The men across the street

3: The Night Out

Later that evening you found yourself thinking about what the dentist had said about the Eden Killers maybe having removed those teeth not because they wanted to make the identification process more difficult but because they would collect them as some sort of relic of their victims. You knew it sounded crazy but everything about this case was crazy anyway, so this wouldn't completely be out of character. However, you did somehow find it unsettling that your neighbor, a dentist of all people, would come up with this theory, but you decided to put those thoughts aside since you felt like you were literally using every excuse to distrust the man while he had done nothing wrong as far as you knew.

But as time went on, you found yourself placing more and more suspicion on Lee Moon Jo and his partner, Yim Jong Woo, or whatever their relationship was. Jong Woo seemed to have moved in with the dentist by now, but the strange thing was that they would live there for periods of time before being away for 2 to 3 weeks at a time. It happened too frequently for them to be going on vacation and since you knew their occupations, one obviously being a dentist and the other one a writer, it couldn't be that they were going on business trips or something like that. So what were they doing when they weren't at the house? Did they have a second house? Were they visiting friends and family? Maybe one of them had sick relatives that they had to take care of.

That was another strange thing you noticed, they didn't seem to have any friends or family close by since no one seemed to be visiting the house. They didn't seem to have a social life at all, you concluded judging by their schedule as they only seemed to go from and to work. You didn't know what Jong Woo was doing during the day since the man left at random times and came home just as randomly, sometimes drunk but never with any friends.
You had tried to speak with him on a couple of occasions since you thought that you had gotten off on the wrong foot, definitely if the man was Moon Jo's partner since you were getting out of the dentist's car when you first met, then you could understand the hostility that you felt when you met, but despite your efforts, you and Jong Woo didn't seem to be getting any closer. The other neighbors also didn't seem as fond of Jong Woo as they were of Moon Jo, which in a way comforted you a bit since you now knew the problem wasn't yours, the man just being somewhat anti social. And in a way, you could understand that since you didn't always like being around people yourself, but you couldn't help but feel like the man saw you as some sort of competition, judging from the look he had given you the first two times you saw each other after that first interaction, and you didn't know why, you hadn't shown any interest in the dentist at all as far as you knew.

However, running into Jong Woo at the convenience store turned out to be rather delightful. Instead of the hostile looks he had given you before, he now seemed relaxed and friendly, even going as far as coming up to you to give you back a packet of noodles that had apparently fallen out of your basket. You had quietly thanked him and the two of you had somehow ended up walking home together. During that walk, the writer apologized for not greeting you properly the first time you met and it was then that you learned, after exchanging formalities that he was only 2 years older than you. You also learned, after asking about his writing, that Moon Jo allowed Jong Woo to stay home so he could completely focus on his writing while recovering from a recent traumatic event that he had gone through, what he did not say however. Not that you minded, since you could already tell by the change in his voice and demeanor that he wasn't ready to talk about it, even seeming quite shocked that he had told you this much, but that was the effect you had on people, something that would come in handy in your profession in the future.

It was even more of a surprise to you, when you also ran into the writer when you were having a night out with your friends, seeing as to how he was sort of the last person you had expected to run into in a social setting like that. You hated running into people that you knew during a night out since you hated small talk, so fortunately for you he didn't seem to notice you at first as he was clearly picking a fight with a guy much bigger than him posture wise. It was then that you quickly realized that Jong Woo had quite the temper, something that could stem from unresolved trauma, you thought to yourself and you told yourself that you had to get out of there before he would notice you, you didn't want to get involved in this kind of thing. Unfortunately for you, your friends seemed to be quite entertained by the fight that was about to happen right in front of them.