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“And you were the only person in his room at the time?” Assistant Inspector Suhyeon clarifies, leaning back in his chair. Rathar mirrors him, trying not to make it too obvious, and flicks his gaze nonchalantly skyward when he catches the violet glint in Assistant Inspector Suhyeon’s eyes.
It’s a nice place, all things considered. Hotel Q has hosted all racers, crews, and even hangers-on staff attending the annual Grand Prix for the past fifteen years, and their loyalty has generated a stupid amount of money. For Mr. Lim Junyoung, it means fifty square meters of floor-to-ceiling windows and a bathroom with three kinds of complimentary face creams, none of which Rathar can pronounce the brand names of.
Lim Junyoung himself stands at a respectable 178 centimeters and has the limber build of a casual runner. He’s one of the race photographers sent out by K Photography every year for the Grand Prix, well-known and well-liked. He’s got that vaguely tortured vibe Rathar gets sometimes from artsy people, but he’s nice enough.
He was also the first person to report the body of top racer Jang Jinwoo, found dead in his hotel room at 12:46 AM on Monday, March 18.
Rathar squirms in his seat. Questioning suspects really isn’t his thing, since he has a bad habit (or a gift, depending on your point of view) of reducing suspects to tears in a matter of sentences. Inspector Jamtteul immediately paired him off with Assistant Inspector Suhyeon when they arrived, probably because on their last case he made a little kid cry and tanked their public trust value.
And he’s learning! At least he thinks he is. Assistant Inspector Suhyeon’s reactions and behaviors are so liquid that it’s hard to follow his lead. By the time Rathar’s copied him, Assistant Inspector Suhyeon has already moved on to the next thing.
It’s a pleasure to watch him work, though, even if Rathar can’t always keep up. Assistant Inspector Suhyeon is so clearly in his element, unhesitating, uncompromising, only glancing away to jot something down on his clipboard, if that. Rathar’s handling the bulk of notes for this interview so that Assistant Inspector Suhyeon can focus on Lim Junyoung.
In Rathar’s experience, Assistant Inspector Suhyeon’s full and undivided attention is like staring into the sun with magnifying glasses taped over your eyes, and today, it’s making Lim Junyoung sweat. He hasn’t exactly been fidgeting, but his eyes keep drifting toward the wall, like he doesn’t want to talk about this. He wets his lips before he says, “Yes, it was just me and Jinwoo.”
“I see. You were visiting quite late at night, then, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I… just wanted to ask him something.”
Assistant Inspector Suhyeon’s voice is mild as he asks, “What did you want to ask him?”
Bingo, Rathar thinks, pressing his pen to the paper. The fact is, Lim Junyoung is super suspicious. He was seen arguing with Jang Jinwoo on opening day, was the first to run out and snap a picture of the pileup on day two, and most importantly, doesn’t have an alibi for the time of the murder, which both Inspector Jamtteul and Assistant Inspector Gakbyul estimated to be anywhere from 9:30 to 11:30 PM. From the moment they stepped onto the track, Duckgae had intuited that Lim Junyoung was the one to watch. This is it. Assistant Inspector Suhyeon has him.
So Rathar almost spills his entire cup of mineral water on his notes when instead of confessing, Lim Junyoung folds in half and bursts into tears.
“Oh!” Assistant Inspector Suhyeon half rises from his seat, momentarily frank with surprise. It’s gone just as fast—businesslike, he whips his sleeves over his palms like he’s going to wipe Lim Junyoung’s face. Rathar shakes himself, snags the packet of tissues from the drinks counter, and passes it to Assistant Inspector Suhyeon, who stands and rounds the table to fold it into Lim Junyoung’s hands.
“There you go, Mr. Junyoung. I apologize, I didn’t realize this was such a sensitive topic,” he says. Lim Junyoung makes a raw noise, staring wetly down at the packet of tissues cradled in his lap. “Would you like us to leave?”
Lim Junyoung shakes his head. He looks like he’s new to the concept of gravity. “No, it’s all right, I just…” He turns away to blow his nose, then straightens, smiling weakly. His face is still glazed with tears. “It hits me at the most inconvenient times, is all. I’ll be going through my day as normal, and then it just—I just remember. That Jinwoo’s d-dead.” His smile whittles down into an unhappy line.
Assistant Inspector Suhyeon is still crouched before him. Rathar gets that weird, prickling feeling—the way the wind feels at the edge of a cliff—moments before Assistant Inspector Suhyeon says, gently, “Were you very close?”
