by Eiji Mikage
“Hehe, isn’t it?”
The two chuckled together.
“But your behavior is a mystery to me. You all were pretending to be someone else, and I’m sure you got frustrated in such an oppressive environment. You must’ve wanted to quit or run away at times. But no one gave up. That’s how tight the bond was between the Reinas. So you must’ve known that they’d go after you when you tried to go back to being Asami Ino. Nevertheless, you still went through with your decision.” Then Higano asked gently, “What exactly motivated you to do that?”
The beautiful woman became quiet again. She sighed deeply before catching her breath and smiling.
“That’s my deepest, darkest secret.”
“Well then.”
“It’s buried so deeply inside myself that not even I have easy access to it. If you must know, you’ll have to pull it out and reveal it yourself. As both a serial killer and a detective, you must be skilled at prying into people, aren’t you?”
This was a challenge. Higano sat in his chair and leaned far back, crossing his arms.
“Mr. Detective, you already know that Koichiro and I had a relationship. A normal person would think that was an unbearable burden. But you don’t seem to think it was a potential motive.”
“Yes, I assumed that there was some reason that took priority. I’m sure of it.”
“You have frighteningly good intuition.”
Higano watched Reina Myoko giggle and was convinced that he wasn’t mistaken.
“Now, may I ask you a question?”
“Please do.”
Higano let out a gentle sigh and said, “You’re in love with Koichiro, aren’t you?”
The woman caught her breath.
But she only allowed the briefest moment to pass before responding, “Yes, I love him. I did in the past, I do now, and I will in the future…hehe, but it doesn’t seem like I’ll have much longer to love him.”
“Another joke.”
“No, I’m just being sarcastic, Mr. Serial Killer.”
“Well that’s…unfortunate.” Higano laughed. “Since you say you know everything about Reina, let me ask you this. Did she have a physical relationship with Koichiro before she created the Reinas?”
“Yes.”
“Was she also in love with Koichiro?”
“Yes. Reina loved Koichiro. She did in the past, she does now, and she will in the future.”
Higano picked up the glass cube puzzle from his black desk and began to spin the pieces in a compulsive way, unconsciously. Even so, he quickly finished the puzzle.
For him, solving a case was the same as spinning his puzzle.
Higano discovered the truth, unconsciously, almost compulsively.
Whether he wanted to or not, he had already exposed several truths. Indeed, these truths rather stripped themselves bare in front of Higano, revealing themselves automatically: truths you didn’t want to know, truths you shouldn’t know, and others that mustn’t be known. In his presence, the truth revealed its grotesque innards just as the women who met him wanted to show off what lay beneath the skirts they wore.
Yet truth really has no value.
Higano looked at the woman’s beautiful feet in their brand new pumps. Whether or not he discovered Reina Myoko’s secret, in the next few minutes he was going to remove the pumps, peel off her stockings, and then cut off her foot with a chainsaw.
However, if he wasn’t able to discover her secret—he would feel awful.
Ah, yes. That awful feeling. Learning her secret might help him scheme to win over the police, but that would only be a bonus prize.
That biological revulsion. In the end, that sensation is what pressed Higano into action.
He closed his eyes, focused on physical sensations, and rubbed the angular corners of his puzzle. As he did, the most important piece of all the information he had gathered separated itself of its own accord and became entwined in the web he had cast in his mind.
“You said that Reina loved Koichiro…That she did in the past, does now, and will in the future.”
“Yes.”
“At what point did she fall in love with her father? Is that something you know?”
“Yes. She was in love with him for as long as she could remember.”
“So she basically loved him since the first time Koichiro held her.”
The beautiful woman nodded slightly.
Hearing this, Higano thought back on Reina’s eventful past.
Reina was in love with her father for as long as she could remember.
That cast a different light on one incident from her past. Higano picked up his tablet and began to search through articles.
* * *
—
A Japanese tourist plunged to her death at the well-known Portuguese tourist destination Cabo da Roca. Yumi Myoko (39) died from the injuries sustained. Her daughter, who witnessed the accident, said her mother lost her balance and fell from the cliff as she was trying to take a photograph. The daughter suffered intense psychological trauma and will undergo counseling.
* * *
—
It hadn’t been a major accident, so there weren’t any other articles detailing what exactly happened.
After he finished reading, Higano pulled up a photo of Reina’s mother, Yumi, that he had found earlier.
He looked at it, opened his eyes wide, and then heaved a sigh.
He set down the completed cube puzzle.
The puzzle, once jumbled, was now connected. The picture he didn’t want to see had emerged.
Again, the truth was grotesque and unseemly.
“This is merely my theory, but it’s the truth.”
“You sound like you know what you’re talking about, I guess.”
Higano didn’t flinch at the woman’s intense sarcasm.
“Reina was sexually attracted to her father from a young age. Why she fell in love with him, I have no idea. Even if she herself had a reason in mind, she didn’t know the real cause. The truth was clearly just that she had been in love with her father from a young age.”
