My face burned. H-How was I supposed to feel?! I’d put a uniform on for the first time in forever and it fit as perfectly as when I’d been in school!
“I’m only twenty-four,” I said quietly. “People think I’m a high schooler all the time. I even get carded when I buy beer.” I tried to pout.
“That’s probably because you don’t wear any makeup and you have no sex appeal. That’s different from looking young.”
Even if that’s what he was thinking, did he have to come right out and say it? Yamaji was just as he appeared: a complete brute!
Yamaji ignored how pissed off I was and unwrapped a lollipop, an incongruous accessory. In an even more hateful voice he muttered, “A high-school girl? Haaa. There’s no way they’d mistake you for one. You’ve lost all that high-school girl goodness from your skin and your aura. Overall you’ve kind of faded.”
Yamaji’s wife had recently run off, and I hoped she kept on running! I hoped she divorced him and got a huge settlement!
“Stop kidding yourself, Princess.”
I wanted to shout, “You’re the only jackass kidding around!” but Yamaji had gotten a serious look on his face, so I bit my tongue.
Inspector Enishi Yamaji: His slovenly appearance made me want to brand him an idiot over and over again, but he was a shrewd veteran who had solved a few difficult cases that had been nearly given up as unsolvable. His recent work especially was spectacular, with him solving several brutal crimes rapidly before an investigative task force could even be organized.
I had only been working under Yamaji for two months, but as you might expect, I’d realized he wasn’t just an unpleasant old man. I should mention his eyes in particular. At times the glint in his eye harbored the edge of a freshly sharpened blade. And he somehow still had a strong sense of justice like an idealistic rookie, despite seeing so many of the worst aspects of the world since joining the force.
I didn’t want to admit it, but somewhere inside me I had a deep respect for Yamaji. His slovenly appearance made me want to suppress this feeling, but it couldn’t be helped. Deep inside me somewhere…there was the slightest…the most minuscule amount of respect for him.
So, yeah, this was the guy who had called me in so urgently.
“Could we actually have another Masquerade murder on our hands?!” I asked.
Yamaji didn’t say yes or no. He placed the lollipop in his mouth in an almost obscene way and raised an eyebrow. “I can’t confirm it categorically, but the face has been cut off.”
I ran to look. A black guardrail with spots of red rust separated the park from the waterway. I climbed over it and down onto one of the massive, concrete tetrapod blocks at the water’s edge.
I could see a woman’s thin legs submerged in the water. The skin had started to blacken and was clearly devoid of life.
I gulped and steeled myself. This was my first time seeing a corpse at a crime scene. You’re fine, I repeated in my head. I had read all of the Masquerade case files so many times that they were basically seared into my mind. I had also seen the photographs of Masquerade’s victims so often that they appeared in my dreams. I should have been prepared to see an actual in-the-flesh corpse.
Then I spotted the corpse just beyond Forensics Division’s Sergeant Omori.
“Ah…” I muttered. The moment I saw the faceless corpse, my legs started to buckle. I narrowly managed to avoid falling by reaching out and grabbing the tetrapod with my right hand.
“Huh?” Yamaji said incredulously. “You’re so green you can’t look at a mangled body?”
What…I couldn’t help it. This wasn’t just any old dead body. The flesh from the nose and below had been exposed, and the bones were sticking out.
“The corpse belongs to one Reina Myoko,” Yamaji rattled off. “She didn’t have a wallet or cell phone, but there did happen to be a gym membership card in her pocket.”
“W-Wait a second,” I said.
“What? If you’re gonna puke, go do it where there’s nobody around.”
“Not that! Tell me her name again.”
“Reina Myoko.”
I looked at the corpse again. A stylish woman my age wearing a nicely-cut dress. There was a beauty mark on her collarbone.
I’d seen her before.
“I think she might be my high school classmate.”
Yamaji itched at his head like he was confused. “Well, damn…I guess I’m sorry to hear that. Looks like you might actually have a connection to Masquerade after all, Princess.” He composed himself and then focused his gaze. “So, what’re you gonna do? If she’s your classmate, do you plan to run home and curl up in bed like a scaredy cat?”
“What?” I asked.
Yamaji would usually never say something so harsh.
I could feel something growing inside me, and it wasn’t anger—it was courage. This was, in his own special way, his attempt to encourage me.
This was it. I’d become a police officer for one reason and one reason alone: to arrest the serial killer Masquerade. So I couldn’t let myself be flustered the first time I found myself at a crime scene that resembled Masquerade’s.
“Alright!” I patted myself on the cheeks to pump myself up again. I got up and brushed the sand off my skirt.
It felt like some strange sign that I was wearing the sailor uniform from when Reina and I had been classmates.
“Looks like you’re going to manage,” Yamaji said. He took out his police notebook and strained his eyes at it. “From the way you’re saying ‘classmate,’ I’m starting to think that you two weren’t all that close…”
“I haven’t seen her since we graduated from Junseiwa Academy, the all-girls high school we went to. Even when we were classmates, we didn’t have the same classes and weren’t all that close.”
“Junseiwa Academy? You must’ve been surrounded by other princesses at that place. Is your family filthy rich?”
“No…My family was your pretty typical middle class family. It felt like I was being forced to fulfill my mother’s dreams by going to Junseiwa. It was tough on my parents’ finances, and I thought my going just caused problems…I mean, they didn’t have to worry about me! In other words, I was just a regular student. She was different.”
“What you’re saying is the victim was a genuine princess?”
“I think so. I didn’t know about the specifics of her home life, so I don’t have any proof, but everything she wore during that time were high-end items that most high school girls don’t have. Even at a school for upper-class girls, she was really popular.”
“Hmph. Even without her face I can sort of tell that she was beautiful.”
As Yamaji said, although now a faceless body, her luxurious, flashy lifestyle hadn’t changed. Her lips were mostly intact despite the face being ripped up. They’d blackened and lost all their red color, but I was still drawn to how full they were.
And when I saw them, her charming voice came to life in my mind.
“Hey, do you know what a misdirection is?”
Ah yes, I remembered. She had a high-pitched, feminine voice that lingered like the vibrato from a violin. Her exact features somehow never stayed with me, but I remembered being impressed over and over by her attractive voice.
“She’s beautiful.” She’d been the kind of woman who made people say that unthinkingly.
But why? Sure, she was incredibly beautiful, yet for the life of me I couldn’t recall her face.
When I saw her, I was gripped by that first impression of her being beautiful—it was so strong that it swept aside any other thoughts and prevented me from remembering what she looked like. So she was hazy in my mind.
That had been true back when we were students. I remembered that she had a beauty mark on her collarbone, but whenever I went to look at her face, I always had to pore over every inch before I realized, ah yes, that’s what her face was like.
Images from that time were running vividly through my mind, despite the fact that her precise features eluded me.
The back of my mind was filled with a dissolving crimson color.