They moved Khai Minh to
another room, this one under guard, and began taking his statement right there
at the bedside, since the doctors still wouldn’t clear him to leave.
An investigator dragged a
chair over and set a thick file on the table. The rustle of turning pages was
even and slow, each one flipping past like the unhurried stroke of a knife.
“Mr. Lam, let me lay
it out so you follow. Mrs. Mai Ngoc’s body was found in an old
cold-storage unit on a plot of your family’s land, a plot that’s sat empty for
years. The examination puts her death several days back. Anything you’d care to
say?”
Khai Minh answered, his
voice still hoarse.
“I know nothing about it.
These past days I’ve been lying unconscious in a hospital bed. And before that,
I never once met with her.”
“And before you fell
unconscious? There are a few things we need you to clear up.”
Then, one by one, they laid
the pieces on the table, each set down like a brick, walling him into a tight
little ring.
First, a message. Mai
Ngoc’s phone still held a text arranging a meeting, sent from the number
registered to Khai Minh, calling her out to that very storage yard one evening.
Khai Minh cut in at once.
“I never sent that. It’s my
number, yes, but I’m blind, and you know it. Every message I send, someone else
reads aloud and types for me. I haven’t sent my aunt a single word all week.”
“And who types your
messages for you?”
Khai Minh fell silent.
The person who typed his
messages, who read his documents aloud, who had stayed at his side through
those final days, was lying comatose one floor below. An Nhien couldn’t open
her mouth to speak a single word in his defense.
Second, blood and hair. In
a car registered to the Lam family, they’d turned up bloodstains and a few
strands of hair, tested, and matched to Mrs. Mai Ngoc.
Third, motive. Everyone in
the trade knew the aunt and nephew had been locked in a fight over control of
Vinh An Hospital. In just a little while, Khai Minh would turn twenty, and the
whole estate would fall into his hands, and the one person who had stood in his
way all along was Mai Ngoc.
Fourth, footage. The cameras
at the Thien Ha Hotel had caught every second of it: Khai Minh storming into
the middle of the signing ceremony, jabbing a finger at Mai Ngoc, announcing in
front of the whole room that she’d had a hand in his parents’ deaths. A packed
ballroom, a pack of reporters, every last one of them had heard him turn on her
in a fury.
The investigator closed the
file.
“Mr. Lam. You had an
aunt blocking everything you stood to inherit. You made your hatred of her
public, in front of a crowd. Then she turns up dead on your family’s land, with
a text on her phone setting up a meeting, sent from your number. Do you see how
neatly it all fits?”
Khai Minh sat still.
He saw it. He saw it more
clearly than anyone.
Piece by piece, every one
of them was real, every one of them was true, yet fit together, they formed a
picture he had never once painted. Someone had stood behind it all, patiently
gathering up every scrap he’d carelessly left lying about these past six years,
his anger, his suspicion, his claim to the inheritance, and braiding them into
a noose.
“Let me ask you one thing.”
Khai Minh lifted his head
toward the voice.
“You say my aunt died
several days ago. Which night, exactly?”
The investigator named a
date. Khai Minh turned it over in his head. It was just as he’d feared. That
night was the night before he and An Nhien had gone down into the basement of
Lab Seven.
“That night I was at the
villa.”
His voice held steady.
“I didn’t set foot outside
the whole night.”
“Anyone who can vouch for
that?”
The words snagged in his
throat again.
That night, the only people
around him had been the household staff. And that staff, after his aunt had
locked him inside the house and gone off to sell the hospital, had been swapped
out, nearly every one, for his uncle’s people. Whatever they said now, this way
or that, it all lay in Minh Quan’s hands.
Then he saw the whole shape
of the trap.
The night he’d been trapped
down in that basement, he’d had An Nhien beside him, and a gas explosion to
prove he couldn’t have gone anywhere. But whoever had set this snare had been
shrewd enough to push his aunt’s death back by a single night, back to the very
night he’d been alone in the villa, with not one decent soul at his side. His
best alibi landed on one night; the crime had been planted on another.
Outside the room, Minh
Quan’s voice still drifted in, in bursts. He was answering the reporters, his
tone thick and cracking, breaking off in all the right places.
“I’ve lost my wife… She was
a gentle soul, spent her whole life looking after that hospital, looking after
her orphaned nephew. And yet… She told me herself, more than once, how afraid
of that boy she was, afraid he’d take his revenge. And I waved it away. He’s
your own flesh and blood, I said, he’d never have the heart. It’s my fault… if
only I’d listened to her…”
Every line dropped exactly
where it should, every one struck home, every one drew a sympathetic click of
the tongue from those who heard it. A model husband who’d just lost his wife. A
generous uncle betrayed by the very nephew he had taken in.
Khai Minh heard all of it.
He couldn’t see the tears
on Minh Quan’s face, but he knew just how dry they ran underneath. Because that
same weeping voice had, only days before, calmly let a single line fall into a
phone that he would never forget: “He should have died six years ago.”
The statement done, they
gathered up their files and left. Minh Quan went out with them, dabbing at his
eyes before the lenses as he walked. But the moment the procession rounded the
bend into an empty stretch of corridor, the moment no one was left watching, he
let the hand holding the handkerchief drop.
That face, twisted a moment
ago into grief, smoothed flat at once. Not a crease of sorrow. Not a drop of
regret. Only a cold calculation, the thing that had always been sitting there
underneath, waiting for the crowd to turn away so it could surface.
He drew out his phone,
stepped to the window at the end of the corridor, and dropped his voice.
“First step’s done. My dear
wife’s got herself a scapegoat now.”
The other end said
something. The corner of Minh Quan’s mouth ticked up.
“Whether they let him go or
not doesn’t matter. What matters is that from here on, whatever comes out of
that mouth of his, the world will only ever hear the words of a man who murdered
his own aunt.”
He paused a beat, then went
on, each word slow and edged.
“We make sure he never
again has the standing to speak before the law. A man like that. You don’t try
him in a courtroom. You try him in a madhouse.”
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