by Eiji Mikage
It was a crazy story.
Much stranger than Higano could have predicted himself.
Which is why he was smiling under his mask.
“It’s starting to make sense. I imagined that the Bumblebees were unusual, but other than trying to kill you, was there anything particularly monstrous that they did?”
Reina nodded. “One made hundreds of millions through the secret club of celebrities.
“Another got into politics as a secretary and plotted to take down a political party through a member of the National Diet.
“And a third hijacked the aims of a massive humanitarian aid group and was trying to incite a war.”
“They were serious threats,” Higano said.
They seemed worse than serial killers, he thought, but he quickly laughed and realized that it was comparing six of one, half dozen of the other.
“They no longer have any feelings. They have no true selves. They are a system, and not even I, their creator, can stop them. However, as the one who brought them into the world, I have to do something about these monsters. I was about to give up, but it looks like I might have one last chance.”
Reina had seemed hopeless, but now there was determination in her eyes.
“Please, Mr. Serial Killer,” she pleaded, bringing her hands to her heart. “Please kill me—kill Reina Myoko.”
* * *
—
Higano took off his mask, injected Reina’s calf with anesthetic, and then began his work.
Her request for death wasn’t a hopeless case of abandoning herself. It was her final act of opposition against the monstrous Reinas.
If Masquerade killed her, the world would know her name as his—Masquerade’s—victim. If everyone knew she had died, the Bumblebees would no longer be able to continue their fabricated existence as Reina Myoko. She was aiming to take back their identity and neutralize it.
However, while she could take the name Reina Myoko back, Higano was by no means convinced, from their conversation thus far, that the other girls would return to the people they had been before. They had already become monsters. Their brakes had been disabled long ago. No one had control over how fast they were going.
They’d keep acting like monsters, only now with a nameless existence.
Or, there was another possibility.
They’d just get rid of the name Reina Myoko.
Hadn’t they tried to kill Reina as revenge for how she’d meaninglessly taken their existences?
If that was true, then this entire case had begun when they had tried to slice her neck. The case should have been called:
The Nameless Women’s Revenge.
Higano poured hot water from a kettle into a pot and allowed the temperature to near 181 degrees. He put a paper filter into the brewer, added the coffee grinds, and allowed the grinds to bloom before he slowly drizzled the remaining water over the filter in a slow circle. After he’d brewed enough, he removed the pour-over filter. The first drops of coffee always tasted best, and the later brew only became more and more diluted. You couldn’t let the last drops go into the pot.
Higano set out Royal Copenhagen cups and filled them with coffee. He had to admit that he could certainly make a fine cup of coffee; he smiled slightly.
Before he killed, he always liked to have rich Guatemalan beans.
Until a moment ago, Reina had seemed hopelessly desperate, but now she looked cheerful. A burden had been lifted: She was doing what she should, and she would defeat the monsters. Her spirits were so high she was even smiling.
It would’ve been too cruel to tell her that the monsters weren’t going anywhere.
Because the truth had very little value.
Higano had a sip of coffee, took a breath, and then said to Reina, “I thought you might ask me to kill you.”
“Really? It sounds like you’re calling me predictable. You’re wrong.”
“I’m sorry if you’ve misunderstood me. But I didn’t mean that, just that this is how things always are. I only ever decide to kill people who aren’t very attached to their lives.”
Reina smiled and tilted her head. “That’s a strange thing to say. By that definition, would serial killers ever kill someone of their own volition? The way you worded it makes the victim sound like the willful party. It also sounds like you’re a little apprehensive about the idea of killing someone.”
“Yes, it does sound like that, doesn’t it? I can see why you’d say that…My apologies. I always killed of my own will. The murders were absolutely sinful acts whether the victims were attached to their lives or not.”
“You’re a weird one. Do you get any pleasure from your murders? I’d only expect that of a serial killer…”
“This I can say definitively: I don’t. For me, there’s nothing more unbearably mortifying.”
Reina, perhaps surprised by this statement, opened her eyes wide. “Well, then why do you do it?
Higano hesitated and then selected a single word: “Justice.”
He hesitated because that word wasn’t quite right. However, he couldn’t find a more accurate alternative to express his motives.
“I’m guilty of killing my mother and bringing about the monsters—killing me would be doing justice. Isn’t that what you mean?”
“No, I don’t care about that at all. That’s unrelated. It would take forever for me to explain it, I—”
“Forget about it then. I’m starting to get sleepy from the injection you gave me anyway. But when you said justice was your motivation, I wanted to let you know how I really felt.” Then, Reina said, as though she were having a joke, “I was disappointed.”
Her eyes had become vacant. Just as she said, the anesthetic was starting to take effect.
Higano took the comment in stride.
Of course she would say that. He wasn’t killing Reina to save her. He was only killing her because his own goals required it.
Because Masquerade’s story required it.
Miss Direction.
