My Calling Is Profiler [EN]: Chapter 503

“Let’s put that aside for now. It’s an area we can’t even track anyway.”

“Pardon?”

“We don’t know who took the child.”

Park Do-joon said, pulling out a document and handing it over.

“According to this investigation, the victim underwent a forced birth after her death.”

“That’s right.”

“Then what kind of person is this criminal?”

“Ah, you’re right.”

No matter how much they suspect and profile someone behind the scenes, if they can’t find the criminals who acted as the intermediaries, they’ll never be able to approach them.

“We’re assuming the real culprit is cruel and hired people for some purpose. So, how would they have hired them?”

“Hmm…”

“I don’t think you understand the question. Let me put it another way. Do you think an ordinary person can hire someone to commit such a brutal crime?”

“No.”

Lee Ji-soo, understanding the point of Park Do-joon’s question, shook her head.

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“Right, it doesn’t make sense.”

Of course, there are plenty of immoral people in the world. But even those people have a line. Someone who would beat someone up? They’re common. Someone who would steal? It wouldn’t be too hard to find them either.

But from the moment you kill someone, the difficulty skyrockets. It’s not just a steep increase; it’s almost impossible for an ordinary person. Even criminals would probably be horrified.

“And on top of that, kill the mother and cut open her belly to take the child? How many people do you think would do that?”

“Almost none.”

Generally, children are seen as objects of protection. Naturally, mothers are also objects of protection. Even criminals who kill adults without hesitation are reluctant to harm children or mothers.

In American prisons, even inmates who are jailed for murder or selling drugs are always looking for an opportunity to kill child sex offenders or child murderers.

Even fellow criminals hate child-related offenders and want to destroy them, even at the cost of their own lives.

In fact, American prisons struggle with child-related offenders because they are both targets of surveillance and objects of protection.

This is because there are quite a few murders of child-related offenders in prisons every year.

“And they’re committing a crime against a newborn? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Not usually.”

“Right, not usually.”

Lee Ji-soo kept mulling over Park Do-joon’s words, wondering why he didn’t give her the answer right away and kept making her think. Obviously, Park Do-joon was trying to teach her. And the answer that comes out of going through that process step by step is only one.

“The perpetrator… or should I call them the mastermind? That person knew those guys before; it’s a matter of trust.”

“That’s right.”

A matter of trust.

Like a mentally ill person who wouldn’t work, to do something like this, you need to know the other person well and be able to trust them. At the very least, you have to be sure that you can control them to order them to do something like this.

“Then it gets more complicated, doesn’t it?”

To ask someone you know to do something like this? Does that make sense? It’s only possible in one case.

“People gather in groups.”

The only way to know each other well enough to ask for such a thing is to have done dirty work together. If it’s just knowing each other, the criminals wouldn’t do something like this.

“Moreover, this crime was committed by three or more accomplices. What does that mean?”

“I, I don’t know?”

Lee Ji-soo tilted her head at Park Do-joon’s words. She didn’t seem to understand it right away.

“It means there’s a group of three or more people who can commit murder. Do you think those guys have no prior convictions?”

“Ah!”

At least one of those three is likely to have a prior conviction.

“And even if they don’t, they’re definitely experienced.”

You can’t commit such a crime on your first time without a single murder.

“If our assumptions are correct, what they needed was the missing newborn. So, they did that.”

Whoever ordered it, one thing is certain: the criminals are heartless.

“Then we need to look through the case records again.”

Is it possible that someone who commits this kind of crime has no prior convictions? It’s not very likely.

“Let’s start tracking now.”

If the answer is out, all that’s left is tracking.

“Same type of conviction? No, there’s no such thing as the same type of conviction in the first place, you idiot!”

Jo Sang-gyu drew a firm line. It’s not like the police haven’t thought about the same type of conviction. In the first place, the very first step in every case is to look for the same type of conviction.

“This isn’t a problem that can be interpreted as the same type of conviction.”

In the first place, it doesn’t make sense that there’s the same type of conviction for this kind of crime.

“I know. There probably isn’t the same type of conviction in the first place. But that’s the trap. Don’t you know? The key here isn’t ‘the same method’ but ‘the brutality’.”

“Ugh, that’s true. But that’s the problem.”

Even if it’s not publicized, there are plenty of brutal crimes committed by humans. They torment and try to kill each other in ways that ordinary people can’t even imagine.

Because humans beat their own children to death or starve their own parents to death. Knowing that, Jo Sang-gyu knew there were too many criminals.

“It’s also hard to pinpoint the perpetrator’s location.”

“Did something come up?”

