Chapter 3

Grave robbers had operated here more than a decade earlier, disturbing many tombs, including this one.

Because of its location, the hole they dug had never filled in.

Passing it, Ma Huc had probably spotted a police drone and crawled inside to hide.

Exhausted and unsure when it would leave, he lay down to rest.

He hadn’t expected us to find him there.

Not long after meeting the grocer, he had abandoned the mountain path and pushed directly through the undergrowth.

That made his route unpredictable, but had obvious drawbacks.

It was dangerous, though fortunately he hadn’t been hurt.

And trampled vegetation was easy to spot.

Officers followed those traces to narrow his location, then used dogs to find him.

Unfortunately, the arrest yielded no body parts, weapons, cloth bag, or phones belonging to either him or Chung Lien.

He refused to say where they were.

Hoang had him escorted to the branch while continuing the mountain search himself, determined to find the evidence that night.

Interrogation began after seven.

Ma Huc remained silent and refused to confess anything.

Fortunately, he wasn’t our only possible breakthrough.

Tracing the woman in white backward from the stairwell footage, officers identified her and her address.

Lau Dinh. Local. Thirty-five. Unemployed. Apartment 702, Building 65, Hanh Phuc Thuy Luc Vien.

We initially found no social connection between her and Ma Huc.

Then we looked at her connection to Chung Lien.

She was Chung Lien’s older cousin.

We dispatched officers to her home immediately.

Too late.

She wasn’t there.

We couldn’t tell whether she had fled or merely gone out, so some officers remained nearby to watch.

Meanwhile, camera teams worked flat out, following her route after she left Ma Huc’s apartment.

She had deliberately avoided cameras on her way out, making our work much harder.

Fortunately, she still appeared in a few scattered recordings.

Eight o’clock.

Ma Huc had admitted nothing.

He kept insisting he was innocent, evading every question about the case without a direct answer.

It looked very much as though he was buying time.

With the interview going nowhere, I decided to try myself.

I knocked, then entered without waiting for a reply.

“Phung, take a break. I’ll handle this.”

The older officer looked surprised, then nodded and left.

Holding a paper cup, I sat down slowly and casually leafed through the notes in the younger officer’s hands.

I had heard the entire interview. This was just for show.

I tossed the record aside and looked at Ma Huc.

“You’ve had a rough day, Ma. Aren’t you tired? Want some water? Don’t worry, I haven’t drunk from it.”

I gestured to the cup.

He gave a polite smile but declined.

“No need, Officer. Please just say what you want to say.”

I sighed.

“All right. Let me introduce myself. My surname is Doi. I’m captain of the Xicheng criminal investigation squad. Phung can be hot-tempered and a little blunt. Don’t take it personally.

“I only want to clear up one thing. Why did you hijack that bus?”

“I told you when you arrested me. I was hiking. I passed that tomb and wanted to explore it. Then you people arrested me for no reason. A bus? A human head? I know nothing about any of that.”

Nonsense again.

I nodded rather than challenge him as Phung had.

“Ma, I understand. Everyone has someone they want to protect.

“I can see you’re a good man at heart.

“If you’d truly lost every moral boundary, would you have let all those passengers go? Wouldn’t you have killed the driver to silence him? And that grocer—wouldn’t you have killed him too, to conceal your movements?

“I know you’re not a bad man. So I wonder whether some misunderstanding brought us here. Can we clear it up?”

I meant none of it.

I didn’t think he was good, nor expect those words to change his attitude.

I merely wanted him to believe I was playing good cop.

Once he settled into that impression, a sudden change of manner and a few facts we possessed could put considerable psychological pressure on him.

As expected, he admitted nothing.

“I really don’t understand you, Officer. I do have principles. I’ve never even killed a chicken. How could I murder someone for no reason?”

I shook my head, folded my hands on the table, and looked helpless.

“Let me be frank, Ma Huc. We’ve found out about Lau Dinh.”

His expression barely changed.

His unconscious finger movements told a different story.

The news made him nervous.

“A murder isn’t something you can evade responsibility for just by dodging questions. A stab to the abdomen, then another knife to take the head off… Brutal, isn’t it?

“I understand wanting to protect someone you love. But if we see a problem with your account, we start suspecting her. Before long, every suspicion falls on her instead.

“Are you protecting her—or hurting her?”

He lowered his head, then looked up.

At last, something in his manner shifted.

“Could you give me time to think, Officer? Half an hour. Just half an hour.”

