by Eiji Mikage
Koichiro, clearly still emotional, muttered, “No, it wasn’t that…Or do you mean it was Shota?”
“What are you talking about?”
“In any case, if you’d really been thinking about Reina, you should’ve tried to stop her plan for revenge. Even if just for my sake. Obviously I wouldn’t have wanted her to do something so dangerous. Why didn’t you or Shota think about what would’ve made her happy? I think she was testing both of you. She wanted to find someone who really loved her.” He began to cry and then said in a quiet voice, unable to contain his emotions any longer, “If that was her plan, then you all betrayed her.”
Ken was silent and bit his lip.
“So which of you was it?” Koichiro asked.
“Which of us was…what?”
For some reason, Koichiro looked irritated. “Whose kid was she pregnant with?”
14
Reina had been pregnant.
This could not be a coincidence. In some strange way, this had to be related to the case.
After Koichiro’s stunning statement, I immediately checked with forensics. Forensics wouldn’t have missed a fetus if the corpse had one, so it should’ve been in the report. I contacted them again, but they said there hadn’t been one.
“She was definitely pregnant,” Koichiro said. “I went with her to the hospital.”
“She must’ve had it aborted after that,” Dr. Higano said. “Abortions leave hardly any scars. Forensics could’ve missed it with a quick first pass.”
Koichiro hung his head. “Is that what she did? Why would she have an abortion? I…thought you all already knew she was pregnant. But not even Ken knew.” Koichiro put his hands on his head. “Whose kid was she carrying?”
I looked over at “Otoha” thinking she might’ve known, but she shook her head.
“Unfortunately I didn’t know either,” she said.
But the woman was a liar. So I had no idea if she was lying or telling the truth. And I didn’t think we’d find anything out from her now.
If that was the case, no one here knew the answer to Koichiro’s question.
Or…
“I’ll answer that,” Dr. Higano said, straightening his jacket.
Koichiro opened his eyes wide. “How?…Come to think of it, you did already know that she was pregnant.”
Now it was my turn to be surprised. Dr. Higano raised one hand to apologize for keeping quiet about it.
I wondered when the two of them had talked—and then remembered that Dr Higano went to Koichiro’s hotel room to follow up on a few things he hadn’t asked at the interrogation. Maybe that’s when they’d discussed it.
“It was meee!” A voice issued from the tablet on the desk. “I looked into all of the medical clinics Reina visited recently.”
Onscreen, Noi-tan had a look of supreme self-satisfaction. Before anyone could say anything, Dr. Higano silently flipped the tablet over.
“Nooo, Doctorrrrrr! Why? Why?”
He turned off the tablet. The bear disappeared; she was a total mismatch for the serious situation.
“I don’t care how you figured it out right now!” Koichiro said. “If you know, tell me. Whose child was it?!”
“Whose child?” Dr. Higano smiled. “Is that really what you should be asking?”
Everyone, myself included, was wide-eyed, unsure of what he meant.
“I don’t think there’s any need to stand on ceremony. After all, I already know everything about Reina’s murder.”
“What do you mean by…everything?” Koichiro asked, his voice trembling.
“Everything,” Dr. Higano responded.
He took the cube puzzle on the desk into his hands.
“Now then,” he said and stared at the puzzle with an emotional intensity. He took it with both hands and twisted it with great force.
Snap.
The puzzle separated in the middle, as though it had been decapitated.
“We need to dissect this case,” Dr. Higano said, “and expose what lies within.”
He plucked off each cube from the puzzle and let them fall to the table. The overhead light made them flash like counterfeit jewels.
They were a sign for the hopeless conclusion he had come to.
We were all completely transfixed by Dr. Higano’s act of destruction. He’d drawn us all in, convinced that we’d missed something important in the case.
“Let’s look at everything in order,” he said. “First, why was her body in the park?”
I snapped from my daze and said, “Wasn’t it…because the killer was pretending to be Masquerade?”
Dr. Higano nodded. “When someone sees a body with its face cut off and a limb missing, the first person that comes to mind is Masquerade. It makes sense that the killer was trying to make it look like one of Masquerade’s crimes. However, it was a red herring—a misdirection. He made people think what he wanted, and concealed the most important details.”
Dr. Higano took the glass cubes in his hand.
“What he wanted to hide was the fact that he had to cut off Reina’s foot.”
I wrinkled my brow. Why the hell would he have had to cut off her foot?
“Yuri, imagine you were in Shota’s position. You receive a strange message from Reina, get to her place, and find a severed foot. What would you think?”
I closed my eyes and thought carefully. I imagined looking at the severed foot—it was impossible to have any good thoughts about that.
“Someone might’ve killed Reina…That’s what I would’ve thought.”
“Yes, that’s to be expected. There was a foot in her apartment, after all. However, the truth wasn’t so simple.” Dr. Higano continued theatrically. “When Shota found the foot, Reina hadn’t yet been killed. At that point, she was still alive.”
