Chapter 4 — Calls are not allowed to be hung up

The hallway leading to the small office at the end of the duty room is always one step darker than the common desk area, with only a row of recessed ceiling lights illuminating the path. The door to Vuong Dac Long's office was slightly open, the desk lamp shining a yellow light on the hallway floor. He sat behind a wooden desk covered with papers, black-framed glasses pushed up on his forehead, and in his hand was a cup of tea that had long since cooled. Hearing a knock on the door, he looked up and saw both Dan and Anh Tuyet coming in. He put down his cup of tea and crossed his arms over his chest.

— Two suspicious calls in an hour, right? I just took a look at the system log.

- Yes. — Dan put the notebook on the table and opened it to the page he just wrote. — The caller was a girl, estimated to be seven to eight years old. The first match was only nine seconds, the second match was twenty-two seconds. She mentioned the "uncle" who was shouting, and described some details about her whereabouts.

Long held the notebook, skimmed through each line, his face did not express clear emotions, only his fingers lightly tapped on the edge of the table in a slow rhythm.

— Thirty-one seconds total. No address, no name, no direct confirmation of violence occurring at the time of the call, only speculation from voices and background noises.

He put down the notebook, tapped a few keys on the computer, and reopened the recording that Dan had sent to the public system. All three people silently listened to the two short recordings coming from the speaker. The whisper "Miss, help me" echoed in the small room, sounding even more fragile than when Dan heard it through soundproof headphones. After listening, Long turned off the speaker, clasped his hands together and placed them on the table.

— I heard a child being scared. That I don't deny. But hearing fear and identifying it as domestic violence happening right now, at a specific address, are two completely different things in terms of process.

— Mr. Long, I understand that it is not enough by normal standards. But the way the child reacted, the way he hung up the phone just in time to hear footsteps, didn't sound like a naughty call.

— I'm not saying you're wrong. I said we don't have enough grounds to do what you're suggesting, which is to ask the local police to send forces to verify an address that we don't even know yet.

Dan was silent for a moment, the familiar feeling of being stopped mid-sentence arose again, but she held back, not letting it turn into a hasty reaction. Anh Tuyet stood next to her, not immediately intervening, just observing.

— I do not propose to mobilize official forces right now. I just ask for your permission to keep this file in priority tracking status, and for me to contact Mr. Vinh in Dong Lam area police in advance, so that he can understand the situation if there are any further developments.

Long leaned back in his chair, looked at Dan intently for a long time, his eyes were somewhat searching and as if he were considering something other than the incident in front of him.

— Dan, I know you're not someone who reports haphazardly. After eight years here, I am one of the operators with the highest accuracy rating. But I also know there are nights when you treat a vague call as if it were definitely deadly, when statistical probability says otherwise.

— I'm talking about last year.

— I am referring to a type of reflex, not a specific incident. That type of reflex is sometimes right, sometimes it causes us to put resources in the wrong place, and the cost of doing things in the wrong place is not small, and I understand that better than anyone else in this room.

There was a short silence after that sentence, enough for Dan to realize he was talking about himself, not just about her.

— Mr. Long, I don't ask you to believe in my hunch. I ask you to give me time to turn that hunch into concrete evidence, with my own expertise, before the child calls a third time and there is no more time.

— "There's no time left" is a sentence I've heard no less than a dozen times in this profession, Dan. Most of the time, everything is fine even if we don't do anything beyond the standard procedure. The problem is that we have no way of knowing in advance which times are exceptions.

Anh Tuyet glanced slightly at Long, then spoke, her voice calm as if she were untying a knot between the two of them.

— Mr. Long, three years ago it was a different story. That time, the initial information was absolutely nothing suspicious other than an anonymous call full of contradictions. This time Dan had a recording of a real child's voice, with specific details about the structure of the residence, with a consistent repeating pattern across the two calls.

Long did not answer immediately, he turned the cold tea cup in his hand around, looking down at the table as if he was looking for an unpleasant memory. Three years ago, he was the head of the dispatch department, and on a busy night, he dispatched two ambulances and requested emergency assistance from the police based on a call reporting someone being restrained in the warehouse, only to discover that it was an overdone joke by a group of drunk young men. That night, while two ambulances were sent in the wrong direction, a real stroke case in another area had to wait nearly ten minutes for the vehicle to arrive. The patient survived, but the disciplinary council still demoted him by one level, and from then on "sufficient grounds" became two words he never allowed himself to ignore.

That story was not in the official records that Dan had ever read, it was just fragments she heard through fragmentary accounts of long-time colleagues, gradually pieced together over the years of working together. She never asked Long directly about that night, just as he never asked her directly about To Diem Thuy's night. There were old marks in this profession that people choose to respect with silence, even though both know clearly that the other's old marks were affecting current decisions.

- Alright. — He finally spoke, his voice less tense. — I authorize the file to be kept in priority tracking status until the end of this shift. You can contact the local police in advance to get information, but absolutely do not ask them to send official forces without more specific evidence, such as an address, a personal name, or a clear sign of immediate danger.

- I know.

— And Dan. — Long looked straight into her eyes, his voice slowed down, no longer the sternness of a review but something close to clumsily hidden concern. — I don't doubt your intuition. I just don't want you to have to pay the price again for a decision made without enough information, whether right or wrong.

Dan nodded and didn't say anything more, but that sentence stayed with her longer than she wanted to admit. She remembered the review meeting nearly a year ago, when she insisted on holding the line with a call reporting strange noises in an empty apartment for twenty minutes, mobilizing a patrol team to check, only to discover that it was just a stray cat entering through the ground floor window. Long did not yell at her at that time, just sat and listened to her explanation, then recorded a line of comments in the minutes: "reaction was more than necessary compared to available information". She never objected to that line of comments, because she knew that, according to the correct procedure, it was not wrong.

She picked up the notebook again and walked out of the office with Anh Tuyet, the door closing behind her with a small click.

In the hallway, Anh Tuyet stopped, put her hand on Dan's shoulder for a moment and then withdrew immediately, as if she knew Dan didn't need a comforting hug right now, he just needed to be left alone.

— Tracking priorities is enough for me to get started. When you're free later, call Vinh and I'll go back to the desk to check on a few other cases.

— Yes, sister.

Dan did not return to the table immediately. She stood for a moment in the empty hallway, looked at her desk, where the phone was still silent under the fluorescent light, and wondered how much the child on the other end of the line had to go through in the thirty minutes she had just spent convincing her superiors that no one in this room knew. Long's last words, "I don't want you to have to pay the price again", kept echoing in her head like a stuck tape, and it pulled with it a door of memories that she had tried to keep closed throughout the eight hours of each shift, now slightly opening a small crack.

She stood there for a few more seconds, eyes closed, trying to picture the face of the child she had never seen before, instead of letting her mind drift to another face, a face she had tried to forget for five years but had never been able to forget.