Chapter 4

Why, for example, had Chu Oánh Oánh always seemed so unaffected in front of other people?

If she was that strong, why had she finally swallowed pesticide in silence and died in agony?

Because she was ill.

At Lương Nguyệt Nga’s house, Old Xu had found a notebook in which Chu Oánh Oánh had occasionally kept a diary.

“The entries are very fragmented,” he said. “Some read almost like delirious rambling, while others are perfectly ordinary. From the advice I’ve received, there’s a strong possibility she had bipolar disorder. It may have started with the abuse ten years ago.

“She might not have understood what happened at the time. But as she grew up, she came to understand it, and it became a childhood shadow that never stopped tormenting her. Her mother, the only person she had, was the one who had chosen to settle the matter. She had no one to confide in. Day after day, it built up, until the illness emerged...”

Old Xu sighed before continuing.

“Ten years later, she was assaulted again, this time by several men. I kept wondering why she didn’t call the police, tell a teacher or tell her mother.

“Now I understand. What happened ten years ago taught her that her mother would choose to put up with it. So she felt she had to put up with it, too. She was also afraid of people finding out and ‘ruining her reputation.’

“In the end, when she could no longer bear it, she chose to end her life. A road she could never come back from.”

So that was it.

I suddenly understood why Dương Chí Nghị had said, “She’s like me.”

They were both ill.

Poor Chu Oánh Oánh.

She had finally found someone who understood her, someone living through the same kind of pain. Both of them had been determined to build better lives.

Then Trịnh Minh Hạo destroyed it all.

Yes, he had been the ringleader.

In her WeChat history, she had communicated only with him, not the others.

The extortion, the humiliation: he had orchestrated all of it.

The others were his disreputable friends, called in to join him in abusing her.

They all deserved to die, but Trịnh Minh Hạo more than any of them.

Because Dương Chí Nghị and Chu Oánh Oánh had found a light in each other.

For someone with a psychiatric illness, whether depression or bipolar disorder, finding even a glimmer of light in life could be terribly hard.

And those men had put it out.

Though it was growing late, we questioned Lương Nguyệt Nga again.

With the information Triệu Tuấn and I had gathered, we put Dương Chí Nghị’s name directly to her, making it clear that we knew.

As expected, she soon began to talk.

She told us what had really happened.

On the day her daughter took her own life, Dương Chí Nghị had come to their home.

He had secretly taken Chu Oánh Oánh’s phone.

Of course, Lương Nguyệt Nga learned that only later. At the time, she was too busy trying to save her daughter to notice whether the phone was there.

That fitted the teacher’s account of his outburst and flight from school.

He had watched events unfold without being seen. He knew Chu Oánh Oánh had been taken for emergency treatment, could not be saved and had been pronounced dead. He also knew her mother would be going to the funeral home the following morning to make arrangements.

From her phone, he learned what had driven her to her death.

That evening, he sent the WeChat message telling Trịnh Minh Hạo and the others to collect the money at Lương Nguyệt Nga’s house the next morning.

Then came the day of the murders.

The drug was a special prescription sedative given to patients with his condition.

The three men drank the tea. Dương Chí Nghị took out the hoe.

Blood spattered everywhere.

But there had been a complication for Lương Nguyệt Nga. She had forgotten her identity card and household registration booklet and had to go home for them.

When she came through the door, she found Dương Chí Nghị washing away the blood with the courtyard hose.

She froze in horror.

What happened next was something none of us had anticipated.

Earlier, Triệu Tuấn and I had asked ourselves why Dương Chí Nghị wanted Lương Nguyệt Nga to conceal his identity.

He had a psychiatric illness. Even if he confessed, he would not be sentenced to death.

The best option would have been for him to stay and leave her out of it.

But the reason was beyond anything we had imagined.

And it was the same reason she agreed to take the blame.

Dương Chí Nghị intended to kill someone else.

There had not been three men in the group that assaulted Chu Oánh Oánh.

There had been four.

But on the day of the murders, Trịnh Minh Hạo brought only two of the others. The last man had been unable to come because he had something else to do. That had saved his life.

Dương Chí Nghị had quickly improvised. He asked Lương Nguyệt Nga to confess.

He still had something to do. He could not be arrested yet.

To her, this was a chance to avenge her daughter.

