Page 37 of Perfect Happiness

The middle-aged detective came over and stood across from her on the other side of the table.

Putting both hands in his pants pockets, he met her eyes head on, as if to push back her gaze.

He looked like he wasn’t interested in introducing himself.

Instead, the young detective who followed him in gave her a na?ve smile.

“Sorry to make you wait. Something came up. Please, sit.”

Jane sat down, but the middle-aged detective didn’t.

Standing there, he turned his chin sideways and inspected the things she had placed on the table, as though he had never seen someone come to an interrogation so prepared.

Jane felt the fire in her reignite. Not only was he twenty-five minutes late, but now he was wasting even more of her time by acting needlessly tough.

“Thank you for so willingly coming down to the station like this,” the young detective said as he sat down.

According to him, the middle-aged detective was the one she talked on the phone with earlier: Detective Gibeom Kim.

With his introduction out of the way, they went right into checking her personal information.

They asked her for her identification number, her name, her occupation, etc.

After that, they informed her that she had the right to a lawyer and could refuse to answer questions at any time.

Then, in a perfunctory tone of voice, he asked her if she would be exercising these rights.

As far as Jane knew, they didn’t do this for just any witness.

Their asking these questions meant that she was actually a suspect.

“I’ll exercise my rights as necessary.”

The young detective looked back and forth between Jane and Detective Kim.

“Oh, yes, of course—” he said with his mouth half-open like an idiot.

“Also, can I record this?”

Jane picked up her cellphone and showed it to them. This time, it was Detective Kim who responded.

“Like a true journalist, always recording everything.”

Although he didn’t give her permission, he also hadn’t said no.

Jane pressed the button to start recording.

Detective Kim’s eyes followed her finger as she did this.

It felt like his gaze would burn a hole through her fingernail if it lingered for too long.

But Jane didn’t sense any hostility in his eyes.

His demeanor was simply informing her that he wasn’t her friend, that it was his job to prove people guilty.

Jane felt the gears in her head starting to move. And like magic her shaking stopped.

“Jane, do you know why you’re here?” the young detective asked.

His tone made him sound like a missionary for some pseudo religion: Do you know the Dao?

Missionaries like that always came in twos.

If he was the cute one meant to make you drop your guard, Detective Kim was the tough one who started pressing you to join.

“No.”

The young detective summarized what they knew about Joon-young’s disappearance.

He was last seen leaving his house in the early morning on November 16; they found his car parked at a public parking lot near Ju-an station in Incheon; they confirmed that the car had been parked there around 8 a.m. on the morning he was last seen; and they were treating this like a criminal investigation. Jane waited for them to continue.

“We want to hear where you were and what you were doing the morning of his disappearance,” Detective Kim said.

“I left the house at around 8 a.m. That morning I went to Chungju to do research for an article.”

Jane continued explaining what happened that day.

But despite having practiced this many times before, the testimony coming out of her mouth wasn’t at all organized.

As a precaution, she wrote down everything she said on her notepad.

Her rate of speech was half its normal speed, and her sentences sounded more like written language than spoken speech.

“So let me see if I got everything. You left the house around 8 a.m. Twenty minutes later you met Joon-young at Ju-an station. You then drove him to Chungju, and while you were gone from the car for a minute, he disappeared without a word. So you called him, but he didn’t answer. Is that right?”

After writing down Detective Kim’s summary on her notepad, she checked the information before correcting him.

“No. I said I was gone for four hours. He left me a message saying something came up. After that, I didn’t try contacting him. So, I don’t know if he would have picked up or not.”

Detective Kim pulled the corners of his mouth into a wide grin. Crooked lion’s teeth poked out between the gap in his lips.

“Isn’t that what I said?”

She didn’t answer this.

“What’s your relationship to each other. You must be close to go to Chungju with him and let him take a nap in your car.”

“I told you he’s a friend from college.”

“I heard he’s your ex-boyfriend and he married your sister.” Detective Kim looked at the young detective. “Sounds like a soap opera, doesn’t it?”

