My Calling Is Profiler [EN]: Chapter 689

Although he started following late, it wasn’t difficult to catch up. He arrived at an old villa area in Suwon.

“The average monthly rent is 600,000 won with a deposit of 10 million won…”

‘Definitely not an expensive place,’ Park Do-joon thought, clicking his tongue.

“Doesn’t seem like the kind of place guys driving around in a Bentley would live, right?”

“No, and I checked the license plate,” Lee Ji-soo replied.

Lee Ji-soo had already made calls to check on the vehicle.

“There’s no report of the vehicle being stolen, but the owner is reported as a runaway.”

“A runaway? Not missing?”

“Yes, according to the records, he’s run away from home more than six times due to gambling addiction.”

“Figures.”

If he’s that kind of person, the car would have already been seized as collateral. And even if such a person disappears, the family wouldn’t file a missing person report. They’d just report him as a runaway.

“Decisively, it matched one of the license plates at the scene.”

“Really?”

“Yes, the Bentley was the only one there that day.”

“I knew it.”

“Yes, and the time it was caught on CCTV was exactly 28 minutes after Park Yu-ran got off the subway.”

“Hmm.”

That’s enough time to get off the subway, come out, and go to a place without CCTV.

“Looks like they’re the culprits.”

“But how do we prove their guilt?”

That was the problem. Of course, they could be detained briefly for buying a ‘ghost car’ [a car with falsified or missing registration], but it would be difficult to get an arrest warrant. You can’t get an arrest warrant just for a ghost car. Moreover, if they’ve been working together for a long time, they would have covered up their crimes by coordinating their stories.

Of course, if they were interrogated earnestly, there’s nothing they couldn’t find out, but to interrogate them, they need to be arrested first.

“We just have to play with words.”

“Play with words?”

“The owner of the car is a runaway, right?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the difference between running away and being missing?”

“Running away is voluntary, and being missing is involuntary, right?”

“Right, but other guys are driving around in the car that person was using. What could be a more definitive way to prove it was involuntary?”

“Ah!”

Just because the family reported him as a runaway doesn’t mean the police can’t investigate it as a missing person case, especially if the situation is very suspicious.

Four men with no registered residence are driving around in it without the person in question?

What could be more suspicious than that?

“Moreover, what are we investigating?”

“A murder… no, a missing person case.”

“Right, missing. For now, anyway.”

He was convinced she had been murdered, but officially, it’s classified as missing.

“It’s legal to investigate other crimes while investigating a missing person case.”

In the police force, investigating separate cases is fundamentally illegal. For example, wanting to indict someone for murder but lacking evidence, so indicting them for fraud instead, or indicting them for obstructing official duties for resisting arrest during the arrest process is clearly problematic.

“But it’s a missing person case.”

A missing person can be one person or ten people. The important thing is that if a warrant is issued for the same missing person case, then questioning them about other missing persons is not investigating a separate case but pursuing additional crimes.

Because it’s happening within the same crime.

“It won’t be difficult to catch them.”

“Probably. And if we catch them for sure…”

If they could catch even a small loophole, bringing them down would be a piece of cake.

As Park Do-joon expected, the warrant was issued without difficulty. It had already been over five months since the owner of the vehicle had gone missing.

To be exact, the family had abandoned him. They initially found him and brought him back, but like a gambling addict, he took the family’s assets to the gambling den each time. And knowing he would do it again if they brought him back, they gave up looking for him.

But from the police’s perspective, they can’t know if he was murdered and the car was stolen, or if it was taken as a ghost car.

And even if the police start investigating this fact, they don’t inform the family until some information is confirmed. Because if it turns out to be innocent, the family, who thought he had just run away, might collapse thinking he’s dead.

So, the warrant was issued regardless of the vehicle owner’s family. And when the police raided their house with the warrant, they surprisingly didn’t resist and quietly came to the police station.

And the first thing they said upon arrival was to request a public defender.

“What do you think, Detective? Doesn’t this look like they’ve prepared everything?”

“Yeah, they usually don’t react like that.”

A person who believes they are innocent usually protests and gets angry when the police come with a warrant.

And later, when they are arrested, they claim there’s some misunderstanding and insist they are innocent.

Surprisingly, many people know about public defenders, and they are even informed of their right to appoint one upon arrest, but it’s rare for someone to request a public defender as soon as they arrive at the police station.

Because while the public has complaints about the police, calling them ‘cops’ and whatnot, they also have a belief in the back of their minds that the police wouldn’t pin a crime on an innocent person.

