Chapter 2 — End of Line Bus 08

Huy returned to his cramped room in a deep alley near Thu Duc market just after midnight. The twelve square meter room is littered with books, documents and coffee cans. He did not turn on the big lights, just lit a small warm yellow desk lamp, enough to illuminate the narrow but familiar working corner.

He carefully placed the brown sheepskin notebook on the table, sat facing it for a long time as if he was looking at a creature that could explode at any moment. Then, he gently turned each page back to the beginning, this time more slowly, more carefully.

Five names. Five occupations, five addresses, five timelines. And next to each name is a bright red X.

Huy took a blank piece of paper and began copying each line in order, copying and analyzing at the same time.

**Nguyen Van Hung** – Freelance carpenter, sixty-one years old according to estimates from the temporary residence address. Disappeared on September 2, at 11:45 p.m. Lot 4 temporary housing area - from his experience as a journalist, Huy realized that this is a temporary housing area for poor workers who migrated from the Western provinces, often concentrated around large construction projects in the suburbs.

**Tran Thi Lan** – Selling noodles, women, location near the foot of Linh Trung overpass. Disappeared on September 15, at 11:30 p.m. Night peddlers never suddenly quit their job. They cling to every single penny. Disappearing without explanation is absolutely unusual for such people.

**Le Huu Phat** – Traditional motorbike taxi, Dai Nam junction area. Disappeared on October 5. Dai Nam intersection - this name evokes associations with Dai Nam Real Estate Group, one of the most powerful real estate giants with many projects covering the Thu Duc area.

**Vo Van Bon** – Freelance bricklayer, camp number 7. Disappeared on October 18. Camp – this word clearly proves that he lived right in the construction area of a certain project, as many poor construction workers often do.

**Dinh Trong Quy** – Measurement engineer quit his job. Disappeared on November 1. This is the most different name on the list. The others are all unskilled, low-skilled workers. And this is an engineer. A person with professional qualifications. And especially, note "quit", not "unemployed". This suggests that he left a job – perhaps voluntarily, perhaps by force – before his disappearance.

Huy lightly tapped his ballpoint pen on the table, staring at the paper. Five people from different circumstances, different ages, different occupations, but have two clear things in common: they all belong to the ordinary manual labor class, are freelance workers, and have no social protection system. And they all went missing late at night, from 11:30 p.m. to 11:45 p.m. - the exact time the last bus of route 08 rolled around.

He opened his laptop and typed in the first search keyword: "Nguyen Van Hung missing Thu Duc 2025".

The returned results are almost empty. There was not a single article, not a single news about the loss of anyone, not a single line of news mentioning a carpentry worker named Nguyen Van Hung who disappeared in the Thu Duc area in early September.

Huy tried with the second name. Then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. The result was identical, equally terrifying: absolute silence. Five names, five disappearances – and no one on this vast internet knows, or bothers to take notes again. They were erased from the world without leaving a trace.

That doesn't mean no one reported losing people. There may have been, but in small local police stations in the suburbs, such reports are often put in a drawer with the comment "arbitrarily left", especially when the subject is a migrant worker without permanent residence, without relatives in power or knowledgeable about the law to pursue it to the end.

Huy looked at his watch. Two o'clock in the morning. He poured himself a cold glass of iced milk coffee, took a long sip, and then began drawing a rough diagram on a large A3 piece of paper. He circled each name, then drew connecting lines. Finally, all those lines converge at a central point: the geographical area along bus route 08, the section through Dai Nam urban area and the surrounding area that is being re-planned. Dai Nam Group. That name appeared indirectly through the addresses of three of the five victims.

He typed into the search box: "Dai Nam Real Estate Group Thu Duc 2025 project".

This result is completely different. Thousands of results appeared, most of them were PR articles written to order, praising the vision of Dai Nam Group Chairman, Mr. Bui Thanh Long. Picturesque perspective images of the "Dai Nam Dong Ecological Supercity" with glass towers overlooking the Dong Nai River, loud advertisements for apartments for sale with starting prices of several tens of millions of dong per square meter, and interviews with Chairman Bui Thanh Long by prestigious economic newspapers, where he answered questions about business philosophy with carefully shaded humility and charity.

But if you dig deeper, ignore the glossy PR articles, surf to residential forums and local community social networking sites, Huy begins to find cracks. Comments from local people complained about being charged land compensation prices lower than market prices and being forced to sign papers to receive money quickly. Anonymous complaints about night construction projects causing noise and dust pollution cannot be sued. And a small detail, very small, but it caught Huy's eye: a single comment on a suburban residential forum posted three months ago, with the content: "Who knows about security guard number 3 here? I heard he's been out of touch for a month now, and his wife is in the countryside looking for him."

