Chapter 54 — Shrimp Street Without Name

The search of the transportation company's server system took nearly two weeks to complete the analysis, a stressful period for everyone on the team, as they both hoped for new discoveries and worried about the possibility that the other side would react even more violently to this important legal step.

In the meantime, the pressure on Hai Yen's family continues to increase in more subtle ways. Mrs. Sau, when going to the market to sell goods, began to notice that some of her old acquaintances suddenly became cold and avoided buying dried shrimp from her for unknown reasons. When she inquired, she learned that there were rumors spreading that her family was "causing trouble" for the largest company in the region, causing many people to worry that contacting her could affect the work of relatives working for Dai Duong.

"Mom is okay," Mrs. Sau reassured Hai Yen when she worriedly asked, although her voice could not hide the hurt. "It's okay if business is sluggish for a few days. Mom can handle it. It's just a little sad when I see people treating me differently, even though I didn't do anything wrong."

Hai Yen felt a simmering anger at this subtle isolation tactic, aimed squarely at the most mundane aspects of her mother's life, where the law could hardly intervene directly. She decided to spend more time at the market with her mother, not to protect her in the physical sense, but to show a public display of solidarity, showing everyone that her family was undeterred under pressure.

Gradually, that strategy worked. Some old sellers, realizing the steadfastness of both mother and daughter, began to return to support as before, some even actively expressed sympathy, telling small stories about how their families had also suffered because of Dai Duong's lack of transparency in the past.

“Miss Ba from across the market told me,” Mrs. Sau recounted one evening, her voice a bit more excited than the previous days. "In the past, her husband worked as a security guard for the company, and was fired for no reason just because he dared to question the night shipments. She said, now that she sees her son daring to stand up, she also wants to support her, even if it's just to buy a few kilograms of dried shrimp."

Small stories like that, gradually accumulating, form an important source of spiritual strength for Hai Yen amid the stressful days waiting for the results of the investigation.

Exactly two weeks after the search warrant was executed, the lieutenant called with the news the group had been waiting for. “We have finished analyzing the data,” he said, his voice both serious and excited. “The results far exceeded what we initially predicted.”

The meeting took place that afternoon at the police headquarters, with the presence of Hai Yen, Kien, and lawyer Hoang. The lieutenant presented a detailed statistic: over the past five years, there have been a total of more than one hundred and twenty recorded cases of moving through the fishing vessel system linked to Hung Phat Nhan Luc in irregular ways, not matching any official labor records.

“The majority of these, we believe, are victims of forced labor or trafficking across maritime borders,” the lieutenant explained, his voice heavy. “A few have been confirmed to have returned, like Phu's case, but the majority's whereabouts are still unknown.”

That number causing the whole room to fall into heavy silence. Hai Yen felt a shock pass through her at the true scale of the crime they were uncovering — not a few isolated cases, but an organized ring, operating continuously for many years, with a far greater number of victims than anything they had ever imagined.

“We need to release this information to the public,” lawyer Hoang said, her voice determined. “Not only for legal purposes, but also to give families whose loved ones have gone missing over the years a chance to realize, this could be the explanation they have been waiting for a long time.”

The lieutenant nodded in agreement, but also warned of the necessary caution. “We will coordinate with official media agencies to publish in a controlled manner, avoid causing unnecessary panic, and protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation.”

Hai Yen sat silently, her mind filled with images of one hundred and twenty people, each with a story, a family waiting, a life stolen by the greed of a small group of people behind everything she had discovered over the past nearly three months since the day she set foot back in Nam Can.

"The piece of paper Phu gave us," she said, her voice quiet, "could be one of these one hundred and twenty stories. We need to find a way to identify as many identities as possible, to give names back to these anonymous numbers."

“The technical team is trying to recover identification data from the server system,” the lieutenant said. “Some records have phone numbers or contact addresses, which, although not complete, could be a starting point for us to trace their identities and contact their families.”

Lawyer Hoang proposed a new idea, her voice full of thought. “I think we should coordinate with non-governmental organizations specializing in human trafficking prevention, they have experience and international networks that can help locate victims who may have been taken abroad, something that domestic investigation agencies alone can hardly do.”

The lieutenant nodded in agreement and took note of this proposal to submit to his superiors for consideration. The meeting lasted for nearly another hour, with specific assignment of responsibilities to each party: the investigation agency focused on identifying victims and prosecuting those directly responsible, while lawyer Hoang would contact international organizations to assist in finding people who may have been taken abroad.

When leaving the police headquarters, Hai Yen felt a new weight on her shoulders, not fear or anxiety like before, but a deep responsibility before the true scale of what she had accidentally opened up. She understands that the journey to find justice for her father has now expanded into a much larger mission - the mission to regain name, to find freedom, for hundreds of people who have been forgotten in the darkness of a criminal network whose true scale no one ever dared to think about.

That night, she recounted the entire incident to her mother, although she tried to select less serious details so as not to make her more worried. After listening, Mrs. Sau was silent for a long time, then took her daughter's hand.

“Yen, I remember the old days, yes Several times I heard people say that there were young people in the neighborhood who went to the beach and then disappeared, no one knew where they went," she said, her voice was thoughtful as if she was trying to recall a distant memory. "At that time, everyone thought they must have left the country to do business far away, without contacting them. Now that I've heard you tell it, I shudder to think back, maybe some of them have had bad things happen to them."

Her mother's words made Hai Yen's spine run cold. She realized that, right in the land where she grew up, there might have been victims that no one had ever thought of, stories buried under the cover of harmless rumors. She wrote down a request for her mother to try to remember more details, names, times, so that she could pass this information on to the investigation agency, perhaps opening up another important clue.

“I'll try to remember,” Mrs. Sau promised, her voice filled with determination. “If it helps anyone, even just one family, I will do my best.”

That night, when she was alone in her room, Hai Yen sat down and wrote down everything that happened that day in her notebook, which was now many times thicker than when she first started her journey. She looked back at the first pages, the clumsy lines recording the initial suspicions about the KB-07 farming area code, and compared it to the present, when the story had expanded into a cross-province, cross-border crime network, involving hundreds of human lives. She could not have imagined that the journey that started from a small doubt could lead her this far, farther than anything she had dared to imagine in the first days back to this land, when she simply thought she was performing a routine audit for a shipment of shrimp returned from Japan.