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 by 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..
Notably, Shota had never been involved with the original Reina. The person he thought was Reina was one of the Bumblebees. So Higano couldn’t use a voicemail from the original Reina to get him to come over. He had to rely on a silent message. At 7:11 P.M. he called Shota through LINE from his car. Because it was a shared account, the Bumblebees obviously were able to see what had happened.
Next, he sent a message to Koichiro, asking him to pick up Reina’s car near the park and, by doing so, creating the definitive evidence of Koichiro having driven the BMW. Even if Koichiro realized the message wasn’t from Reina and then claimed he took direction from the criminal over a text message, Higano wouldn’t run into any issues. By framing the case as a suicide, even this would be attributed to being part of Reina’s ruse.
7:20 P.M. Higano confirmed that no one was around and arranged the body on the tetrapods in the park. He didn’t forget to put her left leg in the water. He put the first knife that had actually been used to stab Reina in a plastic bag, along with her smartphone and a weight. He threw it in the water not far from the body. Even if the items were discovered, it would look like she mustered the last of her strength right as she was about to die to get rid of the evidence. He also put the electric planer he had actually used to cut off her face into the trunk of the BMW.
With all that, all of his preparations would be finished once he returned his car.
7:45 P.M.
No longer wanting to look at the state of the body, Higano left the scene.