“Nope,” Yamaji contradicted him immediately. “Doc, that’s impossible. Forensics found that the foot matched the body in the park.”
“Yes, I know.”
Yamaji wrinkled his brow, and Dr. Higano continued.
“Do you remember the cause of death forensics discovered? The knife wounds to her heart were the cause of death, not the loss of her foot. We could tell from her vital reactions that the foot was removed while she was still alive. If you think about it, the most sensible order for the killer would be like this: First, incapacitate her at her apartment by stabbing her in the chest. Then, before she dies, cut off her foot and her face. That would have associated the killing with the way Masquerade takes home a body part after he kills.
“However, what the killer did was really the opposite of that.”
In other words, I thought to myself…
“Reina’s killer cut off her foot with a chainsaw and then, after allowing a substantial period of time to elapse, stabbed her in the chest and killed her.”
At his awful explanation, I had to press my hands against my temples. If it was true, her murder was unspeakably cruel. Even if she’d been given anesthesia, she would’ve spent an awful period of time without her foot.
“Why would he do something so horrible?” I asked.
“To obfuscate the time and place of the killing. Up to this point, we thought Reina returned home after the café and was killed during the period of time from between when Shota received a message from her and when Shota called the police. In other words, from 7:11 P.M. to 7:48 P.M. However, this was not the case.” Dr. Higano paused and then continued. “The killer abducted her on her way home from the café, tied her up with rope, gave her the anesthesia, and cut off her foot. Then he stopped the bleeding so she wouldn’t bleed out. Next he took her by car to somewhere isolated. He took her phone and at 7:11 P.M. made a call from another location via LINE. The reason she didn’t say anything over the phone is, obviously, because she wasn’t there.”
Yamaj
i scratched at his hair. “We had considered that the call might’ve been a setup,” he said. “The estimated time of death calculated from the state of rigor mortis was between 6:00 P.M. and midnight because her leg had been soaking in the water. But there’s no way the foot was cut off at a different time from when she was stabbed in the chest.”
“Yes, the killer knew exactly what we’d think,” Dr. Higano said. “He made sure to have a solid alibi for 7:00 P.M., then waited for the right time, went back to the car where Reina was still alive, and stabbed her in the chest, either in the car or somewhere nearby, I’m not sure. He cut off her face to make us think it was Masquerade or someone trying to copy Masquerade. Then it would make sense that he cut off her foot.
“If we were able to determine an accurate time of death, his alibi would be meaningless, so the body couldn’t be discovered right away. That’s why it’s not unusual that the body didn’t turn up for a while. Otherwise he would’ve gone to all that trouble to create an alibi and never even be able to use it. So he decided to abandon the body on the tetrapods in the park and put her leg in the water. That way the disintegration would help him disguise the time of death and at the same time control when the body would be discovered. He knew it was unlikely the body would be discovered shrouded in darkness and that there was a good chance it would be discovered at a certain point in the morning.”
I screwed up my face. “Discovered at a certain point?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
The body was by no means in an obvious location, so it would’ve been tough for the killer to predict when exactly it would be found. The first person to see it had been an old man out walking in the morning. It had been a total coincidence.
“A designated kindergartener school path went through that area, didn’t it?” Dr. Higano said.
“What?!”
I realized he was right. As long as little kids walked through the area in the morning, the chances of the body being discovered would’ve been high.
Did that mean the killer had planned for kindergarten-aged children to come across a grotesquely mutilated corpse with its face cut off?
“He’s not human,” I said.
Yamaji made it clear he was disgusted. “He was trying to make kids discover the body. He cut off the victim’s foot so he’d have an alibi, then cut off her face and got rid of it. This is some twisted shit.”
Dr. Higano made no sign of agreement or disagreement. He continued, “The killer made the call from Reina’s phone so we’d mistakenly think he had killed her in the brief 37 minutes between 7:11 and 7:38. All three of the men we questioned, Shota included, had alibis for that period. However, if we assume he cut off the foot in the three-hour period after she left the café at 4:00 P.M., and also that she was killed before midnight based on the coroner’s estimated time of death, then conveniently for us, one person no longer has an alibi.”
I remembered that Dr. Higano had asked each man about their alibis from 8:00 P.M. onward at the beginning of the interrogations.
I rushed to open the records on the desk. Just as Dr. Higano said, only one of the three men no longer had an alibi.
“It can’t be!”
But—he was her—
I looked at the killer.
If it was him, why had he been acting the way he had until now?
I was overcome with shock. Dr. Higano ignored me. He matter-of-factly named him: “Koichiro, it was you.”
At this, Koichiro didn’t panic. He stood stock still, the blood draining from his face. He looked like he was still catching up to what was going on. I couldn’t get any read on what he was thinking.
Ken spoke up in place of the dazed Koichiro. “Just because he doesn’t have an alibi doesn’t instantly make him the killer, right? It just means that of the three people you questioned, one of them doesn’t have an alibi. Maybe the killer is someone who isn’t here right now. This woman here doesn’t have an alibi, does she?” He looked over at “Otoha.” She responded to his charge with a graceful smile.
