Off the Record
The old indirect lighting bled a damp, stale orange across the room. Unidentifiable stains had seeped faintly into the cheap floral wallpaper, and the air was a nauseating stew of harsh disinfectant fighting a losing battle against the cheap air freshener meant to smother it. The only sound was the low, persistent hum of a miniature refrigerator.
Oh Sae-ah closed her eyes, the starched stiffness of the sheets pressing into her back.
Creak. Creak.
The bed screamed in a regular, mechanical rhythm, matching every thrust of the man on top of her. Something like a hot iron rod had forced its way into her deepest place. Slick frictional heat dragged along her soaked inner walls, and each time he bottomed out, a dull, heavy pleasure climbed through her lower belly.
Reason had nothing to do with it. Her body answered on its own. Her inner muscles contracted in waves, sucking him in deeper.
An act to empty her head. A coupling she performed like a habit, like a job.
From the deepest point of her abdomen, something hot began to surge backward up her spine. It slipped the leash of her brain, forcibly waking every dormant cell and flooding through her entire body. Her fingertips went numb. Her toes went dizzy. Beneath the surface of consciousness, her flesh staged a rebellion all its own.
Oh Sae-ah bit down hard on her lower lip to swallow the moan trying to break free. A faint, metallic taste of blood spread through her mouth.
A sensation she could not control. The dam she had built from reason and logic, collapsing before a tidal wave of pleasure. She hated this moment with a vicious, visceral loathing — and at the same time, it felt so rapturous that her mind went white as a blank page.
In the end, the dam broke.
Her body convulsed in fine, shuddering spasms, and she let go of the thread of consciousness.
A short while later, the man collapsed on top of her, spent. The smell of sticky sweat and semen mixed with the nauseating odor of latex rubber, stabbing at her nose.
Into the blank page of her mind, they came flooding back: Park Kyung-chul's corpse. Lee Doyun's mocking eyes. Park Ajeong's hollow face.
A faint self-loathing rose in her chest as she shoved the man off.
"Move."
He sat up in a clumsy shuffle, plucked a cigarette from the nightstand, and stuck it in his mouth. The lighter's flame briefly lit his greasy, glistening face before it vanished again.
"Haaah. Thanks to you, Team Leader Oh, I finally got myself a proper meal for once...."
Oh Sae-ah cut him off. There was not a shred of emotion in her voice.
"Skip the small talk and tell me about Park Kyung-chul."
There was no other reason she had mixed her body with this wretched, slovenly man in his fifties. She wanted the hidden face of Park Kyung-chul that never made it into any report. That was all.
The middle-aged man exhaled a long stream of smoke and looked at her with something like interest.
"Hmm. Everyone already knows Park Kyung-chul was a problem child. What you want, Team Leader... is the stuff nobody else knows. That it?"
"Yes."
Oh Sae-ah studied the man in front of her. Same traffic division as Park Kyung-chul. Rank a little higher, and still a piece of garbage who had no business wearing a badge.
He stubbed out the cigarette and smiled, oily and sly.
"Nah. Why are you so obsessed with the Park Kyung-chul case? Is it even worth investigating if you're handing your body over to a bum like me?"
She ignored the naked question.
"Weren't you close with Park Kyung-chul?"
The middle-aged man shrugged, as if there was no need to spell out what kind of "closeness" theirs had been.
Oh Sae-ah looked him dead in the eye and dropped her voice.
"Tell me what isn't in the reports."
He looked her over for a moment, then nodded, apparently satisfied.
"Fine. Cleanest way is we each give what we've got and take what we came for.... But whatever you hear in this room stays off the record. We clear?"
"Yes."
She answered without a flicker of hesitation.
The man smiled that oily smile again and lowered his voice.
"Garbage."
"Excuse me?"
"I'm garbage too, don't get me wrong. But that bastard was the worst of the worst."
Oh Sae-ah's eyes sharpened.
"So he wasn't just a regular dirty cop taking bribes on the side."
"Right. You know Park Kyung-chul had a daughter, yeah? What was her name.... Park Ajeong?"
"Yes."
"Why do you think Park Kyung-chul got to keep his badge after every filthy thing he did?"
"Kickbacks?"
"That's the part everybody already knows."
"Are you saying Park Kyung-chul... had something on the senior officers?"
"Bingo."
That single word from the man's mouth sent every fragment in Oh Sae-ah's mind slamming into a new configuration.
Leverage. And Park Ajeong.
The face of Park Ajeong — those dead-souled eyes — rose in her mind. That eerie, hollow atmosphere she carried... and yet a face and a body pretty enough to pass for an idol.
A hideous picture flashed through her brain. Park Kyung-chul, using his own daughter to gather dirt on the senior officers...
Oh Sae-ah swallowed dryly before she even realized she had.
"...Are you involved as well, sir?"
"Me? I'm not that kind of garbage."
"Is that so."