That was the perfect name for Reina Myoko, a woman who drove people crazy and produced nameless monsters.
“Ahh.” Reina’s eyes snapped open. “I’m about to die and finally realized how I could’ve prevented my life from going off the rails.”
Her cheeks were flushed with excitement.
“I needed someone who would have exposed all of my misdirections. If only there had been someone in front of me who relentlessly pursued the truth, I might have found my way back!”
Then she spoke her last words in this life.
“Someone, please help.”
But her plea had nothing to do with Higano.
He was, after all, a serial killer shrouded in lies.
Higano abhorred the truth and worshipped fabrication; he was the exact opposite of the kind of person who would’ve saved her.
* * *
—
In his office, under the Aeron chair, Higano had installed a trap door with a fingerprint lock. He opened the small door, through which a large person would barely fit, and descended a simple metal ladder. Motion-activated LED lights flashed on, and the cameras installed in the ceiling were activated. This setup recorded whenever someone entered the 30-feet wide basement space. The room was made from unfinished concrete. This was where Higano had killed many of his victims.
All the evidence of the things he used to kill were here: pharmaceuticals, various implements, knives. There was even a spare mask. Everything linked to Masquerade had been collected in this basement. If police searched the house and looked into this room, they’d immediately determine that Higano was Masquerade.
Higano had no compunctions about that. Indeed, he wanted to confess everything to whomever caught him.
He straightened his white sleeves.
Reina Myoko was passed o
ut on the concrete floor, looking like Snow White. The birthmark near her collarbone was seductively exposed.
Higano removed the knife from her chest and, unsurprisingly, blood began to spurt out. Even with the gore, the expression on Higano’s face didn’t shift.
She was unconscious, but she was still lightly breathing. He hoped that the anesthesia was working properly and that she felt no pain.
As usual, Higano had his chainsaw at hand to cut off the victim’s most beautiful body part.
He took off her brand new pumps with the same care he made the coffee, and gently peeled off her stockings, as though he were handling a virgin. Higano didn’t forget the minimum standard of respect that should be given to his victims.
Reina’s left foot was so perfectly balanced that it almost seemed like a CG rendering, and now it was fully exposed. Without any sentimental fanfare, Higano turned on the chainsaw and cut off her left foot.
When he was finished with the work, he took the foot in his hands, still wearing the surgical gloves, and stared at it.
That’s when he noticed something. For a moment he was struck speechless.
“What’s this…!”
He’d missed something.
Something he’d never be able to fix.
He held a hand to his mouth in disbelief and examined the foot closely again. But it was unmistakable.
For the first time since he had been born, Higano looked upward and cursed the heavens.
Reina’s beautiful, perfect foot—
* * *
—
—was blemished with blisters.
* * *
—
“Miss Direction…You really kept me from seeing the most important thing until the very end!”
The serial killer Masquerade had rules.
His rules didn’t have any particular deeper meaning. They just were. When he killed he always wore a white coat. He always had a cup of coffee made from beans he ground himself an hour before the murder. He always cut off the face. The victims were always women who had body parts of unrivaled beauty. Etcetera, etcetera.
And the blisters on Reina’s foot meant that she would never have been one of his victims.
“I can’t…” Higano moaned. “I can’t make this one of Masquerade’s kills.”
It was inconsistent—
—with Seiren Higano’s personal aesthetic.
Objectively considered, his reasoning must’ve seemed insane. And Higano himself was well aware of this. He was the only one who knew of his strict rules. Furthermore, he’d been planning on disposing of her foot without anyone knowing.
He was the only one in the world who couldn’t come to terms with the blisters.
But though he fully recognized this, it didn’t matter. Breaking his own rules was too terrifying a proposition. He couldn’t count this as one of Masquerade’s kills. It would’ve been like loosening a small screw but not knowing exactly what purpose the screw had served. Loosening the screw might cause everything to descend into madness and result in his total breakdown.
No, Higano understood very well. He knew that was right, but at the same time, it was pure sophistry.
So in the end…
“I feel awful,” he said.
He was physiologically incapable of breaking the rules.
He leaned back against the concrete wall, still tightly gripping Reina’s foot. He held the foot against his chest and embraced it like a long-lost lover.
Internally, he was wracked with pain. He felt as though his body had been crushed by some lumbering beast. His head ached as though it had been hit with a lead pipe.
Higano derived no pleasure from killing, and being assaulted by any emotions in the middle of the act rendered him unable to kill. Because he hadn’t followed the rules, he was overcome with the guilt of his murder and could no longer think of it as a purely mechanical procedure.
Higano’s aesthetic, rigidly defined by the strict rules he’d set for himself, were what had enabled him to kill without hesitation.
This is why he could never violate his aesthetic.
So Higano decided his next step fairly naturally.
“I’ll…make it up.”
As easily as though he had done it before, Higano decided to frame someone.
