It’s already past one? Wow, it’s late. I know you’re all busy, so I appreciate you making arrangements for this. I’ll cut to the chase.
I know who the killer is.
No, it isn’t Ken. Ahh, yeah…Well, I know what I said. I did it to buy some time…but don’t get ahead of yourself. Please, just listen for a minute.
I’ll tell you everything, just as it happened. You probably wouldn’t believe me if I just blurted it out.
I met Reina around the time I was involved in the bank transfer scam. Yeah, I’m guilty. I was twenty, Reina was nineteen, I guess?
She was friends with the girl I was dating at the time. To be honest, I was only interested in this girl for her money. Her name?…I can’t remember. No, I’m serious. That shows you how little I cared.
I think Reina was trying to break us up out of genuine concern for her friend. I didn’t care much for Reina in the beginning, but my feelings quickly changed. I started looking forward to seeing her.
Why? Well, she was super hot, so there was that, of course. But her looks were actually unrelated. It was her…being, if you could call it that. She had an attraction so strong I couldn’t escape it.
But before I could win her over, I got arrested for fraud. The person who accused me was none other than Reina herself. No, I wasn’t mad at her. I was well aware of the risks that came with the dumb shit I was doing. And this was part of the package that came with getting closer to Reina. Just talking with her sharpened my intellect—she had that in her…So why didn’t I stop the bank transfer scam? Those guys were my friends…and we just kind of kept going on.
But I mean, I really regret not cutting that shit out. Not because I got arrested. But because I thought that Reina reporting me meant she was rejecting me.
But I was wrong. She came to see me in jail. During visiting hours, she proposed a little game.
No, you heard me right. A game.
She challenged me to get my sentence suspended by improving the judge and public prosecutor’s opinion of me.
The prize was Reina herself.
I was eager to play.
After I was released on bail, Reina told me exactly what to do. She said it would be better in court if it really looked like I was reflecting on what I’d done and showed the potential of being rehabilitated. I knew if I were on my own, they’d see right through me. So Reina changed my fundamental values.
What awaited me was a complete correction of my character. It was like Reina was heating me up in a burner and flattening me over and over so I’d fit into a completely different mold. An example? One week she made me fast. And if I ever challenged her, she’d make me strip naked for three days or pull out my fingernails.
What’dya mean I was pretty obedient? Look, Reina really cared for me. I could tell. When she pulled out my nails, she was crying as much as though she were experiencing it herself.
No one had ever cared for me so seriously before, and no one has since. Not even my own family took me this seriously. I was over the moon that she was even considering dating me.
Then I became her possession.
Her special training worked, I won over the court, and they suspended my sentence. I won the game.
That’s when Reina and I started seeing each other.
I know what you’re thinking. You think it’s weird, or perverted, or that we weren’t really dating, right? Well, you can think whatever you want. Reina and I were dating. We were happy. Does anything else matter?
You wanna know why Reina was dating me? Whether it could’ve been some reason other than love?
Well, I guess she could’ve been looking for a pawn. The game could’ve been a test to see if I could be her chess piece.
A pawn for what? It’s obvious—revenge.
Right, I haven’t told you her goal.
Reina wanted revenge.
Even while I was working through the court system, Reina was diligently planning her revenge. She reached out to the entertainment industry, to people in finance, to politicians—she started making connections with influential people all over. And she used that political strength and her charisma to continue making connections.
That’s how Reina discovered the existence of a certain secret club.
The club met under the guise of a special association at a restaurant in Nishiazabu. The only members were people contracted with entertainment agencies or VIPS who paid tens of thousands in donations each month. The VIPs had access to the list of the celebrities who were members of the club. The system allowed the VIPs to select a celeb for an introduction. After they met, the restaurant had no involvement in their negotiations, and each party was free to do as they pleased. Models who weren’t doing well would sometimes set up sugar daddy arrangements with them.
Reina? Ha, as if. You do realize Reina would never concern herself with something so trivial?
Reina was figuring out how she could break into the management side of the club. Finally, she decided to act as a go-between. She rounded up some of the talent that was part of the club and started trying to find them clients.
And she knew where there’d be people with money. Think about where Reina used to work. Ring a bell?
