Chapter 1

At the turn of the century, in a small rural sugar mill, a woman’s hair caught in a sugarcane press.

Her entire body was dragged into the feed opening.

Within a few dozen seconds, the other workers cut the power.

But when the machine stopped, the scene on the other side was horrific. The woman had been crushed beyond recognition. An entire tank of cane juice had become a thick mixture of blood and liquid.

It was a gruesome sight.

More frightening still was the truth hidden behind this seemingly simple “accident.”

The scene was a small village sugar mill.

After the incident, its owner, Lý Tông Minh, immediately called the police.

Local officers quickly arrived to examine it.

A directive had recently required factories of all sizes to take workplace safety seriously.

Whenever a production accident endangered lives, the police would investigate at once and establish responsibility.

Our criminal investigation unit became involved because the officers’ preliminary assessment suggested a possible crime.

Safety training had repeatedly stressed that women must never wear their hair loose around industrial machinery.

Hair had to be tied back and covered with protective headwear.

Yet it had happened anyway.

Hair caught in a machine, dragging the whole person inside.

Such a tragedy was deeply suspicious.

Either Tông Minh had disregarded lives and managed the mill negligently, or something else was wrong.

Either way, someone would bear criminal responsibility.

2

After taking the case, we divided the investigation into two lines.

One team examined the victim’s background.

The other examined the scene.

The victim, Lý Huệ Quyên, was thirty-two. She lived alone in the village, married but with no children.

Her husband, Đinh Chí Kiệt, worked away from home.

He had been notified but had not yet returned.

Her parents had died years earlier. She had no other close relatives.

That was unusual in the countryside.

She was married and childless, yet she and her husband had not left together to earn a living.

Such an arrangement was rare.

Next, the scene.

Including its owner, the small mill had thirteen employees.

Tông Minh managed it.

Five female workers, including Huệ Quyên, operated machinery.

Of the six male workers, two were machine operators.

All those people were inside the workshop when it happened.

The other four men transported raw materials and finished products and were absent.

The equipment included two sugarcane presses, six holding tanks, ten large boiling pans, and several processing areas.

Several points stood out.

First, the production area’s only two cameras had failed.

The owner claimed not to know.

Second, Huệ Quyên’s fellow operator, Trần Kiện, had been called away by the owner for a reprimand at precisely the time of the accident.

Third, the old press had no automatic cutoff for foreign objects.

Fourth, the crushing had made it impossible to determine visually whether she had suffered injuries before death.

The remains had to be sent promptly for forensic examination.

Broken cameras and old machinery were extremely common in small private village workshops at the time.

To reconstruct what had happened, we could rely only on the workers’ accounts.

After interviewing everyone, we found that something was indeed unusual.

3

Everyone described Huệ Quyên as scrupulous about the rules.

Whenever she entered the production area, she wore her protective cap.

That day had been no exception.

Tông Minh also repeatedly protested his innocence.

He insisted she had still been wearing it barely ten seconds before the incident.

He could not understand why she had taken it off and let her hair become caught, causing such a serious accident.

It was baffling.

Had she killed herself?

It was not impossible.

Her colleagues all considered her a pitiful woman.

In their eyes, she was no longer young, yet still had no child.

More precisely, she had once had a daughter.

The child had died.

We also learned why Chí Kiệt had not taken his wife away to work with him.

He was a domestic abuser.

Repeated beatings had destroyed their relationship.

Her parents were dead, and her maternal relatives barely kept in touch.

No one stood up for her.

She was an unfortunate woman who seemed to have no purpose left, yet had to keep existing.

But there was a problem.

Would someone choosing suicide choose such a painful death?

Working here, she must have known how terrifying the press was.

She had seen what happened to cane once it was crushed.

Besides, people contemplating suicide often showed warning signs.

That became the focus of our next inquiries.

After obtaining Chí Kiệt’s permission by phone, we searched her home.

On her desk, we found a small notebook.

The first pages contained scattered tasks, like an ordinary reminder book.

On the last page, however, she had scrawled:

“Maybe… I shouldn’t go on living.”

There it was.

Although she gave no reason, the words suggested an intent to end her life.

Moreover, everything we had gathered from the scene and witnesses showed no sign of homicide.

We could think of no way to throw an adult into a sugarcane press in full view of so many people.

At that point, we all thought the case was nearly over.

That was why what followed kept astonishing us.

And overturning everything we thought we understood.

4

Chí Kiệt hurried back from another city.

His first stop was the police station to explain his circumstances.

Most of his statement concerned their relationship.

It amounted to one sentence.

Their marriage had broken down, and they had been separated a long time.

He also wanted to sign the death confirmation quickly.

Since the case involved a possible crime, that could not yet be done.

Although the body was no longer intact, regulations still required an autopsy and forensic report.

One detail in his account stood out.

He accused Huệ Quyên of longstanding, repeated infidelity.

Of making a cuckold of him more than once.

Yet she refused to divorce him.

So he had stayed away, waiting until they had been separated long enough to sue for divorce.

That was also his reason for repeatedly beating her.

He felt humiliated.

Our checks established that he had not returned for over a year and had a clear alibi.

He was unlikely to have committed the crime.

Still, his story puzzled us.

Did Huệ Quyên have another boyfriend?

Neither Tông Minh nor any worker had mentioned one.

At first, we paid little attention.

If it was suicide, the complexity of her private life did not matter.

But things were clearly not that simple.

Meanwhile, the forensic colleague examining her remains sent us information.

The body had been flattened so completely that there was almost nothing to examine.

They had, however, recovered a blood sample at the scene.

It contained traces of a drug whose composition they could not yet identify.

Local forensic facilities were rudimentary then.

Further identification required sending the sample to a higher-level laboratory.

But without signs of homicide, it would not receive further testing.

The pathologist contacted us to confirm that and suggested examining her belongings for recent illness or medication.

We had indeed found sedatives on her desk.

At the time, they could still be bought from a pharmacy.

That helped persuade the forensic team not to send the sample for further testing.

After all, there was then no evidence to challenge our conclusion.

Huệ Quyên had killed herself.