Chapter 36 – 036. Vampire Detective
036. Vampire Detective
“Ugh…!”
“Ah, shit! Hey, newbie! If you’re gonna puke, go outside! If you puke here, you’re dead meat!”
Team Leader Oh Jung-jin’s shout echoed loudly throughout the apartment.
The young rookie detective, who had recently joined the force, covered his mouth with a pale face and ran out into the hallway. Moon Ji-hyuk watched the rookie’s retreating back.
A faint memory surfaced. He too had turned pale when he first saw a corpse, and he hadn’t been able to eat meat for a while.
This was something Moon Ji-hyuk couldn’t help with.
Working as a detective meant that there would be times when you had to see even worse sights than this. Seeing dismembered bodies was rare, but it definitely happened. You had to overcome it yourself and get used to it.
‘He’ll get used to it. Just like I did.’
Moon Ji-hyuk looked back at the crime scene.
The tragedy at unit 603 of Saeoneul Apartment Building A.
Around 7 a.m., an older man who was taking the stairs for exercise found a pool of blood in the hallway. The blood had seeped out from under the front door of unit 603 and pooled in the hallway.
It was now 8 a.m. Oh Jung-jin, Moon Ji-hyuk, and other police officers and forensic investigators had taken over unit 603 and were conducting an investigation.
A total of six bodies were found.
The unusual thing was that three of the bodies had been killed with a long, bladed weapon like a Japanese sword, and one of them had been decapitated.
The other three bodies were found in the master bedroom and looked like gangsters at first glance. Judging by the marks, they had been killed with sashimi knives.
“Ha…. Shit. How the hell did they cut off his head?”
Oh Jung-jin frowned as he looked at the man’s head lying on the floor. The cut was too clean.
This was not something that could be done with human strength. Even executioners, who were experts at beheading people, rarely cut off a person’s head in one swift motion. It wasn’t like they brought a guillotine or a cutting machine here.
“There’s no way a person could cut off a head this cleanly with their own strength.”
Watching him deep in thought, Moon Ji-hyuk clenched his fist.
‘It’s a vampire. With a vampire’s strength… they could cut off a person’s head in one go.’
However, what he didn’t understand was the state of the bodies. There were no signs that they had been drained of blood.
‘If it wasn’t blood, then what was the purpose…?’
First, they needed to find out the identities of the bodies.
“Team Leader. We’ve canvassed the nearby houses and found out the identities of the victims.”
Detective Park approached Oh Jung-jin and said.
“Oh, really?”
“Well, the owner of this house is Jang Sung-min, and he’s been living here for about a year.”
“The guy who got his head cut off.”
They had already found out the victim’s name. His wallet and smartphone were still there.
“According to the nearby residents, four people lived together.”
“……Four people?”
“Yes. They don’t know their jobs, but they said the four of them often acted together. They never talked to the residents and lived quietly without causing any trouble.”
“Does anyone know what happened yesterday?”
“They say they don’t.”
It was impossible to know whether they really didn’t know or were pretending not to know. Most people were reluctant to get involved in incidents.
“Was the other one a gangster?”
“The bodies in the master bedroom aren’t. He’s a punk-like guy with blonde hair and piercings in his ears.”
“……Three are dead, and one is alive…. Anyone can see that he’s a suspect. Catch him.”
“Yes.”
Detective Park immediately began the investigation.
“Detective Moon.”
“Yes.”
“Secure all the nearby CCTV and dashcam footage.”
“Understood.”
Moon Ji-hyuk moved. Even as he moved away from unit 603, he couldn’t shake the thought that the culprit in this case was a vampire.
•••
“Did you find anything on the CCTV?”
Oh Jung-jin approached Moon Ji-hyuk, who was sitting at his desk, watching CCTV footage on his laptop.
“No. Nothing special. But there’s one man who’s bothering me.”
“A man who’s bothering you?”
Oh Jung-jin looked at the video on the laptop.
“Why is the screen like this?”
Part of the screen was broken.
“This is the CCTV in front of the apartment. I thought it was broken, but only the front of the camera is a bit damaged, and the video is being recorded properly.”
Moon Ji-hyuk manipulated the laptop and rewound the video a little.