“It did. A vehicle was found. Well, it’s already burned to the ground, though.”

The vehicle had already been found burned to the ground in a mountain.

“They didn’t just set it on fire; they meticulously poured gasoline on it and burned it all.”

Because of that, there’s nothing to identify the perpetrator.

“The owner of the vehicle is in Incheon, but the vehicle was found in Gangwon-do.”

“They deliberately stole it from far away and dumped it in another area.”

“Right.”

“Was the route of travel discovered?”

“We don’t know the route.”

They didn’t take the highway but the national road. Even then, they traveled through sparsely populated areas, so it’s impossible to know where they moved from.

“Hmm.”

Park Do-joon organized the case in his head at those words.

‘Up to this point, it’s like what happened before the regression.’

Is it déjà vu? Maybe this is as far as they tracked it before the regression.

And even if it wasn’t him, he would have judged it to this extent. Even if Han Seong-gi is unskilled, Han Seong-gi alone wouldn’t have been put into a case of this magnitude.

‘Then where did it go wrong?’

Assuming we got this far… why couldn’t we catch those guys before the regression?

‘Maybe the purpose is the problem.’

The purpose is the biggest part of judging a crime. There’s no such thing as a crime without a purpose in the first place.

Random killings are also called abnormal motive killings, but they have a clear purpose of relieving stress through killing.

‘But this is…’

I can’t figure out the purpose at all. Why do they need a child, especially a newborn?

‘Let’s break away from the existing method. The purpose is the child, that’s right. So, the purpose is to raise the child? No. Inheritance is not an issue either. The victim’s bereaved family is an only child. Then… wait a minute, inheritance?’

At that moment, a very old case came to Park Do-joon’s mind. Of course, it’s a rare case these days.

‘Come to think of it, there was such a time.’

People won’t remember it now. Because the crime disappeared with the development of science and technology. The reason Park Do-joon can remember it is because he encountered it as information, not as a case.

But if the child is very young, maybe…

“Could it be that the purpose is to raise them?”

“What?”

Jo Sang-gyu looked at Park Do-joon as if he was dumbfounded.

“Raising? Are you crazy? You’re saying they cut open a mother’s belly and kidnapped a child because they wanted to raise them?”

“Yes, Detective. That doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t *not* make sense. There have actually been cases like that.”

“But wasn’t that in the 80s?”

There’s a reason why Jo Sang-gyu is saying this. That’s because such crimes have disappeared since the development of genetic testing technology.

In the past, there were women who kidnapped children to catch men and claimed that they were born between them and the man. It was a very rare crime even in the past, so almost no one remembers it, and even then, no one has committed such a crime since the development of genetic testing technology.

These days, if you get a genetic test, the results come out within three days, so who would commit such a crime?

“But psychologically, it doesn’t *not* make sense.”

“What?”

“Adoption or kidnapping inevitably shows signs of the child’s growth.”

Children show signs from the moment they are born. A child who is one day old, a child who is one week old, and a child who is one month old grow differently every day.

“But, you see, from the moment you see the signs of childbirth, the possibility of kidnapping or adoption decreases significantly. As you know, the place where that incident occurred in the past was an obstetrics and gynecology clinic.”

Lee Ji-soo, who didn’t know about the case, had no idea, but Jo Sang-gyu nodded with a look of remembering something.

“Indeed…”

“Um, Team Leader, I don’t know?”

“Oh, don’t they teach you these days? Well, I guess not. That’s probably the last case. There was a child kidnapping case in the 80s. The location of the incident was an obstetrics and gynecology clinic.”

There was a woman who came into the room with the children at the obstetrics and gynecology clinic pretending to be a mother, kidnapped the child while holding the child, and ran away.

In that era, everything was recorded by hand, not by checking faces with photos or wearing bracelets with computer tags that classified children and mothers.

“Why? No, did they kidnap the newborn like that?”

“Yes, she was caught about a month later, and it was absurd.”

The woman who kidnapped the child was caught, but the reason was absurd.

“She lied that she was pregnant to catch a man.”

“She lied that she was pregnant? Is she stupid? Even an ultrasound would show…!”

“There was no such thing back then. No, there was, but it was too expensive for ordinary people to even think about it.”

Lee Ji-soo tilted her head as if she didn’t understand Jo Sang-gyu’s words. Then Park Do-joon scratched his head and said.

“If you look at the movies that were released in that era, there are often movies that depict fake pregnancy scandals.”

There were ultrasound machines, but they weren’t in general hospitals.

Only university hospitals had them, and even then, using them once was as expensive as several months’ salary.

“It wasn’t even covered by national health insurance at that time.”

“Even so…”