“But to immediately invoke their right to remain silent and request a lawyer means they have experience with this or predicted what to do in this situation.”

“You wouldn’t be fooled by them getting angry, though, Detective.”

“That’s right.”

There’s a difference between genuine anger and anger feigned to escape the situation. The emotion shown by someone who is genuinely angry is, first of all, bewilderment.

They can’t control their reaction because they’re dumbfounded. On the other hand, when a criminal gets angry to hide their crime, their priority is not their lack of self-control but suppressing the other person, so their reaction and response are subtly different.

“But to call a lawyer right away? They’re not very smart.”

If they were smart, they probably would have gotten angry first and claimed their innocence.

‘Well, if they were smart, they wouldn’t have committed murder.’

The money that woman took wasn’t a small amount, but it wasn’t enough to ruin their lives.

They’re all in their early 20s and work in small and medium-sized enterprises, so they don’t have particularly good incomes.

“Well, if they were smart, they would have just disappeared instead of continuing to kill.”

Even the police didn’t know about the dead woman.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“But Detective, how should we approach this type?”

“Huh?”

“I’ve never taken a statement from this type before.”

“Oh? Ah, I guess so. Well, it’s not like it doesn’t happen sometimes.”

It sounds ridiculous, but it sometimes happens within the profiling team that they don’t interrogate criminals who are relatively weak in resistance, like Lee Ji-soo.

Because once a profiler is assigned, it’s already a serious case, and most of them are difficult, high-level cases to track.

And in such cases, even if the criminals committed planned or impulsive crimes, most of them are intelligent enough to confuse the investigation.

And generally, the person who interrogates them after arrest is the police, not the profiler. So, people with weak hearts are just filtered out at the police stage.

“And I looked it up, and it says that guys with a lot of self-rationalization try to hide their weak points, right?”

“That’s right. So, surprisingly, you can do it in a textbook way.”

“Do you think a textbook method will work? Seeing them call a lawyer right away, it seems like they’ve made up their minds and prepared in advance.”

“Yeah, but you can’t block everything just because you anticipate it. Hehehe.”

Every human wears a mask. And whether there’s a devil or an angel underneath, you won’t know until you break it. Of course, in most cases, there’s a devil. There are devils wearing angel masks, but angels wearing devil masks are really rare. At best, it might be someone like Oskar Schindler, who saved countless lives from the clutches of the Nazis, as seen in movies.

Therefore, profiling has evolved in a way that shatters the masks of devils wearing angel masks. But for guys with weak hearts, their masks are naturally weak too.

“And in those cases, there’s always a leader.”

“That’s right. It’s rare for guys with weak hearts to suddenly commit crimes, especially murder.”

“And that guy is obvious.”

“Song Do-jong, that’s the guy, right?”

Among the four, two have records of rape and aggravated assault, respectively. But Song Do-jong was punished for aggravated assault.

“The guy who committed rape is Lee Man-tae, right?”

“Yes, but he doesn’t seem like a leader type at all.”

“Probably. Basically, rape is an attack by the strong against the weak.”

People think that a guy who committed rape would be burly, rough, and cruel. But even if they are cruel, the vast majority of rapists, when viewed externally, often appear relatively weaker rather than burly and tough.

Because rape is not just a matter of sexual desire but also about control, and some of the guys who rape relatively weak women don’t have the ability to exert control over other men, so many of them attack the weak.

“On the other hand, Song Do-jong is different.”

When he was in school, Song Do-jong beat up a teacher. That’s how he got his record for aggravated assault. Even though times have gotten better and the victimized teacher was a woman, teachers are structurally superior in society, and attacking such superiors is a highly antisocial act.

“And that antisocial behavior doesn’t just mean hitting a teacher out of anger.”

Hitting a teacher because you don’t like something? A normal student might protest, but they wouldn’t hit them. There’s social pressure.

But committing assault means they don’t care about social pressure at all.

And those who ignore social pressure and complete their crimes in school, profiting from them, are usually called bullies.

“Actually, so-called bullies often rush at teachers.”

“Yeah, especially the guys who are classified as leaders within the bully group.”

For them, school is a battlefield of the survival of the fittest, and teachers who can’t subdue them with their fists are just idiots, nothing more, nothing less.

“Considering that schools tend to cover up incidents, Song Do-jong crossed the line a long time ago.”

A school is a group that hates external noise very much. So, even if there are suicides due to school violence within the school, they cover it up, and even if teachers commit suicide due to parental abuse, they try to hide all sorts of crimes by packaging them as accidents or deaths from illness. That’s what schools are, organizations that try to hide all sorts of crimes.