Chapter 1

Of all the cases I investigated, this one revealed human nature most starkly.

Three boys took a girl from their middle school, confined and tormented her throughout the night, and ultimately drove her to end her life.

Yet none of them was punished.

The school covered it up and reached a settlement with her family. The police were never told.

Everyone believed it was over.

Until something even more terrible happened.

This took place in the late 1990s, in a desperately poor and backward county where even middle-school fights could involve knives or hoe handles.

The report we received concerned an exceptionally serious massacre.

Five members of one village household had been murdered.

Grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, and a fourteen-year-old boy—all killed together.

I’ll call the boy Lý Tuấn Hùng. He was one of the key figures in the case.

Our examination showed that someone had broken into the house at midnight and brutally killed the sleeping family with an axe.

The killer had made little effort to conceal evidence.

The weapon lay abandoned in a pool of blood. We also recovered fingerprints and shoeprints.

Once we identified a suspect, a fingerprint comparison would establish whether he was the killer.

The shoeprints suggested an adult man.

Meanwhile, nothing had been stolen.

We therefore ruled out a burglary.

This was a targeted killing.

The killer was probably someone the family knew, with a deep grudge against them.

Given the gravity of the crime, we began investigating immediately, focusing on the family’s social connections.

But neither Hùng’s parents nor his grandparents appeared to have enemies who hated them that much.

Only when we visited the village head, Mr. Chung, did we learn that the target might have been Hùng himself rather than the family.

“If you mean a real life-and-death grudge,” Chung told us, “there’s only that girl’s family… She died a terrible death…”

That was how we learned of another incident.

Something concealed so thoroughly that even our criminal investigation unit had known nothing about it.

I’ll call the girl Lâm Tiểu Tiểu.

She had died six months earlier. Her death had been classified as suicide by drowning.

The local police had investigated, but quickly found no signs of homicide, confirmed it as suicide, and never referred it to us.

The truth might not have been so simple.

Chung quietly told us that the official conclusion might not reflect what had happened.

Before her suicide, Tiểu Tiểu had been missing for an entire night.

He had helped her family look for her.

Without evidence, however, he spoke cautiously, only hinting.

“I only heard… I heard some boys took her away that evening and locked her in an isolated wooden hut. Three of them, I think… They certainly wouldn’t have treated her well… And I heard one of them was Hùng…”

So that was it.

If true, the massacre might have been revenge for that incident.

The case was too serious to waste time.

My colleague Triệu Tuấn and I split up at once.

He would establish Tiểu Tiểu’s identity, relatives, and social connections.

I took a team to her school to verify whether she had been harmed.

At the town middle school she had attended, we met Principal Hoàng, a balding man of about fifty.

Her homeroom teacher, Ms. Trần, was also there—a young, slender woman.

Both looked tense at our arrival.

When I briefly described the murder of Hùng’s family, their alarm increased. The principal broke into a cold sweat.

I went straight to the point.

“Was Hùng connected to Tiểu Tiểu’s death?”

“No, not at all,” Hoàng said hurriedly. “That child… her family circumstances were unhappy. It was her family problems that made her do something so foolish…”

I didn’t believe him.

Beside him, Ms. Trần had gone visibly pale.

She seemed about to speak, then hesitated.

I turned to her immediately.

“Ms. Trần, tell us what you know. It happened six months ago. The case has long been closed. This won’t affect your interests. Just tell us.”

I understood perfectly.

Hoàng’s reluctance probably meant he had helped conceal what happened.

If he spoke, connections that ought to remain hidden might be exposed.

Ms. Trần was different.

Perhaps she had not been so deeply involved.

As I expected, she glanced at the principal and slowly answered.

“As far as I know… yes, he was involved. They were the ones who took her away. When her family couldn’t find her that night, I asked every student in the class. Someone had seen the three of them take her.”

There it was.

Her statement matched Chung’s account.

That was enough for now.

They either knew no more or would not tell us.

So I took a step back.

“All right. I won’t press you on the rest. But give me the records for the other two students. I’ll verify the details myself.”

When both still looked uncomfortable, I lost my temper.

“Don’t you understand how serious this is? Hùng’s entire family has been murdered! Do you think the other two little bastards are going to be safe?”