“Yes, that’s right. However, love isn’t something that happens without a reason, is it?”
“I’m not criticizing the form their love took. I agree that even the slightest thing can cause someone to fall in love…However, while Reina held onto a love that was forbidden love for a daughter, Koichiro was a normal father. He loved her as a daughter, not as a woman, and he wasn’t going to budge. So naturally her feelings would be unrequited.”
Higano could see fear in the outlines of the woman’s face.
“But she didn’t give up,” Higano said. “Reina was determined one way or another to get her father to see her as a woman. She made several failed attempts. Finally, she came to believe: ‘If he’s so normal, then I’ll have to make him go crazy.’”
The woman gasped.
“Reina knew someone close to her who had the ideal love she wanted. She wanted to become her, to replace her. She was obsessed with this. And she knew that she could do it if she managed one thing. She waited for that chance for a long time. Then came the family vacation in Portugal. Reina brought Yumi to the tourist spot Cabo da Roca to get her alone.”
The woman was shaking.
“Wait,” she said. “Don’t say anything else.”
It was a plea.
The woman hadn’t begged for her life or even lost her composure despite knowing Higano might kill her. But now, for the first time, she showed signs of being upset. Unable to take any more, she wriggled her hands bound behind her back and shook her head. Her back trembled when she breathed.
Thrusting the secret before her might just break this beautiful woman. She was as elusive as a cloud because she herself had looked away from reality. She had fooled herself more than anyone
with her own misdirection.
And once the deception was peeled away, like a dust-covered piece of tape, it wouldn’t stick to anything ever again.
Musing on this, Higano thought, Why am I holding back something so insignificant?
Seiren Higano was a serial killer, after all.
So without any hesitation, he continued, “This is the secret that Reina wanted to hide. The thing she hid her whole life until she became Miss Direction. The reason she created the Reinas and ran away. She—” He let out a breath and said, “—she killed her mother.”
The woman was dripping with sweat and her breath was ragged. Given the revelation, her reaction was no surprise. But she was bound by the rope and powerless to do anything. All she could do was sit there and accept the truth Higano was laying out.
Once a serial killer caught his prey, there was already no chance of escape.
“It seems like Reina Myoko herself was much more human than I thought. She loved her father and took revenge on the people who hurt him. She killed her mother so she could have all of his love to herself. This is no ordinary behavior, but her motivation, at least, is within the realm of understanding. But she was unable to live with what she did. Miss Direction was the result of her averting her gaze from the truth. That’s human, in a certain sense.”
The woman was trying to get her breath under control.
“A girl who loved her father like that wouldn’t just hand him over to the other Reinas, isn’t that so? If you think about it, the idea that you all could fool your blood relatives too is unthinkable, right? I was completely—no, excuse me. You didn’t mean to deceive anyone.”
He looked at Yumi Myoko’s face on the tablet again.
She and the woman in front of him resembled each other.
The two women weren’t biologically related. Yet they looked incredibly similar. The shapes of their faces were remarkably close—but the rest of them, not at all. Yet the impressions both women cast were nearly identical.
This wasn’t resemblance—it was imitation.
In order to mimic the woman her father loved.
“You said it from the beginning—you aren’t Asami Ino.” He exhaled softly. “You’re the real Reina Myoko.”
Now that the truth about her killing her mother had been revealed, Reina’s will to live, already weak, had completely disappeared.
Her spirit died before the knife could kill her.
Higano removed Reina’s blindfold. It no longer mattered if she saw what he looked like.
With her vision back, she grimaced in the bright light, glanced at Higano, and instinctually flashed a polite smile before large tears began rolling down her face. She said nothing and was wracked with tears.
Higano took out a white handkerchief and wiped away the tears.
Once she’d taken a moment to recover, Reina looked at Higano and said, “Would you give me a little more coffee?”
“Unfortunately, it’s all cold now.”
“I don’t mind.”
He considered making a new cup, but in the end only picked up the cup in front of her. Perhaps it was this cold coffee that she wanted instead of a fresh brew.
He poured the coffee into her mouth. She didn’t spill any, perhaps because her vision had been restored to her.
He watched her delicate throat pulse as she finished the cup.
“It’s sad,” she mused. “No matter how perfect the technique, even delicious coffee gets cold with time, loses all its flavor, and ends up tasting worse than a cup from any old coffee shop.”
Higano nodded.
“It’s just as you put it.” Reina looked off into the distance, as though remembering something, and repeated, “Reina’s secret was that she killed her mother.”
Then she laughed, tacking on to her previous statement:
“That’s a much more ordinary secret than you’d imagined, I bet.” Reina Myoko reflected on her life.
