A Familiar Cage

Screech.

“There’s no proper place to park.”

We had arrived at the detention center where Lee Donghyeon was being held.

“Ah, there are more spots in that alley over there than here. We’ll have to walk a bit, but we can park there.”

Lee Ilwoo followed my fingertip with his gaze.
After quickly parking and walking over, Lee Ilwoo glanced around.

“…It feels new.”
“Ah, you haven’t been here since then, Mr. Lee Ilwoo. Nothing ever changes here, no matter what.”
“Did you come here often? You seem familiar with the place.”

Well, I used to come here often in the past.
But as Cha Yohan, it wasn’t that many times.
The me that Lee Ilwoo remembered would have been the same.
I smiled at Lee Ilwoo and shook my head.

“I have a good memory, you know.”
“You have an excessively good one. I’m surprised sometimes. I didn’t think you’d even notice that I changed my socks…”
“Haha. Was it that shocking?”

This was not a place of good memories for Lee Ilwoo.
I deliberately smiled and added. Like a joke.

“You said you were going upstairs, but it was quite impressive that your socks had changed from white to black.”
“…It’s embarrassing to hear it again. I’ve met many people in my life… but you’re always a bit of an exception, Attorney Cha.”
“A lawyer’s job is to observe.”

Lee Ilwoo nodded at my words and stared at the detention center for a moment.
Instead of rushing him, I stood behind him.
Just as Lee Ilwoo always stood behind me.
After a little while, Lee Ilwoo called out to me.

“…Attorney.”
“Yes.”
“Can Mr. Lee Donghyeon also come out of this place like I did?”

Lee Ilwoo was asking if he could come out of this iron gate again, not if he was being transferred from the detention center to prison.
I answered with a question.

“How was it for you when you were here, Mr. Lee Ilwoo?”
“…It was unfair. I couldn’t sleep, and every day was despair.”
“If what his parents said is true, it won’t be any different for Mr. Lee Donghyeon. If so, I’ll be able to help.”

Lee Ilwoo seemed to be recalling his first meeting with me.
Not with me, but with the ‘real’ Cha Yohan.
I smiled brightly and nodded.

“Then I’ll be back.”

“Please adhere to the visitation hours.”
“Yes, thank you for your hard work.”

Leaving Lee Ilwoo, who couldn’t enter the visitation room, I followed the guard’s guidance.
Not long after I sat down, a man in handcuffs entered the room.
The vitality from the photos his parents had shown me, along with any other light, was gone from Lee Donghyeon’s eyes.

Thump.

He staggered over and plopped down on a worn-out folding chair.

“Hello, Mr. Lee Donghyeon.”
“…Yes.”

Lee Donghyeon bowed his head as if forcing himself to be polite.
And he just stared at the desk between us.

“Um, my name is Cha Yohan, an attorney. Your parents came to see me today.”

Lee Donghyeon, who had seemed completely apathetic, flinched slightly.

“So I’m going to ask you a few questions, and I’d appreciate your honest answers.”
“…What if I don’t answer honestly?”

When I didn’t reply, Lee Donghyeon raised his head and looked at me for the first time.

Swoosh.

“I’ve been completely honest all this time. But no one listened. Well, are you any different?”
“Mr. Lee Donghyeon.”
“The lawyers I’ve met so far have all said the same thing.”

He raised his cuffed hands as if in agony and rubbed his face roughly.
The louder the clanking of his wrists, the more roughly he rubbed his eyes.

“‘Admit it,’ ‘the more you deny it, the longer your sentence will be,’ ‘do you want to add contempt to your charges.’ Why do I have to admit to something I didn’t do…”
“What do you mean by that?”

Swoosh.

Lee Donghyeon lowered his hands.
His reddened eyes were revealed.
A gaze filled with anger and another that seemed to have given up on everything looked at me at the same time.

“I didn’t do it. I really didn’t.”
“Tell me. What happened?”
“I… I mean… I wanted to do well for my parents.”

I watched as Lee Donghyeon placed his hands on his thighs.

“They just told me I have a visitor, and everyone jeered at me. As if I could get away with it like that. It’s just a matter of a few more years in prison anyway.”
“……”
“But why do I have to hear that here? I really haven’t committed any crime.”

People always crave the truth.
Especially those who deal with the law should be so.
There’s a saying that people even write lies in their own diaries.
I could see how many people lied, and how trivially.
That’s why I turned off all my skills when I wasn’t in a meeting with a client.
Because I didn’t want to know.
How much my world was riddled with lies.
But the man in front of me now was different.
He was not a client who claimed innocence with lies, nor was he one who minimized his crime by pleading for his wrongdoing with tears.

“Did you ever feel anything was strange while working at that company? Anything that felt off, or a sense of unease?”

Lee Donghyeon slowly shook his head.

“I’ve never done anything that would make me ashamed to face my parents.”
“What specific tasks were you in charge of at the company? Your parents said you sent them a considerable amount of living expenses every month.”

Lee Donghyeon raised his head and looked at me.
His eyes were visible under his overgrown hair that seemed to be about to poke them.
I met his gaze without avoiding it.

“I didn’t have much to spend money on besides rent, so I sent almost half of my salary.”
“Is a developer’s salary normally that high?”

He must have been asked before if he received such a high salary because it was an illegal job.
Lee Donghyeon seemed slightly flustered by the unexpected question.

