Chapter 1

On the day of the incident, the young couple both went out, leaving their seven-year-old daughter, their only child, in her grandmother's care.

But the grandmother locked her inside and went to play mahjong. The little girl fell from the sixth-floor balcony and died.

At first glance, it looked like an accident.

What made us uneasy enough to keep investigating was something her grandmother said at the scene.

“She was only a girl. So she's dead. What of it?”

It happened in an old apartment complex, the kind with no elevators.

So old that there were only a handful of surveillance cameras.

The victim was Chung Hân Hân, seven. She lived with her parents and paternal grandmother in a sixth-floor apartment.

She fell from the balcony and died on impact.

Her father, Chung Trạch Hoa, was the first to rush home.

He held her body and wailed.

The neighbors who witnessed it couldn't hold back their tears.

Her grandmother returned a little later. Seeing her son cradling the child's body, she froze.

The last to arrive was the girl's mother, Lý Ngọc.

She rushed forward like a madwoman, seized her daughter from her husband's arms, and kept calling her name.

“Hân Hân! Hân Hân!”

She cried so hard she nearly passed out.

Anyone hearing that grief would have felt their heart break.

But soon, she erupted.

Laying her daughter down, she charged at her mother-in-law.

Her hand, still stained with her child's blood, struck the old woman's wrinkled face.

Apparently, the slap was deafening.

Smack!

Sharp and painfully loud.

It came so fast and hard that the neighbors had no time to intervene.

The old woman reeled.

“It's your fault! All your fault! Give me back my daughter! Give her back!”

Sobbing and screaming, Lý Ngọc seized her clothes and tried to strike again.

But the slap seemed to have brought the grandmother to her senses.

She flew into a rage, struggling with her daughter-in-law and swearing.

“You whore! You dare hit me?

“She was only a girl. So she's dead! I didn't kill her. What right have you got to hit me?”

The neighbors hurried to separate them.

Meanwhile, the father still held his daughter's body, seemingly so numb with grief that he no longer cared about the quarrel.

Only when an ambulance from the 120 emergency service arrived, followed by the police, was the scene brought under control.

After hearing the witnesses' accounts, our colleagues made an immediate decision.

Every detail of Chung Hân Hân's fall had to be investigated.

Sure enough, we found suspicious signs in the apartment.

Perhaps this hadn't been an accident at all.

The criminal investigation team formally took over.

We learned that before going out, Lý Ngọc had left her seven-year-old in the grandmother's care.

Instead, the grandmother locked the door, shut the girl inside, and went off alone to play mahjong.

The initial account was that the child had been playing on the balcony by herself, accidentally fallen, and died at the scene.

The first suspicious detail was the balcony itself.

It was the common projecting type, with a railing approximately 1.2 meters high.

For that reason, most households hadn't added glass panels or security grilles.

The top was wide enough to hold a flowerpot. Children also liked climbing onto it to play.

Hân Hân was under 1.2 meters tall.

To get onto the railing, she would have needed a chair or something else to stand on.

There was indeed a chair directly beneath it.

At first, everything appeared to fit.

The problem was the dust on top of the railing.

If she had really climbed up to play before falling, the marks in that dust should have allowed us to reconstruct her movements.

They didn't.

All we recovered were two partial handprints, showing the palms and four fingers.

She would have needed to brace both hands there to climb.

But her next movement should have put a knee or foot on top.

There were no knee marks.

No footprints.

We had no evidence that she had stood there, let alone sat or played on it.

In other words, she might only have put her hands on the railing before being flung over, like a fish tossed out of the water.

Could a seven-year-old girl have done that herself?

It seemed very unlikely.

Even if she had deliberately tried to jump, with the chair as her support, she would at least have needed to bring a knee onto the railing.

Another possibility emerged.

Just as she was about to climb up, someone had shoved her from behind, or lifted her and thrown her over.

With that hypothesis in mind, we immediately began preliminary conversations with her three family members.

First, we needed each person's movements that day.

But Lý Ngọc was still close to a complete breakdown.