"Security number 3." Huy quickly typed the name of that online community into the browser. "Dai Nam Dong construction site." And right after that, he tried typing: "Nguyen Van Hung protects".

There are no exact results. But a small piece of news appeared, from a local district newspaper, reporting three months ago: "The district police received a report to find a missing person: Nguyen Van Hung, 58 years old, works as a contract security guard at a construction project in the Thu Duc area. Authorities confirmed that verification is underway."

Protect. Not a carpenter like the book says. Either the notebook made a mistake, or – and this gave Huy goosebumps – the person who wrote the notebook deliberately wrote the wrong occupation to disguise the information. The first victim worked as a security guard at a Dai Nam project. Huy underlined this line three times.

The sky began to brighten with silver gray pouring into the small window. Huy stretched his back and heard a cracking sound, looking back at the diagram paper cluttered with arrows and question marks in front of him. With decades of experience in investigative journalism, Mr realized: it was no coincidence that these five names were written in the same notebook, in the same chronological order and with the same pattern of disappearance behavior. Someone has systematically and carefully tracked and recorded these disappearances. Someone knew the truth and was trying to leave evidence the only way they could: throwing a notebook under the seat of a late-night bus, hoping whoever picked it up would understand and move on.

This means that the owner of the notebook is in danger and cannot be made public. Or, what's worse – they no longer have a chance to go public.

In the morning, as soon as it was bright enough, Huy went straight to the district police headquarters where Dai Nam urban area was under construction. He presented his press card and asked to meet the officer in charge of finding missing people to ask for information about the five cases in the book.

The officer welcoming Huy was a middle-aged major, with a stout figure and a strangely leisurely attitude. When Huy presented the case and gave the names of the five missing people, the major typed into the computer system, waited, then shook his head.

"There are no records. No reports have been received during this time with these names in the area under our management. Where did you get the information from?"

"I found a notebook listing their information," Huy answered frankly. "I suspect these are related disappearances."

The major looked at Huy with a complicated look – both suspicious and with something that looked like a discreet warning. "Brother Huy, it's normal for many freelance migrant workers to come and go without informing anyone. Without a report, there is no basis to open an investigation file. If you have specific evidence, please submit an official application." He paused, emphasizing each word: "Concrete evidence."

Huy left the police headquarters with the feeling that the wall had just been built with another layer of bricks. Not necessarily rejected, but not supported either. The major's strange leisureliness when hearing those names - no surprise, no curiosity, no worry - made Huy unable to help but wonder.

He took out his phone and called his old colleague who worked at the census agency. "Hai, I need your help to look up the household registration information of these five people. Especially to see if any relatives have reported missing."

In the afternoon, while sipping coffee at a sidewalk cafe near the bus station, Huy received a text message from Hai: "The check is complete. Of the 5 people, 2 people have absolutely no household registration in the city system. The other 2 people have household registration in the countryside but do not have temporary residence in Thu Duc. Only Dinh Trong Quy has a temporary residence address in the district, but strangely, two weeks before the day you said he was missing, his rental contract was canceled early by the landlord. term."

Canceled the lease two weeks before going missing. Dinh Trong Quy, the "retired" surveying engineer, was pushed out of his residence before disappearing. Don't leave voluntarily. It's about being systematically chased away and cornered.

Huy looked at the notebook on the table, this time with cold certainty. These are not five random disappearances of people no one noticed. This is a series of intentional actions, subtly hidden in the darkness of an overheated city and its Billion-dollar giant projects poured into suburban areas. The five names in the notebook are five pieces of evidence of a systematic crime. And the person who wrote this notebook knows that truth. He – or she – threw it under the seat of bus 08 like a bottle of letter sent to posterity, praying that someone would find it and dare to continue the journey they could not complete.

Lam Huy turned on the flame of the gas lighter, watched the small blue flame dance in the afternoon breeze, then turned it off. I will continue that journey. Not because he was brave, but because this was the only thing that made him feel like he was still worthy of the journalist card he carried in his pocket. But he needed one more link, someone who knew the shadows on bus 08 better than anyone. And that person spoke to him last night, with deep black eyes that never revealed everything he knew. Tran Tue, the bus driver.

He typed into his phone the hotline number of the Bus Enterprise in charge of route 08, asking to connect with driver Tran Tue, the night shift. Even though she knew that the next approach would not be easy for the woman with that thorny, wary look like the raised thorns of a porcupine.