Chapter 2

They were going there to extort money, yet they had walked into her home as though collecting a legitimate debt.

Lương Nguyệt Nga had made a show of being meek and deferential, then poured their tea.

The drugged tea.

Once it took effect and their limbs went weak, she returned to the main room with the hoe she had sharpened beforehand.

Then she began hacking.

That was her account of the entire incident.

She described it all clearly.

And she seemed to have abandoned any wish to live.

Toward the end of the interview, her eyes red from crying, she said, “I’m not asking to live. Give me the death sentence. Then I can go and find Lôi Lôi... She must be so lonely down there...”

Afterward, Old Xu said nothing. He quietly smoked a cigarette to the end.

I knew he was grieving for Chu Oánh Oánh. He even felt sorry for Lương Nguyệt Nga.

But there was nothing to be done.

Things had gone too far. There was very little left that we could do.

We had the suspect’s confession.

Once the evidence was organized, we could hand her case to the procuratorate for prosecution.

During that interval, there was a minor disturbance.

Trịnh Minh Hạo’s father, Trịnh Kiến Hoa, barged straight into the Criminal Investigation office.

Our division did not normally receive walk-in complaints. Even criminal cases were supposed to be reported to the local police station first, then transferred to us.

But Trịnh Kiến Hoa clearly had not come to report a crime. A deputy chief from the station downstairs had accompanied him.

He had come to make trouble.

The moment he entered, he started shouting.

“Where’s the murderer? Fuck! Where’s the bastard who killed my son—”

Old Xu sprang to his feet.

“Who the fuck are you? Get out!”

Trịnh Kiến Hoa looked stunned.

The deputy chief beside him gave an awkward smile and was about to speak. Old Xu pointed at him.

“You get the fuck out, too! Do you even know what kind of bastard your son is? Fuck you. I’m not doing you any favors. Out!”

The deputy chief’s face flushed, then darkened. He did not dare say another word.

Trịnh Kiến Hoa, however, kept shouting.

“What did you say? Do you know who I am? I’ve had dinner with the mayor! Believe me, one phone call and I can—”

“Throw them out!”

Old Xu swept a hand toward the door.

Several of our bigger, more intimidating colleagues got to their feet and advanced on them with hard stares. Trịnh Kiến Hoa wilted at once.

The deputy chief could only drag him away. They left with their tails between their legs.

Even after sitting down again, Old Xu was still worked up. He told me to pull Trịnh Kiến Hoa’s file.

If the man came back to disrupt the investigation, he said, we should find a reason to lock him up.

Why mention that little episode?

Because it mattered later.

There was a long way to go yet. This case would not end, as we had expected, with Lương Nguyệt Nga’s conviction.

A turning point was coming.

The colleagues processing the scene and organizing the evidence brought us findings we could not have established by sight alone.

First, besides the footprints of Lương Nguyệt Nga and the three victims, there was a fifth person’s shoeprint.

It appeared to belong to a man wearing size forty-four athletic shoes.

Someone had deliberately tried to erase it.

The running tap had clearly been used to hose down parts of the scene, spreading bloody water across the courtyard.

Fortunately, one print lay in a dry spot untouched by either blood or water. The dust had preserved it.

Second, fingerprints had been wiped from the wooden handle of the hoe.

The examiner explained that the only identifiable prints on the handle were Lương Nguyệt Nga’s bloody handprints. That made no sense.

Normally, whoever picked up the hoe would first leave ordinary fingerprints. Blood would spatter onto their hands during the attack, producing bloody prints afterward.

Yet there were only bloody prints on the handle. Not a single ordinary one.

The likely explanation was that the original prints had been wiped away. Lương Nguyệt Nga had then deliberately pressed her bloodied hands onto the handle.

That was serious.

On its own, a fifth person’s shoeprint might have belonged to an earlier visitor.

Combined with the fingerprint evidence, it changed everything.

Lương Nguyệt Nga might not be the killer at all.

She might be protecting the real killer by taking the blame.

