By the time they boarded the 747, they had agreed on the need for close monitoring of the staff and the neccesity for giving frequent reminders of the vast differences between the cultures of East and West.
Chapter 20
While Burke and Jerry were dozing high over the Pacific Ocean east of the Japanese islands, Captain Yun Yu-sop sat at his cluttered desk in the Namdaemun Police Station more than a thousand miles to the west. He sipped a cup of barley tea and sifted through the stack of reports and documents in front of him. They represented the questionable results of thirty-six hours of digging since the discovery of Mr. Chon's battered remains.
First was the interrogation of Pak Tong-hui. In retrospect, the fabric merchant had been able to add no significant details to the brief initial report. Clipped to this was a set of rather gruesome photographs of the victim. They told him nothing he didn't already know. Next was the file on his visit to the Chon home. Questioning a victim's family soon after a homicide was one of the toughest parts of Yun's job. Mr. Chon's wife had taken the news particularly hard. She was not in good health. When Yun gave her the news, she sank to her knees, rocking and wailing, of no help whatsoever. Kim Yong-man, a grandson, lived at the Chon home with his wife and baby. Mrs. Choe, Kim's wife — Korean women did not change their family name when they married — was fearful for her husband. He was still missing. She reported Kim had driven his grandfather to meet someone around eleven the previous evening. She had no idea who they were meeting or where. Captain Yun felt reasonably certain of the who. No doubt it was Chon's contact regarding Hwang. The old man had probably arrived with the expectation of receiving the requested information on the elusive assassin. Instead, he had walked into an ambush. Yun obtained descriptions of the grandson and the black Kia, which were promptly distributed to all police stations.
Another report in the pile concerned the theft of produce from a truck on its way to make a delivery at Ewha Woman's University. The driver had stopped for lunch, of necessity parking his truck two blocks from the restaurant. He was not aware of the missing cases of fruit until he started unloading at the university. It was the afternoon before the murder. The produce company subsequently identified the crates in front of Mr. Chon's stall as their stolen merchandise. Yun noted the restaurant's location on the western side of the city.
The Captain reasoned that the fruit had been a ruse to make the motorcycle less conspicuous if it had been spotted by a policeman. Following up on that thought, the next document involved a motorcycle and trailer reported missing from a western suburb. The owner had noticed it gone from its usual parking spot sometime after dark. At first he thought it might have been borrowed by a relative. An hour or so later, he had reported the possible theft to police. But the next morning, there sat the vehicle in its accustomed place, looking none the worse for wear. Or so it seemed. Then he started to detach the trailer and saw what looked like spots of blood on it. He reported this when he called to cancel the theft notice. He was told to leave things where he found them, and Yun was immediately alerted.
The motorcycle owner was a construction worker named Chang. A burly man built like the stony-faced mountains that surrounded Seoul, he had arms about as large as Yun's legs. Yun had called for a forensic unit, which took a sample of the blood on the trailer. Then he looked over the motorcycle and noticed its instruments included a trip odometer.
"Would you have any idea how many miles it might have been driven since last night?" he asked Chang.
The heavy-set man glanced down at the odometer. "What you see right there. I put it back to zero every night when I get home."
"You haven't driven it today?"
"No, sir. The officer on the phone told me not to move it."
Yun copied the figure off the odometer. "Exactly what time did you first miss it last night?"
Chang thought a moment. "I'd say eight-thirty or eight forty-five. Something like that."
"And when did you first see it this morning?"
"I was up at six-thirty. Went outside shortly after that. Saw it was back then."
Hwang had probably returned the motorcycle within an hour after depositing Chon's body in Namdaemun, Yun thought. It was the same pattern as the telephone company truck involved in the probing incident at the home of the industrialist, Yi In-wha.
A blue and white police car drove up just then, and a short, bushy-haired man stepped out of the passenger side. He walked over and bowed to Captain Yun.
"Mr. Pak," the Captain said, "does this look like the motorcycle and trailer you saw at Mr. Chon's stall?"
The piece goods vendor stood back and frowned at the vehicle. "It appears just like the one I saw. Yes, sir. It was dark, of course, so I can't say for sure this was exactly the same one."
That was good enough for Yun. This was the motorcycle Hwang had used. He had no doubt about it.
Yun set his tea cup on a nearby table and cleared off the files, then spread a street map of Seoul across his desk. With a pencil, he drew a straight line from Mr. Chang's house to the Namdaemun Market. He would construct a rectangle by extending the line to either side by a distance calculated from the motorcycle's mileage. First, he took the number of kilometers on the odometer and divided it in half to get the maximum one-way distance Hwang could have traveled. Then, taking the distance to the market as a radius, he plotted to either side of that line a distance calculated from the number of kilometers left over. It gave him a rough approximation of the area in which Mr. Chon had likely gone to meet his contact and, instead, met his death. It covered a strip of western Seoul about eight kilometers wide. He wrote out a memo to all officers who operated in the target area, asking their cooperation in locating people who had been on the streets during the late evening prior to or the early morning hours following Chon's death. He wanted to talk to anyone who might have seen the motorcycle or Chon's black Kia.
After dispatching the memo, he leafed through the remainder of the stack, including the medical examiner's report. As he had anticipated, the head blow was considered the cause of death. The time of death was put between twelve-thirty and two a.m., sufficient for transporting Chon's body to his stall.
There was also a delayed report from a boat on the Han River. The people on board had heard a large impact in the water just before dawn following the murder. It had the characteristics of a vehicle crashing into the water. The location was just below an abandoned warehouse where the parking area extended out above the river. Yun had arranged for divers to probe beneath the water. If it turned out to be the old man's car, he would not be surprised to find the grandson's body inside.
The final document was a report on the first twenty-four hours of surveillance in his neighborhood. Two questionable sightings had been checked out and found to be legitimate visitors.
He was returning everything to a folder in his desk when a gravelly voice spoke up behind him. "Captain Yun, I hear you've been looking for me."
He turned to face the stocky frame and owlish face of Superintendent General Ha, the former army officer turned lawman who had been his first police commander. Normally outgoing and pleasant, Ha could switch at will to the legendary inscrutable look that Western writers found so intriguing, betraying no emotion, no hint of where his thoughts might be going. He had long-since retired to the seaport village of Chungmu, on the Hallyo Waterway southwest of Pusan.
"Superintendent Ha," Yun said as he made a low bow, "what a pleasant surprise. To my recollection, you don't look a day older than the day you left us."