* * *
—
“Well then,” Higano said. “What am I going to do now?”
* * *
—
He took off his white coat, speckled with blood. Underneath, a bespoke black Armani suit skimmed over the lines of his lean physique. He folded the white coat carefully so as to not stain his suit, and hung it over his arm. The refined gesture gave him the air of a capable butler swiftly clearing away his master’s tablecloth.
Higano glanced down at the dead body.
The muddy waters of Tokyo Bay washed in gentle waves against the concrete tetrapod blocks near the shore. On top of one block lay the body of a beautifully-proportioned woman. She was dead. A slender leg dipped into the water. It was easy to imagine that, when she’d been alive, she’d been captivating: her slender, seductive limbs stretched out from a flashy, well-tailored dress. She had a beauty mark on her collar bone that heightened her charm. Her long, well-manicured nails were blood red and even a little mysterious.
But this glamorous mystique was quickly punctured.
Her beautiful left leg was severed at the ankle. The foot was gone.
The corpse’s face had also been scraped off so the contours were ruined. Her once-elegant features were completely unrecognizable.
These signs all suggested the crime had been committed by Seiren Higano, also known as the serial killer Masquerade.
However, throughout his career Higano had removed many faces, and he judged the technique used on this corpse as extremely crude. The lips and everything on the face above the nose remained intact; conversely, the neck had been needlessly cut up. It wasn’t very attractive.
“This is unacceptable.”
Higano turned his head and averted his gaze, unable to look any longer.
He calmed down quickly once he could no longer see the body.
* * *
—
From that point, Higano forged the entire incident, which was clearly one of Masquerade’s killings, into an entirely different crime.
I’ll make it a suicide, he thought.
The moment he decided to fabricate the case entirely, the perfect scenario came to mind.
Motivation was no issue. He knew Reina had conceived her father Koichiro’s child. Most normal people would consider suicide in a case like that.
However, there was one major obstacle to his cover-up story.
He had already cut off her left foot. Was there anyone anywhere in the world who would commit suicide by first cutting off their own foot? In order to complete his lie, he had to surmount this fundamental problem. He needed a clear reason why she would have to cut off her foot.
Perhaps, he thought, he could turn Reina’s suicide into her ultimate gamble—an attempt to entrap Koichiro. He’d frame the case to show that she despised him so much that something like killing him wouldn’t be enough for her. Of course that hadn’t been the true story, but that’s how he would frame it.
Reina would have tried to think of the cruelest method of revenge and decided that the worst thing she could do was to frame Koichiro for his own daughter’s murder. That way she would reveal to the world that he was an awful human who had brainwashed his adopted daughter into being his sex slave and then killed her off when she got inconvenient.
If he could convey exactly how devastated Reina had been by the abortion, it would even be possible to have Koichiro falsely testify that he’d killed her himself. And if he played his cards right, he might be able to settle the whole thing as a murder committed b
y Koichiro rather than a suicide.
Higano came up with all of this in an instant in the basement room below his office. He had no time to hesitate. If he cut off Reina’s face after she died, her body’s reactions would make it impossible to disguise as a suicide.
Reina was on the floor. He checked that she was still alive and quickly got the electric planer going. Then he cut off her beautiful face from the nose down, leaving her eyes intact.
He had to cover up the scar on her neck from the Bumblebees’ attempt on her life, and he focused on cutting that area up. If any of the wound was identifiable, the police would naturally look into the details. Then they’d quickly realize that that scar was from long before she was killed. He wanted to prevent the case from going off into any unpredictable directions. In the worst case scenario, Higano would lose control over the case if the police started to look into whether the Reinas had actually been the ones to cut her neck.
Because of this, Higano violated his aesthetic completely in the crude way he cut up Reina’s neck and face. He ended up with a product he couldn’t bear to look at.
6:38 P.M. Higano took his car, to plant Reina’s severed foot in her apartment in Sumida Ward. To be more accurate, the apartment wasn’t hers alone; the Reinas shared it. They each had separate hideouts, but Higano hadn’t yet discovered them.
Higano snuck into the apartment. It had been meticulously cleared of all individuality so no one could learn anything about the personalities of the Reinas. He left Reina’s foot inside, along with a chipped knife identical to the one used to kill her. He had planted the broken chip of the second knife in her body.
He wiped everything he touched with a cloth to indicate clearly that someone had come to get rid of fingerprints, and then left. He drove his car the half mile to the parking lot and moved Reina’s body from his car into her BMW. Then he headed for the park on the water he had in mind.
7:05 P.M. Higano arrived at the park in Odaiba. For his trick to work, he had to get someone to go to the apartment. Higano had learned by looking at Reina’s smartphone that the Reinas, including the original Reina, kept track of what the others were doing by using a shared LINE account that could make VoIP7 phone calls. He’d discovered that Shota Akiyama was the only person involved with the Reinas who could go to the apartment immediately..