Hoàng stared, stunned by my shout.

Ms. Trần stood at once.

“Come with me. I’ll get the files.”

After we obtained them, Tuấn and the others rejoined us.

They had established Tiểu Tiểu’s family relationships.

Her father, Lâm Hữu Kim, worked away from home most of the year.

In the village, she had been cared for by her grandfather, Lâm Tùng, and mother, Vương Ngọc Lan.

After her death, Kim had never returned to the village.

Lan had disappeared.

People said she had already been mentally unwell. Losing her daughter had made her condition worse, and no one knew where she had gone.

Only the lonely old grandfather remained in what had once been their home.

“We must find all three as soon as possible.”

That was my first thought after Tuấn’s report.

“Unfortunately, we can’t reach any of them,” he said with a sigh.

“I went to the house. No one was there. Everything was dusty; we couldn’t even recover fingerprints. It looked unoccupied for at least a week or two. I asked around. Nobody has seen the mother for months. The grandfather has vanished too—no one has seen him in the last fortnight. As for Kim, I found a number for the construction site where he worked. They said he’d left long ago and they didn’t know where he was.”

Mobile phones were not common then. Finding someone quickly was genuinely difficult.

After thinking it over, I instructed him:

“Keep looking. Take a team and trace them. Focus on the grandfather and father. They fit the likely offender profile better. I’ll visit the other two boys’ homes, both to establish what happened and to keep them from being harmed.”

Tuấn agreed and left.

I reassigned work with the officers at the scene too.

To save time, we divided into teams, one for each household.

The family I visited lived in the county town.

The husband, Hà Quân, was a businessman.

His wife, Ngô Thu Nguyệt, was a full-time homemaker.

Their only son, Hà Kiệt, was the middle-school boy we were looking into.

Something already struck me as odd.

The address in his file was in a relatively affluent neighborhood.

At that time, owning a detached house with a garden was no small thing.

What puzzled me most was this:

There were far better middle schools in the county town. Why send their son to a rural one?

We visited with that question in mind.

Quân was out.

Nguyệt received us.

Kiệt was at home but stayed upstairs in his room.

We never got to meet this potentially crucial boy.

His mother’s attitude, however, told us a good deal about the family.

I did not immediately explain why we had come.

The massacre was too horrifying to announce casually.

But the moment I mentioned Tiểu Tiểu, Nguyệt impatiently interrupted.

“Will you stop? Honestly… We’ve paid more than enough compensation, and my son transferred schools afterward. Can’t you leave it alone?”

I understood at once.

Kiệt might have ended up at that school because he kept causing trouble and being transferred from one school to another.

And he was very likely involved in Tiểu Tiểu’s case.

Her words contained a great deal of information.

First, the family had paid a large settlement.

Second, she did not consider what her son had done serious, even though the girl was dead.

So I deliberately asked:

“You know Tiểu Tiểu died, don’t you?”

She nodded, without a trace of guilt.

“How could we not? If she hadn’t died, would we have had to pay so much? We’ve paid. Isn’t that enough? You keep dragging it up, and it’s having a terrible effect on my son. Don’t you understand?”

I understood.

The girl might be dead, but her son had been traumatized too.

For a moment, it seemed the person at fault was not her son.

It was the innocent girl who had long since died.

I sighed, kept my temper, and decided to tell her what had happened to Hùng’s family.

“One of the boys involved in driving Tiểu Tiểu to her death was Hùng. I’m sure you know him. His whole family is dead. They were murdered last night. Have you considered that we aren’t the ones refusing to let this go? The killer is.”

Her arrogance vanished instantly.

She went white.

Clearly, I had frightened her.

My next words were more frightening still.

“Ms. Ngô Thu Nguyệt, if the killer murdered Hùng’s family to avenge Tiểu Tiểu, who do you think his next target will be?”

She tried to answer.

Her mouth opened, but no sound emerged.

I could see her lips trembling.

Only then did she truly grasp the seriousness of the situation.

Unfortunately…

Even we had not yet understood its true scale.

I believed that, with precautions, we could stop the killer’s revenge.

I never imagined he had killed Hùng’s family first precisely to make us warn these two households.

It was all part of his plan.

While we blindly searched for him, he had already predicted our next move.

What followed lay beyond anything we expected.