The Sun to my Moon

Chapter 6: Paradigm Shift

When Cha Dal-geon returned to the bullpen, Go Hae-ri had gathered the team in a little half-circle around one of those bulletin boards held up by two skinny metal legs on wheels. The board was turned towards the wall and the mailing tube Hae-ri had been carrying earlier was lying empty on the table beside it. Dal-geon took his place in the little group, coming to stand between Kim Se-hun and Kong Hwa-sook.

"Okay, listen up," Hae-ri said, her soft concerned voice replaced with the authoritative tone she used when she wished to command attention. "I've been thinking a lot about the Blue Shark case over the past few weeks, and the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that we need to stop being so reactive in how we deal with it."

"What do you mean?" Tae-ung asked, puzzled.

"Every time we catch a Blue Shark case, we follow up leads until they fizzle out, and then it's like we're just waiting for Edward Park to kill again on the off chance that he'll leave some evidence this time around. We need to stop being so passive. We should be forcing him to react to us, not the other way around."

"Okay," Hwa-sook said slowly. "But, Timjangnim, how do we do that when every lead we get always ends up being a dead end?"

"We do it by changing our approach," Hae-ri answered with confidence. "We've been treating the Blue Shark cases the way we treat all our other cases. We get word of a new victim, and search through the evidence to piece together the different elements of the victim's life. But Edward Park operates differently than other serial killers. He isn't motivated by jealousy, or greed, or rage. And he doesn't work alone. He has an extensive network of followers who will apparently do his every bidding. Our usual methods don't work with him, because he's a different breed than most of the murderers we go after. We're going to use those differences against him."

"Use them how, Timjangnim?" Shrek wanted to know.

"I've been working on developing an approach that will help us do that." Hae-ri turned the bulletin board around so it faced the team.

Over half the board was covered by a large map of South Korea, which was stuck full of multi-colored pins. Across the top, there was a timeline with notes, dates, and pictures of every individual who had ever surfaced in connection to any Blue Shark case the team had ever looked into. Dal-geon recognized a family picture of himself with his nephew Hoon from his case file and repressed the urge to tear it down from the display. The right side of the board seemed to be devoted to the miscellaneous. It included index cards and post its with words and names such as "Steel Corporations," "He is ray," and "Falcon's Wings" scrawled in Hae-ri's familiar hand. In the center of this collection, there was a note saying "How does he choose them?" underlined several times. In addition, there were pictures and drawings scattered over the space. The familiar image of the macabre smiley face was there, but there was also a picture of a lone teacup with blue flowers which Dal-geon recognized from the crime scene photos from the farm property where he and Hae-ri had rescued Lee Pil-sun. There were also pictures of complex surveillance systems, and a schematics drawing of an explosive device. It took Dal-geon a moment to realize the schematics were for the bomb vest a month ago that had been strapped to Hae-ri's chest for several hours on one of the most terrifying nights of his life.

Dal-geon stared at the board, appalled. He had never seen such a thorough and complex visual representation of a collection of facts relating to a case outside those movies where the psycho killer's true nature is revealed when the police storm his basement and discover evidence of his obsession in the form of a wall of photographs of his victims. This particular representation was meticulous in its level of detail, but that was Go Hae-ri for you. Apparently, when she decided to become obsessive about something, she was all in.