“I killed my mother Yumi at Cabo da Roca and was able to take the love my dad had for her. I mimicked her looks, her expressions, and her character. That’s how I managed to entice my father. He was conflicted, but in the end he couldn’t bear his grief at losing his wife. So he lost to my seduction. He was a decent guy. He always felt guilty about sleeping with me, but I was able to manipulate those emotions to spice things up. I made him jealous, too. That’s why I was dating so many different guys. As expected, my dad lost it. My love turned him into a puppet.”
Reina looked directly into Higano’s blue eyes, but her focus was somewhere else.
“However, even though I had done this all for myself…I reached my mental limit. No matter how good I was at repressing my feelings, I couldn’t escape the guilt of killing my mother. It hurt to be around my dad. I ran away from home to try to reset my life.”
“It wasn’t your average running away, was it?”
“No, it wasn’t. I’d thought about turning the Bumblebees into Reina Myoko. I prepared for a long time. I never appeared in photos. I didn’t let anyone get to know me or even notice me. I wanted other people to not know if I had really existed or not. And I knew it was possible to pull this off with my own ability to amplify my presence, seem larger-than-life. Once I had made the Reinas, I could take revenge on all the people who had demeaned my father. Of course, there were many ways to take revenge. But I guess it was just like me to choose this rather ridiculous method of creating the Reinas.”
Basically it was her “nature.”
Nevertheless, her desire to avenge her father and her guilt over killing her mother made her seem more human. Reina was far-removed from the mystique her initial impression gave off.
“It might be weird to say this, but it was fun to watch everything work out even better than I’d dreamed it would. The Bumblebees became even better Reinas than I imagined, and they gradually turned that unexpected revenge into a reality. At times they even exceeded my imagination.”
The problem was—
Obviously, what didn’t add up was—
“Ha…ha…haha,” Higano began to laugh.
He reached for the attache case under his desk. He entered a code into the lock and took out the contents.
Inside the case was a masquerade mask, the kind that rich people wore at parties. The mask was dazzlingly decorated with jewels and a golden butterfly. This was what had earned Higano the nickname Masquerade.
He put it on.
Under the mask, Higano’s smile widened, broadening from his usual grin into an innocent expression that clashed with his cold demeanor. Most people would consider this look, so different from his usual, charming.
But Higano himself, his eyes twinkling as he smiled, thought he looked ugly with this expression of pure joy. He didn’t want to be seen this way in public.
Yes, the mask was a way for Higano to hide his face.
“Ahhhhaha…haha.”
Truth always stripped itself bare before Higano’s superior intellect. It was automatic for his mind, incredibly simple, monotonous work. And for Higano, all of life was merely a repetition of that monotonous work.
However, on rare occasions—extremely rare occasions—Higano discovered an unexpected answer in the truths he compulsively drew from the world. He was overjoyed when he encountered these answers. They were the only time he ever felt alive.
“You’re Reina Myoko. Which means this.” He tried to suppress a smile beneath the mask. “The Reinas copying your life are trying to kill the original Reina.”
The blood drained from Reina’s face.
Higano thought of the Japanese foliage spider. Before giving birth, the females built leaf nests shaped like rice dumplings, making an enclosed space where they lay their egg sacs. After the children are born, they begin to eat the only source of nutrition in the tiny space: their own mother. They devour the mother’s innards
and kill her. For the mother, the nest she made herself as a breeding space was also her own coffin.
Just like these women. After giving up their past selves and taking on new lives as Reina Myoko, they no longer had any need for the parent who produced them. They stole her name, her life—everything.
The problem wasn’t Reina Myoko.
It was the Bumblebees.
The Reinas, counterfeits from the very beginning, were clearly unnatural.
“They peeled off my mask and didn’t need me anymore.”
This was the worst-case scenario Reina had to face.
“I was extremely skilled at misdirections, but the Reinas I created weren’t. The Reinas weren’t duplicates of me—they were copies of my illusion of Reina. The illusion of Reina was greater, more pure, more capable, and more beautiful than me, the real thing. The girls who faithfully copied this illusion surpassed me before long. They each became monsters of their own creation. Monsters that manipulated people and things as they desired and had the ability to destroy others in brutal, cunning ways.”
Reina’s shapely lips were quivering.
“I, on the other hand, was unable to get over my attachment to my father. Rather than become a monster like them, I returned to our relationship. Then I even got pregnant…and of course I wanted to have a child with the person I loved. But I couldn’t make things more difficult for him. So after much hard consideration, I aborted it. The sense of loss I felt once the baby was gone was awful and I was overcome with a sense of emptiness. I felt that nothing mattered anymore.”
Reina looked into Higano’s blue eyes and said, “I decided to stop being Reina Myoko.”
“But the Reinas wouldn’t let you exist that way.”
“Yes. It didn’t matter that all they saw of me was just an illusion; that didn’t change the fact that I was Reina Myoko. I had shackled them. But when I tried to escape, they finally realized the critical thing was to maintain the system of Reinas we’d created—to eliminate my real existence behind the illusion. The real Reina Myoko was actually an obstacle for their future development and ability to become a sanctified ‘Reina Myoko.’”