The more information we get, the more something seems off about this case. Our detectives continue to be suspicious of our unconventional heroine whose composure never slips whether she’s being interrogated or examining a corpse. Her husband, on the other hand, takes the news of his mistress’s death hard and decides it’s time to make a change.
EPISODE 5
Mi-rae pulls the drowning Woo-sung out of the water and resuscitates him with mouth-to-mouth. She and Consultant Nam ride in the ambulance as he’s taken to the hospital. After he’s treated, Woo-sung wants to thank Mi-rae, but Consultant Nam informs him she left for her part-time job.
Yeo-joo rushes in, and Woo-sung hurriedly shoos out Consultant Nam so his political run isn’t outed. As the couple walks out, Yeo-joo shocks Woo-sung by opining that this is what he gets for hanging around the no-good Consultant Nam. So much for keeping that secret.
A nurse runs up with a bag – it’s Mi-rae’s. Sharp as ever, Yeo-joo immediately ascertains it must be a female art student’s. Woo-sung says Consultant Nam was with a female student, so they take the bag with them.
From the car, Woo-sung sees Mi-rae. But before he can make some excuse to return her bag to her, Yeo-joo asks, “You’re being cautious, right?” He’s startled, but she’s just referring to his posture and tells him to sleep comfortably in the backseat.
Meanwhile, Se-jin pesters Seung-cheol about his relationship with Soo-jung. He unconvincingly denies any personal connection and states he’s just a fan. Se-jin doesn’t buy it.
We flash back to nine years ago when Seung-cheol was working as a traffic cop. He’d stopped an uncooperative Director Ma’s car for a search. He stared in shock at Soo-jung bound and gagged in the trunk. Director Ma closed the trunk and casually said he was on official business. When Seung-cheol nervously pulled his gun, Director Ma scoffed. But Seung-cheol didn’t back down and untied Soo-jung.
Now, Director Ma sighs as he gets word that Soo-ho is unreachable. Suddenly, his phone slips out of his grasp, and he grabs the scarred right side of his face as if in pain.
Soo-ho heads to a containment zone (supposedly for the avian flu) in the mountains where that cemetery is. His colleague thought he was following Director Ma’s orders by setting this up and wonders what’s going on between Soo-ho and Director Ma.
Soo-ho had pressed Director Ma on his order to erase all traces of Yeo-joo, but Director Ma claimed he just didn’t want Soo-ho wasting time on it. He wouldn’t find Soo-jung’s body there anyway. Soo-ho notes that he sounds like he’s sure she’s dead and even knows where her body is.
Soo-ho and his colleague supervise the search for Soo-jung’s body, relying in large part on a trained dog to sniff her out. Elsewhere, Se-jin and Seung-cheol arrive at the river which is swarming with police and reporters. While police photograph the body and retrieve it from the water, Seung-cheol and Se-jin interview one of the boatmen who found her.
Seung-cheol and Se-jin identify the body: it’s Soo-jung. Seung-cheol is so bothered that Se-jin comments he looks like he’s just lost a girlfriend. At the cemetery, the dog sniffs something out, so Soo-ho digs a massive hole but finds no body. He does, however, find a plant that seems to interest him.
Woo-sung wakes alone in the car, police lights flashing around him. It seems Yeo-joo got wind of what’s going on at the river and decided to take a look. He spots Yeo-joo talking to Seung-cheol and heads over. That’s when he sees Soo-jung’s corpse.
He gasps and begins to retch, so he runs off to a more secluded area. Or so he thinks. He ends up in the midst of the reporter pool. Overwhelmed, he sinks to the ground and holds his head.
In the car with his colleague, Soo-ho watches news coverage of the discovery of Soo-jung’s body. He thinks back to seeing Soo-jung meet with Yeo-joo that night in the café. It doesn’t look like he’s done investigating.