Once the initial shock had passed, she made her decision.

She wanted revenge, too, but lacked the means to carry it out.

And after losing her daughter, she had been thinking of ending her own life.

That was how the situation we found had come about.

Her statement alarmed us all.

Because she did not know who the fourth man was.

It was already the early hours.

Old Xu remained in command, using the limited staff available overnight to identify the fourth man as quickly as possible.

I took officers straight to Dương Chí Nghị’s home.

We called Dương Huy repeatedly on the way. No answer.

We forced our way into the apartment.

As expected, Dương Huy was drunk and asleep again.

Dương Chí Nghị was gone.

We immediately contacted other teams and mobilized every available officer to trace him.

Through Old Xu’s efforts, the security unit gave us full access to its camera system.

We confirmed that Dương Chí Nghị had slipped out early on the morning of the murders. We also began checking when he had left that night and which direction he had taken.

But our efforts could not keep pace with the bloodlust rising in him.

A report broke the deadlock.

A young man named Trần Kiệt had been murdered in his small rented room.

He had been stabbed and slashed repeatedly. Blood covered the floor. The killer had shown no mercy.

We rushed to the scene.

The room was in disarray. There had clearly been a struggle.

The weapon, a long watermelon knife, had been abandoned there. It bore Dương Chí Nghị’s fingerprints.

He was no longer trying to hide.

Trần Kiệt was the fourth man.

He reeked of alcohol. We thought he had probably just returned from drinking when Dương Chí Nghị followed him, broke into his room and killed him.

His phone messages showed why he had gone out that night.

To celebrate his narrow escape.

Yes. He had gone drinking to celebrate.

To celebrate not dying that morning with Trịnh Minh Hạo and the others.

To celebrate the arrest of the killer, Lương Nguyệt Nga.

Celebrate?

How ironic.

The King of Hell, it seemed, never overlooked those who deserved to die.

But Dương Chí Nghị had vanished.

We were deeply concerned about his state of mind. With his illness, and four people killed in two separate attacks within just two days, we feared he might descend into an indiscriminate killing frenzy.

We launched a manhunt at once.

Every available camera feed was brought into use. After killing Trần Kiệt, he had run toward the old quarter, then disappeared into an area without camera coverage.

We searched the whole area but found no trace of him. The darkness made the search extremely difficult.

He did not appear again until morning.

And not in any way we expected.

At about eight, we received a report of a serious hostage-taking and assault at the funeral home.

The hostage was a five-year-old boy.

The hostage-taker was Dương Chí Nghị.

The funeral home was ten kilometers from the old quarter where we had lost his trail. He had walked all night to get there.

Our fears seemed to have come true.

He had lost his mind completely.

Revenge had taken over. After killing the four young men who had assaulted Chu Oánh Oánh, his hatred had spread to their parents.

This time, his target was Trịnh Kiến Hoa.

We did not know how he had learned it, but he apparently knew Trịnh Kiến Hoa would be going to the funeral home that morning to arrange Trịnh Minh Hạo’s funeral.

Clearly, though, his attempt had failed.

We set off as soon as the call came in. It took us only about ten minutes to arrive.

But all that awaited us was Dương Chí Nghị’s body.

He had cut his own throat with a sharp fruit knife and died before the paramedics reached him.

Blood soaked his clothes.

I could reconstruct what had happened only from the security footage and the account of the guard who had witnessed it.

After the funeral home opened, Dương Chí Nghị had tried to slip inside, posing as a bereaved relative coming to complete the paperwork.

A funeral home in a small county town had no reception desk. The entrance led into a large hall, while cremation arrangements were handled in offices farther inside.

We thought he had wanted to reach those offices to find Trịnh Kiến Hoa.

But he had killed someone the night before. Traces of blood remained on him. Though it had dried brown and was not immediately recognizable, it still drew attention.

Exhausted and disheveled after a sleepless night, he was noticed at once by a sharp-eyed security guard. The guard grabbed him and asked what he was doing there.

Dương Chí Nghị panicked.

He mistook the uniformed guard for a police officer.

After all, he was only a high-school student, and his mental state was extremely unstable.

Trying to protect himself, he pushed the guard away, seized a little boy wandering through the hall with one hand and pulled out a dagger with the other.