“‘Close’ doesn’t cover it. We were like—” Lim Junyoung pauses awkwardly, plows forth to pass it off. “We grew up together, in Gangwon-do, and we went to the same schools the whole way through, and when he went to racing I thought we—I thought I could stay, if I were photographing him, and cataloguing his wins and things. Help him carve his name into legend.”
Rathar ducks his head so he can scrawl gibberish into the margins of the debrief packet, a sour squirm of sympathy in his gut. Jang Jinwoo never took first place in six full seasons because he had the misfortune to debut in the same year as top racer Park Woohyun, a ten-time trophy holder who always comes in first for the Grand Prix. All the tabloids Rathar skimmed while waiting for Inspector Jamtteul to finish profiling the scene said that at this point the Grand Prix was just a formality. Everybody knew Park Woohyun was going to win, that all the other longtime racers—Jang Jinwoo included—were going to go home empty-handed. In other preliminary interviews, the only people who knew Jang Jinwoo by name were his crew and the racer who started right behind him on day one.
Assistant Inspector Suhyeon is nodding encouragingly, so Lim Junyoung continues, a bitter edge creeping into his voice. “You probably already know how it went. Seven whole years, and we got nothing. Jinwoo is—he was—he was so broken up about it, I don’t know how he got through it all. You don’t understand how good he w-was. When he debuted, everyone was talking about him, and loved him, and…” He mops his eyes. “And this is cliché, but he genuinely lit up any room he walked into, so kind, so openhearted. He was incredible.”
Rathar looks up just in time to catch the thoughtful little furrow that creases Assistant Inspector Suhyeon’s face. Judging it safe to interject, he offers awkwardly, “He was important to you.”
Lim Junyoung’s laugh is all angles, a fistful of razors. He rolls his shoulders back and sits up to his full height, and there’s something unmistakably exultant in his face when he says, “He was everything.”
And the thing is, Rathar’s not unobservant. He wouldn’t be a detective if he couldn’t pick up on the subtle details most people miss. He’s noticed that Assistant Inspector Suhyeon never makes a big deal out of anything, from admissions of petty theft to confessions that would probably go over better in a church than a police station. It makes sense—you don’t exactly want to let the culprit know that the game is up—but Rathar’s wondered if Assistant Inspector Suhyeon ever wants to emote and just doesn’t let himself.
When Lim Junyoung clasps his hands and pours his heart out and says, “He was everything,” Assistant Inspector Suhyeon actually gasps.
Maybe more like a sharp inhale between his teeth, but the effect is there. The window of perfect silence shatters. Lim Junyoung’s head snaps up, and Rathar only barely manages not to do the same by faceplanting into his notes.
Assistant Inspector Suhyeon, firing on all cylinders, quickly turns it into a coughing fit. “Sorry—one moment,” he hacks, twisting away and accepting the water Rathar all but shoves into his hands. When Lim Junyoung glances uncertainly his way, Rathar tries to go as blank as possible; he’s not a good actor, never has been. If he tries to pretend like everything is fine then Lim Junyoung will read him like an open book, so better to empty himself entirely.
Assistant Inspector Suhyeon clears his throat sheepishly, setting the glass back on the table. “Pardon me,” he says with a charming smile. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you. You were telling us about Mr. Jinwoo…?”
Lim Junyoung doesn’t follow Assistant Inspector Suhyeon’s lead. He sits back instead, openly studying Assistant Inspector Suhyeon. Rathar feels his hackles rise, adjusts his grip on his pen accordingly. Questioning isn’t too different from a fistfight: when the flow changes, you change with it, and Rathar’s sat in on enough interrogations to be able to sense the shift. Lim Junyoung, pleasant and acquiescent up to this point, might try to steer the conversation his way.
What comes out of his mouth, though, is, “You know what it’s like, don’t you, Detective?”
Assistant Inspector Suhyeon rears back so suddenly that for a confusing moment Rathar thinks Lim Junyoung hit him. He jumps to his feet, dropping his clipboard onto the desk with a clatter. Lim Junyoung yelps, looking up in alarm. Rathar, prepared for fists to fly, chokes when Assistant Inspector Suhyeon surges forth and grips Lim Junyoung’s folded hands so hard Rathar can see the skin of his knuckles pale.