I could understand her thinking. After losing her daughter, she no longer wanted to live. If she was going to die anyway, why not accept responsibility?

From her perspective, the killer had avenged her daughter.

But who was it?

We had no lead. We had not even caught a glimpse of this fifth person.

Whoever it was must have been close to Lương Nguyệt Nga or Chu Oánh Oánh. Otherwise, why go that far?

Old Xu said we needed to widen the investigation.

We would have to examine their relationships in detail: relatives, friends, everyone who had been in contact with either mother or daughter.

He would continue with Lương Nguyệt Nga. I was to visit the school.

I took my colleague Triệu Tuấn, and we headed to the high school Chu Oánh Oánh had attended.

It was one of the county’s leading high schools, drawing pupils from more than a dozen towns.

In short, only students with excellent grades could win a place there from the surrounding towns.

It was a boarding school. Students stayed from Sunday through Thursday, then could go home on Friday for the weekend.

I mention this because I could not understand how Chu Oánh Oánh had become involved with those thugs when she spent most of her time at school.

That seemed worth particular attention.

Triệu Tuấn and I met the principal, the head of academic affairs and her homeroom teacher in turn. An entire morning brought us nothing.

They had not even known she had been assaulted.

Her homeroom teacher blamed himself bitterly. Right up until her suicide, he said, he had noticed nothing unusual about her.

That afternoon, I concentrated on her dormitory roommates.

Disturbingly, they said the same thing. Even the night before her death, she had seemed completely normal.

Something felt strange.

Someone planning to take their own life would, I thought, show at least some change from their usual behavior.

And before her death, she had endured a group assault, followed by sustained humiliation, threats and extortion.

I did not believe a girl in her first year of high school could conceal so much distress so completely.

Her roommates offered no direct lead, but one suggested someone else.

“Maybe you could ask Dương Chí Nghị? He was really close to Lệ Lệ. They often walked around the sports field together after evening study...”

Dương Chí Nghị. It sounded like a boy’s name.

“Was he Chu Oánh Oánh’s boyfriend?”

“Maybe, but Lệ Lệ never admitted it. And... after what happened to her yesterday, he stopped coming to school, too.”

If he was her boyfriend, we would not have to look far for a motive.

Love was reason enough for revenge.

We went back to the homeroom teacher to ask about him.

But the teacher gave us another piece of information.

Dương Chí Nghị was on medical leave.

That day, apparently after receiving a farewell message from Chu Oánh Oánh, he had lost control in class, shoved a teacher in front of everyone, then run out of school. No one knew where he had gone.

The teachers were all aware of his condition. He had suffered from mental illness since childhood and had been diagnosed with depression and delusions.

The school had taken it seriously. They immediately called his father, Dương Huy, and asked him to find his son, bring him home and keep him there to rest and receive treatment.

The homeroom teacher could tell us little more. His condition had been under control, he said, and he had always behaved well at school.

Perhaps Chu Oánh Oánh’s suicide had triggered a severe relapse.

But that raised another issue.

As someone with a psychiatric illness, even if he was the killer, the court would not sentence him severely.

Could not, I should say. At most, he could be committed to an institution for compulsory, long-term treatment and confinement.

Triệu Tuấn laughed when he heard that. I sharply rebuked him.

I knew what he was thinking. He, too, was sickened and enraged by what Trịnh Minh Hạo and the others had done.

But first, I told him, we had to find out the truth.

We could decide whether to laugh afterward.

Perhaps a conclusion in which no one had to pay with their life for getting rid of those animals could count as a good one.

Yet if that was what had happened, another question followed.

Why would Dương Chí Nghị, a psychiatric patient, want Lương Nguyệt Nga to take the blame?

Would it not have been better simply to stay at the scene and leave her out of it?

Whatever happened, there could be no truly happy ending to this case.

Reality would prove crueller still, leaving us with an ending beyond anything we could have imagined.

After leaving the school, Triệu Tuấn and I went straight to Dương Chí Nghị’s home.

He, too, came from a single-parent family.

According to the teacher, his mother had left years before.