“Is it this man?”
It was a man in a suit. He had a very good physique. However, his face was completely obscured by the broken part of the screen. There were no special features on his body, so it would be very difficult to identify him.
“Yes. For some reason, I think this man is the culprit.”
“A hunch?”
“……Yes.”
Moon Ji-hyuk slowly nodded. That’s right. It was just a hunch.
“Detective Moon. You know we’re not fortune tellers, right? No matter how much you think this guy is the culprit, there has to be a valid reason. If there’s no evidence, it’s just a false accusation. And no matter how I look at it, it’s not this guy.”
Oh Jung-jin tapped the monitor with the back of his hand.
“There are at least two culprits. The gangsters were killed somewhere else and moved here, and the fact that there are cut pipes around the bodies means there was a fight. I don’t know how they cut the pipes and cut off the head… it’s not something a person can do alone.”
‘What if it wasn’t a person, but a vampire?’
The words almost slipped out of Moon Ji-hyuk’s mouth. But he held them back. He shouldn’t say anything that would make Oh Jung-jin, who knew nothing about vampires, suspicious.
Oh Jung-jin was not someone he could trust.
“And besides, this guy isn’t carrying anything. He doesn’t have a knife, let alone a sword. He doesn’t have a bag either. Unless he has something like a magic pouch, there’s no way this guy is the culprit.”
“……”
Moon Ji-hyuk thought differently.
What if this man was a trueblood vampire? What if he had a superpower that allowed him to hide objects?
‘…No. I’m getting carried away. There’s no evidence that that man is a vampire, and it’s unlikely that a trueblood would commit such a crime.’
Moon Ji-hyuk shook off his distracting thoughts.
He was confident in his hunches, but he couldn’t conduct an investigation based on hunches alone. Moon Ji-hyuk removed the man in the video from the list of suspects.
“Oh, right. Jang Sung-min’s personal information came out. Turns out he was running an illegal sports gambling site. The punk he caught today said he had 4.8 billion won in his closet. As you know, not a single penny was found. I guess this whole mess happened because of the money.”
“…So it’s money after all.”
“It’s nothing new. It’s common for money to be involved in crimes. And the three gangsters were members of the Bae Won gang. You know about the pool of blood in the alleyway the other day? Those guys were the owners of that blood.”
“Huh? Wait a minute. Isn’t something strange?”
“It is strange. When I looked into it, they were missing. But today, they were found dead. The head of the Bae Won gang is denying any involvement, and the room where they worked is also saying they don’t know anything.”
“……I heard that the blood in that alleyway belonged to four people. Is there any information about the other person from the DNA analysis?”
“They said he was a healthy man in his early twenties. Judging by the amount of blood, he was definitely cut by a knife. Detective Park roughly searched the nearby hospitals, but there were no men in their early twenties who had come in with knife wounds.”
“Were the gangsters killed just yesterday?”
“Yeah. That’s what the forensics team said. They were in very fresh condition. There weren’t any signs of torture, but Ma Bong-cheon’s testicles were crushed. Dying as a eunuch… poor bastard.”
“Did another organization capture and imprison them? No…. There’s no reason to do that…. What the hell is this?”
“I don’t know, man. The more you dig into this case, the stranger it gets. It’s not logical. It’s almost as if the culprit is a wizard.”
“…Maybe he really is a wizard.”
“Why are you like this too, man? Anyway, investigate this properly, collect the data, and hand it over to the special unit.”
The special unit.
More precisely, the Special Investigation Unit. They were in charge of special cases.
“Another special unit? The mummy case was also handed over to them not too long ago, and now we have to hand this over too?”
“What can we do? That’s what they told us to do. They say the special unit is the expert in this field.”
Moon Ji-hyuk had no trouble predicting the common thread in the cases that were being handed over to the special unit.
Vampires.
Most of the cases that the special unit thought were related to vampires were being handed over to the special unit.
“Organize it and send it over today. And that CCTV footage too. If you don’t send it, they’ll be a pain in the ass again.”
“…Yes.”
Moon Ji-hyuk felt powerless as he barely managed to answer.
There was nothing he could do as just a regular detective.
‘……If there’s nothing I can do as a detective…. I have no choice but to move on my own.’