“Not like you do,” Assistant Inspector Suhyeon says, the veneer stripped off, his voice somehow raw. “Not—not exactly.” Rathar’s jaw drops open when Assistant Inspector Suhyeon’s voice falters: it’s an unthinkable tell. “But. Yes. In part, I understand.” Assistant Inspector Suhyeon takes a dragging breath, one that rattles through him like he’s made of tin, and then he says, ragged, “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Rathar… has absolutely no clue what’s going on. He’s tactful enough to keep his mouth shut, but the air is emotionally charged in a way he wasn’t anticipating at all, and it kind of feels like Lim Junyoung and Assistant Inspector Suhyeon are speaking a different language.
Lim Junyoung’s face, when Rathar chances a look, is fraught with relief, even if it’s not exactly a smile. Tentative and tremulous and suffused with hope, if that counts as an expression. “You do understand,” he breathes.
“Not completely.” Assistant Inspector Suhyeon sounds steadier. At the very least, he’s firm on this point, gathering his hands to his chest and standing up. “I’m sorry for disturbing your mourning process, as well. I think we’ve heard everything we need to hear. We’ll be on our way.”
“Oh, um. Alright,” Lim Junyoung says, sounding just as blindsided as Rathar feels. It’s as abrupt an end to an interview as Rathar’s ever heard Assistant Inspector Suhyeon make. It almost feels like running away, which is dumb, because Assistant Inspector Suhyeon said it himself, they got everything they needed. Rathar dutifully took down Lim Junyoung’s alibi, his movements, even that last weird, stilted volley. It makes sense that they’d leave now, right?
Lim Junyoung walks them the five steps it takes to get to the door. He offers a dazed nod to Assistant Inspector Suhyeon’s “Thank you for your cooperation” and not much else.
Rathar, giving his notes a skim, pauses over a sentence he underlined. Intuition—not even close to Duckgae’s, but more like a general, sharpened detective’s instinct—needles the nape of his neck.
“Mr. Lim Junyoung?” he asks, frowning.
Lim Junyoung pauses in the middle of closing the door, poking his head back out. “Yes?”
Rathar pokes his tongue between his top front teeth, debating whether or not to trust his gut. Finally, he asks, “What were you going to ask Jang Jinwoo?”
Assistant Inspector Suhyeon stills.
Lim Junyoung looks at them under his lashes, his teeth square and white in his broad, beatific smile. “I was going to ask him to marry me,” he says, and shuts the door in their faces. The sound rings through Rathar like a struck bell.
They stand there for a moment. The silence in the hallway is different from the silence in the room. The secret language is suddenly clear: Lim Junyoung and Jang Jinwoo were lovers.
Rathar bites his lip, fumbling his way back through the complicated contours of the conversation that they just escaped. How much of this can he repeat? What does he even tell the others? His friend in second year was the same way, he’s pretty sure, but it’s one thing to be terrified of brushing another boy’s hand when you pass him a kkwabaegi during lunch and a completely different thing to be so totally in love with another man, to be so sure of your bond with him that you’d dare to ask him to marry you, and to lose him before you even have the chance. Thinking about it that way washes Rathar in a grief so sudden and crushing that it takes his breath away.
“It’s so sad,” he says before he can stop himself. He winces once it’s out of his mouth, hazarding a glance at Assistant Inspector Suhyeon.
Assistant Inspector Suhyeon doesn’t react, or if he does, it’s not obvious enough for Rathar to pick up on. His ears are folded back delicately. Rathar, taking in the pale slash of Assistant Inspector Suhyeon’s profile, sucks his bottom lip between his teeth again.
In that moment, even though he’s trying to hide it, Assistant Inspector Suhyeon looks terribly alone.
“Hey, you two!”
Assistant Inspector Suhyeon jumps. Rathar almost does, too. The elevator doors at the end of the hall have slid open to reveal Inspector Jamtteul, standing tall, her coat flared out around her like a storm pulling itself together.
“Assistant Inspector Suhyeon, Senior Officer Rathar!” she calls, striding over. “What did Lim Junyoung say? Did you get anything?”
That foreign grief lifts its head again, fanged with venom. Rathar gropes a hand over his belly the way he did that one time a murderer's frightened accomplice knifed him in her sitting room, remembering the abrupt red, thinking this isn’t so different from a fistfight after all. Assistant Inspector turns his flat gilt eyes on Rathar, and Rathar feels like someone’s punched him all over his body.
“...He loved Jang Jinwoo very much, Inspector,” he says helplessly.