Chapter 1: Greetings (1/1)

A girl, dressed professionally in a crisp white blouse and black pencil skirt, along with a black suit jacket and heels, strode confidently into the headquarters of the Busan Police Department. The lush, black hallways were familiar to her; the waves of admiring colleagues, subordinates and even superiors were refreshing yet regular. Clutching the identification tag tightly in her jacket pocket, she made her way into the packed lift (it was 8am in the morning after all), a cup of coffee casually slung on her free hand. She got out on the 10th floor, and walked briskly down another corridor to a glass-partitioned office.This is Kim Seolhyun, Head of the Serious Crimes Division in the Busan PD. “Hey, Seol, you’re back!” greeted a short, black haired girl enthusiastically. That was Chanmi, the maknae of their team, and fresh out of high school. She had just joined the team last year, but with her impressive forensic knowledge and enthusiasm had quickly become an important member of the team.“In the meantime~,” sang Mina, the cute klutz of their team.“We have a case for you!” completed Yuna, the sensible, reasonable analyst in their team who happens to like cute klutzes.“It’s a serial killer. 5 murders across the 2 weeks you weren’t here,” interrupted a sober, serious voice, the owner of which dumped 5 case files onto Seolhyun’s desk.“Sheesh, Baechu,” complained Mina, “you don’t have to be so serious all the time.”“Hey guys, just chill, seriously. Joohyun, could you brief me on the case so far?” Seolhyun said with a tone of finality, the definitiveness in her demeanour part of how she became the leader of this team despite three quarters of her subordinates being older than her.Joohyun flipped open her laptop, loaded the slides and transmitted them onto their whiteboard via the projector. Flipping through 5 slides in quick succession, she went through the brief profiles of each of the 5 deceased. “You can find more detailed profiles on them in your file,” advised Joohyun, before moving on to the suspects.“Strangely, for such a case we don’t have concrete, evidence-based suspects yet. The serial killer is probably very skilled, at least in the field of covering up evidence. All our basic, essential methods of recovering evidence have been thwarted in some way or the other,” continued Joohyun.Seolhyun took a sip of her coffee, before choking and spitting some of it back. It’s so bitter, she thought. She had definitely gotten too used to the gourmet coffee she sipped on her holiday. “Unnie, here’s a tissue,” she heard Chanmi’s voice ringing out beside her, Chanmi having scooted to her side all the way from the opposite side of their conference table.“What we do have, however, is suspects unearthed by circumstantial evidence,” Joohyun continued, flipping to another slide containing the picture of two girls. “The one on the left is Park Choa, aged 30. The one on the right is Shin Jimin, aged 29. But what we have on them is very sketchy, to say the least. Both were the founding members of Elvis Book Club, which meets every Wednesday at the Ace Library, located in downtown Busan. All 5 of the deceased were regular members of the Elvis Book Club, having attended for varying lengths—Park Sojin, the longest, at 8 months; Lee Hyeri, the shortest, at just 2 weeks.”“Is that all we have on them?” questioned Seolhyun, after Joohyun paused. “If that’s all we have, we might as well just give up on those two already.”“We have two more circumstantial reasons that I assure you are far more important, and which I will cover later on in the briefing,” assured Joohyun.“Fine. What’s the MO?”“Well, it varies. Some involved the victim being bludgeoned to death, others involves asphyxiation via rope. It differs between victims, but the MO is largely restricted to these two variations.”“If so,” Seolhyun interrogated, sipping her bitter coffee, “how do you know it’s a serial killer? It could be just 5 murders that happen to fall close to each other.”“Because of the following two intriguing factors linking all the cases together. Firstly, the killer leaves behind a namecard,” Joohyun pauses to fish out said namecard from her pocket, and places it in front of Seolhyun, “that bears the mark of Moya-ism.”Seolhyun twiddled with the card in her hand. It was made out of thin paper, the edges stained with blood. It was plain white save for the letters “AOE” printed in the centre in silly Microsoft Word text effects, resembling the work a LOL-crazed 7 year old would do for art class. “What the fuck is Moya-ism?” asked Seolhyun.“It’s a relatively new social media cult, having started last October, but has become somewhat a national phenomenon,” explained Joohyun. “Its aim is to reverse the process of objectifying women in today’s beauty-obsessed culture, especially here in Korea.”“Sounds noble enough,” commented Seolhyun, thinking of the hundreds that she had spent on facial products just this year.“Well,” interjected Mina, “they get their followers to kill 10 hot people a year in order to achieve this aim.”Ahhh.“But these acts could have been by multip