Chapter 439: Lustful Search (2)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 439: Lustful Search (2)
The police provided me with the personal details of the missing woman.
Her name was Jo Yeon-hee, age twenty-three… a university student.
Her slightly upturned eyes gave her a provocative charm.
She seemed like the type who would be quite popular with men.
After cramming all the potentially useful information into my head, I handed the documents to the two fledglings trailing behind me.
“Memorize her basic information.”
“Yes, sir!”
Yoon Si-hoo, who had been waiting eagerly, snatched the papers. Jin Ha-rin, standing beside him, lightly tapped his shoulder and chided him.
“Please, just calm down.”
“Ugh… I can’t help it.”
Yoon Si-hoo was overflowing with passion, while Jin Ha-rin remained calm and composed.
They were truly a polar opposite couple.
About five minutes later, after they had committed the information to memory, they returned the documents and asked me a question.
“Where are we going now, sir?”
“Well…”
All we’d gotten from the police station was the missing woman’s personal information.
Her movements on the day she disappeared—where she went, what she did—were completely unknown.
We needed to figure that out first to find any sort of lead…
As I pondered for a moment, Jin Ha-rin spoke up.
“Couldn’t we trace her movements by checking the CCTV footage from the day she left home?”
A reasonable suggestion.
But unfortunately, it was impossible.
“I’m afraid that’s not an option.”
“May I ask why?”
I explained the reason to her as she asked in a disappointed tone.
“There are no CCTVs near her house.”
The house where the missing woman, Jo Yeon-hee, lived with her mother wasn’t far from Jeong-hee’s place.
Maybe a five-minute leisurely walk.
The neighborhood itself was on the outskirts of Seoul, so it was incomparably worse off than the city center.
The fact that you had to complain dozens of times about a broken streetlight on a daily route before someone would finally crawl out, pretend to fix it, drag their feet, and only actually fix it months later—that pretty much said it all.
It wasn’t that there were no CCTVs at all.
There were, but they had broken down long ago, and since no one had bothered with them, they might as well not have existed.
After hearing my explanation, Jin Ha-rin’s eyebrows furrowed in distress.
“That’s just awful. If they had fixed it beforehand, we might have found her by now…!”
After venting her frustration in an angry tone, she seemed to come to her senses, blushing as she bowed her head to me.
“I-I’m sorry. I just got so angry all of a sudden…”
“It’s fine. Your reaction is perfectly understandable.”
The outskirts of Seoul were in a truly awkward position.
The city center received massive funding for further development simply because it was the center, and the provincial areas were also getting their fair share of investment to make them livable again. But this place? It was stuck in time.
And this stagnation was likely to continue for quite a while.
At least, until the city center becomes so saturated that the politicians’ attention naturally turns this way.
Or until someone steps up and changes the tune before that happens.
The latter would probably come sooner than the former.
After all, I was planning to step in and turn a part of this area upside down myself in the near future.
Of course, I had a lot to take care of before that, so I had no idea when that would be.
“Then what should we do…?”
Worried that we might not be able to find her, she asked the question on her mind. I answered.
“We’re going to the university.”
“The university… you mean the one she attends?”
“Yes.”
“Ah… I understand.”
The sharp girl immediately grasped my meaning.
“You’re going to look into her usual routine to figure out her movements on that specific day, right?”
“Exactly.”
Smart kid.
* * *
The three of us arrived at the university Jo Yeon-hee attended and split up, each seeking out the friends she usually hung out with.
We focused on one key question.
“Where does she usually go to drink or have fun?”
To this, they gave similar answers.
“We usually drink at the bars near the university. They’re close, and the food is cheap.”
“And when it’s not ‘usually’?”
“Uh… on a Friday night, or if we were feeling good after an exam, we often went to Hongdae.”
“Hongdae…”
“Yeah, we never had a specific place in mind. Just pickup bars, clubs, that sort of thing…”
One of the women was listing off places that came to mind.
Just then, another woman who had been chiming in with “Right, right,” suddenly interjected as if she’d just remembered something.
“Oh, we went to a club in Gangnam that one time, too!”
“Ah, you mean for Yeon-hee’s birthday?”
“Yeah, yeah. Didn’t Yeon-hee love it?”
“She did. She said she loved the atmosphere and insisted we go there whenever we went clubbing…”
The mood quickly turned somber.
“Sh-she’ll be fine! That girl, Yeon-hee, she probably met some great guy and just forgot to call.”
Comforting each other with a sliver of hope, the two women bowed their heads to Kim Do-jin.
“Please, you have to find Yeon-hee.”
“She was a really good person. She was always studying super hard, saying she wanted to graduate quickly so her mom could have an easier life. She rarely even showed up to drink unless it was a special occasion.”
“……”
Their sincere worry told me everything I needed to know.
