The Love Trap by Nicole French

4

Detective Cho was a man on a mission. What mission that was, I didn’t really know, considering I understood next to none of the Korean ricocheting around the Hwaseong-Seobu police station. But I knew from the minute I met the relatively young detective that he meant business. His manner was curt and professional. His eyes, however, met mine directly with every question I asked, and beneath his abrupt exterior flickered genuine concern.

“This is not my beat,” he said as he escorted me through the halls of the large station. “Missing persons is downstairs. I work in homicide.”

I glanced back at the elevator we had just left. Tony and another detail followed with suspicious eyes on Cho. Downstairs was the opposite of where we were headed.

“Just as well. When I was here before, they didn’t seem to care much about a missing Korean-American woman,” I remarked, ignoring the suggestion implied by his use of the word “homicide.”

“What do you say?” Cho replied over his suited shoulder. “Not our jurisdiction? She is an American now, isn’t she?”

“Well, the embassy didn’t seem to care much either,” I said. I had spent a solid two hours this morning on the phone with the U.S. Consulate, and no one there had been a damn bit interested in my mother’s whereabouts, despite the fact that she was an American citizen. More of John Carson’s insidious influence, no doubt. Despite Zola’s contacts, the CIA thus far had also been no help.

With the case against Eric still in progress, Zola wasn’t reachable either. Well, maybe it was time to start throwing the weight of my new last name around. I wasn’t just some random person. It was time to act like it. My mother’s life depended on it.

“Look, Detective Cho. I want to make something clear.”

Cho turned outside a conference room and waited patiently.

“I only just got here,” I said, “but I’m not exactly one woman. I am part of a very powerful family back home, and we can be very…loud…if we don’t receive the help we need.”

Was that clear enough? Too clear? It was honestly hard to tell, and I was new at this innuendo thing.

Cho raised his eyebrow. “I am very aware of your husband’s family, Mrs. de V-vries.” He stumbled slightly over the compounded V-R sound of Eric’s last name.

I folded my arms. The subtext was clear—the de Vries family weren’t necessarily my family. At least he wasn’t an idiot.

“Am I talking to the wrong person, then?” I asked. Fuck innuendo. I was better direct.

Cho shrugged. “Your husband’s company operates several large ports in South Korea. The Korean government will not wish to upset him.”

“Good,” I said. “Then hopefully we’ll have an understanding. And perhaps you can convey the importance of that to them in a way I haven’t managed.” I had yet to get any major Korean official to call me back—maybe Detective Cho could grease the wheels.

“But,” he continued, “Chariot Industries also has many contracts important to South Korea.”

Shit. So basically, South Korea itself was stuck between a rock and a hard place and was choosing to pretend the conflict didn’t exist at all.

As I followed Cho into the conference room, I decided to pursue a different tack.

“So, if you’re in homicide,” I said after he closed the door, “does that mean you think Lawrence Kim’s death didn’t occur from natural causes?”

The detective didn’t answer right away, instead moving to a counter in the corner bearing an electric kettle. He calmly fixed us both tea, and we waited the few awkward minutes for the water to boil. This was obviously not a man to be rushed.

I accepted a cup of tea from the detective before he took his seat.

“I think the death of Lawrence Kim is very suspicious,” Cho replied at last. “Mrs. de Vries—”

“Jane,” I interrupted. I needed the detective on my side. “Please call me Jane.”

His gaze levelled on me. “Jane. Okay. I will be clear. You should be very careful who you talk to about Jonathan Carson. Or even about Lawrence Kim. As I believe we have established, not everyone is on your side.”

“Are you?” My palms were damp. Please say yes, I pleaded inwardly.

Again, Detective Cho took a very long time to answer. “I am not on anyone’s payroll other than this station’s.”

I exhaled.

“But you should still be careful. Lawrence Kim’s death, it reminded me of something. Have you ever heard of the Hwaseong serial murders, Mrs. de Vr—Jane?”

I shook my head. “No…should I have?”

“They are very famous here. There are two movies, I think, and many TV shows about them. An unsolved case even now, but the subject of much curiosity from the public.” Cho tapped his mouth. “I don’t know. My colleagues think I am crazy, but I think maybe there is something here. Maybe yes, maybe no.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Cho leaned back in his chair with the ease of a practiced storyteller as he cradled his teacup. “They started in 1986, and ended in 1991. Ten murders. All women. All of them raped. All strangled with their own clothes. Pantyhose, brassieres, things like that. All but one of the bodies abandoned in rural areas around Hwaseong—rice paddies, melon fields, canals. Four in eighty-six, two in eighty-seven, two more in eighty-eight. And the last in 1990 and ninety-one.”

Rice paddies. I couldn’t imagine that was an uncommon place to leave a dead body in the history of this country. After all, rice paddies were ubiquitous all over Korea, not to mention most of Asia.

Still, the dates struck home.

“John Carson was here in 1987.”

Cho nodded. “And eighty-six and eighty-eight. Lawrence Kim had his travel records in his notes.”

I put my teacup down. “You have the rest of Kim’s notes? Can I see them?” I wondered if they contained anything different from the ones the station had given me with his other belongings.

Cho shook his head. “They are part of the evidence of the case. I cannot have tampering.”

“Because you think John Carson killed those women?”

