looked up at her quizzically. “Who?”

“The man I bumped into.”

“Oh.” Jungkook’s expression melted back to neutrality. “Yeah. That’s who I mean.”

A cloud of a latent worry bleared Sa Rang’s gaze as she retired into her thoughts. When Taehyung told her that Jin Mo didn’t kill her son, a part of her believed him. Mostly because she knew they didn’t have proof that Jin Mo was at the scene. But Chae Yeon reassured her that Jin Mo indeed killed her son.

Chae Yeon even showed her a footage from a CCTV that contained Jin Mo’s face — a piece of evidence the police didn’t possess because, as Chae Yeon said, they didn’t start investigating right after Kang Ho’s death because of their devastation. And she was able to get that footage before the police. For her own reasons, which she didn’t elaborate, she kept the footage for herself. 

That footage wore off her doubts and restored her faith that Jin Mo was the one. But a persistent itch had followed her since that day that urged her to talk to Taehyung again. Even though she tried to deny it, Taehyung seemed nothing like how Chae Yeon had described him. A cold-blooded, ruthless killer like Jin Mo, in short.