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.
"Like I said, we're going to have to change our approach-" Hae-ri began, but she didn't have a chance to finish her thought.
"This is what you've been doing all weekend?" Dal-geon burst out incredulously. "You spent three days in the mountains building this crazy bulletin board?" She'd scared him half to death for an arts and crafts project?
She looked annoyed about being interrupted. "I had an idea to think through and I needed to be able to concentrate. I asked my friend if I could use her place and she said it was okay, so yeah, I spent the weekend up there working up a different perspective on this case."
"What friend?" Dal-geon demanded.
"What does it matter?" she said, irritated. The rest of the team exchanged uneasy glances, clearly wishing they could be elsewhere during this exchange, but not knowing how to leave the meeting without drawing unwanted attention to themselves.
Dal-geon ignored them. "Whose cabin was it?" he persisted.
She glared at him. "It was Ho-sik's cabin. He used to take the boys hunting up there. I called Sehyunssi and asked if I could use it for the weekend and she said she didn't mind."
This brought him up short. Kim Ho-sik's cabin. Hae-ri had asked Ho-sik's wife to use their cabin? Hae-ri hated to ask for favors. Yet she had felt this was important enough to merit asking for one from the wife of a man who had betrayed her. Dal-geon knew Hae-ri still felt guilty about Ho-sik's death, even though her colleague had tried to kill her. She had trusted him though, it was unfortunate Edward Park used his family to turn him against Hae-ri. Dal-geon scowled. If Ho-sik had been alive, she probably would have told him where the hell she was going when she decided to leave town for three days.
Hae-ri took advantage of Dal-geon's temporary distraction as he considered this thought to pick up where she had left off. "As I was saying," she said with a pointed look at Dal-geon. "Obviously we're still going to take into consideration his choice of victims, but we're going to re-focus the investigation on his followers. Getting as much information from his followers as we can is going to be our top priority from here on out."
"But they're all fiercely loyal to him," Se-hun pointed out. "The ones who aren't end up dead."
"Look, all those people that he's gotten to follow him over the years didn't grow up in a bubble," Hae-ri said. "They all have people who've known them, cared for them. It has always bothered me how he's managed to get such a complete hold on his followers. I want to know how he convinces them to give up their lives for him, to follow him unwaveringly. To do that, we need to reconstruct their histories, find out what led them to Edward Park in the first place. His network is like a spider web- we're going to identify all the connections in the web, and then we are going to use the common threads to lead us back to Edward Park."
Hwa-sook was staring at the map. "What do the pins mean?"
"Red ones are victims that fit the profile of his original targets," Hae-ri informed her. "Young women he killed by stabbing them while they were at home alone. Purple ones are the victims that he killed directly that deviate from the profile in some way. Yellow ones represent the last known location of his accomplices, and the green ones represent people killed by his accomplices."
Dal-geon peered at the board. Each pin held a scrap of paper with a name and a date scribbled on it to the map. He saw a blue pin with his own name on it next to two purple ones in Banghak-dong. "I see this blue one is meant to be me," he commented.
"That's right," Hae-ri confirmed.
"Why do you have me in Banghak-dong when I live in Chang-dong?" he inquired.
She shook her head. "You only live in Chang-dong because of your pursuit of Edward Park. You were in Banghak-dong at the time you initially got involved in the case."
He scanned the rest of the map. "I'm the only blue one."
She shrugged. "You don't fit any of the other categories."
There was only one other pin without any other companion pins of the same color. This one was silver. Dal-geon took note of it, but didn't inquire. He would let it be, for the moment.
Hae-ri continued. "The whole concept behind what we're going to be doing here is similar to how those social networking sites work. Even if Edward Park's followers can't lead us to him directly, it's likely that at least some of them know each other, or know other people who also know him. And chances are that those people aren't as clever or as careful as Edward Park is. One of them will make a mistake, and that's how we're going to finally crack this thing."
There was a brief silence while everyone processed this. Gi Tae-ung was the first to speak up. "Where do we start?"
Hae-ri checked her watch. "I have a ten o clock meeting with Gang Boojangnim. We'll have to wait to dive into the details until I get back. This is going to be our primary focus for foreseeable future, so go ahead and take a little time to tie up any loose ends you can on your other work. I'll be back in an hour and I'll give you your assignments then."
She left.
Se-hun exhaled. "Whew. It's a pretty big change from standard procedure. Think it'll work?"
Tae-ung shrugged. "It's the best idea that anyone has come up with for this case in a long time. And what we've been doing hasn't been working, so a change is probably a smart idea."
Hwa-sook was still staring at the map. "It's brilliant."
Privately, Dal-geon agreed with her assessment. It was such a straightforward idea, elegant in its simplicity. By reorganizing the evidence to sort through it using this new perspective, Hae-ri had taken everything they'd ever done to catch Edward Park and turned it on its head. This paradigm shift opened up possibilities he had never considered before.
The others continued to discuss the elements of the board, throwing questions back and forth.
Dal-geon tuned them out. He only had one question about Hae-ri's new approach to the case...
Why hadn't he thought of it first?