“No,” Cho said quickly. “I do not. It was not that simple. He has too many alibis for all the incidents. John Carson was not here when they were found. He did not kill those women.”

I gulped. I wasn’t sure if I felt fear or relief. I didn’t want my biological father to be a serial mass murderer, but a part of me did wonder if he was capable of it after what he had done to Eric. And what he might be doing to my mother.

“But then I think about,” Cho continued, “there were ten murders. Seven of them were similar. Young girls. Fourteen, fifteen, twenty-one, twenty-five, twenty-nine. All raped, then strangled with their clothes, and abandoned. Then three others were older. Fifty-four, sixty-nine, seventy-one. One had DNA of a local boy on her, someone witnesses say they saw on a bus.” He shook his head. “It didn’t go anywhere.”

“Do you think that some of them might have been copycat crimes?” I chimed in, now following his train of thought.

“Some, yes. To confuse investigators,” Cho agreed. “Killed in the same way as the original. Maybe to lead them away from the real criminal. Maybe just to mask someone else’s crimes.” He sat back up and leaned across the table. “Does the name Park Seo-hyeon mean anything to you?”

I started to shake my head, but then I stopped when I realized that it did mean something to me. “That’s the name of my mother’s friend. The one who worked with her on the airline. The one who—”

“Organized a prostitution ring, yes?” Cho pointed to the table, like he was gesturing to evidence that was actually there. “It was in Kim’s notes. She was also one of the victims—found in a melon field.”

Found in a melon field.

Just like Kim.

I blinked, trying not to shake. I hadn’t read through all of the notes yet. Obviously there were some critical things I had missed.

The pieces were starting to come together now. Carson had been involved with a prostitution ring gone awry. For whatever reason, Carson wanted these women taken care of, but he was smart. He didn’t do it himself. He likely sent someone and had them camouflage the crime with the rash of others that had happened in the area.

“But there was nothing—nothing at all—to condemn him or…whoever he sent?” I asked. It was hard to believe.

He shook his head. “The technology was so bad back then. They did not even take samples from the bodies until the last two, and even then, they only show it was maybe not the same person. It is the reason the cases were never solved.”

He was being delicate, but I understood what he meant. If the victims were raped and strangled, “samples” meant semen. Blood. Looking under fingernails for skin or other bits of the killer scraped during a fight for the woman’s life. The last two, then, pointed to the possibility that there were multiple killers. Maybe one was actually committing the crimes of the original.

Which pointed to a new question: who was the original murderer?

“The only witness we ever had was a victim of attempted rape in 1991 who gave the police a description of a young man, no double eyelids, maybe in his twenties, who was on a bus with her.” Cho continued like he was telling a fireside tale, not updating me on a homicide case.

“God,” I muttered. “That could have been anyone.”

“That is the statement that was in the papers. It was the strongest evidence we had, along with one hair found on another body. You can see why we had a hard time solving it.”

“I do, yeah. But what does this have to do with my mother? Or Lawrence Kim? He’s not a woman, and he wasn’t strangled. Was he raped too? The coroner would have noted that.”

Cho shook his head. “No, he was not violated that way. But…” He tipped his head to one side, like he was trying to divine the answer to this mystery from me. “When I saw who he was looking for, I wondered if there was more of a connection.”

“Why?”

Cho stretched his arms lazily over the chairs on either side of him. “Another rape victim was treated at the Hwaseong hospital in early 1987, but she would not give a statement to the police.” He looked at me meaningfully. “When they tried to contact her a few months later, she had left the country. Her name was Lee Yu-na.”

He pronounced it in Korean, without the Americanized accent he had been affecting since greeting me outside the station. I recognized it nonetheless. Yu-na. My mother.

Someone had raped her, possibly tried to kill her, just like her friend after all. Her fears, apparently, were founded in her own experience. And so, heeding the warning John Carson had given her back then, she stayed quiet. Until she fled.

“Oh, Eomma,” I murmured, my hand closing over my mouth. Was that why Carson had brought her back here? Some demented attempt to finish the job he had started thirty years ago?

“I think Lawrence Kim was killed because he was too close to finding something that linked John Carson to these crimes,” Cho said. “The statute of limitations on murder is only fifteen years in Korea, so it would not matter now. But it would ruin the contracts he has in the country, no?”

“It would ruin a lot of things for him,” I murmured.

“Your mother was last seen in Jinan-dong.”

I looked up. “What? Kim said—”

“I asked more,” Cho interrupted gently. “People here, they didn’t forget what happened all those years ago. They hear of strange people, they keep watch. She came back, and she was recognized.”

I swallowed. “Where—where is that?”

“It’s a neighborhood east of here. South of Suwon, on the other side of the river.” He tipped his head, like he was surprised I didn’t know. “It’s where your family is from, Mrs. de Vries.”

I swallowed down the rest of my tea, now lukewarm from sitting on the table. “Why—why would he take her there?”

Unfortunately, Detective Cho was all out of answers. “I would like to know everything you know about John Carson,” he said mildly. “I think it will help me to answer your questions. And find your mother.”

I looked up. “So you—you’re going to help?”

He smiled then, and for a moment, he looked almost familiar. “Why, yes, cousin,” he said, dropping one last revelation in my lap. “Family has to help family, after all.”