Chapter 2

I couldn’t understand it.

Ultimately, we knew too little. Any deeper analysis would have to wait for the scene examination or Ma Huc’s arrest.

A few minutes later, Luc’s team arrived.

A comprehensive investigation began.

He briefly reported how the work had been divided: scene examination, autopsy, neighborhood inquiries, camera retrieval. Each had its own team.

We should have progress soon.

The surveillance team produced results first.

Hoa Ha was an older complex, but a thorough renovation the previous year had installed cameras at every stairwell entrance. That was an enormous help.

With the school’s time for Chung Lien’s departure and our record of Ma Huc boarding the bus, the relevant window was small. That explained how quickly the team finished.

At 9:37 a.m., Chung Lien had entered Stairwell 3.

From then until Luc’s arrival, she never appeared on camera again.

The stairwell had only one entrance, and she wasn’t elsewhere in the building.

We could now be fairly certain she was the victim.

The footage also showed something else: Ma Huc had returned at 10:15 a.m. and left at 11:22 with the cloth bag.

Two questions naturally followed.

Why had Chung Lien come home?

And why had Ma Huc?

Her explanation to the school—“a matter at home”—was too vague to help.

His claim that someone at home was ill was almost certainly an excuse.

We needed other leads.

I had officers contact the carrier for both their call records.

I also reminded the scene team to look for Chung Lien’s phone. Call logs wouldn’t tell us what had been said, but messages on WeChat or QQ might.

Soon, neighborhood inquiries brought important information too.

Some neighbors barely knew the couple. Others described them as loving, rarely even arguing.

One account stood out.

It came from Apartment 506, directly above Ma Huc’s.

The resident was a retired woman in her sixties. She said she had heard an argument downstairs that morning, though she couldn’t recall when. It lasted five or six minutes.

Most words were indistinct. At its height, however, someone lost control and shouted two sentences loudly enough for her to hear.

“Have you ever treated us as family? Why do you keep saying the same thing every day?”

She was certain it was a woman’s voice.

It seemed Chung Lien’s killing must be connected with that argument.

Unfortunately, the witness could only place it somewhere between nine and eleven, based on her usual routine.

That was too broad to help much.

And what had they argued about?

Money? Their relationship? Incompatible personalities? Some trivial incident?

I had no idea.

Still, the words “Have you ever treated us as family?” suggested a serious problem.

Their conflict had probably existed for a long time. For some reason, they had hidden it from outsiders and maintained the appearance of harmony.

The source of the dispute lay deeper than whatever had triggered this particular argument.

Yet if neither her parents nor their neighbors had noticed any discord, finding its true cause would be difficult.

Better to arrest Ma Huc and question him directly than get tangled in speculation now.

The search was fully underway.

Drones scanned from above using optical and thermal cameras. Large numbers of officers and police dogs searched on the ground, starting from several likely access points.

He couldn’t hide much longer.

The preliminary autopsy findings arrived.

The neck and wrists weren’t the victim’s only injuries. A sharp weapon had penetrated her abdomen, rupturing an artery and causing severe blood loss.

The pathologist believed that wound had killed her. Her head and hands had probably been removed afterward.

There was another point: the abdominal wound differed from those at the neck and wrists. Two different weapons might have been used.

The skin and muscle at the neck were badly torn, with conspicuously turned edges. The severed cervical vertebrae were uneven, and repeated chopping marks remained in both bone and soft tissue.

A long, heavy blade had clearly been used several times.

The wrist injuries were similar.

The abdominal wound, however, was slit-shaped, probably caused by a pointed knife thrust.

Scene officers found no evidence that the body had been dragged any considerable distance after death. It lay in the living room, which was probably also the primary crime scene.

Together with the neighbor’s account, those findings allowed us to form a rough reconstruction.

Ma Huc and Chung Lien had likely argued in the living room. In a fit of anger, he had grabbed something like a fruit knife and stabbed her to death.

Then he had used a cleaver or bone chopper to remove her head and hands, slashed her face, and put the parts into the cloth bag.

The ponytail was the strange detail.

The footage clearly showed she hadn’t worn one that day.

In other words, Ma Huc might have tied her hair himself after killing her.

