CASE 4419 - Bang Chan

CASE 4419.

The person who had come to bring to light the art of mathematics could blithely jump off a bridge. The incalculable amount of numbers that filled her paper sheet made no sense. Negative signs, directions, abscissae, ordinates, third-degree equations... Why was there so much to consider in order to determine a mere security perimeter? Why did the police forensics need to be absent because of external training? Why this specific day, when she needed them the most? While she had to give back to her captain the results for him to accept her request of reconnoitering? Luck was not on her side, it had already helped her too much in previous cases. She now had to manage as best she could and try to solve this equation seemingly extracted out of a book compiled by Einstein. Admittedly, she was currently lacking rationality and objectivity, yet mathematics was for the woman what his heel was for Achilles: a fucking pain in the ass! As a kindergarten or as a college student, mathematics classes were just a time slot during which it was convenient for her to do the homework required in other subjects. She was not good at mathematics, her former teachers knew it, her parents knew it, her friends knew it, and her colleagues knew it too.

"If someone would've told me that Lieutenant Park would block on a calculation, I-" The man's sentence was cut off by a paper pellet, filled with numbers, which he received in the head.

"Shut the fuck up, Jake."

The latter was new to the department; of American origins, he had left the New York police to move to Seoul and work for the S.K.I.S: South Korean Investigation Services. He had explained to her about the many job offers he had received when he announced his resignation. She had found it staggering how he did not accept the post offered to him by the FBI but the one by the S.K.I.S, even though he had no notion of the Korean language. At that exact moment, the woman decided that she would never try to find a meaning to Jake's absurd thoughts again. The S.K.I.S. was not known of many people based in Korea because it covered secret sector affairs, unlike the detestable public services which dealt with the life of the capital's inhabitants. The national body acted in the shadows, out of sight. Its creation had closely followed the one of the FBI with whom they had many relations and connections. The woman only kept a dreadful memory of the only joint mission she had done with a member of the American organization. Those who knew about the institution had vowed to remain silent, whether it was employees or civilians.

Today, she wanted to waive the confidentiality clause of her contract and discuss this case with her parents, close friends, neighbors, anyone who could possibly help her move forward in the resolution of this bloody case. Today, she wanted to shout her frustration from all the rooftops in Seoul. It had been two years, twenty-four months, seven hundred and thirty days that this file had been dropped off on the pile of files in progress piled up at the corner of her desk. The first weeks were the easiest, finding clues on clues, the main suspects; with a gold road in front of her, the woman felt invincible and ready to finish this case in record time. Never could she have guessed the long period of doubts and failures she would go through; everything seemed perfect. The harsh reality took care of putting the lieutenant back in her place. From that moment on, the weeks turned into months and then years. Soon an inquiry that initially seemed child's play became a nightmare, replacing the golden road with a path filled with deadly traps. The suspects, whom the agent managed to identify as a group of nine boys, had perennially evolved into their procedures. They now acted quickly, accurately and concisely, distressing a real ordeal to her team that only managed to reach to the places located after the exchange had been carried out. The only traces they sometimes succeeded to find were the bodies of the victims left behind by the group after savagely killing them. At some point, she began to think they were doing this because they did not want to get rid of the bodies by themselves. This theory was refuted when her team and she arrived on a ground burned with gasoline and discovered there unidentifiable calcined bodies. The rest of the affair was nothing but a succession of failures, false hopes as well as other shameful moments for her, yet impressive, career. These moments, the woman wanted to forget them, to erase them from her cerebral cortex. Unfortunately for her and her self-esteem, the numbers never lied. In total, in more than eight hundred exchanges in the space of two years that took place, she didn't interrupt any. Not even one. With only two years of experience, this group of mafioso had succeeded in driving incompetent the S.K.I.S, an institution created in 1912. How did they do that? The young woman did not know and, to tell the truth, she did not know anything anymore. Her brain was shutting down without her being able to do something about it. The false leads, the bad deductions, all these things had murdered her ego and her self-confidence.