Facing us, she sobbed as she spoke.

“The balcony door locks! We'd all agreed. It had to stay closed and locked...

“I only went out for a medical appointment...

“She did it on purpose! That vicious old woman did it on purpose...”

Much of her account was confused and of little immediate use, but at least we learned why she said she had left home.

A medical appointment.

We got even less from the father.

“I was working. Out on business, like any other day. I never thought...”

He choked.

“My mother... she doesn't hate Hân Hân that much. She just has a sharp tongue.

“It was an accident.”

He didn't say it outright, but we could tell he leaned toward his mother's side.

He didn't mention his daughter again.

We had intended to ask whether the marriage was harmonious, but with the tragedy so fresh, this wasn't the moment.

Last was the fierce old woman, Chung Trạch Hoa's mother and Lý Ngọc's mother-in-law.

She knew how to put on a show.

Sniffling, she said, “I've been wronged too. I only went out for a little while, just a few games of mahjong.

“Who knew the child would be so badly behaved?

“I don't want to live anymore.

“My daughter-in-law hit me and blamed me...”

Her own words made it clear that she felt little responsibility for her granddaughter's death.

She even thought the girl had been “badly behaved.”

As far as she was concerned, her daughter-in-law had no right to hit or blame her.

The world really did contain every kind of person.

It was equally clear that she didn't care about this granddaughter at all.

That abnormal way of thinking was, in fact, an important clue.

Unfortunately, we all missed it then.

After establishing the family's stated movements, we began the first round of investigation.

It sounds cold, but our first task was to rule out their involvement.

We had to verify their alibis.

At first, we thought perhaps one of the three had lied and had no real alibi.

What we found exceeded our expectations.

All three had lied.

All three alibis were false.

Lý Ngọc hadn't visited the hospital she named.

There was no appointment record for her there at all.

Chung Trạch Hoa hadn't gone out on business either.

No one at his company knew where he had been.

The grandmother really had gone to play mahjong.

But after only a short time, she received a call and left.

That was still well before Hân Hân's fall.

The possibilities became far more complicated.

And the deeper we looked, the more morally repellent things we found.

Things worse than a simple preference for boys over girls.

Naturally, we focused first on the father.

His movements were the most suspicious.

In the interview room, he was visibly uneasy.

Perhaps he understood that being seated there couldn't mean anything good.

I laid his company's attendance records and several colleagues' preliminary statements before him.

“Where were you really when your daughter fell?”

“I... was meeting a client...”

He stammered.

“Maybe my colleagues didn't know.

“You can call him. He'll confirm it. We were discussing a project.”

His work involved sales. Meeting clients was normal.

His reaction wasn't.

Beside me, Triệu Tuấn immediately cut in.

“Fine. Write down his full name, address, and phone number. We'll bring him in to assist with the investigation.

“I don't believe anyone will dare give you a false alibi.

“Lying in everyday life is one thing. Let's see who dares lie to the police.”

Chung Trạch Hoa went white.

Triệu Tuấn had guessed correctly.

He had probably asked a familiar client or close business associate to cover his unexplained absence.

That sort of favor might work if the company checked whether he had been working.

Faced with the police, the other person would surely refuse.

He had no choice but to give in.

After a long silence, he said slowly, “All right... I'll tell you.

“I wasn't meeting a client.

“I was seeing a woman named Tiêu Hiểu Nhàn.”

“What is she to you?” Triệu Tuấn asked.

He sighed.

“My lover.”

We exchanged a glance.

Neither of us thought this was simple.

Even if he was telling the truth now, it didn't immediately clear him.

After discussing it, we decided to bring Tiêu Hiểu Nhàn in for questioning.

She was single, twenty-five.

We collected her in a police car, and she too was extremely nervous.

In another interview room, when we told her that Chung Trạch Hoa had admitted their relationship, she made almost no attempt to deny it.

“Yes... he came to my place that morning.”

Then she quickly added, “But we stayed there the whole time. We didn't go out.

“So we absolutely couldn't have killed his daughter.”