Exactly, the casinos. The big winners at casinos had the cash and wouldn’t be stingy because they made easy money. Reina got a job with a casino management company working as a promotional model and quietly reached out to gamblers who’d won big, so that the casino wouldn’t know. Supposedly a lot of the winners were interested. And you can understand why, right? They’d finally won big, so they wanted to know what luxury felt like. And it’s pretty easy to understand how sleeping with a well-known celebrity would feel like the highest sort of luxury, even if it was a kind of commonplace thing to want.
I helped her, too. With negotiating between the customers and the celebs. As a driver. As a bodyguard. Responding to trouble whenever it happened. I did whatever Reina ordered me to do. Several times it was so dangerous I really thought I might die.
These guys were paying ten, sometimes even a hundred times what the VIPs in the club were paying, and they did it with a smile on their faces. The gamblers had lost all sense of the value of money. Gamblers win or lose money in the range of hundreds of millions each day. A couple million was pocket change for them. You remember that case a while back when the son of the owners of Empress Paper Corporation4 embezzled 18 billion in company funds and blew it all gambling in Macao and Singapore? That guy was pretty famous as a high roller among gamblers. And that was just the society we were working with. We took kickbacks, and sometimes from the kickback alone we ended up taking in 100 million. The customers had their wildest fantasies fulfilled. A mountain of cash came in through the Nishiazabu restaurant. The celebs also ended up with a ton of cash and occasionally connections or patrons, depending on the circumstances. It was a win-win situation. Obviously, Reina came to be considered pretty valuable. She gradually worked her way into the core of the operation.
Because she’d earned their trust, Reina was allowed to look at the list of VIP members. As she anticipated, the list included the names of major players in every industry you could imagine.
The preliminary work for her revenge was complete.
Right, you want to know why she was after revenge…
You already know that Reina’s father’s company went bankrupt, right? I think his name was Koichiro? The company didn’t go under because of his incompetence. Politicians and rival companies joined forces and monopolized the market he was in.
Reina looked into the names of the people involved in stealing her dad’s business: Taichi Asagaya, a Diet member from the National Party; Tatsuo Yamashita, a councilman from Minato; Daigo Oshitari of Oshitari Construction; and Heiji Nakahigashi of Central Construction.
Heiji Nakahigashi is Ken’s dad.
Oh, so you’ve heard about his financial support when Koichiro was running for Metropolitan assembly? Yeah, he did. From Reina’s point of view, what Heiji did was like paying for the funeral of a guy he’d stabbed to death. I don’t know what he was thinking. Maybe he did it out of guilt, maybe because he just wanted to, or maybe he wanted to make sure Koichiro wouldn’t hold a grudge. He probably thought getting involved made the most sense. Getting Ken engaged to Reina had to be part of that plan, too.
So that’s where we were. It was pure coincidence, but Reina found Heiji Nakahigashi and Tatsuo Yamashita on the list of VIP members in the secret club. And that wasn’t all: She also learned they both had sugar baby relationships with teen idols who were still in high school.
So she decided to take the fate of her targets into her own hands.
It was impossible for her to pass up such a perfect opportunity. She set up an appointment with a newspaper reporter to expose the scandals to the world—or was about to when all this happened.
Nobody knew what she was up to. At least that’s what we thought, but we must’ve been wrong. They acted so quickly. They’d probably had an eye on us for a while.
I don’t know who the killer was. Heiji Nakahigashi wasn’t the only one afraid that the club’s awful crimes would become public. There were a number of people who would’ve done anything to stop her and some who would’ve even killed to do so.
Don’t you get it?
The killer was someone from that syndicate.
You’d never’ve believed me if I had said someone from “the syndicate” did it up front, right?
You still don’t believe me?
Well, okay, but if you do a little digging you’ll find that this secret club really does exist. Then you’ll realize what I’m telling you is the truth.
I felt like I had to tell you guys this. Like I said, the syndicate is still after us. I’m probably the next target. They left Reina’s foot in her apartment as a threat to me.
My only option was to escape the reach of the organization. So I made it seem like there was some love triangle with Ken and Reina and me to mess up their search. I was planning to leave the country and escape while they were confused. I mean, even if I told the police, this is the kind of thing they’d want to hush up, right?
But I changed my mind. Circumstances changed. And everything I’ve told you is the truth. You’ve gotta protect us.
That’s all I’ve got. Now I’ve got something to do.
Oh, just gonna step out and drink this. Later.