L*st and Death

The three of them returned to the McCarthy siblings' shared residence, ate a dinner of frozen food, and then gave their daily reports in earnest. When Siron told them he'd spent $9,000 to commission a DNA analysis of V3011 at the Quest Genetics Research Lab, Anna looked at Lewis with genuine concern.

"My God. For an unemployed man, you're awfully brave."

"...What? Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t tell me... I wasn’t supposed to pay the full $9,000?"

Siron and Anna, who had both been staring at Lewis with pity and disbelief, glanced at each other and shook their heads. Leaving the now-depressed Lewis behind—who had just realized he'd been ripped off—Anna began recounting what had happened at the Homeless Support Center.

The center was a social welfare institution drowning in malaise. Homeless people continued to pour in endlessly, and those who had received aid and landed jobs would often return to the streets just weeks later. Amid exhausted public officials and disillusioned volunteers, one man—Joseph Miller, in charge of homeless relocation—stood out by openly criticizing the homeless and scratching the itches of public frustration. You could say he had a bold personality, but to be accurate, he was a man who deliberately encouraged discrimination. Some of his coworkers would laugh along with him, but his borderline remarks frequently created tension and discomfort.

“Guy’s got guts. Who the hell tries to steal a necklace from a musclebound Miss Misery like her?”

A civil servant sitting beside him burst into laughter at Miller’s brazen joke.

Anna glared coldly at the laughing official but forced an awkward smile, hiding her true thoughts—namely, that one day she was absolutely going to destroy that bastard Miller. She was investigating a motel rape case involving a suspicious cherry-colored drug called NeoPeak, and for that, she needed Miller’s cooperation.

“Haha. That’s so funny, Mr. Miller. You make my day.”

Under normal circumstances, Anna McCarthy would’ve just stared blankly at Miller for making such an inappropriate joke, her face devoid of even a hint of humor. But this time, she actually played along. Miller eyed her curiously, as if unsure whether her response—clearly made to appease him—was pleasing or irritating.

“You act tough, Anna, but you kinda come off as soft. Got a tender heart in there or something?”

“...You do know that crosses a line, right?”

“No, no. I meant, I bet you treated that homeless guy real nice. Problem is, if you show them a little kindness, they always stab you in the back. And come on, you only know the guy’s name? Aren’t you being a little too sloppy with your job?”

Anna could only offer a bitter smile. She had personally escorted the homeless man—who’d been the victim of the motel assault and who went by the name Joan Welch—to the shelter, but beyond that name, she knew nothing about him.

“He said he was going to his family in San Diego. Looked like he was in his mid-twenties.”

Miller casually began searching the logs in the system.

“Here we go. August 14th. Joan Wedge. Born August 1st, 1990.”

“...Joan Wedge? Not Joan Welch?”

“Problem?”

“No.”

“Hmmm, says here he was sent off to San Francisco the very next day.”

“Any family contact listed?”

“Nope. Joan Wedge called them himself. Didn’t give me a chance to butt in. Think of it this way—you wouldn’t have gotten the necklace back even if you’d found the guy.”

Miller burst out laughing, as if it were all no big deal. Then, suddenly shifting in his seat, he narrowed his eyes and asked with a sleazy tone,

“So, Anna. When you get stressed, do your muscles get bigger? When you walked in earlier, I thought the earthquake alarm was going off.”

Though Anna hadn’t gone into detail about her conversation with the center’s relocation manager, both Lewis and Siron could tell from her visceral disgust just how much she despised the man.

“But I still managed to squeeze one useful clue out of that piece of trash.”

Lewis asked, “What clue?”

“That everything in the record is a lie.”

That was all she got for having a helpless man branded a thief. The victim of the motel rape case—a homeless man in his twenties—was not Joan Wedge, but Joan Welch. The welfare official had clumsily forged his name in the official record. And it didn’t stop there. He’d also lied about sending Welch to San Francisco instead of San Diego.

Considering he lied so easily about everything else, it was highly likely the listed birthdate was false too. If Anna hadn’t remembered the man’s correct name was Joan Welch, they might’ve hit a serious dead end.

Siron, who had been silently listening to Anna’s account, tilted his head and asked,

“Why would a civil servant lie? His only job is to relocate the homeless outside of Helsota. There’s no reason to fake the records.”

“It’s definitely strange.”

“If you just go by the records, it’d look like this ‘Joan Welch’ guy never even visited the shelter, never got sent to San Diego from Helsota.”

Picking up on Siron’s point, Lewis posed another question.

“What if this Joan Welch guy... never actually left Helsota?”

