The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  Munroe closed the computer and leaned back against the couch. She tilted her head up and stared at the ceiling.

  A body, missing footage, and a unique murder weapon: These were clearly drawn lines pointing to only one guilty party, an intentional narrative that left no room for doubt or mistake, evidence laid out so neatly that it was too convenient.

  Surely anyone who’d worked in law enforcement for any length of time would find this suspicious. Wouldn’t they?

  Munroe sighed and dropped her head to her knees.

  That type of thinking was a made-for-TV melodrama.

  This was Japan, not the United States, but human nature was universal. Arrest and prosecution were never as much about guilt or innocence as they were about belief, bias, and the potential for winning the case. Easy answers and ready-made culprits made everyone in the justice food chain happy, so why should this be any different just because it was Bradford? He was a foreigner in a highly xenophobic nation—worse, an American, from the country of perceived stupid, violent people—and he was a trained killer who’d taken life many times.

  Munroe searched for calm, the reptile beneath the surface, the indifference that severed emotion from fact and allowed her to plot through morass and confusion, but the animal brain was sleeping. She swore and kicked the coffee table and set the laptop and the fruit bowl rattling.

  This was not who she was or who she was meant to be.

  Emotion was weakness. She’d known this. Lived by this. And yet had so stupidly allowed herself to fall, believing in the fantasy that in giving herself over to what terrified her, she might find peace.

  Instead she’d grown soft and useless. Cut her own legs out from beneath her.

  She stood and walked to the kitchen, ripped the notepad off the fridge, yanked the pen off its accompanying string, and as a way to force clarity, began to sketch. There were three certainties: an innocent man; a dead woman; and an emerging technology that the company was trying to protect.

  If the woman’s murder had only been intended as the ultimate silencing tool, or a theft prevention device, or a subterfuge for some other nefarious plan, it would have been far simpler and cleaner for the killer to dispatch her off-site and avoid whatever effort had gone into making Bradford the guilty party.

  That made Bradford the target, and the dead woman a placeholder, and herself a bystander, helpless without facts.

  Munroe drew the last of a line within a web of circles and set the pad on the counter, staring at the unknowns while the question that would answer all questions fed on them like a parasitic tumor.

  Why?

  In the dark, before dawn, Munroe left for ALTEQ-Bio, detouring to approach from the facility’s blind side, and parked the Ninja far down the road and out of sight.

  She walked, scanning buildings and alleys, and found her observation point on the landing of an outside stairwell across the street, three floors up. The sun rose. Cars pulled into the lot at an increasing trickle. Employees, converging on foot from the nearest train stations and bus stops, entered in straggling numbers. She searched for the killer among them, the liar, the thief, who’d reached a fist into the heart of happiness and ripped it, beating, from her chest.

  Tai Okada pulled into the parking lot before eight.

  Munroe gave him time, waited until the workday was fully under way, and then left her perch and crossed the road for the front.

  At the guard desk she gave the uniform her name, asked for Okada, and stood aside, breathing in the ambience: the smell of paper, ink, cleaning chemicals, and Bradford’s absence. Through the eyes of a killer she traced the lines of the lobby, confirming cameras, gauging security, measuring the activity that passed through the area.

  Even she, chameleon and strategist, would have never chanced bringing a dead woman into this building. The risk of being seen, or of being caught for a second at an odd camera angle that might be missed when deleting evidence, was too high. Whoever had murdered the woman had done the killing inside.

  Okada arrived in wrinkled clothes, as if he’d slept in them or at least had tried. He nodded curtly, his expression unreadable and laced with lack of sleep, and without a word, signed for Munroe’s badge, taking responsibility for her.

  She followed him away from the desk, and when they were out of earshot, Okada said, “Why are you here?”

  “This is the only place I can come for answers.”

  Okada remained rigid, which spoke of fear or anger, and he led her in silence across the wide entry to one of the halls and from there turned into a smaller hall. He opened the first door and motioned her into the tiny waiting area with its two chairs, forlorn coffee table, and a dusty fake ficus tree.

  He closed the door behind them but didn’t offer her a seat.

  “There’s nothing I can do to help,” he said. Layered beneath the words was an undercurrent pleading to be left alone. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  Munroe waved a hand toward the door. “The person who did this is out roaming free, Tai, in your building, under your nose, while you let your friend stand accused for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  Eyes on the floor, in more whisper than voice, Okada said, “You’ll cost me my job.” His words were an explanation of the plea, because in this society employment was never just a job but the core of life and security and identity, and to lose his place was to lose face, and future, and hope.

  “I need to see his office,” she said.

  Okada avoided eye contact. He shifted from foot to foot and then, as if he’d made a decision and had to move quickly for fear he’d change his mind, he reached into one of the folders he carried, pulled out a thumb drive nearly identical to the one he’d given her last night, and thrust it toward her.

  Munroe took it from him cautiously.

  “What’s on it?” she said.

