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Choi Sung-Hyun began to explain what he had planned to do with Lee Jun-Sung, whom he had kidnapped.
"I was thinking of placing Jun-Sung in a better home, like mine. A home that desperately wanted a child, just like my adoptive parents did."
"Then... don't tell me..."
"Yes. I intended to take revenge on Mr. Park Dong-Joon, but I never planned to hurt any of the kids. The children did nothing wrong," Choi Sung-Hyun let out a sigh and continued. "And since I'm a cop, I had access to lists of children under seven in our jurisdiction who were suffering from abuse or domestic violence. Jun-Sung was one of them."
"So you only planned to abduct those children?"
"Yes. I had a few more besides Jun-Sung. I intended to stage them as missing and send them to adoptive parents in other areas who truly wanted children. In Jun-Sung's case, his father had basically abandoned him at an orphanage and kept visiting with lies... so I was going to introduce him to adoptive parents in Jeju Island."
It was an answer I never expected. I had assumed the crimes were random, but there was a clear intention behind them. Which meant that, in the previous timeline, the reason the missing children were never found was because the adoptive parents who finally got a child they longed for never spoke up.
"There are really parents like that?"
"Yes. Adoption requires certain conditions, and those who don't meet them don't even get a chance. Even if they didn't have much money, I believed that if they were kind and loving, they would never abandon a child once they had one."
He said he even compiled a list of adoptive parents who would never give up a child no matter what.
"How many children were there?" I asked.
"About five. That's how many I had identified."
At last, I understood why there had only been five serial disappearance cases before the regression. I had assumed the kids hadn't been found because they were all murdered, but that was a mistake.
"Still, I don't think that excuses my crimes."
"T-then... What were you planning to do with the private investigator?"
"Honestly... I hadn't figured that out yet. If anything, I might've created fake evidence pointing to another suspect and released him. I thought, as a police officer, people would believe me over whatever he said, especially since he never saw my face clearly."
This was the difference...
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