“What motive would Koichiro even have to kill Reina in the first place?” Ken continued. “She was trying to avenge him. Even if their parent-child relationship wasn’t good, he’d never do something like that. After all, no matter what, it’s only natural to think he really loved her.”
“Your questions make sense,” Dr. Higano said. “I don’t know what his motive was yet.” He began to pick up the pieces of the puzzle he had disassembled. “However, if we arbitrarily assume that Koichiro was the killer, I can then theorize what his motive would have been.”
He looked at Koichiro through one of the glass cubes.
“And this theory will demonstrate my true value as a detective.”
Koichiro was still wide-eyed. He hung his head and looked away. I couldn’t tell if he was silent from shock at being accused, or because, given the circumstances, he had nothing to say.
Dr. Higano looked away from the glass cube and turned toward the woman.
“Otoha—I don’t know if that’s your real name, but I hope you don’t mind me calling you that for convenience’s sake—when we questioned you, you attempted to make us think the killer was someone from an imaginary syndicate, did you not?”
The woman shook her head with a smile. “You can think what you like. As far as I’m concerned, I gave no such suggestion.”
“Yes, but right now we are running with the assumption that Koichiro is the culprit. So please allow us to continue under the assumption that someone from the syndicate wasn’t the killer.”
There was nothing she could say to that. The woman let out a small sigh and went silent.
“If Koichiro was the killer, then Otoha covered his tracks with this story about the syndicate and protected him. Why would she do that? The rational response would be that she, too, was helping Reina take her revenge.”
“Even if I told you you’re wrong,” the woman said, “you’re still going to keep going, aren’t you.”
“Yes. Now then, let’s assume that everything Otoha said when we questioned her was convenient for Koichiro…Yuri.”
“Y-Yes.” I straightened my spine.
“I assume you recall that Otoha told us Reina was involved with many men? And that from what she told us, I was able to determine that she was trying to manipulate us into thinking that Reina naturally dated many men at once, and that there might be some secret wrapped up in Reina’s romantic life.”
“I remember.”
“Now I think there’s only one way to think about this. Otoha learned directly from Reina that she was pregnant. She also knew whose child it was. Then she pretended that Reina was dating multiple people so we wouldn’t be able to guess whose child it was…Oh, and of course, she was lying just now when she said she didn’t know Reina had been pregnant.”
I looked at the woman, but as always she remained graceful and showed no sign of being shaken.
“Okay, let me go over it again,” Dr. Higano said. “Who was Otoha trying to protect?”
I thought for a second…and finally understood what he was getting at.
“Ah,” I started to say.
But I couldn’t accept it.
That was impossible. It was too…disgusting.
For some reason, my eyes began to fill with tears.
And that’s when I realized how much Reina had been a special, almost holy presence for me. At Junseiwa, I had felt lonely, confined, and tremendously insecure. And this above all was why I was struck by her purity. Amidst everything else, Reina Myoko had an almost symbolic existence at Junseiwa Academy. A distant, unreachable existence.
Her light shone brightly, and I spent my adolescence walking with my head lowered.
I had wanted to make that school, and my adolescence, something special. But despite my best efforts, something vulgar and disgusting had wormed its way in. I didn’
t want to accept it. So I instinctively denied it.
However—the reason Reina had an abortion. The reason she ended her engagement with Ken. Koichiro’s motive. Everything started to come together.
“That’s right,” Dr. Higano said mercilessly, unaware of my feelings. “Koichiro. It was your child that Reina carried in her womb.”
Silence.
After a long moment, Ken broke it.
“B-But,” he said, his stoic poker face broken, showing clear distress. “That’s totally insane.”
“Let it be insane,” Dr. Higano said.
I hated it when his language became so intense.
“The truth has very little value here.”
He flicked one of the glass blocks he was holding. It hit another on the table.
“It doesn’t matter whether the theory is correct or not. What does is how he reacted to this conversation.”
I looked at Koichiro.
If Dr. Higano’s theory was purposefully off the mark, he should’ve been confused or angry.
I was hoping for that reaction.
“Ah, n-no…” he said.
But then Koichiro gritted his teeth. His clenched fists were trembling.
It was all totally obvious.
I suddenly felt utterly drained and held my head in my hands.
“Wait a minute,” he said.
But “Otoha” smiled and cut in.
“Obviously Reina’s dad doesn’t have an alibi. And based on his reaction, he might even have had a physical relationship with her that would give him a motive. But that’s it. That’s not proof he was the killer.”
“Absolutely,” Dr. Higano agreed.
“I’m still pretty suspicious of the syndicate. They had plenty of reasons to go after her. Plus, they’re so massive, no one would ever believe they did it.”
“First, I’ll attempt to prove it was Koichiro.”
The doctor wasn’t operating as she expected. In the face of Dr. Higano’s attitude, she just smiled and kept quiet.