  “Phone conversations,” Okada said. “Noboru Kobayashi, my boss, head of all security, believes Miles Bradford was here working for the American military, to steal the same trade information that he was hired to protect.”

  “What does this have to do with the murder?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Maybe this was a motive.”

  Munroe tucked the thumb drive into a pocket. Bradford would no more have discussed the company’s trade secrets within a building wired to record every word and every movement than he would have provided the evidence to convict himself for murder.

  “You knew I would come?” she said.

  Okada whispered, “He told me you would.”

  The words wrapped around her chest, threatening to stop her heart. “You’ve spoken to him since his arrest?”

  “In the days before,” Okada said. He glanced up and met her gaze. “If something unexpected happened to him, eventually you would ask for me and I should do all I could to help you.”

  “I need to see his office,” she said again.

  “The police have already been there.”

  Munroe stayed silent, expectant. Okada relented. “If I do this, then you won’t return again.”

  She didn’t respond. He watched her, waiting, and when after a moment she still hadn’t given him an answer, he opened the door, peered out, then motioned her through.

  He led a doglegged roundabout route, and Munroe followed, mapping inside her head, searching out cameras until Okada stopped.

  He waited, so she opened the door and faced an empty room—no desk or chairs, nothing but bare carpet and empty walls, as if the mere idea that Bradford had once been here was so offensive that it required obliterating all evidence that he’d existed.

  “The police did this?” she said

  “They took computers and papers.”

  “Where did everything else go?”

  Okada shook his head: didn’t know or couldn’t tell.

  Munroe stepped into the office, her eyes scanning the corner seams and tracking up the walls, her memory searching through e-mail conversations she and Bradford had shared, an
effort to predict what might haunt them when the investigators combed through Bradford’s correspondence.

  Anything could be twisted and made to appear to be something other than what it was. How long, then, before she was hauled in for questioning? Maybe she was already implicated in whatever this was and the authorities simply hadn’t found her yet to arrest her.

  Munroe followed the edge of the room, checking the floor and finally the window frame. If Bradford had told Okada she would come looking, then there were things Bradford expected she’d find, but he wouldn’t have stored them in the one location guaranteed to be searched.

  The hair on her neck rose in animal awareness of being watched, that sixth sense of intuition that kept her alive and that she’d learned to trust without question a long, long time ago. She turned to Okada, who was staring at her from the doorway, and he averted his gaze.

  Munroe walked to him and stood just a little too close.

  Okada took a step into the hallway to maintain personal space and kept his focus just to her right.

  “When he wasn’t here,” she said, “when he wasn’t out wandering and talking to people and doing interviews, where did he spend the most time?”

  “We did a lot of paperwork review in one of the conference rooms.”

  “I need to see it,” she said.

  He led her down the hall and around a corner to another room, slightly bigger. A conference table occupied most of the space, with six wide-back rolling chairs around it. A whiteboard filled the far wall. Narrow windows opened onto a view of the rear parking lot. As she’d done in Bradford’s office, Munroe followed the walls, searching for anomalies and inconsistencies.

  Finding nothing, she tugged the chairs away from the table.

  Okada stepped into the room and shut the door.

  Munroe crawled beneath the table and flipped onto her back. Flush against the decorative edge was a thin drawer. She closed her eyes and sighed, then ran her fingers around the edges, feeling for a crease or line or lock, found a small metal circle.

  To Okada she said, “Did Miles leave you a key?”

  Okada’s feet moved from the door to the table, but he never knelt.

  “He left me nothing,” he said.

  Munroe knocked one of the chairs over, pulled off a caster, and hammered the pin into the drawer. Okada said something, but the noise drowned him out, and she pounded metal against wood until a corner loosened enough for her to get a finger wedged into place. She yanked hard. Wood split and bought her an inch.

  She wiggled another two fingers into the space, wincing against a splinter, and pulled hard against tongue, groove, and glue. She caught the pieces before they hit her head, flipped onto her stomach, and dumped the contents on the floor: manila envelope, external storage drive, and a number of calendar sheets.

  Munroe scooped everything back into what was left of the drawer and pushed it ahead of her, out the opposite side. She stood and then slid into one of the chairs. Okada glanced at her, then at the splintered drawer, and said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  The door opened and closed.

  Munroe shoved the drive into a pocket and opened the manila envelope. Inside was an English version of Bradford’s work contract. She flipped it open to a marker on the sixth page and to a clause underlined and highlighted.

  Munroe read, and then reread, legalese that clearly stated that Bradford, as a security contractor, had the right to hire subcontractors of his own choosing—which explained, possibly, the security badge with Munroe’s name and face clipped to the pages and the official-looking paperwork folded behind it.

  Munroe leaned back and, without really seeing, stared at the wall.

  Bradford could have hired her at any point in time, had even had a badge made and paperwork processed, and had never given her either. He’d seen this coming. This. He’d put this here for her to find. This. This fucking box with its fucking trove of access that said Sorry I wouldn’t let you work when you wanted it, but thanks for coming in to clean up my shit, I hope you can help me out.