Jane didn’t react to this. All she did was record this comment on her notepad. She was hoping he might hold his tongue, but he seemed to have no intention of pulling punches. Detective Kim grinned at her again before continuing.

“It seems to me like you’ve been seeing your ex-boyfriend all this time, the man your sister married. Is that right?”

“I can’t answer that question.”

Detective Kim propped his cheek on his hand and stared brazenly at Jane, who used all her energy not to avert his gaze. This stalemate continued for a while. Tick-tock, tick-tock .

Detective Kim started over from the beginning.

Jane for her part would glance down at her notes and repeat her answers from before as if reading a script.

Getting angry or making any unnecessary comments would only hurt her.

The more energy she allowed her emotions to consume, the greater the chance she would slip up.

This was also the only way to get out of here faster.

She had to repeat the same answers until the lion got sick and tired of her.

“Can you show me the text message Joon-young sent you?”

Jane paused her recording and looked for the message. Detective Kim glanced momentarily at the cellphone she gave him before returning it to her.

“Would you mind sending me a screenshot of that? I want to take a closer look at it later.”

He talked as if she had just sent him a ten-page report. After taking a screen shot of the text exchange, she sent it to the number he gave her.

“At what time did you read the text message?” Detective Kim asked as he fiddled with his phone.

“Around 3 p.m.”

“You said you got out of the car at 11 a.m. And this text message arrived at 11:04. You mean to tell me you didn’t check your phone for four hours?”

“I put my phone in airplane mode just before going into the museum. I can’t concentrate if I get phone calls while working. I’m required to record interviews.”

Jane held up her phone and showed it to them.

“Just like this.”

Aha . . . Detective Kim mouthed before changing the subject.

“Do you know Min-young Seo?”

“I do.”

“She told us she met you last Monday.”

“That’s true.”

“She said you hid from her the fact that you met Joon-young. Why?”

“I never hid it from her. She never gave me a chance to speak. I guess she didn’t tell you the scene she made when she showed up at my workplace.”

Detective Kim tapped on the desk with the side of his thumb as he stared at her. His facial expression was saying, You tell me. Jane agreed to this, but she spoke as casually as she could, and only gave him the most basic details.

“I find it hard to believe you ran away just because of a little disagreement. Did you record that, too? I’d like to hear what was said.”

Jane didn’t answer this. But he continued to push her buttons.

“What? You don’t have it? I thought you were a journalist!”

“If you’re so curious about what happened, then you can ask the staff who were working at the café that day.”

Detective Kim didn’t look that interested after all. He skillfully moved on to the next question.

“Min-young sent you an email asking for help the next day. You could have told her then.”

Jane focused in on his choice of words. He said “Min-young sent” not “Min-young said she sent.” The former implied that he had seen the email himself, and the latter implied that he’d only heard about it. Jane had to check to see if she was correct.

“Did you read the email?”

Detective Kim didn’t respond. Jane took this as meaning he had.

“It was a hard email to reply to.”

“You didn’t tell her because she hurt your feelings—that’s what you’re saying? Come on, Jane. This is someone’s life we’re talking about. Can’t you put your feelings aside?”

There was contempt in his tone. Jane’s brain was telling her to ignore this, but her emotions took a direct hit.

Her face became flush, as though someone had lit her skin on fire.

Not only was she pissed, but she could also feel her eyeballs bulging.

Her fingers, which were holding the ballpoint pen, tensed up.

Her handwriting as she wrote on the notepad suddenly became messy, as though the pen were slipping on ice.

There were three reasons why she didn’t reply to Min-young’s email. The first was shock. In fact, she was still shocked by what Min-young had told her.

The second was blood ties. No matter how much she despised Yuna, she was still her sister.

So Jane’s natural inclination was to be a defense lawyer for Yuna, not a prosecutor.

From this point of view, everything Min-young told her was circumstance and conjecture.

She had no physical proof that Yuna had done anything.