Their idol

empty

At _Gangnam Police Station_, Detective Jin-woo stood still, staring at the bulletin board.

Photographs of young women were pinned across it, their faces staring back from different angles—fan cams, ID shots, a few candid street photos. Red wool stretched between them, crisscrossing like a web, with dates, locations, and names scribbled on sticky notes where the threads met.

But the center was empty.

The red strings radiated outward from that blank space, connecting every girl to a point that wasn’t there.

“The pattern… the pattern… the pattern,” he muttered, sighing as he bit his lip.

“These people have nothing in common. Some are teenagers. Some aren’t even Korean.” The more he thought about it, the more it confused him.

“Maybe it’s not a serial killer,” he said quietly. “Maybe it’s just kidnapping. Or some of them ran away. They do look like bad girls.” He sighed again.

Jin-woo stepped closer, fingertips hovering half an inch above the board without touching it.

The faces were all different—different ages, different backgrounds, different styles. But their eyes were the same in one way. All of them had that look of being caught mid-moment, like they’d been seen before they knew they were being watched.

He pulled out a red marker and circled the blank center again, harder this time. The ink bled through the paper.

“Not a coincidence,” he murmured. “No one runs a pattern this messy unless they’re hiding the real one.”

Behind him, the bullpen was loud with phones and keyboards. He didn’t turn.

“Han,” he called out. “Check missing persons again. I want every case from the last eight months. Ages 15 to 22. Doesn’t matter if it was closed as ‘runaway’.”

The younger officer hesitated. “You think they’re all connected?”

“I think someone wants us to think they’re not,” Jin-woo said.

He tapped the empty center of the board. The red threads pulled tight around it, like they were waiting for something to fill the space.

“For now, we keep searching. Names, locations, dates. If there’s a link, it’s buried deep.

And if there isn’t… then we’re dealing with someone who’s good at making it look like there isn’t.”

He stepped back and let the board stare back at him.

No answers. Just more questions.

“A serial killer with no signature,” he muttered, shaking his head as he tried to make sense of it.

He looked at the pictures and it landed on the girl , the flashback hit him :

Early in the morning a sound cut through the noise of the bullpen—loud, ragged, coming from the front desk.

Jin-woo was still fixing his uniform as always ,he was the messy cop but the cries made him walk out of the room with a half unbuttoned shirt

A woman was on her knees in the lobby, screaming like a banshee. “Please help me, I beg!” Her forehead hit the floor over and over, each bow harder than the last. When two officers moved to pull her up, she didn’t stop. She kept bowing, kept pleading, words breaking apart between sobs.

Jin-woo crouched in front of her, keeping his voice low.

“Miss, look at me. What happened?”

Her eyes were wide, unfocused. She grabbed his sleeve with both hands.