Chapter Text
"Detective Park-- Oh," Namjoon's deep and intimidating voice boomed, startling Jimin awake. "Sorry, didn't expect to find you asleep at 9:30."
In his embarrassment, Jimin tried to laugh, but as he flailed to regain his posture, he knocked a folder from his desk that released documents all over the ground. "Ah, shit," he muttered, feeling his face burn as the taller man watched him sternly. "Sorry, I can't believe I dozed off. I had absolutely no sleep last night; I had to follow up a--"
"Park, no offence, but I really don't need to know about your personal life." Officer Kim snapped, looking down on Jimin, who's wide eyes were hidden under the table, as he awkwardly tried to scoop together the discarded contents of the folder.
Making a grimace at the rejection of another one of his attempts to be friendly, Jimin continued to stack the papers for a couple seconds longer, allowing his dignity some time to recover. When he finally stood up to reveal his face again, Namjoon was holding out a sheet across the desk with an irritated expression. He looked exhausted himself, his dark hair more tousled than usual and eyes a little bloodshot, but he still contained a professional composure, quite the opposite of Jimin.
"We received a call requesting you at a crime scene." Namjoon stated, wiggling the paper, impatiently. "Another mutilated body was found this morning at 8:48. The details and address are here."
Jimin anxiously took the paper, chewing the inside of his lip as he turned the paper around in his hands. "Mellocroft Pier," Jimin read, under his breath. He looked up at Namjoon. "Do you think it's the same guy?"
"It's almost certain, but they need you. It sounds likely." He confirmed, nodding lightly as he adjusted his shirt sleeve. "Officer Kim Seokjin is at the scene. Get going."
When the officer left, Jimin made no movements, simply staring at the blurred image of Namjoon walking away through the misted, glass door as it stiffly swung shut. Namjoon was cold, always had been, but it was his harsh nature that made him such a brilliant policeman, despite Jimin feeling strange hunches about him in past cases. He'd been assigned to Rhu three years prior to the start of Rhu's serial killings and after just one week as a rookie officer, he had already established his superiority and apparent advanced intellect over Jimin, even though he was only older by a couple of years.
Finally slipping into his trench-coat on the back of his chair, Jimin fixed his dark brown hair in the misted glass and sighed in an attempt to relax his racing heart rate. As he made his way throughout the office, ignoring the curious eyes that followed him, his mind sped through all the previous victims, wondering wether this one was going to look similar or wether it would be connected in any way to the last.
By this point, the killer had initiated his method: injure victim with a bear trap, cut throat, remove one or more limbs and crush the head to the point of it looking to be missing. He then would often relocate the bodies to open and easily accessible places, to proudly exhibit his work to the public. Teeth were removed in an apparent attempt to make the bodies unidentifiable, but only on the first two victims, which were both found on the same night. The killer seemed to give up on that however, when they were still identified by other means. It seemed he thought that all he had to do to conceal their identity was to take away the chance to identify them by their dental records, which made him look somewhat naive to Jimin. The killer had learned not to bother however and changed his techniques.
Based on the killer adapting to what the press was releasing and not knowing that the bodies could be identified, Jimin had made the observation that the killer was still very much experimenting with the murders and that either he perhaps wasn't very well educated or was young and unknowledgeable in the area.
When Jimin arrived at the pier, the car shuddering over the wooden boards of the structure in a decreasing rhythm as it slowed to a halt, he could feel the familiar shudder down his spine at the sight of multiple officers lining the crime scene with white boards to hide the body.
Once out of the car, he looked around him at the rough, windy seas and back towards the road that was only behind a small hump of sand dunes and lined with dozens of bright and open apartments, facing the beach. The pier had been closed from pedestrians before the body was found due to repairs. Plans to build a Ferris wheel had also been approved the summer prior, so dumping the body here was possibly a threat from the killer to the community. Any rides built here would no doubt be feared, the atmosphere of a dead body would kill sales and start toxic rumours and theories.
Turning back to the bundle of police officers, Jimin's eyes met Officer Kim Seokjin's, who was looking over his shoulder at him from under his fair hair that was whipping around in multiple directions, in the early sea breeze. He gave a weak smile and nod, approaching the tape to lift it for the detective.
Jimin returned the nod and ducked under the blue and white police line, unfolding his notepad. "Thanks for calling me," he said, barely hearing himself over the wind coming in from the sea. "Is the caller here still?"
"Yeah, he's a little shaken up, so the medical team is taking a look at him." He said, motioning to a police car parked nearby that held a young man, sitting in the backseat with the door open, medical professionals kneeling beside him. "He rang at 8:48 this morning in a hysterical state, but he hasn't been able to answer any questions, so we were keeping him here for you to speak to."
"I'll see the body first." Jimin decided, continuing towards the white border, noting down the numbers '08:48'. The officers pushed the boards open for him and Seokjin to enter. As soon as they did, Jimin was certain that he felt the smell physically hit him in the face. It was such a vile and eerily familiar stench of a butcher's that his eyes watered on impact. Subtly brushing his nose to hide his reaction, Jimin took in the sight below him.
