Chapter 1

A woman rumored to have been the victim of a sexual assault planned her revenge. In a single night, she killed five people from two families.

What astonished us was that none of the dead had assaulted her.

Yet she had not mistaken her targets. Everything had been meticulously arranged.

And that was why the case kept taking turns we could never have predicted.

I’ll call the suspect Trang Tuyết Mai. She was twenty-four.

Surveillance cameras had recorded her face clearly both before and after the killings. The evidence was indisputable.

Only her subsequent whereabouts remained unknown, preventing an immediate arrest.

The five victims, from two households, had all been stabbed to death at around one in the morning. Even a child barely a year old had not been spared.

There were signs of forced entry.

The locks in the old apartment complex were easy to open.

We surmised that the killer had struck while everyone was asleep.

Sleeping people have almost no chance to resist.

Our inquiries established that the two men, Chu Ninh and Trương Tuấn Huy, had known each other since childhood.

They had been schoolmates for years and neighbors for years.

They had also been Tuyết Mai’s classmates.

Coincidentally, my colleague Triệu Tuấn was a local of about the same age.

While we processed the scene, he drew me aside.

“I know her. Trang Tuyết Mai. She used to have a bad reputation.”

In a small city, any story could grow tenfold in the telling.

I immediately asked what had happened.

“In high school, she had a boyfriend outside school. On one of their dates, he and his thug friends assaulted her.”

He paused.

“But she didn’t report it. Later, people said she’d agreed to it. Her reputation was ruined.”

So that was it.

“Were Ninh and Huy among the men who assaulted her?” I asked.

Tuấn shook his head.

“Of course not. They were her classmates.”

That was what puzzled him.

If she wanted revenge, surely she should have targeted those thugs.

Why attack innocent classmates?

We needed answers quickly.

We split the investigation in two.

He took a team to continue examining the scenes and hunt for the killer.

I went to find Tuyết Mai’s relatives.

I asked my colleagues to pull her records immediately.

Something strange emerged.

She had dropped out of university.

Her family was actually comfortably off.

Both parents had been public employees.

Her mother had died of illness years earlier, but by any reckoning, money should not have forced her to leave university.

We contacted her father, Trang Chí Quân, and visited his home.

Despite the late hour and his exhausted appearance, he cooperated.

At the news that his daughter had killed people, he showed only slight surprise.

He did not panic.

He said he did not know where she was.

Then he produced a stack of documents.

“Officers, please look at these first.”

Most were medical records, prescriptions, and diagnostic reports.

Recognizing their importance, we examined them quickly.

Our conclusion was that Tuyết Mai had serious psychiatric illnesses.

Two severe conditions at once.

Schizophrenia and delusional disorder.

While I was still absorbing this, Chí Quân suddenly asked:

“Officer, do you know what my daughter has endured? I do. Whatever she has become, I don’t blame her.”

I understood.

This father had much more to say.

I immediately asked him to explain.

His very first sentence sent the case in an entirely different direction.

“My daughter was never sexually assaulted.”

We had to go back more than ten years, to when Tuyết Mai was in high school.

According to her father, she had never had a thug boyfriend outside school.

That day, she had simply gone to a film with her best friend.

Afterward, a group of thugs blocked her way inside the cinema.

They wanted to “get to know” her.

She refused.

It should have been a minor incident.

But a classmate happened to see it.

That was where the tragedy began.

When Tuyết Mai returned to school, rumors had spread everywhere.

She had been assaulted by several men.

Or worse, had willingly slept around with men outside school.

Because she hadn’t gone to the police.

If it wasn’t consensual, why hadn’t she reported it?

So she must have agreed.

No one gave her a chance to explain.

No one even asked her directly whether it was true.

They only talked behind her back.

And turned a rumor into an indisputable “fact.”

One group after another believed those baseless stories.

They decided she was that kind of dirty woman.

Again and again, they pointed from a distance, laughed, and passed judgment.

She broke down completely.

That was the first time depression forced her to take time away from school.

Hearing her father’s account and thinking of tonight’s victims, I suddenly understood.

“Were Ninh and Huy the main people spreading the rumors?”

He shook his head.

He did not know.

But he said:

“Whatever happens, she is my daughter. Whatever she does, I will protect her unconditionally. I will hire the best lawyer to defend her.”

That was scarcely a hint anymore.

Before us lay documented evidence of her illnesses.

She might well bear no criminal responsibility.

Just then, Tuấn called.

He had discovered something crucial at the scene.

“The killer may not be Tuyết Mai.”

He had reached that tentative conclusion from the physical evidence.

First, the killer had been exceptionally proficient.

Every stab was fatal.

Yet the weapon had vanished.

There were no fingerprints.

Very few shoeprints.

Second, the building had another entrance.

We could not rule out someone else coming and going.

Third, and most importantly, Ninh had not died in his sleep.

He had woken and struggled with the killer.

Unfortunately, he had lost.

The problem was that, if Tuyết Mai—a woman acting alone—had been the killer, Ninh ought to have had a better chance of surviving.

Tuấn therefore believed there might have been a second killer.

Someone highly proficient, ruthless, and careful to frustrate the investigation.

Someone who had erased his own traces.

Tuấn was urgently searching for more leads and tracing Tuyết Mai.

He had called so I could use her father’s help to investigate those closest to her.

The second killer must be someone she trusted intimately.

His reason for saying she might not be the killer was simple.

Our current evidence proved only that she had been at the scene.

Not that she had killed anyone.

I questioned Chí Quân immediately and learned two important things.

First, he had no alibi for the entire night.

Second, Tuyết Mai had one particularly close friend: Lý Lệ Hồng.

She had stayed beside her since their school days.

Even after Tuyết Mai became ill, she had never left.

They were close enough to become accomplices.

But when I asked a colleague to check Lệ Hồng’s records, he told me something stranger still.

Another murder had been reported in our jurisdiction.

The person who reported it…

Was Lệ Hồng.

We rushed to the scene.

Experience with countless murders had taught us to examine the person reporting a crime first.

Lệ Hồng was a nurse who worked nights.

She had been on duty that evening, but had felt unwell and asked to leave early.

At about two in the morning, she came home and found her live-in boyfriend, Trịnh Đông Minh, dead in the bedroom.

She called the police immediately.

While we examined the scene, we contacted her hospital.

The head nurse said she had spent the evening in the staff room because she felt ill.

Her request to leave early had come by message.

At least that night, the head nurse had not seen her in person.

Until we checked the hospital cameras, we could not fully establish her alibi.

Meanwhile, corridor footage revealed a familiar figure.

Tuyết Mai.

Only about fifty minutes separated the murders of the two households from Đông Minh’s death.

That was enough time for her to commit the first crimes and come here.

Yet her almost deliberate appearances on camera puzzled us.

The scene of Đông Minh’s death had also been cleaned meticulously.

No fingerprints, hairs, or other traces of the killer remained.

During our interviews at the scene, Lệ Hồng offered an important detail.

Đông Minh was a street thug.