Chapter 12: Personal Effects

Woo-seok didn't move his hand.

The cameras on the steps swung back and forth between them.

Ha-yeon stepped down between the hero and the firefighter with a clear plastic bag in her hand.

"Anything recovered from a sealed room is a personal effect of the deceased," she said. "It belongs to their families."

"I dropped that pouch the morning the gate opened," Kwak said. "It's mine."

"Then you can claim it at my office with proof, Mr. Kwak."

She held the bag open.

Woo-seok dropped the pouch into it.

Ha-yeon sealed the bag, signed across the seal, and put it inside her coat.

For a moment Kwak's gloved hands looked as if they might light up on the bathhouse steps.

Then he smiled at the reporter with the blue umbrella.

"The inspector is right, of course," he said. "Rules are rules."

He walked to his car without looking back.

That night Ha-yeon climbed the stairs to the rooftop room with the sealed bag.

"Personal effects go back to the family," she said. "I need to know whose family."

"You're allowed to open it?"

"An inspector may open effects to identify the owner, with two witnesses present."

She looked at Woo-seok and Gyeol.

"You're my witnesses."

She cut the seal at the low table and took out the pink pouch.

Inside it was a pink phone with a sticker of the same cartoon bear on the back.

The battery was dead, of course.

Gyeol ran down to the twenty-four-hour phone shop on Mangwon-ro and came back with a charger for a phone ten years old.

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