“It’s not low, but… I know I received a little more.”
“Is there a special reason?”
“I once posted my work online, and they contacted me.”
“Saying they wanted to work with you?”
“Yes.”

This was a story I hadn’t heard from the couple.
As I nodded for him to continue, Lee Donghyeon spoke again.

“At first, I was suspicious too. Offering such a salary to a rookie with no experience.”

As the conversation continued, Lee Donghyeon’s anxiety gradually subsided.

“But when I looked into it, it was a pretty famous company for a startup. They said they had scouted a few people like that.”
“Scouted? It seems the number of employees wasn’t small.”
“No. It changed often, but the headcount was always about the same. It was really big for a startup.”
“How many employees were there?”
“Usually about thirty.”
“Were they all developers?”

Lee Donghyeon frowned for a moment in thought and then answered.
He seemed to be retracing his thoughts. He tilted his head and then slowly shook it.

“No, not all of them… about half.”
“And the work you were in charge of?”
“I created the programs they instructed from above, and I checked for bugs in the programs that were already made or under development. Just as the company wanted.”

[There’s really not a single lie.]

‘I know.’

Swoosh.

I placed my hand on the table.

“It would be great if I could see what kind of program it was… Is that possible? It’s not written in the file.”

At that moment, Lee Donghyeon gritted his teeth as if in a fit of anger and answered.

“You can see it.”
“What? But the file doesn’t mention the programs you were developing. Are you saying your statement was omitted?”
“Because the police ignored it!”

Bang!

Lee Donghyeon slammed his cuffed hands on the table.

“I showed it to the police too! I backed it up to the cloud and my email every time I worked, and I showed them all of that.”

I quickly took out the documents from my bag and scanned the contents I had already memorized.

‘It’s not here, even looking again.’

Watching me, Lee Donghyeon added in a choked, sorrowful voice.

“They didn’t believe me, saying I had manipulated it. They told me to stop my tricks…”

No matter how much they believed it was a lie, and even if it looked like one, it should all be in the report.

‘This is fishy. Could it be…’

After a moment of thought, I looked at Lee Donghyeon.
He wasn’t even thirty.
He was engulfed in the anger of his parents being in trouble because of him, his own sense of injustice, and the fact that no one believed him.
The eyes looking at me were asking.
If I would also not believe him.

“…I’d like to check it myself. Is that possible?”

He nodded silently.
I silently held out a piece of paper and a pen.
With a trembling hand, Lee Donghyeon pressed down hard on each and every letter he wrote.
After checking several times to see if he had written any alphabets or numbers incorrectly, he returned the paper to me.
I deliberately made a show of tucking it into his case file and putting it away neatly in my bag.

Zip.

Zipping it up, I met the eyes of Lee Donghyeon, who couldn’t take his eyes off me.

“I only take on cases of people who are truly innocent. The reason I came here to see you, Mr. Lee Donghyeon, is because of your parents.”
“……”
“I promised your parents. That if you were truly innocent, I would help you in any way I can.”
“…Then, are you going to help me?”

Swoosh.

I stood up from my seat and replied to Lee Donghyeon, who had raised his head to follow my eye level.

“Ignore what other people say, whatever it is, and just think about your parents. And your future, Mr. Lee Donghyeon.”

I bowed my head and turned my back. I could still feel his gaze on my back.
Opening the door, I spoke.

“The visitation is over.”

Did they say there’s a characteristic to a person’s walk?
That just as everyone’s voice is different, so are their footsteps.
As if to prove it, Lee Ilwoo stood up from a distance to greet me.
He probably hadn’t stood up once before I came.

“Were you bored waiting?”
“Not at all. It was fine. I also organized my thoughts a bit.”
“Thoughts?”
“Well… the bodyguards are asking for work. They say they’re bored.”

An unexpected answer.

‘Since they’re physical people, they must be getting antsy.’

I nodded and replied.

“That’s right. There hasn’t been any need for bodyguards for a while. Then could you ask them to secretly watch Mr. Kim Eun-gyeom and Mr. Choi Yikang?”
“The new attorneys?”
“Yes. Only from a distance. So far away that even a decent agent wouldn’t notice.”
“Understood.”

Lee Ilwoo didn’t ask me for the conditions, and I didn’t explain the reason.
We talked like that and headed for the car.

Thud.

Only after getting in the car did Lee Ilwoo ask me a question.

“Have you decided on the case?”
“Yes, I’m thinking of taking it. It seems Mr. Lee Donghyeon was just caught up in it. Thanks to that, I also learned a few new things.”
“Then should we head back to the office now?”

I shook my head and took the documents out of my bag.

“There’s something I want to check first.”

I went to the site and entered the ID and password Lee Donghyeon had written down.
After a brief loading, emails organized by date filled the screen.
Inside, the work instructions and the results were all intact.
The programs Lee Donghyeon had created and organized were also backed up in order of time, date, and version.

‘They just dismissed this, which is several months’ worth of work, as if it didn’t exist?’

Even at a glance, it was a considerable amount.
So much so that it would be difficult to pretend not to know.
Of course, I didn’t have the knowledge to properly understand and judge this.
In fact, I was close to a layman.
But I knew.
Just as I could easily read the law books that were gibberish to others, there was a person who could read this complex thing in one go.
And most importantly, that person was someone I could trust.