Love Me If You Dare

Chapter 8

Another chilly winter morning.  The rising sun casts a ray of soft golden light over the mountain side.  The trees gives a gentle glow in the morning sun. Hardly anyone comes to this part of the town. It’s always so quiet and peaceful here.  Except for the little episode yesterday.  

Lisa walks quietly toward the villa.

She enters the house she is now fairly familiar with.  Upstairs, the gates are open. 

    Cautiously, she steps into Jungkook’s territory. 

    "Jungkook? Jungkook ?"

    No answer.

    Lisa walks up to the first room.

   The door is open.   She walks inside.   Near the window, a stack of files sit on top of a table.  There are a few books scattered there as well. It’s rather messy.   A big blanket is left unfold on a sofa next to the table.  A half-finished cup of tea sits on the small coffee table.  

   Opposite the sofa hangs a large whiteboard.  It’s covered with photos, with lots of captions and words written around them. 

    Lisa walks over to the whiteboard. 

   There are a  total of nine photographs. These are the pictures of the missing teenagers. All of them are rural children.  Underneath three of the photos, Jungkook wrote down the locations where the boys went missing. South of the market. Train station.  Materials Quarter.

    Taehyung has already briefed Lisa about this.  They have enough evidence to determine the abduction locations for three of the boys that went missing. As for the rest of the teenagers, for all they know, they could have disappeared anywhere.  

    Then there’s the second row of words.  More locations, places with similar qualities to those three above -  Eastern market, bus station, farmers market ...... and so on. Lisa understands their significance  -  Traffic, video game movie theatres, Internet cafes etc.  Places teenagers like to hang out.   Possible hunting grounds for the kidnappers. 

    But these places are dispersed throughout the city.  Looking for the criminals will be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

    Further down the whiteboard, there’s more words, a combination of  English and Korean.  The handwriting is so messy that Lisa can’t work out what some of the words are.  On the corner of the white board is a drawing of a little turtle.  It’s only a stick figure, but it’s very cute.

    So ‘great god’ likes to doodle when he’s analysing data.  How adorable.  Lisa smiles to herself.  

   There’s a phrase within the messy writing that is written in a bigger and clearer font than the rest.  

    "No witnesses."

    No witnesses?

    Everybody knows this. So why is he emphasising the point?

    Lisa doesn’t understand that.  She takes out her phone and sends a text message to Taehyung.

“Key-point : No witnesses.”   

    -—

    Last night, Lisa made a decision.  She called Taehyung.

    Taehyung immediately went to her home.  The first thing he said was,  "I still want to work with him and learn from him."

    Lisa is not too surprised : “But… How?”

    “Whenever he tells you something - conclusions or ideas he comes up with, theory, opinions,  everything!  Can you please write them down and let me know? This is not ‘infringement’.  Whatever information you can access, I should be able to access too."