The sequence was chilling.

No one in the analysis room could say why he had removed the head and hands.

To make disposal easier? Or simply to vent his rage?

Either seemed possible.

Neither explained the hair.

An experienced detective nearing retirement offered a bold theory.

“I wonder if he did it to satisfy some distorted emotional need.”

“Go on.”

My instincts also told me this behavior was abnormal and probably tied to emotion.

“Things between Ma Huc and Chung Lien have clearly become so strained that they ended in murder. But that doesn’t mean they were never close,” he said.

“If they’d never loved each other, there would have been neither a reason nor much ability to appear so affectionate in public.

“Perhaps she often wore a ponytail when they were first in love.

“In his mind, the woman he adored back then gradually became separate from the wife he now disliked, felt distant from, and argued with.

“The ponytail represented the Chung Lien he loved. Loose hair represented the one he resented.

“Then, after killing her over their marital problems, he wanted to see his perfect lover again.

“Tying her hair might have been a way of restoring that emotional identity. In his last hours with her body, he wanted the Chung Lien of the past beside him.”

It was a plausible theory, and I agreed.

But only Ma Huc knew whether it was true.

Then the search brought a new lead.

A villager reported seeing him.

Hoang and the frontline officers headed toward the sighting while asking the caller for details.

He ran a grocery shop in Ho Gia Village, Guangqiao Town.

After our branch sent Ma Huc’s photograph to nearby village leaders, Ho Gia officials had posted it in their WeChat group and told everyone to watch for him.

The grocer had recognized the face. The man had apparently bought water from his shop several times.

But he knew nothing about him, so he hadn’t thought much more of it.

Not long afterward, another villager called. Coming down from the mountain, he had seen someone stealing the grocer’s persimmons.

The grocer grabbed an iron bar and went to catch the thief.

The fruit was worth little, but after years of theft he was sick of it and wanted to teach someone a lesson.

Halfway up, he met Ma Huc coming along the mountain path.

He greeted him reflexively, then immediately regretted it.

Officials hadn’t said exactly what the man had done, but had stressed that he was dangerous and should not be approached. The grocer had guessed he might be involved in a killing.

Greeting a fugitive murderer was practically announcing that you recognized him. He might kill you to keep you quiet.

Fortunately, Ma Huc looked at him a few times, seemed not to recognize him, and walked on.

Once he recovered from the fright, the grocer found a spot with reception and called us.

Hoang asked three further questions.

Was Ma Huc the persimmon thief?

Was the grocer certain he was the man who had bought water? When had those visits occurred?

And did the path Ma Huc had taken lead only down to Ho Gia, or were there other branches?

The grocer answered in turn.

He had checked with the villager who reported the theft. The thieves were a family of three, with a short, somewhat plump husband. Definitely not Ma Huc.

On the second point, he trusted his memory. He couldn’t have mistaken him.

Ma Huc had visited five or six times in the last year. The grocer couldn’t recall dates, but they must have been Tuesdays or Sundays. On other days he worked elsewhere, leaving elderly relatives to run the shop.

Those relatives had seen the photograph and had no memory of the man.

As for the path, it led to a three-way junction. Besides descending to Ho Gia, one could climb to Linh Doan Peak. From there, paths crossed the slopes or the summit and led to many other places.

A smaller track between two mountains also reached Ong Gia Ha Dau Village, not far from Ho Gia.

With the fruit theft ruled out, the grocer had supplied two important leads.

First, Ma Huc had been to Ho Gia before. Familiarity with the area might explain his choice of a place to dispose of the remains and hide.

How familiar was another question. We didn’t know whether he came for leisure, work, or family visits.

Second, if the grocer was right, the main search area should cover Ho Gia, Linh Doan Peak, and Ong Gia Ha Dau.

Municipal commanders were deploying units across that area.

Barring surprises, we should have him today.

Then a new lead from Luc made the case stranger still.

It came from the daughter of the woman in Apartment 506.

After learning we were investigating the downstairs apartment, she had spoken to her mother and jogged another memory.

A parcel had been delivered that day.

The courier had knocked while the woman was watering her plants, and she hadn’t paid attention. No signature was required, so he left the parcel, took a delivery photograph, and went away.

