Chapter 15: The Deceased, ABB
The only thing Kagehara Tetsuya could be sure of was that Yomikawa taking her own essays and activity reports wasn’t meant to increase the chances of him being exposed.
If she had wanted that, she could have simply not left her phone behind. While he could have claimed the phone was stolen and then tried to recover the number and social media accounts as "Yomikawa Tsuko," the chat history would have been lost, making exposure far more likely.
Therefore, Yomikawa taking her essays and activity reports was a precaution against him, but what exactly she was guarding against, he hadn’t figured out yet.
His intuition told him it might be related to Lord Mask-Taker, but intuition wasn’t always reliable.
Leaving the basement, Kagehara Tetsuya took a quick look around the second floor. Besides the master and secondary bedrooms, there were two guest rooms and several functional rooms. Yomikawa, of course, wasn’t there. A more thorough inspection could wait, so Kagehara Tetsuya returned to the first floor.
He went to the kitchen first, grabbed a few garbage bags, and spread them out on the coffee table. Then he moved the black handbag onto the bags.
Fortunately, no blood seeped out.
Next, he fully unzipped the black handbag. Inside, the head was facing downward, with a fair amount of hair.
Kagehara Tetsuya grabbed the hair and slowly lifted the head out.
When he saw the face, now gray and lifeless, he froze.
Hasebe Koichi.
What was going on?
At the inn, Matsushita Makoto had shown him a photo of Hasebe Koichi and told him that this was the guest from room 216, who had mysteriously disappeared.
"Could the police have made a mistake?"
Kagehara Tetsuya placed Hasebe Koichi’s head on the coffee table and sat down on the sofa, deep in thought.
"That shouldn’t be the case. Even the most incompetent police wouldn’t make a mistake when confirming the identity of a victim."
He didn’t know how the police had determined that the body in room 216 didn’t belong to Hasebe Koichi, but since they had specifically investigated his whereabouts, they must have had solid evidence to support their actions.
"Could Hasebe Koichi have been killed afterward?"
"If that’s the case, why did Yomikawa bring his head here? And where is the head from the body in room 216?"
Thinking this, Kagehara Tetsuya turned on his phone’s flashlight again and crouched by the coffee table, prying open Hasebe Koichi’s eyelids. It was possible to estimate the time of death from a severed head, but without miotic or mydriatic agents, he could only roughly infer the time of death by observing the cornea and lips.
It was currently 3:20 AM. He noticed that Hasebe Koichi’s corneas had already clouded over, and his lips had begun to shrivel. This indicated that Hasebe Koichi had definitely been dead for over five hours—meaning he had died before 10:20 PM last night.
Yomikawa had committed the crime in room 216 at 9:30 PM, then left the inn between 9:50 and 10:05 PM. At that time, she had a severed head that urgently needed to be disposed of. And in that situation, she killed another person?
Kagehara Tetsuya found it hard to believe because it didn’t make sense. If Yomikawa had wanted him to help dispose of the head, she should have left both heads here. After all, leaving one head was enough to prove that a murder had taken place.
So, if she had killed two people, there should be two handbags on the coffee table right now.
With this in mind, Kagehara Tetsuya laid the head flat and carefully smoothed out the flesh around the neck wound. He had personally handled the neck of the body in room 216 and remembered certain distinctive areas where he had put extra effort into the cuts.
From his perspective, at least two of the wounds on Hasebe Koichi’s head matched those on the body in room 216. If this was a coincidence, it was far too convenient.
If he were to perform two dismemberments, he was confident he could create identical, indistinguishable wounds—but this was a skill he had honed through his experiences with Pit Bulls.
Judging from the marks on Hasebe Koichi’s head, Yomikawa definitely didn’t possess such skill.
That left only one explanation.
"Hasebe Koichi’s head was cut from the body in room 216."
"But the police said the body wasn’t Hasebe Koichi’s, and that Hasebe Koichi had mysteriously disappeared."