When Jin-ho and Yoon-hee see the news, he bails on their dinner plans and rushes to check on Woo-sung who currently sits in a state of shock at a bus stop. Yeo-joo, meanwhile, continues to insert herself in the investigation against the detectives’ protestations.
Seung-cheol wonders if she has some connection to Soo-jung that’s making her invested in this case. Yeo-joo argues he’s the one that fits that description. He pretends not to see Se-jin glaring at him and accuses Yeo-joo of hiding that her husband is Woo-sung. She laughs and wonders why she’d need to tell him that – they’re not exactly friends.
Yeo-joo promises to be out of their hair after the examination of the body. If they try to block her … there is a lot she could tell all those eager reporters about the case. Se-jin agrees to her proposal and stalks off with Seung-cheol.
Woo-sung isn’t in the car when Yeo-joo returns, so she calls him. He’s at a bar with Jin-ho and tells her he’ll be home later. Woo-sung is still in a daze and berates himself for only being worried about the CCTV footage after Soo-jung went missing. Jin-ho tries to convince Woo-sung not to let this change anything, but Woo-sung thinks justice for Soo-jung is more important than hiding the affair. Guess there’s a limit to his shamelessness.
At the morgue, Se-jin notices how Yeo-joo compulsively spins the shiny pen in her hand. Seung-cheol struggles to stay composed as Yeo-joo and the examiner discuss the multiple stab wounds and the blunt force trauma to Soo-jung’s head. The examiner thinks the weapon could’ve been a hammer which makes Se-jin think of the trophy. They have to do an autopsy to know more.
Seung-cheol makes sure Yeo-joo sticks to her terms and stops bothering them now. As Yeo-joo gets in her car, she dangles a mention of something regarding Soo-jung and that trophy. She pettily leaves them hanging with, “I don’t want to bother you.” Pfft.
Jin-ho waylays Yeo-joo on her way inside the bar to pick up Woo-sung. He seems to want to soften Woo-sung’s behavior and says that men are driven by instinct, but Yeo-joo stops him. He’s confused when she cautions him to quit before Yoon-hee finds out and encourages him to read her book about a man whose “thing” was cut off after cheating.
Inside, she finds Woo-sung passed out on a table. When he sees Yeo-joo, he apologizes on the verge of tears and claims he drank so much because he felt sorry towards her. He suggests they go for a drive.
Jin-ho gets a text from Woo-sung: he plans to confess his infidelity to Yeo-joo. Jin-ho barely has time to worry for his friend, though, when he discovers Yoon-hee changed the door passcode. She opens the door to tell him to get lost, but he sneaks in by pretending she slammed his foot in the door.
While the police divvy up the massive pile of USBs containing CCTV footage, Se-jin stares intently at an officer who spins his pen the way Yeo-joo did. Seung-cheol remembers the pen-spinner in the café CCTV footage and runs back to his desk to look it up.
Soo-ho returns home and freezes – Director Ma stands in his living room. He asks sardonically if Soo-ho found some good mountain herbs. Soo-ho shows him the plant he found, saying that it can’t have grown underground. He plans to figure out how it came to be buried in that cemetery. Director Ma sighs that Soo-ho isn’t cut out for this kind of work.
Woo-sung is almost too drunk to string a sentence together, but he’s determined to come clean to Yeo-joo. He wants to watch the sunrise with her and whimpers he wants to be reborn as a new man. She agrees to get some fresh air.
Thanks to Yeo-joo’s speedy and reckless driving, Woo-sung starts to sober up a bit. Soo-ho watches them arrive home through his telescope and is startled to see Yeo-joo angrily throw off her husband’s hand multiple times.
At the station, Se-jin and Seung-cheol watch the blurry pen-spinning footage into the night. They note the odd way the person spins the pen between their ring and middle finger – just like Yeo-joo does. That’s enough to convince Seung-cheol of her guilt.
Elsewhere, police officers find a man unconscious in the woods by a road. It’s Manager Bae. They rush him to the hospital.