"Why do you think I can even tell you this? Because I'm not in it."
"......"
She conceded the point, reluctantly. The man looked pleased with himself and pointed at the last condom wrapper sitting on the nightstand.
"Anyway. One left..."
A curse slipped from Oh Sae-ah's mouth, barely more than a breath.
"You piece of shit."
"Hey, what's with the attitude? You're the one who came on to me first."
When his rough hand closed around her breast and squeezed again, Oh Sae-ah let out a long, deep sigh. She exhaled a short breath, as if resigning herself to everything, then lay back on the stiff sheets and spread her legs.
The sight of it sent the man crawling up onto the bed like a starving animal, practically vibrating with excitement. As he pushed between her thighs, her cunt was laid bare under the damp orange light. Beneath neatly trimmed pubic hair, her inner lips were swollen and flushed from what they had just done. Between them, her clit glistened, and the entrance below it was soaked and shining.
The man swallowed hard at the sight and asked, giddy.
"Can't I just put it in raw once? In and out, that's it."
Oh Sae-ah flicked a glance at his naked lower body, her eyes loaded with contempt, and said coldly,
"You think you could?"
The man had nothing to say to that. He just clicked his tongue.
Riiip....
In the end, he tore open the last condom. His cock, sheathed in that thin film of latex, slid back into her. The motel room filled once more with the wet noise of flesh slapping flesh and the sound of ragged breathing. The creaking bed announced everything they were doing without a filter.
"Haaah, Inspector Oh... I thought you were made of wood, but you've actually got some sensitivity in you, huh?"
His filthy voice crawled into her ear. Instead of answering, she let out a short, sharp moan.
"Sh...ut up....nh...."
She felt a wave of disgust at the middle-aged man panting on top of her, and still she could not stop her lips from falling open at the sensation of him roughly pistoning in and out of her cunt. Hot pleasure coiled through her lower belly. Her inner muscles clenched around him of their own accord. A body that had slipped the leash of consciousness was starting to rock harder and harder in time with his thrusts.
......Fuck.
She swallowed the curse inside her head. The gulf between the revulsion she felt toward herself and the pleasure her body was taking was so grotesque it made her sick.
Blank......
There was no emotion at all in Oh Sae-ah's eyes as she stared at the yellowed stains on the old motel ceiling. She started to sit up, and her gaze snagged on the condom dumped carelessly across her hip. A small, wrinkled rubber pouch holding a cloudy white fluid. She glanced at it.
This was the product of the "transaction" she had just completed.
She had given her body. She had gotten a secret.
Park Kyung-chul had dirt on the senior officers.
And at the center of it was his daughter, Park Ajeong.
A filthy, nauseating method. The thought flickered through her mind unbidden — maybe it was actually a good thing Park Kyung-chul was dead.
The idea made her own skin crawl. She shook her head hard.
What the hell am I thinking.
I am a cop. I am not the person who decides who gets to live and who deserves to die. I just catch the perpetrator, according to the law.
She tried to impose some order on the chaos in her head, turning over the results of this ugly transaction.
A father who used his own daughter for entertainment.
No physical evidence. But the motive had been confirmed. Park Ajeong had more than enough reason to hate her father to death.
The problem was that Park Ajeong's alibi was airtight. At the time of the crime, she had been somewhere else entirely, no gaps, no cracks.
Which left only one picture that still fit.
Lee Doyun had helped Park Ajeong.
Why?
Their relationship was far too strange to read as a romantic one. Oh Sae-ah replayed the face-to-face interviews, and that moment they had brushed past each other in front of her own house. She had not been able to find a single trace of affection between them.
So was it money? Had Park Ajeong "commissioned" Lee Doyun to kill her father?
A new hypothesis began to take a faint shape in Oh Sae-ah's mind. She raked a hand roughly through her tangled hair.
Should I apply for a warrant and start digging through the financial records?
She shook her head almost immediately.
There won't be a payment trail. Under what heading?
On the basis of a sexual-favors arrangement I can't even officially confirm?
With unofficial information like this, the warrant itself would be rejected, no question. And besides — how was she supposed to report the source?
She could not bring herself to write that she had obtained it by having an affair in a motel with a fellow officer, a married man with a family.
More than that — she had no idea which names inside Mujin Police Station were tangled up in that "entertainment." Was Sergeant Park on her own team clean? The way he had been so eager, from the very start of the case, to steer everything toward a financial grudge was starting to look suspicious. The criminal investigations chief's pressure to wrap it up fast was suspicious. Maybe this was not a simple homicide at all. Maybe they were terrified that the department's own rot would come to light. Even the chief's stonewalling was suspicious.
They might all be in it together.
Oh Sae-ah rose from the bed in silence, without a sound. Time to be a detective again.
She opened the motel room door, stepped out into the stale hallway, and muttered under her breath.
"Fuck......"
One piece of human garbage is dead, and this is what I'm doing?
She asked it of herself.