The knock had come after the argument ended.

The daughter supplied his number. Luc’s team contacted him at once.

His delivery record confirmed the time precisely.

10:07 a.m.

The argument, therefore, had ended no later than 10:07.

But Ma Huc hadn’t entered the building until 10:15.

There might have been a third person at the scene.

One thing was now clear: that hadn’t been a face-to-face argument between husband and wife.

Either Chung Lien had argued with someone on the phone, or she had been arguing with an unnoticed visitor in the apartment.

We couldn’t rule out either.

Her phone records had arrived.

She had made one call that day to another teacher about schoolwork. Technical means couldn’t establish its content, but inquiries with the school and teacher confirmed it had nothing to do with the case.

There were no other calls through her mobile service.

She might have used WeChat, QQ, or DingTalk. But her phone hadn’t been found, and obtaining online call records from the companies involved was a complicated process. We couldn’t quickly determine whether she had argued over an app.

Ma Huc’s mobile-service records showed no calls either.

Yet a colleague had seen him answer one.

That must have been an internet call too, and we couldn’t trace it quickly.

The investigation could still move forward.

I instructed Luc to review the cameras again, matching everyone who entered or left that day against the building’s residents, looking for anyone else suspicious.

My instincts told me one link in our reasoning was wrong.

Then came another scene finding.

Only Ma Huc’s shoe impressions remained in the apartment. Furniture yielded no fingerprints belonging to anyone else.

The problem was obvious.

If Chung Lien had been killed at home, her shoe marks and fingerprints couldn’t simply be absent.

Clearly, someone had cleaned the scene after her death. Ma Huc had erased every trace he could.

But he hadn’t left immediately, so he had made new marks himself.

Meanwhile, the second camera review identified four visitors who weren’t residents.

One woman was particularly suspicious.

She had entered wearing a white dress.

When she left, the dress was gone. She wore a khaki sweater and a red coat instead.

The white dress wasn’t at the scene. But she had a fairly large cloth bag and could have put it inside.

Luc checked Chung Lien’s wardrobe. A rail had two obvious gaps, possibly where her coat from that morning and the visitor’s red coat had hung.

The camera team established the woman’s movements.

She entered at 9:45.

She left at 10:28.

That meant she and Ma Huc must have spent some time in the apartment together.

Of the other three visitors, one was a courier and another an hourly cleaner for Apartment 205. The third was still unidentified. All three seemed far less suspicious than the woman who had changed clothes.

Unfortunately, she had worn a hat both arriving and leaving, its brim pulled low enough to hide her face.

But the trail wasn’t dead.

“Check the cameras,” I ordered. “The complex, shops, streets—everything around here. She’s connected with Chung Lien’s death. The scene suggests a killing in the heat of the moment. If that’s right, I don’t believe she was avoiding cameras before she even arrived.”

At last, the case seemed to be taking shape.

Perhaps Ma Huc had cleaned the apartment to erase the woman’s presence and remove her connection with the crime.

But who was she?

His lover? A relative?

Had she killed Chung Lien, helped him, or merely witnessed it and failed to report it?

There were many questions.

I now had a theory that could link all the clues.

This might be a crime of passion.

Ma Huc had an affair, which Chung Lien naturally couldn’t accept.

She invited the other woman over to settle matters—or perhaps the visitor came of her own accord to discuss Ma Huc.

The conversation went badly.

An argument escalated, until anger or some other overwhelming emotion drove the other woman to kill Chung Lien.

Learning what had happened, Ma Huc rushed home.

He clearly valued his lover far more than his wife. He sent her away, cleaned the scene, and prepared to dispose of the body for her.

He hadn’t expected to be exposed before he could even get rid of the head.

Of course, that was only my theory.

But the evidence pointed that way.

If it was true, it was a bitter thought.

Some acts crossed such basic moral boundaries that they forced you to confront human ugliness directly.

Sometime after six that evening, Ma Huc was arrested.

Officers found him in a Qing-era grave in the mountains.

It was a small tomb, barely two square meters.

Much of the country around Guangqiao remained undeveloped. Small graves from the Qing and Republican periods were still common.