In the morning, Woo-sung wakes up and jumps to see his wife glaring down at him. She doesn’t say a word and just walks away. All he can remember is telling her he made a mistake and her yelling for him to get out of the speeding car.
Woo-sung makes his way downstairs in his robe and runs into Soo-ho who he hasn’t met yet. He’s somewhat unsettled by his wife’s extremely handsome new assistant, and it makes him feel self-conscious in his ungroomed state. But Soo-ho is busy admiring how naturally stylish he looks despite just waking.
After Mrs. Yeom spots him, Woo-sung nervously joins his wife for breakfast. But the second he speaks to Yeo-joo, she stabs her bagel with a knife and walks away.
Woo-sung talks it over with Jin-ho later, sure that Yeo-joo wouldn’t be merely giving him the silent treatment if she’d learned of his cheating. Jin-ho encourages him to just focus on work.
That afternoon, Woo-sung gets a call from Mi-rae who heard from the hospital that he has her bag. He thinks better of going to meet her and asks if he should mail it, but Mi-rae tells him she’ll pick it up from his assistant in his office.
Woo-sung calls Mrs. Yeom and is horrified to discover she threw out the bag. She suggests he just buy a new one. Yeo-joo walks up and wonders if he’s asking about the bag. “He must not remember anything,” she muses and hangs up on him.
After ensuring Yeo-joo is in the kitchen with Mrs. Yeom, Soo-ho sneaks into her car but can barely breathe for the smell. (Ah, is that why she’s mad at Woo-sung?) He uploads her dashcam footage into his phone. Then, he checks the basement, but the bloodstain has been cleaned and the books removed from the fridge.
Yeo-joo overhears him order someone to do something on the phone and narrows her eyes in suspicion. He covers that he’s obtaining materials for her. Soo-ho tries to stay calm as she confesses she’s known he was hiding something from the start. He’s getting a friend to do all the work she assigns him, isn’t he?
Soo-ho breathes a sigh of relief and plays along. He apologizes, but he can’t hold back his anger when he watches her hang the Korean flag upside down on a little flagpole. Soo-ho goes on a longwinded tirade about how Koreans protected this flag even during the Japanese occupation. Aaaand we’re back to the independence fighters. Ha.
They put the flag up on the house, and Soo-ho wonders what’s with the sudden patriotism. He goes through every patriotic-ish holiday he can think of (which are numerous), but Yeo-joo informs him it’s her wedding anniversary.
Apparently, this is a tradition because Woo-sung is relieved to hear from Mrs. Yeom that Yeo-joo hoisted the flag which means she’s still observing their anniversary. Pfft, what the heck? Mrs. Yeom offers to figure out what he did to anger Yeo-joo and quickly hangs up when Yeo-joo walks up.
She asks Mrs. Yeom for a good cleaner for her car seats; she needs to remove the stench. Soo-ho asks what that awful smell is, making Yeo-joo wonder why he’s talking like he’s smelt it. Was he in her car?
Soo-ho covers by reminding her he was in her car last week. She sighs that that was new car smell while this is alcohol-induced vomit smell. In a flashback, Woo-sung throws up on her new seats and uses Mi-rae’s bag, the only plastic bag in the car, as his vomit bag. If that weren’t bad enough, he’d even disgustingly gotten some vomit on Yeo-joo’s leg. She was livid.
As they clean up her ruined clothes, Yeo-joo tells Mrs. Yeom that the biggest problem is the ruined plastic bag. The cheap looking thing that resembles a plastic shopping bag is actually an expensive designer bag. (I don’t get fashion.)
The doorbell rings, and Yeo-joo is surprised to see Seung-cheol and Se-jin at her gate. They summon her to the station. Yeo-joo appears more amused than worried.
Woo-sung picks out a bag for Mi-rae. Having no idea of how ridiculously expensive her old bag was, he opts for an affordable backpack. He leaves it with Jin-ho to pass along when Mi-rae comes. Meanwhile, Manager Bae goes missing at the hospital.
