Just like mine, her eyes were round as saucers. She seemed completely taken aback by the question. I thought her reaction was totally justified.
However, Dr. Higano nodded twice, three times, like her response somehow proved his theory exactly, and then looked at me. “Yuri. Otoha Tamachi was your former classmate. Is the woman before you really her?”
“Well, of course…” I started. Then I stopped myself.
Maybe she wasn’t.
I had had an incredibly strange feeling when she walked in—that uncertainty whether she’d actually been this pretty.
“Is this really Otoha Tamachi?” Dr. Higano repeated.
The blood rushed from my head. “I did feel…a little uncertain, but…” After careful consideration, I shook my head. “But there’s no way! How could someone stand in front of a former classmate and blatantly lie about their identity?! It’s so risky.”
“Absolutely,” Dr. Higano said encouragingly. But then he added, “That would be the case if we were talking about an ordinary person. However, this person isn’t ordinary. You can’t call someone so skilled at lying ordinary.”
Otoha raised an eyebrow in a very natural look of consternation. “What the hell are you saying? I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re getting at.”
“Well, let’s look at some of the signs of a liar: They avoid eye contact. They frequently cover their face with gestures. They get an awkward look in their eyes because the timing of their facial expressions is off and they focus on compensating around the mouth. They look up and to the right. They blink more often. Their voice lowers. They respond more slowly. When asked a question, they repeat it to buy time. They force unnatural changes in the subject of conversation. The list goes on.”
“You’re saying these apply to me?” She shook her head and looked a little frightened. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember doing any of those.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Dr. Higano admonished gently. “Conversely. You didn’t do any of those things.” He began to spin his puzzle again. “You looked us squarely in the eye. When you were thinking, you looked up and to the left, not to the right. You never repeated anything we said, nor did you divert the conversation. You didn’t show a single sign of someone who was lying.” Dr. Higano paused for a moment and continued, “However, that in and of itself was strange.”
He had completed his glass cube puzzle and held the finished product in his hands.
“People are usually cautious or nervous when they meet someone for the first time, not least a police officer in a murder investigation. Sometimes their memory is uncertain and they’re not confident. If that’s the case, like liars, they tend to blink a lot, their voice lowers, and there’s an unnatural lag to their responses. But in your case, there weren’t signs of any of that. Zero. That’s not natural. Now why would that be the case?” Dr. Higano stared into the eyes of this woman who called herself Otoha Tamachi. “It was because you have a complete understanding of what distinguishes a liar and made a conscious effort not to let those things show.”
I was listening to him, dazed, but now I shook my head emphatically. No matter how logical his reasoning, I wasn’t going to give in easily. “That’s impossible. People aren’t that good at lying. An ordinary person isn’t capable of what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, I already told you she’s not ordinary. Now, how is that possible? Perhaps she regularly painted over her life with a set of lies. Maybe her circumstances were so extreme that if she hadn’t done so, her life would have collapsed. Her environment trained this unique skill.” The woman shook her head quickly, as though scared. I still couldn’t detect any deception in her manner.
“However, there’s some truth to what you’re suggesting,” Dr. Higano said. “There’s a remote chance that she just happens not to have the tells of a liar. But putting that possibility aside for now, let’s see if we can deduce whether my premise is correct.”
Dr. Higano brushed his collar, arranged his white coat, and then completely scrambled the cube puzzle he had finally finished.
“This woman actively sought out information about this case not because she was interested in the details but because she wanted to connect with the investigators. Her goal was to shift the investigation in a favorable direction. To take such an action means, first of all, that she was lying about having cut off contact with Reina. Indeed, it seems likely they’re still quite close.”
I looked at the woman, but her expression still revealed nothing beyond confusion.
“But then,” Dr. Higano continued. “No matter how skillfully she spun her lies and fooled people, there had to be certain things in the case she wouldn’t be able to twist the way she wanted.”
“Like what, exactly?” I asked.
“There are things the police would be able to investigate and confirm even if she fooled us about them here. And if she’d kept insisting on her account, she would’ve lost credibility and cast suspicion on herself. So she avoided lying about those things.”
What he said was making sense.
“They way she mentioned Shota without seeming to know anything about him is also suspicious,” Dr. Higano continued. “Assuming she’s still in touch with him even now, it seems highly likely she also would’ve known Shota was still dating Reina. If she knew about their relationship, then she also could’ve surmised that the investigation would eventually get to him.”
“And if that happened,” I extrapolated, “Shota would talk to the police and he wouldn’t be able to lie. So she was telling the truth about him?”
“Yes, that seems highly likely. Thus, Shota and Reina were dating—this is a fact. They probably did cheat, or something like that—also a fact. And in the past he was arrested for fraud—this is definite.”
That’s when it occurred to me again that maybe Reina had kept seeing him precisely because she found the fact that he was a criminal appealing.
“In addition, there’s a chance that she found out from Reina herself that Reina and Shota had over 100 million saved up,” Dr. Higano said. “The investigation would track down the flow of the money at some point. She knew she couldn’t cover up any lies about that. And once the police realized the alarming amount of money, they’d obviously focus on whether and how the source of the money was related to the murder. Furthermore, this woman tried to lure us in that direction by talking about Shota as though he were someone important.”