I nodded.

“All right. In half an hour, I hope you’ll have an answer.”

Outside the interview room, Phung came over.

“Captain, he’s still stalling. You’re really giving him half an hour?”

“I know he’s stalling. But if I refuse, will he obediently tell us the truth? Of course not. He may still say nothing in half an hour. Finding Lau Dinh is what matters. Keep working on him.”

“All right.”

He hadn’t told me anything, but the visit wasn’t useless.

I had learned two things.

First, his involuntary reactions showed that he cared deeply whether Lau Dinh had come to our attention.

Second, when I suggested his lack of cooperation could make us misjudge her involvement, he still asked for time rather than admitting or denying her connection.

If he wanted to clear her legally, he should have offered something, whether to win our trust or mislead us.

Instead, he simply wanted half an hour.

That made me suspect he wasn’t currently focused on exonerating her. He was trying to give her time to escape.

He must know whether she had decided to flee. They couldn’t have failed to discuss that after the crime.

If his strategy assumed flight rather than staying, it indirectly suggested she had chosen to run.

Her absence from home wasn’t temporary.

I left only a small team watching her apartment and sent the rest to help the camera teams trace her.

I also had Gia investigate whether either of them knew anyone in fishing, shipping, or boat tourism.

The cities around Yinhai were developed and densely covered by cameras. Running to one of them would scarcely count as escape.

Hiding in the mountains wasn’t a long-term solution either. They lacked the necessities of modern life.

Her likeliest route, I thought, was a boat abroad.

I had already obtained the chief’s approval to coordinate monitoring of transport and border movements. Together with these new measures, we could largely seal her escape routes within Yinhai.

Another lead arrived quickly.

Lau Dinh’s call records showed a call at 2:30 that afternoon.

I had officers contact the recipient and ask what they had discussed.

The moment he heard we were police, he told us everything.

He knew her from mahjong. They had met at the table three years ago and weren’t especially close.

She knew he sold light bulbs overseas. Today she had asked whether his connections could secretly get someone to Central Asia.

She offered a hundred thousand yuan.

He liked money, but that was beyond him. He contracted container shipping out to a professional company and had no personal involvement in that side of the business.

He could only refuse.

We were surprised.

Leaving overland was hardly reliable. Yinhai was far from a land border. The journey would take a long time and offer many opportunities for arrest.

Yet she really had considered it.

I was almost at a loss for words.

Still, it was good news for us. The other units had already put land routes under close watch. Even if she got out of Yinhai, she couldn’t get far.

We also spoke to Chung Lien’s parents again.

This time, we didn’t conceal what had happened to their daughter.

Devastated, they nevertheless tried to help.

They weren’t close to Lau Dinh.

More than ten years earlier, she had claimed she was launching a highly profitable project and persuaded relatives to invest.

Chung Lien’s parents put in thirty thousand yuan and lost it all.

Later, they learned it was a classic Ponzi scheme.

They didn’t know whether Lau Dinh had understood that in advance. But she had pocketed all the supposed interest the scammers paid and refused to compensate anyone for lost principal.

The relatives were furious. Everyone thought her untrustworthy.

Chung Lien’s family gradually distanced themselves.

Contact dwindled further over the years. Lau Dinh never offered repayment. Instead, she kept inventing reasons to borrow more.

Naturally, they refused to be fooled again.

She resented them for it and frequently spoke ill of the family.

Their extended family situation was certainly messy.

Then news came from the interview room.

Ma Huc had confessed.

His account broadly matched my theory.

He had been having an affair with Lau Dinh, and Chung Lien had found out.

She didn’t want to hold on to a man who betrayed her, but she did want the money settled.

She invited Lau Dinh home and demanded half the money Ma Huc had spent on her.

Lau Dinh refused, accused her of looking for trouble, and provoked her.

They argued.

Those must have been the two sentences heard by the woman upstairs.

Thinking back, perhaps they hadn’t come from one speaker.

“Have you ever treated us as family?” might have been Chung Lien’s shout.

“Why do you keep saying the same thing every day?” might have been Lau Dinh’s.

Their voices lacked distinctive features, so the neighbor hadn’t realized she was hearing two different people.

At the argument’s height, Lau Dinh lost control, grabbed a nearby fruit knife, and stabbed Chung Lien to death.

Realizing she had killed her, she panicked and called Ma Huc on WeChat.

He hadn’t known they were meeting secretly and certainly hadn’t expected Lau Dinh to kill his wife.

