Before they married and after they married, she had always been a woman who threw every bit of heart and effort into her work.
He’d fully expected that, now that she was back in Korea, she’d start working again, so it came as no great surprise.
Iheon simply made a guess.
That whatever favor she wanted from him would have to do with her work.
He shrugged off his jacket, slung it over the back of a dining chair, and spoke.
“What was the favor you wanted to ask me?”
The question came out of nowhere, and Jei, following him into the living room, stopped mid-step. Her lips parted slightly and she just stared at him, blank-faced.
“You had no problem barging in on me when you wanted a favor. Now that I’m giving you the floor, why so quiet?”
“Oh.”
A beat late, Jei caught up with what he meant.
“Weren’t you still angry at me?”
“I am.”
He twisted the knot of his tie loose beneath his collar and answered without inflection.
“Being angry is one thing. But that doesn’t mean I want to keep getting blindsided without knowing a single thing.”
“...”
“I have to know something about what goes on in your head before I can understand it, or accept it. So talk, while I’m still offering to listen.”
Jei looked at him for a while, as if making sure of what he intended, then slowly pressed her lips together. And then, as though afraid he might change his mind, she turned on her heel at once.
Her hurried foot nearly caught on the corner of the rug, but she came back fast, the laptop and the documents all bundled up together in her arms.
“There’s something I want to show you.”
Instead of answering, he undid his cuff buttons, folded the sleeves back until his forearms were bare, and jerked his chin toward the table.
Jei set the laptop down in the middle of the kitchen island and laid the file of documents she’d brought neatly beside it.
While she bustled about, Iheon leaned at an angle against the pillar that met the edge of the island. He folded his arms across his chest and simply watched.
Jei stole one glance at his face, then opened the laptop. When she typed in the password, the light of the screen washed over her chalk-white face. With a bright chime, the desktop appeared.
“It’s a documentary I’m preparing to develop. And I need your help.”
“Ha.”
He’d guessed it would be about work, but hearing it out loud still knocked the breath out of him.
It wasn’t as if he’d taken her at her word when she said she came back because she missed him. And yet, from the moment she’d said it, something in him had swelled up all on its own, and now it plunged straight down without mercy.
He hadn’t let it show, so there was no way she’d notice. Whatever.
“Before I ask, there’s something I should tell you up front.”
Jei folded both hands neatly on the island and looked up at him.
Let’s hear it, he said with another small tilt of his chin.
“This case is strictly at the planning stage, and nobody at the station knows about it. It’s never officially been reported anywhere.”
Iheon spread his thumb and middle finger wide, pushed the glasses up his nose, then propped a hand against his jaw.
“A cold case?”
“I’m not even sure it can be called a cold case yet. The facts haven’t even been established.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“There’s no scene that would suggest anything happened, and there’s no one identified as a victim.”
Iheon’s brows drew together at the inner edges.
“Which means that apart from me, you’re the first person who knows about this. Not even the police know.”
That she would say he was the first, at a moment like this, was rather endearing. But instead of letting it show, he lightly stroked the tip of his chin.
“What kind of case is it.”
“Presumed homicide.”
In that case, the very premise that a murder had actually occurred would have to be verified first. If it was true, there was a possibility this was a hidden homicide, one that had never once surfaced.
Deaths filed away as a disappearance, a suicide, an accident, or a plain unexplained fatality, and then buried somewhere in the records.
He thought it over for a moment, and his eyes narrowed.
“But if you don’t even know who the victim is, what makes you call it murder?”
“I got a tip.”
No crime scene, no victim, and yet there was a tip?
“And the informant checks out?”
With a case like this, who the informant was mattered more than anything.
It was an obvious question, but Jei held her tongue. Whether she wouldn’t say or couldn’t, he couldn’t tell, though the look on her face as she deliberated was rather dark.
“You’re asking for help. Then there shouldn’t be anything you’re hiding either.”
Iheon unfolded the arms crossed over his chest and braced one hand on the island. At the jab, Jei’s lips worked for a moment before she came clean.
“The truth is, I don’t know who the informant is either. Man or woman, how old, where they live. There’s no way to confirm their identity.”
“Chance it’s a hoax?”
“I’ll have to dig more, but there’s definitely something there.”
She had been a PD on an investigative reporting program once. And her ability in that field had been well recognized. Which meant there was no chance she couldn’t tell a baseless tip from a real one.
“What makes you think it isn’t false?”
Jei opened her inbox. Then she turned the laptop screen around so he could see.
Iheon lowered himself slightly to look. Behind the glasses, as his eyes took in the screen, a sharp glint flickered through them.
“What is this?”
Dozens of emails, every one of them with the same subject line, filled the screen top to bottom.
Each one had been sent on a different date, enough that the sender’s peculiar obsession came through intact.
“These started coming three months ago. At first it was just one line, exactly the same as the subject. ‘Who am I?’ That was all.”
“And emails like that kept coming for three months?”
“Yeah. But a little while ago, the body of the message started to change.”
“...”
“I’ve got no idea how they found my personal address instead of the official tip line, but it was too persistent to write off as a prank. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.”
Just to be sure, she’d phoned the other PDs and asked around. She was the only one getting these emails.
“And the sender’s address. I ran a search on it.”
“Santa muerte.”
Iheon read the sender’s name out loud. Santa Muerte. Judging by the arrangement of the letters, it wasn’t English.
“I only searched ‘Muerte,’ and this is what came up.”
Jei slid a single page out of the documents stacked beside the laptop and held it out to him. He took it and skimmed what was written there.
Santa Muerte.
The full, proper name was Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte.
Translated literally, Our Lady of Holy Death.
Originally she was one of the many figures of death venerated in Mexican folk religion. Her followers saw death not as an ending but as something that sheltered and guided, and so they feared her and leaned on her at the same time.
In modern times, apparently, that meaning had shifted a little.
Santa Muerte also went by another name: the Lady of the Night.
Just as that nickname suggested, the ones who came looking for her were the people who lived in the world of the night, or those left outside the protection of the law and of God.
Gang members, drug dealers, prostitutes above all.
To people for whom violence and death were simply daily life, Santa Muerte was the saint who stayed beside those nobody else would guard. The last salvation left to them.
“Whoever sent this seems to think of themselves as the saint of death.”
Now that he knew where the name came from, he found himself curious about what the emails actually said.
Iheon took the mouse out of Jei’s hand and clicked one of the identically titled messages.
As his eyes moved down the email Santa Muerte had sent, they cooled into something flat and hard.
The opening lines alone were enough to tell him this was no joke.
「Kill a human being, and it’s murder.
Kill an animal, and it’s animal cruelty.
So what do we call it when you kill a devil wearing a human’s skin?
I thought about it for a long time.
Whether a thing deserves to be called human simply because it wears a human face.
I couldn’t find the answer.
So I asked the devil.
What my sin was.
The devil laughed for a long while, and then, far too late, howled without making a sound.
I still haven’t found the answer.
But I did come to know one thing.
That sometimes death is the most honest testimony of all.
And so I killed three devils.
This time, I want to ask you.
What is my sin?」
The Korean uses 암수 살인, the “dark figure” of crime: offenses that are never recorded in official statistics because no one ever discovers or reports them.
