“Furthermore, she purposefully made light cuts in her chest with the knife she had prepared and placed it in the room with her severed foot. Then she stopped the bleeding so she wouldn’t pass out, gave herself anesthesia, and left the apartment in such a state as to make everyone think she had been murdered. She had plastic sheeting in the BMW seats so she wouldn’t leave blood anywhere, and drove herself to the park in Odaiba using her remaining foot. She stabbed herself in the chest with an identical knife she had bought to make everyone mistakenly think the first knife was the original cause of death, and then she died.”
I was frozen, but Dr. Higano continued his explanation.
“Before she carried out her plan, she tied herself up with rope and cuffed her own hands to leave signs that she had been bound. She also called Shota after she cut off her foot. We can assume that she weighted down the bloody sheet, the knife she stabbed herself with, and the smartphone that also would have been evidence, and threw them into the bay. We might find them if we search the shallows near the park.”
“G-Give me a second to take this all in!”
“Of course.”
I took deep breaths to slow my racing heart and gave myself vigorous slaps on the cheek to bring myself back to my senses.
“Phew…Ahh, so…But, in this case, Koichiro had the key to the BMW, right? Why was that?” Finally I had hit upon a good question.
“Yes. We can probably attribute that to Reina texting Koichiro and asking him to move the BMW that was near the park. He probably didn’t think twice about a request from his daughter, so he went to the park, got in the BMW, and drove it away. By then it was dark, so he wouldn’t have noticed her body nearby. Reina likely planned to pin the crime on Koichiro as he returned the car by putting evidence in the trunk of the BMW—maybe one of the murder weapons—that would mislead police into thinking he was the killer. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“So Koichiro didn’t return the car because the cops had the parking lot staked out?”
“Yes. Although he didn’t know about the incident yet, he probably instinctively ran off when he saw the police. Then after they found her body, he must’ve thought he was being framed by the killer. So he didn’t say anything about driving her car to avoid drawing any suspicion to himself.”
“That makes sense. So by that logic, Reina’s plans were messed—”
Wait a second.
I stopped in my tracks.
Reina cutting her own foot off was improbable enough on its own, but I remembered the severed foot wasn’t the only grotesque part of the mutilated corpse.
Her face had also been cut off with a hand plane or something.
Up until now I had naturally thought that Koichiro had done it. It was a brutal murder, but we thought he’d tried to copycat Masquerade, so the details of how the corpse was mutilated were convincing enough.
However, if Reina’s death was suicide, that changed dramatically.
“Did Reina…cut off her own face?”
Had she cut off her face with an electric planer or something while she was still living?!
That was just out-of-your-mind ridiculous.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
Yes, it was ridiculous!
“Totally impossible. There’s something fishy about this ‘trick’! It’s nuts to think she drove after cutting off her foot, and even crazier that after that she wouldn’t have gone into shock halfway through trying to cut her own face off while she was still alive. This is just too much!”
Unthinkingly, I had raised my voice, and Dr. Higano tried to calm me down by nodding along with me in agreement.
“Of course, that’s a natural reaction to have.”
“Right?! So that means—”
“However,” Dr. Higano interrupted me. “This only proves my point. No one ever thought she cut off her own face. Anyone would reject the possibility as entirely too strange. Which is precisely why no one considered this case a suicide at first glance. Yes, this too was one of Reina’s misdirections.”
I was at a loss for words.
It couldn’t have been true. Was he suggesting that she was trying to plant a red herring for us by cutting off her own face?
“I can’t help but respect the lengths she was prepared to go to in order to execute her plan,” the doctor added. But he could probably tell that I wasn’t convinced, so he continued, “Yuri, do you remember the way Reina’s face had been cut off?”
What the hell was he getting at with this question?
I was still dazed, but eventually I shook my head quickly. The exposed bones and awful brutality of how her face had looked had been so horrible to look at that now, my mind couldn’t remember any of the details.
“Her face seemed to have been cut off, but actually everything from her nose up was left more or less intact. That’s because she still had things to do after she cut off her face. She had to get rid of the tool she used to cut her face—or maybe she threw it in the trunk to serve as evidence that Koichiro was the killer. She also had to get rid of the other evidence like her phone. She couldn’t lose her eyes while she was cutting her face.”
I couldn’t keep up with what he was saying whatsoever. Nor was I able to accept it.
“B-But say this had all miraculously worked out and she was able to do everything you say she did? There’s no way she planned this all out ahead of time! Nobody makes a plan they’re not sure they’ll be able to complete!…And there’s no reason Reina would opt for such a torturous method. No matter how prepared she was for it, normally she’d never pull it off!”
I could feel my head getting dizzy from lack of oxygen after all my yelling. I collapsed onto the sofa and tried to get my ragged breathing under control.
“Normally, you say? But you must’ve felt it a number of times over the course of this investigation…You likely even thought it from the very beginning when you were in school, right?” Dr. Higano shut me up with a single sentence: “Reina Myoko was insane.”
Ah.
That one explanation was more convincing than any of his most logical theories.
I could finally be convinced of her ridiculous trick. Indeed, for her, this entire bizarre production probably even seemed entirely natural.
Convinced, I had no retort for him. I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion.
“As for why she decided on this plan,” Dr. Higano said, “I have my own opinion, although it’s just a hypothesis.”
“I’d love to hear it.”
“As I mentioned earlier, I think Reina felt both love and hate for Koichiro. Don’t you think she must’ve wanted to test these two competing emotions to see which one was correct? If she couldn’t make it all the way through, then that couldn’t be helped, and she would have had to be satisfied with the limits of her persistence. So it must’ve been a difficult choice for her.”
That was a persuasive hypothesis.
But it just didn’t jive for me.
“Well…I knew her in high school and have a slightly different take.”
“Really. Please share.”
“Something came to me when you said she was insane. She’d never shown the cracks in her armor, and she lied at times to keep her self, and her true feelings, hidden. This was true when it came to me, her classmate, obviously, but even for the Bumblebees, too. I couldn’t understand why she did that. It didn’t look like she was having fun or enjoying herself. But through this case, I was able to see that she didn’t even reveal herself to Shota, Ken, and Koichiro, her lovers and her father, which led me to think this.”
I didn’t have any basis for it.
But I was certain of it.
“Hiding herself was the way she lived. She didn’t know any other way. And no reason she had would’ve convinced anyone.”
Miss Direction.
Without a doubt, Reina had lived a life fitting of that name.
And now we’d seen the result.
“I finally understand why she chose such a convoluted suicide,” I said. “That was just her nature.”