ENTANGLED

Chapter 1 - The First Case

The paperwork on Roseanne's desk had been sitting there for three days, untouched and apparently destined to remain that way.

She had opened the file twice. Both times, she had gotten as far as the first page before deciding that the more urgent matter was whatever was happening on her phone.

"You're not even pretending to work anymore."

Jennie's voice came from across the aisle. She didn't look up from her own screen, but Roseanne knew better than to assume she hadn't noticed.

Roseanne kept her eyes on her phone, her thumb moving lazily across the screen.

"I'm pretending very hard. You just can't tell because I'm a professional."

A quiet snort came from the desk beside her.

Lisa lowered her coffee, looking far too pleased with herself. "She's been playing that phone game for twenty minutes."

"It's not a game." Roseanne finally looked up. "It's strategic thinking practice."

Lisa stared at her.

Then at the phone.

Then back at her.

"You're feeding a cartoon cat."

"The cat," Roseanne replied with the gravity of someone defending a life's work, "has very specific dietary needs."

Jennie finally lifted her eyes from her monitor. Her expression was unimpressed in the exact way that meant she was trying not to smile.

"Detective Park. Your incident report."

"Detective Kim. My cat."

"Roseanne."

"Fine, fine."

With a sigh that suggested she had been asked to perform manual labor, Roseanne stretched in her chair. Her joints popped loudly enough to earn another look from Jennie before she pulled the file toward herself.

The Violent Crimes office at Hanpo Jung-gu was quiet for a Tuesday afternoon, but it was the kind of quiet everyone there recognized. Not peaceful. Just temporary.

Doosik had disappeared upstairs for a budget meeting twenty minutes earlier, muttering something about quarterly targets and department spending as if the numbers had personally offended him. Sungmin was three monitors deep into a CCTV investigation, headphones covering his ears while several windows played different angles of the same street. Every few minutes, he made a small triumphant noise whenever he found something interesting. Nobody asked what it was anymore.

The rest of the office had settled into the familiar rhythm of paperwork, phone calls, printers, and the occasional complaint about coffee.

Roseanne flipped through the report with considerably less enthusiasm than she had shown for her cat.

Lisa rolled her chair over and stopped beside her desk, resting her chin on one hand.

"Dinner tonight? Jisoo says she's got news."

Roseanne didn't look up. "Jisoo always has news."

"She said it's actual news this time."

"She said that last time too. It was about a cat café."

Lisa's expression turned solemn. "The cat café was genuinely important information."

Jennie exhaled through her nose.

She had long since accepted that her three closest friends operated on a completely different frequency from everyone else. Somehow, she had still chosen to keep them.