Barely an inch of flesh was left uncovered by the soaking of blood that the area had sustained. There was little clothing left amongst the carnage, but one foot had a high heel shoe on. A few inches up however, the foot was almost entirely severed by a bear trap firmly latched into her ankle. It looked like there had been a struggle, as the metal teeth had chewed down to the bone. He silently gave his condolences and hoped she hadn't suffered for long, convincing himself that the slashed meat was really a human.
Due to the slit on her neck looking much drier and darker than newer wounds, it was safe to assume that he'd most likely killed her before he mutilated her body. The fresher wounds were the various slashes across her torso that had been savagely ripped and attacked like a pack of mad wolves, the missing limbs such as the leg, both arms and head. Upon closer inspection however, Jimin noted that the head was in fact there, but had been hit so many times that it was flat and disfigured enough to be nothing more than a slate of mush. The leg was missing from the upper-thigh downwards and her stomach looked to be ripped inside out. A metre or so to her left was another collection of battered tissue, but it had been thrown at the wooden pier's barrier with such a venomous force that it had sparsely remained its shape and misted the area with black, red and a sickening brown.
Most of the blood had dried up and clotted in areas, but oddly enough there were other wounds that were still fresh-looking. The blood around her had been there long enough for it to soak into the wooden panels, but in some areas it still pooled in between the splinters, like it had only just been forced out. As Jimin's eyes followed the blood that smeared around her in an equal radius, like a morbid painting, his eyes fell upon a dark red square marked out with the blood, with a large tick also painted inside of it. This was the third time the killer had used this symbol to confirm that he had 'checked off a rat'.
"Jimin," Seokjin finally said, catching his attention when his tone sounded breathy. "The last ones weren't like this. He didn't spread the blood around like this last time, either. He usually kills them out of sight, but this time he did it right here, on the pier. What do you think?"
Jimin took in Seokjin's words, allowing his eyes to shut, pretending it was because of his thoughts to hide the fact that he just didn't really want to look anymore. "No," he began, struggling to speak, think hard and write down notes at the same time. "No, I don't think he killed her here. It's too out in the open. Catching her in the bear trap would be far too loud and the victim couldn't have been up here when it was closed for construction. High heels aren't really ideal footwear to walk along the sand to the pier and her ankle and throat wound look to have been done much earlier."
"So he killed her somewhere else, but decided to do all the cutting up here, instead of prior to moving her, you think?" Seokjin pondered, taking Jimin's firm nod as means to continue. "Then she was here in one piece this morning, dead. Then he removed her internal organs, destroyed her head and then cut off limbs to take back with him. He must have brought a car here, you think?"
"I wonder about that." Jimin murmured, turning away from the mangled corpse, to stare off into the skyline. Using the clear sky to try and clear his mind enough to piece together a rough timeline.
"You don't think he brought a car?"
"Not that, the order of how he did things." Jimin stated, still unmoving his eyes from the distant horizon. "The victim's missing arms have a different colour of blood around them. They look like the newest additions. It's possible he came back to do more later, like he needed her arms for something."
"I see what you mean. Or maybe he just went home feeling like it didn't look gory enough, so came back just to do more damage." Seokjin said, quietly, still looking down upon the body, gravely. He then motioned to the head. "He must have been working at that for a long time. And surely it was loud."
"Either he smashed her skull into tiny pieces or he just removed it, because I don't see it," Jimin agreed. He then gave Seokjin's arm an affectionate pat. "I'll see if the caller is alright to speak."
Seokjin nodded and lead Jimin out of the cover, failing to hide his instant relief to be free of the stench. "So it's your guy?" He asked, through a sigh. "Is it the Rat-catcher?"
"Rat-catcher," Jimin scoffed, repeating the name with a poisonous tone. "Yeah it's him, alright. Sick bastard. He's the fucking rat!"
Their echoey footsteps on the wood and the muffle of voices around them was the only sound for a few moments as they walked. Seokjin kept his mouth in a thin line, possibly surprised by Jimin's malicious tone. "I wonder what qualifies them to be rats." The officer finally responded. "How many has it been, now?"
"Four," Jimin said, gravely. "This is the fourth victim. Eld Carroll was first, the taxi driver, then the teacher Joshua Druitt, then Crystal Maybridge, an alleged sex worker. All of them so far have had a bear trap somewhere on their body and all excluding the first had the tick in a box symbol nearby, written in blood or etched into something."
"And no connections at all, between victims?"
"Nothing, which is honestly unusual for Rhu." Jimin sighed, earnestly, before stopping in front of the parked police car and turning to Seokjin. "I need you to ask the residents along Oswold Front about any events they may have seen or heard between 12am and 4am this morning. He most likely came in the 4 hours that the streetlights go off."
"Right away, detective." Seokjin replied instantly, radioing a couple of policemen in the area to assist him.
As Seokjin headed down the pier at a marching pace, various other officers weeded out of the crowds of the investigative team, down towards the beach after him. Along the construction barrier, a handful of early morning passers-by had stopped to hear what had happened. They all started firing questions at Seokjin and other approaching officers, but they handled the situation calmly, asking them if any of them lived on Oswold Front.
It was clear that until the so-called "Rat-catcher" was apprehended, Jimin and Seokjin wouldn't be going out for their previous after-work-pints for a while.