Reina’s rented apartment was not far from a shopping arcade in a blue-collar shitamachi neighborhood filled with a mix of new and old buildings. Several police vehicles were parked on the narrow streets, from which the towering futuristic spindle of the Tokyo Skytree was visible, intruding upon the neighborhood’s old-fashioned character.
At a month-to-month parking lot placed quite a distance from Reina’s apartment, I noticed two other parked cars.
Reina’s apartment, located in the middle of the bustling shopping arcade, was an aged wooden building whose character fit right into the shitamachi neighborhood.
To be honest, I found it strange that Reina lived in such a pedestrian building. The rundown, wooden structure didn’t even have security cameras; the whole place was at odds with her flashy looks.
We were greeted by a man with thick arms and eyebrows. “Hey,” he said. “You must be Yamaji from the 11th. We’ve heard you like to play fast and loose with jurisdiction. What the hell brings you all the way over here?”
This must have been the investigator from Mukojima Station. He stared at Yamaji. His intensity chilled me, but Yamaji only gave him an indifferent glance before zipping up the stairs to the apartment.
“Looks like the rumors were right,” the investigator drawled, seemingly unimpressed by Yamaji’s cool response. “You go where you please without waiting for orders.”
Yamaji just frowned and said, “Shut your hole, man. Yapping about jurisdiction isn’t gonna solve cases.” He stepped into the apartment, and I rushed to follow.
The room was a 10-mat studio with a separate kitchen. The flooring was unnaturally new, suggesting it’d been redone recently, and the bathroom and prefab kitchen were also relatively new, but still, overall, the rent for the place couldn’t have been all that high. This was in no way a room where a princess from Junseiwa Academy would live.
Maybe her family hadn’t been so wealthy after all? Had she come from an ordinary family just like me?
Other than the forensics ID tags placed around the room, at first glance it looked like an ordinary room with only the bare minimum of things. There was no extraneous furniture to give the place any personality, making it seem the residence of a cold minimalist.
But I started to get a bad feeling.
“Huh?” I asked. “I feel like something’s off.”
I took another look around the unusual room, which had no business being unusual.
Something was definitely off. The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot of clothes. But the styles all seemed scattershot, without any unifying theme throughout, and it was impossible to get a sense of the owner’s tastes. The clothes seemed as though they could have been a careless assortment of gifts.
It was then I realized that, even aside from the clothes, the other objects in the room also seemed to lack consistency in the same way. I had missed this upon first glance because as a whole the place seemed tasteful enough, despite the eclectic assortment of things.
I’d never seen a room like this before.
Yamaji had a stern look on his face and also appeared to be in tune with the faint but definite sense of unease I had.
The forensics team had finished, and Reina’s foot was, of course, already long gone.
I tried to sort through everything we’d learned so far.
There were no visible abnormalities in the flooring, and from the luminol test we also knew there were no traces of blood. Maybe the killer had used a sheet of some kind to prevent blood stains. There were also no signs that fingerprints had been wiped from doorknobs or other places the killer would’ve had to touch with his hands.
According to Shota Akiyama’s account in the report, he had received a call from Reina the previous night at 7:11 P.M. while he was in the break room at the convenience store where he worked. It was a blank call. On Reina’s LINE account there had been a 15-second call recorded in the history. But she didn’t pick up even when he called back, which Akiyama thought was strange, so he prepared to go home right away and then apparently headed to her apartment.
He arrived at the apartment at 7:45 P.M., roughly 30 minutes later, and rang the doorbell. However, because she didn’t respond, he let himself in with his copy of the key. He had immediately come across her foot and a bloody knife. He called the police at 7:48 P.M. Five minutes later nearby officers rushed to the scene.
The first to discover Reina Myoko’s abandoned body was a 71-year-old man who walked near that park every day. He was apparently quite shaken up after discovering the grotesque corpse, missing a foot, with its face cut off.
The results of the investigation were still preliminary, and because one leg had been in the water, the estimated time of death had a large window. Based on the postmortem rigidity and the state of decomposition, the murder most likely happened between 6:00 P.M. and 12:00 A.M. during the previous night.
Another critical detail was that the immediate cause of death was a cut to her chest, not the loss of her foot or face. She had been stabbed twice and a fragment of the blade of the murder weapon was found in between two of her ribs. One of the strikes had pierced her heart, which was the fatal wound. A knife that had been left in the apartment had been matched with the stab wounds, but the knife itself was mass produced, so it wouldn’t be easy to determine where it had been purchased.
She appeared to have been bound; there were traces of rope marks all over her body. We also knew from fibers found between her teeth that she had been gagged with a towel or cloth of some kind. In addition, she had a bruise behind her left knee. It had been caused by tight binding, so we believed the perpetrator had applied a tourniquet when cutting off her foot. Also, her calves and the back of her neck had signs of injections. Detailed testing was still pending, but she might have been drugged. Her foot and face both showed signs of vital reactions, so we knew she’d sustained the injuries while she was alive.
The DNA testing was also still incomplete. However, a dental ID card in her place, which led us to her healthcare provider, had revealed that the dental work on the corpse was a perfect match with a procedure Reina Myoko had done to fix a cavity when she was 21.
So much for the facts.
Based on the evidence we had so far, we could conjecture the following:
The perpetrator broke into her apartment around 7:00 P.M. on the previous night, possibly with the intention of killing her. Reina attempted to call Akiyama, but the intruder found out and turned off the phone. He bound her, and after laying out a tarp to keep blood off the floor, he injected her calf and neck with a local anesthetic, and applied a tourniquet to her left knee. He stabbed her in the chest, and as she went into shock, he cut off her foot and removed her face. He then confirmed that she was dead, wiped the place for prints, wrapped up the tarp, left the knife and foot in the apartment for whatever reason, and was gone by the time Akiyama arrived at 7:45 P.M. The killer then abandoned the body on the tetrapods near Odaiba.
What the hell was all this?
It didn’t make any sense. He’d prepped the anesthetic, so it clearly wasn’t a crime of impulse. It did happen quickly, but for a premeditated killing he left a lot of evidence and the execution was also pretty crude.
Did a crime this sloppy really have the mark of the serial killer Masquerade?
I’d read the Masquerade files so many times that I’d nearly stared a hole right through them. All his crimes were so perfectly flawless that it was immediately clear why he hadn’t been caught yet. And more than that, although in a way that was difficult to describe, there was a kind of consistency between all of the crimes.
I realized this might be a little strange to say, but all of his crimes had an…aesthetic.
But there weren’t any signs of his perfectionism or that aesthetic in this crime.
However, some aspects of the shoddy execution did feel intentional.
Yamaji seemed to be thinking the same thing, judging from the way he kept scratching his head, the lollipop still stuck in his mouth.