Page 66 of Damian & Jun: Episodes 5-8
“We’ll provide security for your family if necessary.”
Yun sighed. “How long do they have?”
“I’m setting it up now. They have a couple of hours to make up their mind and get on the ball with us.”
“Okay. Okay.” Yun hung up.
Within the hour, Damian and Jun were at his office building. Alice and Ash had waited for them in the lobby. Damian waved them into the elevator, and they all went up together. No one was in yet. Most of the staff wouldn’t be back until the next day. Inside Damian’s corner office, Ash and Alice immediately reset their work spaces. Damian started a countdown clock and put it in the corner of the digital screen everyone could see.
“That’s how much time we have. Jun, you can help Alice. We need motive and evidence for child trafficking and/or sexual trafficking. I don’t think you can find it, but building dossiers on Bak Sahyuk and Bak Gyeong will help future investigations. We have two private investigators in Korea working on their end. They’re primarily focused on the business angle. The forensic accountant started a few hours ago. Ash, I don’t know the dark web like you do, but as long as nothing ends up on computers here or trackable to us, find what you can on your end. These are names, locations, and photos. I’ll put them in the cloud folder you were pulling from yesterday. Can you do reverse photo lookups on the dark web?”
Ash made a waffling hand motion. “I have things I can do.”
Damian gave a quick nod. “Less I know, the better.”
Ash nodded and started rifling through his backpack. He had a whole mess of computers and set up his own Wi-Fi.
Damian stepped outside and made a call to the detective who had met with him while Collin, Richard, and Émeric had been hospitalized a few months before. She didn’t answer, but he left a voice message and crossed his fingers. He’d give that an hour or two and then find another option.
He’d barely made it back to his desk when Bryce called him back. “I got numbers for you.”
There were several numbers, the top one being for one of Bryce’s university classmates who was now in the FBI and stationed in Chicago. “I gave her a heads-up that you’re calling. I don’t know what she can do, but she knows more than I do.”
Jun
“Breathe,” Jun reminded himself. The fire that had burned inside him earlier was still present but running cooler now in the face of what he was planning to do. With his own computer open, he sat beside Alice as her fingers flew. Having work was a relief even if it wasn’t something he felt confide about doing. Alice, however, was perfectly at ease.
“I don’t read Korean, so you’ll take the Korean stuff, and I’ll do the English.” Alice split up the work between them. “Start with what you can find on your dad in Korean in a general internet search and tell me what you’re seeing.”
“How do you know how to do all this stuff?”
“It’s called being a know-it-all.” Alice shrugged. “And taking journalism classes. And…well…there was a time when I thought I could find my dad.”
Jun blinked. “Collin said he was dead?”
“I didn’t want to believe them even years later. It’s not like there’s a gravestone anywhere. Mom says there’s a plaque for him in D.C. but I never saw even a picture. Anyway, that’s…history, sort of. Time’s ticking. Let’s see if we can piece together who’s doing what. We’re the grunts. The professionals will take everything further.”
An hour later, Jun had moved from entirely confused to hopelessly confused to slowly seeing the method to Alice’s madness. Social media, news articles, arbitrariness, and online title record sites were all information dumps where traces of someone could be teased out. Search engines were absolutely magic. Looking up obituaries was an excellent way to find fragments of family trees.
Alice glared at her screen.
Jun finished jotting down the name of Bak’s sister’s husband that he’d just pulled from a social media post on the wedding seven years before and turned toward her. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s a feeling. Like…something’s off.”
“About what?”
“Your dad. It’s just…like there’s information missing that you’d think would be there. He lives at a really ritzy address, and his kids go to a really expensive school. You’d think there’d be more assets showing up in his name or a business name he owns.”
“Maybe it’s all back in South Korea.”
“Maybe, but he’s very, very much based in the US. Like, I want to double check he’s not naturalized he’s so completely established.”
“Naturalized?”
“That he hasn’t become a US citizen. But…” She frowned. “That would be fucked up, but let’s check.”
She pulled up a photo from a social media post. “This is his primary residence. What we need to do is find the address.”