"The body and the head don’t belong to the same person."
If his judgment was correct, perhaps Hasebe Koichi had also undergone a face swap.
Kagehara Tetsuya touched his own neck. According to the legend of Lord Mask-Taker, his hair would swap with Yomikawa’s the day after tomorrow. If he were killed and decapitated at that point, it would create the same bizarre situation he was seeing now.
"No wonder, no wonder..."
No wonder Yomikawa had cut off the head of the corpse. If she hadn’t, it would have practically been a confession to the police that the legend of Lord Mask-Taker was real.
"Hasebe Koichi and the other person’s hair had clearly already been swapped."
Kagehara Tetsuya pondered for a moment. The real Hasebe Koichi was probably still alive. The person in front of him was someone who had swapped faces with Hasebe Koichi. He had checked into the inn wearing Hasebe Koichi’s face, which was why the name registered in room 216 was Hasebe Koichi—just like how he was now disguised as Yomikawa Tsuko.
"If we separate the face, body, and identity, it becomes much clearer."
"Let’s say Hasebe Koichi is A, and the other guy is B. If we separate the face and body, before the face swap, the two were AAA and BBB."
"The first A represents the face, the second A represents the body, and the third A represents the identity, or consciousness, or soul. After the face swap, the two became BAA and ABB."
"BAA is Hasebe Koichi, and ABB is the deceased. You just need to look at the third letter to figure it out."
"So, from the police’s perspective, Hasebe Koichi mysteriously disappeared from the inn. But in reality, this disappearance never happened. Because Hasebe Koichi never went to the inn—it was ABB, wearing Hasebe Koichi’s face, who went there."
Thinking this, Kagehara Tetsuya couldn’t help but laugh. The clueless Japanese police didn’t know Lord Mask-Taker was real. Did they even stand a chance of solving this case?
"In any case, Hanako’s second wish has already come true, so the face swap between the deceased and Hasebe Koichi happened at least four days ago."
"Yomikawa specifically cut off the head because she was afraid the police would discover Lord Mask-Taker was real. That means at least Hanako’s sixth wish hasn’t come true yet—their DNA, fingerprints, and other characteristics haven’t been swapped. Otherwise, there would be no need to cut off the head."
Thinking this, Kagehara Tetsuya shook his head again.
"No, it’s more likely that Hanako’s fourth wish hasn’t come true yet. If the two had already swapped bodies, cutting off the head would be a terrible idea. Because once a DNA test was conducted, it would reveal something that defies common sense."
To give a simple example: in ten days, his appearance and body would completely transform into Yomikawa Tsuko’s. But if his fingerprints and DNA hadn’t yet been swapped with hers, and he were killed, the police wouldn’t be able to identify him. If they ran a DNA test, they would extract Kagehara Tetsuya’s DNA from a female body.
They might even extract a Y chromosome.
Similarly, if Hasebe Koichi and the deceased had already swapped bodies, the results of a DNA test and the identification of the body by family members might not match.
"That means the real Hasebe Koichi is also in danger."
Kagehara Tetsuya sat back on the sofa, muttering to himself.
"If the real Hasebe Koichi isn’t killed before the fourth wish comes true—that is, within ten days of the face swap—the fourth wish will arrive as scheduled."
"At that point, the real Hasebe Koichi would become BBA. In the eyes of the police, it would be as if a dead person had come back to life."
"And if the sixth wish comes true, it would be irreversible. By then, Hasebe Koichi, aside from his self-awareness, would have completely transformed into B, including his DNA."
"For Yomikawa, such a person must be eliminated, and she doesn’t have much time left."
Thinking this, Kagehara Tetsuya suddenly frowned.
"That means, after the sixth wish comes true, my brain will become Yomikawa’s brain."
He clearly knew that his brain was missing something compared to a normal person’s. Academically, people like him were called psychopaths.
So, if his brain changed, wouldn’t he gain the emotions that normal people have?
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