At the station, Yeo-joo smirks to see Team Leader Hong literally run away at the sight of her being led to an interrogation room. After Yeo-joo sends Seung-cheol out to bring her a green tea, Se-jin mentions how popular Soo-jung was with guys Woo-sung’s age. Yeo-joo cuts to the chase and asks if she’s supposed to suspect her husband of having an affair with Soo-jung. Se-jin thinks she already is suspecting it.
Once Seung-cheol returns, Yeo-joo guesses that she’s there as a witness and has no legal obligation to answer their questions. She offers to trade intel. From the photo of Soo-jung with Woo-sung, she’s in agreement with the PD that the interest was only on Soo-jung’s end.
The detectives share that there was blood on the trophy and ask if she met with Soo-jung. Yeo-joo admits to having her for dinner and noticing Woo-sung’s discomfort. She doesn’t remember if they met again. As Yeo-joo spins her pen, Se-jin shows her the video of the pen-spinner.
After several tries from a payphone – Woo-sung had been ignoring the unfamiliar number – Manager Bae finally reaches Woo-sung. “You killed Baek Soo-jung, didn’t you?” Manager Bae accuses. He rages against Woo-sung for trying to have him offed too and says he’s reporting him to the police.
COMMENTS
I was half expecting Soo-jung’s body to be a fakeout. The NIS is looking mighty suspicious this hour. After that flashback where Seung-cheol discovered Soo-jung hidden in the trunk of Director Ma’s car, the NIS’s involvement in her murder doesn’t seem implausible. That puts Seung-cheol’s emotional reaction to her murder in a different light. I do believe he is genuinely bothered by her death, but I wonder how much is worry based on who was involved the last time she was in trouble. We only saw a snippet, so it’s impossible to say whether he became privy to some national secret during that time or was kept in the dark. Either way, he knows this could be much more than your typical murder case. What in the world happened to Soo-jung nine years ago? If memory serves, that’s around the same time she left the country and blamed Yeo-joo for driving her away. Is that incident how they both got on the NIS’s radar?
Then we have Manager Bae’s accusations against Woo-sung. Is he just guessing based on the affair or does he have evidence of some kind pointing toward Woo-sung as the murderer? Woo-sung comes off as too cowardly to be a killer, but it’s possible his bumbling demeanor is all an act. Honestly, it’d be kind of interesting if he was some criminal mastermind or cold murder under it all. There’s still the matter of the bloodstain in their basement which could just as easily incriminate Woo-sung as Yeo-joo. Of course, Yeo-joo’s cold demeanor makes her an easier suspect compared to her warm-seeming husband. The perception of her as morbid, calculating, and unfeeling is enough to rouse suspicion in a lot of people. And as a woman, those traits are much more damning. The juxtaposition of Yeo-joo and Woo-sung’s personalities and how they’re perceived is interesting. He’s going around being completely two-faced and getting away with it due to his nice persona while Yeo-joo is called “Demon Kang” and has seemingly done nothing more than be brutally honest and sometimes refuse to engage in social niceties.
I was surprised Woo-sung decided to come clean to Yeo-joo since he’s never seemed particularly guilt-ridden about his affairs. Why now? He seemed resigned to the fact that his cheating will be exposed in the investigation, so perhaps he just wants to tell her on his terms rather than having her find out when it’s publicly revealed. I kind of think that window has passed, and he’ll probably wimp out on confessing to Yeo-joo now. Although, from her reaction when Se-jin brought up Woo-sung and Soo-jung, she might already know. She’s too astute to have no idea, so I think she’s either concocting some plan or has decided not to believe it and pretend everything is fine. Then again, for how observant she is, her conclusions do sometimes miss the mark like how she thought Soo-ho’s furtive behavior was due to him foisting his work onto a friend. I’m not sure if she’s just straight up obtuse at times or if it’s overconfidence in her own abilities. Either way, it’s kind of endearing. I like those glimpses behind the perfectly controlled mask, and I hope we get more.