•••
I got out of bed, where the sweet scent of a woman lingered.
My body felt stiff. Yesterday, I wrote a legendary night and came to Hera’s house instead of a motel, and we had a post-party sex session.
My life as a ‘vampire detective’ was truly a sexy one.
‘Should I sleep at Mi-young’s house tomorrow?’
I had a sex partner relationship with several women. They would look for me when their sexual desires built up, and I would look for them from time to time and have sex.
Among them, Hera was the one I had the most sex with. Hera had a stronger sex drive than I had expected.
Hera was at work at Younghyejeong, so I was the only one in this house.
Clunk.
I opened the refrigerator, took out a can of soda, and walked towards the sofa.
Hera was living alone in a luxury officetel, which was spacious and clean, more like a hotel than a regular apartment.
I turned on the TV, and the 7 o’clock news was on.
-This morning. An explosion occurred in a residential area in Seoul. The fire burned down five houses in the vicinity. There were three deaths and four injuries. Thanks to the efforts of the firefighters, the fire was quickly extinguished. The exact cause of the fire is still under investigation, but an LPG gas cylinder explosion is the most likely cause.
“Ah. This is that episode.”
The fire accident on the news was actually arson. The arsonist was a vampire who was setting fires just for fun.
The fact that this episode was out meant that the current time was the beginning of the middle part of the drama. Moon Ji-hyuk would catch the vampire arsonist, and he would hear information that the vampire organization, Kantra, knew how vampires could become human.
“And the arsonist dies at the hands of a vampire hunter.”
At the same time, it was an episode that informed viewers of the dangers of vampire hunters.
-Yesterday at dawn, gunshots rang out at a museum. The police explained that there was a gang fight and declared that they would never tolerate gangs with firearms. The deputy police chief also said that it would be best for Seoul citizens to refrain from going out at night…….
“What?”
My eyes widened.
The museum battle.
This was an episode that came out a little later, not now.
The police explained that it was a gang fight, but in reality, it was a battle between vampires and vampire hunters.
“……Shit.”
I cursed.
This was the fuse that would ignite the full-scale war between vampires and vampire hunters. And that fuse had already been lit, and it would explode within a few days.
The night that the citizens of Seoul didn’t know about was becoming a battlefield.
‘I expected the story to be a little twisted. But this… it’s too fast.’
In the worst-case scenario, the Flower of Life, which would bear the Bead of Life, might not come to Korea. That would be the worst.
‘What was the problem? Killing Jang Sung-min? No…. That’s not it.’
That was something I did the evening before yesterday. It didn’t make sense for that incident to have an impact in terms of time.
“……The bus terror.”
That was the only answer.
Because of that incident, vampire hunters had gathered in Seoul, and the Black Cross Society was searching for the culprit who had committed the terror with bloodshot eyes.
‘In the meantime, they must have discovered a group of vampires living near the museum.’
They were supposed to be discovered a little later, but it seemed that the Black Cross Society was really pissed off because of the bus terror.
‘Damn it. If the vampires shrink back in this situation… the Flower of Life might not come to Korea.’
The Flower of Life was currently in the possession of one of the executives of the vampire organization, Kantra. He would bring it to absorb the energy of the Korean Peninsula sometime later.
But what if the Black Cross Society was running rampant in Korea? They wouldn’t come to Korea, of course.
It was a shame to waste the energy of the Korean Peninsula that was being released for the first time in three hundred years, but it was better than having the Bead of Life stolen by a vampire hunter.
My plan was to intercept the Flower of Life when it bore the fruit of the Bead of Life, before Moon Ji-hyuk could get his hands on it.
‘The Flower of Life not being on the Korean Peninsula is something that shouldn’t happen.’
After agonizing for more than 30 minutes, I jumped up from my seat.
“I need to reduce the number of vampire hunters a lot.”
I brought an object from reality. It was an object that I had gotten when I did a random draw.
A white clown mask. The mouth and nose were red, the left eye area had a green star pattern, and the right eye had a blue cross pattern.
The clown mask had a red, wavy wig attached to it. Overall, it was a rather childish design.
[Devil’s Clown Mask
A clown mask imbued with the power of the devil.]