He nevertheless rushed home, sent his lover away, and stayed to deal with the body.

Her clothes were bloodstained, so she changed into items from Chung Lien’s wardrobe and put her white dress in her bag.

They agreed that if it came out, he would take the blame.

But as he dealt with the body, his mind began to collapse.

Dismemberment wasn’t easy. An inexperienced man couldn’t sever a head with one stroke. Facing someone he had once loved, he couldn’t calmly strike the body again and again.

Chung Lien’s unclosed eyes seemed to accuse him.

Unable to bear it, he destroyed her face.

By the time he finally severed the head, he felt he had gone mad.

His thoughts drifted to when they first met. In that state, he unconsciously braided her hair.

Then he took the head onto the bus, intending to dispose of it near Ho Gia.

A friend lived in Nga Son Village, between Ho Gia and Lam Ao, and often invited him over.

Ma Huc liked hiking. When he visited, he usually wandered the neighboring villages or climbed the surrounding hills.

That had made him familiar with Nga Son, Ho Gia, and Lam Ao, which was why he chose the area.

Then the head fell from the bag, and we pursued him.

Yet something about his account bothered me.

In the analysis room, Phung offered his assessment.

“He’s still hiding something. I’ve done interviews for years. I can tell. This confession is too neat. Compared with his earlier attitude, the change feels staged.”

“I agree,” I said. “And it conflicts with what we know.

“For one thing, Lau Dinh barely had contact with Chung Lien. How did Ma Huc end up having an affair with her? That’s a serious question.

“And if Chung Lien arranged the meeting, why at her own home? Why on a workday? Most importantly, why go to work as usual, only to ask for leave shortly afterward to meet her? Why make it so inconvenient?”

There was no fatal hole in his confession.

It simply didn’t make sense.

Finding Lau Dinh remained urgent. Comparing her account with his should reveal something.

At 10:05 p.m., Hoang reported from the mountains.

They had found the head, two knives, and both phones.

Only the victim’s hands were still missing.

Ma Huc had been fairly resourceful. He had no shovel, and with the crime exposed so early, no time to borrow one.

He had hidden the head in another previously robbed Qing tomb.

Fortunately, we now had ample equipment, search officers, dogs, and experienced personnel.

All the evidence was brought back immediately.

For a complete evidential chain, the head and knives mattered most.

For understanding the case, the phones were more important.

They weren’t in good condition.

Ma Huc had removed the SIM cards and discarded them somewhere, then smashed both devices.

Fortunately, the damage wasn’t catastrophic. Data recovery was possible and wouldn’t take too long.

The bureau began examining the fruit knife and cleaver.

Formal results would take time, but preliminary comparison suggested they were the weapons used.

The fruit knife had killed Chung Lien; the cleaver had dismembered her.

Unfortunately, the fruit knife had been wiped clean of fingerprints.

The cleaver carried only Ma Huc’s.

We still lacked evidence that could establish Lau Dinh’s guilt.

Sometime after one in the morning, the data from Ma Huc’s phone was recovered.

We focused on his WeChat.

Very soon, we found a major problem.

He had no contact named Lau Dinh.

We checked QQ, DingTalk, his address book, and his photo gallery.

Nothing suggested she had ever been part of his life.

We also established he had no secondary accounts on those platforms.

Judging solely from his phone, their lives had never intersected.

I immediately told Phung and the others to make him describe their relationship in detail.

How they met. How they became involved. Their secret encounters.

Anything would do, as long as he talked.

He produced a few stories that sounded superficially plausible.

But they were hollow and illogical.

Details he should have remembered were missing. Things no one would ordinarily notice were described at length.

Neither his known movements nor ordinary behavioral logic supported them.

He was plainly inventing everything on the spot.

At last, we had to acknowledge it.

Ma Huc and Lau Dinh didn’t know each other at all.

The affair was nonsense.

He had led us around by the nose.

But why invent that lie?

An absurd possibility occurred to me.

Drawing our attention to Lau Dinh, making us believe she was the murderer or an accomplice, was itself part of his delaying strategy.

Every moment spent following a false direction bought time.

Then what was the right direction?

Whose escape was he buying time for?

I drew a deep breath.

He was already in custody. There was no point delaying for himself.

Lau Dinh wasn’t entirely cleared, but the evidence and his behavior suggested she wasn’t the person we really sought.

Who else had been at the scene?

The answer was almost obvious now.

Chung Lien.