Chapter 8 — Shrimp Street Without Name

The Southern Food Safety Certification Center, where Hai Yen works, has a regional branch located in Ca Mau city, about a forty-minute drive from Nam Can. The morning after the evening meeting with Mr. Bao, she asked her superiors for permission to visit this branch to look up audit records of businesses in the same industry in the area, a normal request for any auditor handling a complex case.

What she did not say was the real goal of the trip: this branch, under a different organizational name before merging into the current system, was the same unit that issued export certificates to Kenh Ba cooperative during the years the cooperative was still in operation. If the old records were preserved, this would be her only legal way to access technical documents from that period without having to rely on the court records, which have been redacted.

The branch archives manager, a woman a few years younger than Hai Yen, led her down to the basement where old files were boxed by year. "The records before the merger year are a bit messy, we haven't digitized them yet. Which year do you need so I can help you find them?"

“About ten years ago, the export certification documents of small shrimp farming cooperatives in the Nam Can area,” Hai Yen said, trying to keep her tone as if it were a normal business requirement.

While waiting to find the file box, the warehouse manager told her more about the storage work here, lamenting that since the system merger, most of the staff in charge of the old warehouse had quit, and the new people did not understand the traditional arrangement so they often had to search all day to come up with a file. "There was a time when the old boss wanted to liquidate the paperwork before the merger to tidy up the warehouse. Luckily, someone objected and kept a fair amount of it. Otherwise, I would have given up trying to find it," she said, still quickly flipping through each box to look for labels.

After nearly an hour of searching, they found a cardboard box labeled "Small and medium cooperatives - temporary storage", inside were dozens of thin files of long-dissolved cooperatives. Hai Yen followed the alphabet and found a file named Kenh Ba, which was only one-third the thickness of the case file she had seen in the provincial court, but contained something the court file did not have: quality certification slips issued by the Center's predecessor organization for each export shipment of the cooperative in the two years before the incident.

She flipped through each ticket, compared the dates, and looked for the most recent coupons before the time the poisoning shipment was discovered. In the bottom corner of each ticket, in addition to the signature of the technical person in charge, there is also a small stamped code, an abbreviation with two digits, used to internally identify the person performing the final technical appraisal before issuing the certificate. On most ballots, the code is “TT-02”. But on the last three votes, right before the time the shipment caused poisoning, the code was changed to "TS-04".

Hai Yen wrote down that code in her notebook, comparing it with what she remembered from the case file at the provincial court. In the copy of the technical evidence appendix taken the other day, even though most of the content had been blurred or lost, she still clearly remembered a similar small stamp appearing in the corner of the last page, the code also starting with the letter TS. She did not dare to confirm that it was the same code, because memory cannot be a substitute for evidence, but her professional hunch told her she was on the right track. close to something important.

“Did you find anything that you need more help with?” the warehouse manager asked when he saw Hai Yen sitting quietly for too long next to a stack of files.

"No, thank you. I just need to copy a few pages." Hai Yen smiled, trying to keep a normal expression, even though her heart was full of unanswered questions.

She photocopied all the certification forms related to code number TS-04, signed the loan book according to procedures, and then left the branch with a feeling of both excitement and heaviness. On the way back to Nam Can, she stopped by the temporary office arranged for her by the Center at a small hotel near the port, where she could access the Center's internal electronic records system for further comparison.

She searched the Center's electronic storage system - which only started digitizing data about seven years ago, so there was nothing from the old case - but found all of Dai Duong's most recent audit records, including the official result sheet that the company submitted for shipment DH-0417, which she had briefly looked at during the opening audit meeting but had not had time to carefully examine every small detail.

She zoomed in on the scanned image of the result sheet, moving to the bottom corner, where there was the signature of the current lab technical manager confirming the results, accompanied by an internal identification stamp similar to what she had just seen in the old file. The code appears on the screen, clearly and unmistakably: “TS-04”.

Hai Yen sat motionless in front of the screen for a long time, her hands on the keyboard but no further typing. Ten years, two different cases, two sets of records stored in two completely separate places, yet a unique identification number appears: TS-04. This cannot be a coincidence. Such an internal identification number is usually associated with a specific individual throughout the time that person works in a technical appraisal position, and is rarely re-issued to another person for the purpose of avoiding confusion of responsibilities.

She reopened all the old case file photos, looking for any other clues that might confirm the TS-04 code was tied to a specific name. But most of the documents related to the identity of the technical appraiser in the old case were lost along with the original test sheets, just like what Mr. Bay in the court archives said.

She reviewed in her mind everything she knew about the identification code system in the industry: normally, testing laboratories issue a permanent code to each technician as soon as they are granted a practicing certificate, and that code stays with that person throughout their working time, even when changing work units within the same industry system, unless there is a decision to revoke the certificate. If that rule is correct, the person who carried the code TS-04 ten years ago must still be carrying the same code, even though he may no longer be directly working as a technician but has moved to another role with final approval authority.

She needed another way to determine who was or had been with the code TS-04. The fastest way, and also the riskiest, is to directly ask Ms. Tuyet — the only person still alive and working continuously in the industry from that time until now, who certainly knows how the lab's internal identification system works. But after their previous failed meeting, she understood that a direct approach would only make her angry The snow is more clustered.

She decided to try a different direction. She drafted an email to the human resources department of the regional testing laboratory, on behalf of the auditor doing the audit, requesting information about the internal identification code system used to assign technical appraisers, citing the need to compare the validity of the result sheets related to the shipment under audit. This is a completely legal request, within your authority, and cannot be considered personal scrutiny.

While waiting for a response, she reopened her father's notebook, scrolling to the last pages containing mysterious numbers that Kien had commented looked like internal lottery codes. She tried applying the logic of the TS-04 code to those sequences of numbers, looking for any similar structure — the first two letters followed by two digits — but found no obvious match. Perhaps the code system of Kenh Ba cooperative and the lab's identification code system are two completely different things, the same decoding logic cannot be applied.

She closed the notebook and rubbed her temples, feeling tired starting to creep in after a long day with too much information. But just as she was about to stand up and make a cup of tea to rest a bit, her phone vibrated with a response email, arriving earlier than she expected, from the regional testing lab itself.

The content of the email was brief, with a cold administrative tone: "According to internal security regulations, we cannot provide personal identification information associated with technical appraisal codes to outside parties, including certification partners. If necessary, please contact through the official channel between the two organizations."

That refusal answer, according to regulations, was nothing unusual. But what caught Hai Yen's attention was the response time: less than twenty minutes from when she sent the request, an unusually fast processing speed for an administrative agency that was notoriously slow in every other paperwork she had worked with in the past. So fast, she couldn't help but wonder if someone, upon seeing her request appear in the system, immediately pushed it to priority processing and ordered it to be denied before it could even go through the usual review steps.