  Munroe read the clause once more, and then the conditions under which the corporate heads could terminate any subcontracted arrangements, and then picked up the badge and angled it toward the light. The picture wasn’t recent—it had been taken from Capstone Security files.

  Everything was presented in her male persona.

  Munroe drew in a deep breath and let out the anger.

  Maybe he thought he’d be dead at this point, not arrested, and had meant this as a way to provide answers when she came looking for them.

  She flipped through the calendar pages, single sheets, printed off the Internet or from a calendar program, just blank dated squares into which he’d jotted occasional notes. She worked backward from the day of his arrest and hiccupped over a night, a few weeks back, one of several in which he’d said he’d had to stay late at work and had ended up sleeping at the office.

  Sure.

  If office meant hostess club with an address somewhere in Kitashinchi, Osaka’s high-end nightlife area.

  Munroe flipped to the next page, thoughts growing more vehement, searching for other nights he’d said he’d slept at the office and, according to these calendar entries, hadn’t.

  Hours that he could have spent with her—and hadn’t.

  Truths he could have told—and hadn’t.

  Munroe stacked the loose pages and shoved them, together with the security pass and the contract, back into the envelope.

  He’d locked her out of a job that he’d clearly needed help with, had refused her help and used her anyway, had lied about staying at work overnight, had lied about God only knew what else.

  She kicked the chair beside her and it toppled over.

  Okada opened the door and, seeing her face, stood for a long second, half in the room, half out, and then came inside and shut them in.

  He put a bottle of tea on the table.

  “If you’re thirsty,” he said.

  Far down the street from the facility, in a slice of paid parking beside a konbini, where customers came and went and life rushed on with the steady pulse of city movement, Munroe pulled the helmet on, straddled the bike, and then just sat.

  The contents of the drawer rested against her chest, zipped up in her jacket, bulky and uncomfortable, urging her toward action, toward answers, while inside, deep inside, where air should have been, and knowledge and assurance, was darkness so real it coated her lungs and bled out into her veins, tangible and physical.

  She needed speed, movement, to cleanse her head of the fog. Needed the soothing of violence and pain to shove feeling into the background.

  She closed her eyes.

  Motion and aggression would only provide the illusion of doing something, anything, under the guise of controlling a situation that was chaos.

  There was nothing here to control.

  Air seeped into her lungs and she held the breath, allowing darkness to rise.

  Despair.

  This was the same pit that had swallowed her when those she loved had been tortured to control her, when she’d been forced to stand aside as they suffered, unable to save them. Despair. Because the man who had saved her life, who’d had her back, had turned around and stabbed her in it.

  One moment to the next, reality, gone.

  Munroe brought the bike to life. The machine called her to fly into the arms of fate and once more roll the dice of mortality. She crawled onto the street, staying beneath the speed limit, and followed the most direct route back to the apartment.

  There were still no police, no investigators.

  Munroe opened the door to an empty home that had once felt vibrant and alive in its emptiness and now screamed of abandonment. She carried Okada’s newest thumb drive and the items from the broken drawer into the living room, dumped them on the coffee table, and glared down at them in a bad dream from which she couldn’t wake.

  She inserted the drive into the laptop.


  There were five files—phone conversations, as Okada had said—text files consisting entirely of time stamps and English transcripts.

  Without hearing the actual dialogue she couldn’t know if one of the speakers was indeed Bradford, but even accounting for typos and misspellings it was clear that both participants were fluent in English military jargon. But there’d been no exchange of information or promise of such, only banter that referenced prior conversations and events in the veiled language of two people who knew they being were listened to.

  Bradford had plenty of friends with military connections; that he was spying for one of them was an idea she would have aggressively rejected two hours ago. His lies and obfuscations forced her to reframe what she’d thought she’d known and now left everything open for debate.

  Munroe shut the laptop. Didn’t bother with the drive she’d taken from the drawer. None of it really mattered anymore.

  She shoved the computer into a backpack and followed it with both of Okada’s thumb drives and everything Bradford had left for her at the office. She went into the bedroom. Pulled a couple of outfits off hangers, grabbed a few days’ worth of essentials, and added them to the backpack. She took what she needed from the sink room and turned her back on the rest. Things only slowed her down, became chains to the past or chains to a place, and she wanted none of that.

  She went back through the bedroom and home office for Bradford’s things; took his watch, and the money stashed beneath the bed. She grabbed his favorite shirts and went through his valuables and papers, dumping anything of importance into a second bag. Didn’t matter that he’d speared her in the gut; she wasn’t going to leave anything behind that could be used against him.

  She paused and stared at the drawer that held her knives.

  She picked up the first and flipped the blade open. The handle was warm in her hand, an extension of her body, alive with its own will, as all knives were when they nestled against her skin. Hunting knife, fishing knife, combat blade, switchblade, fixed blade, and balisong, they were all the same: different weights, different needs, different force and movement, but always, the knife was alive.