All three of them immediately thought of V3011, the one who’d been [N O V E L I G H T] locked inside Hybris headquarters and used for sexual release by alphas. Just before their imaginations could fully transform Joan from a homeless man into another victim locked in a corporate dungeon, Anna spoke with grim determination.

“Let’s confirm it first.”

She placed two laptops and a tablet PC on the table. After setting up a device for each of them, she downloaded the necessary video files onto each screen.

“What is this?”

“Remember the Luna Motel in the Mocho-Locca area where Siron stayed? These are security tapes from the owner. Said he’d reported several cases of prostitutes being raped so violently by men built like refrigerators that the beds ended up soaked in blood—but the cops never investigated. Anyway, we’ve got footage. Take a look. You’ll see the man entering the motel room and Joan’s face.”

“I’d heard the story... Didn’t realize this was the victim.”

Siron and Lewis each opened the folder on their device and played the footage. It wasn’t high-resolution, but the faces were visible enough. A man as big as Baekgyeong or Lewis entered the motel with a much skinnier man who only came up to his shoulder. Siron paused the video at a frame where the smaller man’s face was clearly visible.

His eye color was indiscernible, but his hair was dark brown or black. His drooping eyes gave him a gentle appearance, but beyond that, his features were unremarkable. Siron resumed the video, studied the face in the frame, and asked,

“Okay, so I’ve seen his face. Now what?”

Anna replied casually, as if switching TV channels with a remote,

“Simple. Search ‘Joan Welch’ on Peoplebook.”

“...I was afraid you’d say that.”

Peoplebook was a global social media platform used for every kind of communication. With billions of users, it was massive.

“Welch isn’t the most common surname. If we narrow the location to California and Helsota, maybe something’ll turn up.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“If it doesn’t, well, I’ll have to do something I really don’t want to—access the police database. He used drugs, was involved in prostitution, lived on the streets, and had no contact with his family. I’m sure he’s been flagged for petty crimes or listed as a missing person in the NCIC database.”

“Then shouldn’t we just search that first?”

Anna let out a heavy sigh as she put her tablet on the table.

“Can’t.”

“...What? But you just said—”

“If I bribed a coworker I don’t know that well and begged them to run the query for me, maybe I could get one lucky hit.”

She rubbed her thumb and index finger together in front of Siron, blatantly miming a bribe.

“Why can’t you run the search?”

“First reason: to access the info system, police need approval from a TAC agency. And I’m on a watchlist. Back when I was a rookie, I used to run background checks on people without clearance. ...Still not sure how I haven’t been fired.”

“...Any other reason?”

“Second: the chief hates me. I ran a background check on him, too.”

Lewis added with a sigh of exasperation.

“Anna’s not as level-headed as she looks. She suspected the chief got promoted for covering up corruption for the Commissioner and tried to dig up dirt. She was just a rookie back then. Dumb and brave.”

Anna gave a small, detached smile at her brother’s blunt appraisal. Avoiding Lewis’s eyes, she lowered her head and sighed deeply.

“The chief has someone monitoring everything I search in the database.”

“So the guy’s still hiding skeletons in his closet, huh?”

Anna let out a small laugh at Siron’s naive comment. She shook her head slightly and narrowed her eyes at him.

“Oh, he’s got skeletons alright. The chief’s tied to a group we haven’t fully identified yet.”

“...A group?”

Anna leaned forward slightly, eyes fixed on Siron.

“I’m certain he’s involved with the people who kidnapped Isaac Bazelli. I don’t know yet if it’s Hybris or some other group connected to alphas.”

The unexpected direction of her claim made Siron glance toward Lewis, trying to gauge whether he was following her line of thought. But Lewis wasn’t looking at Anna. He seemed dazed, as if his mind had wandered somewhere else.

“I looked up the license plate of the vehicle Isaac Bazelli used to kidnap you.”

“Yes. I know.”

“And the chief, who was spying on my search history, passed that plate number to someone—someone we don’t know. So we weren’t the only ones looking for Bazelli. They attacked his hideout before we could.”

Everything after that, Siron had experienced firsthand. The airstrikes, the explosion, and then waking up to find Isaac Bazelli had vanished without a trace.

The shock hit him like a truck, and his breathing turned ragged and erratic. To Siron, it felt like Anna had taken the most direct highway to finding Isaac Bazelli... and decided to wander around in circles instead. She’d gone to Hybris, chased a nameless man, hunted for Joan Welch—when all she really needed to do was follow the Linhart Police Chief’s trail.

“This might actually be good.”

Siron’s voice rose with urgency.

“Let’s start digging into the chief. Right now!”

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