Chapter 189
Seoul, Korea
Gwangjin District
As much as it annoyed Evie that her husband was such a people person and a shameless flirt, she knew he was doing it now in order to give her time to find the needed application and records.
The nine minutes Manager Bak gave them has turned into twenty, but there was only so much chitchat Mauri could hold the annoying Manager’s attention with before the widow shut them out completely.
The office was a mess that only a good bonfire could fix. There was no discernable method of organization, that Evie would decipher. The filing cabinets were stuffed with documents that prevented them from being opened. The ones she could pull out were dated more than ten years ago so those weren’t what she was looking for.
The most recent applications, in theory, should have been on the top of the desk.
But they weren’t there.
The top of the desk had copies upon copies of the same ten applications, making the pile seem so much bigger than it actually was. It didn’t make sense, and it caused Evie to be even more suspicious of Manager Bak than she was before.
“William, give me the report on Manager Bak, now,” Evie ordered.
Lula sighed. “Manager Bak is Bak Chang-Li,” she said, her voice trailing off.
“Who was the previous building manager?” Evie asked when she found a picture that had fallen between two filing cabinets.
There was silence from Will and Lula; that meant they were having to do things that weren’t legal in order to get the requested information.
“There has been no change in managers in thirty years,” Will said. “Manager Bak… Is a man!”
Evie popped her head out of the office and looked to the lounge and made eye contact with Mauri and he nodded that he was okay and he’d hold the woman’s attention. She slipped out of the office and silently hurried to the kitchenette and snagged one of the teacups from the sink before hurrying back to the office.
She pulled her mobile phone out and flipped through the applications William Lee made just for his in-laws for field use.
“Run these,” Evie instructed, using a bit of face powder to dust the prints then took photos for Will to run for her with the application.
This wasn’t right, and something was seriously wrong.
The picture she found was of a smiling young woman with her arms around an older man. The girl looked familiar to Evie, but she couldn’t place where she’d seen her before.
“We have an ID and you aren’t going to like it,” Lula said. “The one posing as Manager Bak is his wife, but she’s been married ten times before, and eleven times a widow spanning the last twenty years. Either she is exceptionally unlucky in love, or those she marries have exceptionally bad luck.”
Evie pocketed the photo then went around to the desk and flipped through some of the documents that were stashed under the desk on the floor. “Let me guess: car wreck, food poisoning, allergic reaction to something, a nasty fall down the stairs, electrocution care of a radio in the bathtub?” she surmised.
“I hate it when you do that,” Lula complained. “Yes to all the above, a few times. Father is entertaining a black widow.”
“If he drank the tea, he can die with her,” Evie said. “We’re not going to find an application for the unit in question because it was never legally rented out. There are no utilities running to that unit, are there?”
“No,” Will confirmed. “The neighboring unit Lucien had me look into had spikes in electricity usage in the past couple of weeks which coincide with the unit being occupied.”
Evie looked around the office again, this time she was looking for anything but what they came for.
Black widows were very difficult to tie to their crimes. She knew it took Will longer than it should have to find that out because most likely Manager Bak had been married in different providences in order to keep suspicion off of her. The office though, it had over thirty years’ worth of files and applications in it.
Evie ran her hand under the desk and smirked when her fingers brushed against what she was looking for.
A thumb drive.
“Wrap it up, Husband,” she said in Japanese, pulling her sidearm then headed from the office.
Manager Bak turned around and she glared at the menacing woman with the gun pointed at her. “You aren’t with Interpol,” she sneered.
Mauri got to his feet. “No, she is not,” he said.
When she turned to look at him, Mauri’s hands moved in a blur of movement to her head and Manager Bak stumbled back and landed on the couch, unconscious.
Evie huffed. “But I wanted to kill her,” she whiend.
“Kyusho jitsu 3-point to the head,” he said. “She will be dead soon enough and it will look natural.”
“Uh huh,” she grumbled, holstering her sidearm. “Did you find anything out?”
Mauri looked around the apartment. “I was not going to let you kill her until I saw that,” he said, motioning towards the box in the corner.
Evie went over to check it out.
The moment she pulled the quilt off the box, the smell of almonds filled the air.
“Damn it,” Evie softly growled under her breath in irritation.
“Son, report?” Mauri demanded, but only static came through their com pieces. “Lucien, come in!”
When there was no response, the two looked at each other then hurried for the door.
Before they could pull it open, the ground violently shook under their feet and the hanging light fixtures swayed from side to side and the lights flickered.
“Lucien!” Evie screamed.
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