It gave me a good sense of what kind of person the missing woman, Jo Yeon-hee, was.
Kim Do-jin offered them a reassuring smile and replied.
“I’ll do my best.”
That was all he could say for now.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
After finishing their inquiries, the three of them regrouped and headed to their first destination: the club in Gangnam that the two university students had mentioned last.
The club’s name was ‘Rising Sun.’
True to its name, it was a club that was currently gaining popularity, targeting young men and women in their twenties.
Looking at the entrance, which was flashy from the outside, Jin Ha-rin asked a worried question.
“Are you sure this is the right place…? The profile you showed us said that Ms. Jo Yeon-hee wasn’t very well-off.”
Hearing her question, Kim Do-jin’s lips curled into a smirk.
One thing was for sure.
“Ha-rin, you’ve never been to a club, have you?”
He could say with certainty that she had never set foot in one.
“Well, no… H-how did you know?”
As she asked with a slight blush, Kim Do-jin explained.
“For women, clubs aren’t that expensive.”
Getting an expensive table was usually the man’s job.
“Pretty girls just have to go in and dance. Things will naturally follow.”
“Follow…? What will follow?”
She asked with genuine innocence, as if she truly didn’t know. He continued with a bitter smile.
“Drinks, a place to sit, and men.”
“Eh….”
At the word ‘men,’ Jin Ha-rin’s face turned beet red.
I expected her to be shy, but she seemed to be beyond anything I imagined.
That’s what made me curious.
It would be natural for an adult couple to have been intimate, but her reaction was that of a complete innocent.
But I quickly convinced myself.
Well… not everyone is crazy about sex.
He had been the same way.
When he started dating Han Ju-hee, his first-ever girlfriend, they had cherished each other immensely.
…Or did we?
He was certain they had cherished each other’s hearts, but he wasn’t so sure about their bodies.
Quickly pushing the past from his mind, he continued.
“Anyway, for that reason, I think this place is a more likely possibility.”
“I-if what you say is true, sir… then it’s not entirely out of the question.”
“As expected of you, sir…!”
Jin Ha-rin agreed, still too embarrassed to look at me, while Yoon Si-hoo sent a gaze so full of admiration it was almost scorching.
Leading the two, who amused him in their own very different ways, he walked toward the club’s entrance.
There, two burly men stood, chuckling and trading jokes.
“Excuse me, we’d like to ask a few questions.”
Their eyes turned to Kim Do-jin as he approached and spoke.
He pulled out his smartphone, brought up a photo of Jo Yeon-hee, and held it out to them.
“Did this woman happen to come to the club a few days ago?”
One of the men’s faces twisted into a scowl as he shot back in a gruff voice.
“Who the hell are you, shoving a picture in our faces and asking all these questions?”
Kim Do-jin was taken aback.
“…You don’t know me?”
“If I knew you, I wouldn’t be asking, pal.”
“Ah, um.”
Right.
Of course, he was asking because he didn’t know.
As Kim Do-jin gave a bitter smile, Jin Ha-rin stepped forward from behind him and made the introduction.
“This is Hunter Kim Do-jin. You know, the one who was just promoted to S-rank.”
“Kim… Do-jin…?”
One of the men hastily took out his smartphone and furiously tapped the screen before his face filled with shock.
“H-he’s for real! Look at this.”
“Gasp.”
Quickly grasping the situation, the two men immediately bowed at a ninety-degree angle.
“Greetings, Boss!”
“It’s an honor, Boss!”
“……”
Who’s your boss?
He suppressed the words that rose to his throat and had them stand up straight.
Once more, he displayed her photo on his smartphone screen and asked.
“Alright, I’ll ask again. The woman in this picture…”
“I saw her!”
Before he could even finish his sentence, one of the men shot his hand into the air.
“It was four, maybe five days ago… I don’t know the exact day, but she was one of the first customers we had right after we opened, so I remember her clearly!”
Four or five days.
Last night, her mother said her daughter had left home four days ago, which meant today was the fifth day.
The dates matched perfectly.
This is the place.
He didn’t know for sure yet.
He didn’t know if she disappeared from here or somewhere else.
But the fact that she had visited this place on the day she went missing was certain.
Kim Do-jin patted the shoulder of the man who had provided such crucial information in praise.
“Ah, excellent. The info you’re dishing out is a work of art, you know?”
“Th-thank you, Boss!”
“But, uh.”
“Yes!”
“Could I ask for one more favor?”
“Just say the word!”
Kim Do-jin grinned at the man who answered with a triumphant attitude and continued.
“Gather up all the club employees for me.”
“Yes…! Y-yes, sir?”
“Everyone, from the owner down to the lowest-ranking staff.”
“W-wait…”
“Please?”
“……”
The man wanted to die, cursing his own big mouth that had just been boasting so grandly.