The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  Munroe stood. “Thank you for your time,” she said.

  Nakamura shook her hand. “It’s good that you are here,” he said. “You do have support among the executives. Please visit with me again, please keep me informed. I’m very interested in following your investigation.”

  Of course he was.

  Munroe didn’t have the luxury of catching catnaps on the trains to and from work, or stealing sleep on her desk during breaks like most of the facility employees. She arrived earlier, left later, and then spent hours in the hotel room afterward assembling clues and pieces of the puzzle onto the oversize map along the wall, and perhaps that was why, in spite of thinning traffic, she was halfway to the hotel before she spotted the tail.

  Munroe made mirror and blind-spot checks, then switched lanes. The tail, forty meters back and separated by three cars, waited until the last minute to cut over. The blue and white signage of a Lawson called out from down the road, so Munroe slowed and pulled off into the konbini’s minuscule parking area. She carried the helmet inside, bought food she didn’t want, and browsed the magazine rack, watching the street from the window.

  She started up again. Several blocks down the lights were back.

  Exhaustion tweaked at her nerves, a warning against her own weakness.

  She changed directions, routing into the thick of city residential streets. Better to get this over with on her own territory, out of sight of the masses, away from where police would be called and she’d wind up in a worse place than where she was now.

  Munroe turned off for Bradford’s apartment.

  She parked underground, took the stairs up, and violated the sense of cleanliness by wearing her boots inside. Her knives were in the hotel room in Bradford’s bag, so the stash in the kitchen drawer became the surrogate, and with the blades clenched tight, she stalked back to the hallway, slid down to the floor, and waited there.

  Time ticked on; the adrenaline settled. She startled awake with the first touch of daylight and kept motionless, breathing and listening. Then she stood, walked softly to the door, and took a look through the fish-eye, into an empty outside corridor, questioning her own memory, her own judgment.

  The car hadn’t been a trick of sleep deprivation or the product of chasing shadows in the dark. She’d been followed. That had been her purpose for detouring to the apartment, but the attack she’d waited for had never come.

  She left the building through the emergency stairwell and looped around the block. Eyes darting about the garage interior, she sought out the imagined, hallucinated threat. She continued toward the Ninja, parked exactly where and how she’d left it. She stared at the machine, its flaming-red fairings reflecting slivers of daylight from the entrance.

  And then, temper rising, she stomped back up the stairs to the apartment, grabbed a bag of tools off the shelving that lined the home office, and carried the weight back down to the garage. She worked the Allen wrench and screwdrivers, popping pushpins and loosening screws and bolts to detach the right fairing, pulled it off, and shone a flashlight into the belly of the machine.

  The first tracking device didn’t surprise her. She’d suspected as much on the first night she’d been attacked. The young men with pipes couldn’t have been a result of Jiro hunting for Alina, which left a tracker as the only other way an ambush could have been laid out in advance at an address no one knew.

  She’d been careful since, keeping the battery out of her phone, making sure that the bike was far away from where she slept, from where she worked.

  But the second tracker, that was a surprise.

  Munroe wiggled closer, allowing her fingers to confirm the story told by her eyes, then sat back on her heels, processing. Reconfiguring context and motive. Searching for connections in the unrelated, for ways the data touched without touching.

  She left the trackers where they were, same as she had when she’d suspected the first. She replaced pins and screws and fasteners, then dropped the tools into the bag and hauled them back upstairs.

  In the bedroom she grabbed Bradford’s keys off the hook—the same place they’d been since the day she’d dropped him off expecting to pick him up that evening. Munroe returned to the garage, to Bradford’s Mira, tossed her backpack on the passenger seat, and plugged the key into the ignition.

  With the engine running, her arms draped over the steering wheel and her chin resting on her hands, she stared at the Ninja. She’d been operating on the logic that whoever had killed the Chinese woman had done so to set Bradford up—that he’d been collateral damage.

  Still true, but now on a deeper, murkier level.

  If Jiro or his men had followed her last night, the goal would have been to kill her, not track her. This turn in events wasn’t Jiro any more than the boys with their pipes had been Jiro.

  Collateral damage, yes.

  There were two sets of players at the facility, different factions playing cat-and-mouse, and now she, like Bradford, was the ball of yarn, tangled up and caught in the middle.

  With the belt buckle in one hand and the phone in the other, Munroe punched in the number to Bradford’s lawyer’s office, one deliberate jab at a time. Three days of calls, all left unanswered and unreturned, and now the rings dead-ended into the same nasal voice offering yet another derisive promise to pass on a message.

  Munroe shoved a pen between her teeth to force a smile and channeled venom into a sweet cocktail of sugar and blackmail.

  “I know he’s in the office and he knows who I am,” she said. “If he doesn’t take this call, I will personally see that he is removed from the case for ineptitude. I guarantee intense publicity and ample shame for the entire firm. Pass that message along, I’ll wait.”

  The hold was less than three minutes.

  The lawyer said, “Your demands are inconvenient.”

  Munroe reinterpreted the lack of directness into what the lawyer had actually meant: I’m authorized to speak with you, but I don’t want to.

  Bradford had a good team in his corner. They would have vetted the lawyer, made sure this was the right man for the job, but in the time drop of his first sentence, Munroe questioned everyone’s judgment.

  She said, “Of all people, you should want to speak with me most. I’ve lived with your client over the past few months, I’ve known him for years, and I was with him in the morning, right before the murder.”

  “Perhaps in the future,” the lawyer said.

  His voice dripped with condescension, the type of derision that sat tall on the assumption of guilt, looking self-righteously down from the high horse of disdain at those who were inferior by association.

  Munroe pinched the bridge of her nose and set aside pride and indignation for the sake of strategy. Doing this over the phone was the equivalent of gifting plans to whatever digital ears listened in, and that was always the assumption, but she only had one chance. Conspiratorial and inclusive, redundant for the sake of trying to glean facts, she lowered her voice to a near whisper and said, “I have information for you, information you want. How important is the murder weapon to this case?”

  “This is a question I shouldn’t answer.”

  I don’t want to answer.

  “Was the woman dead before the belt was used?”

  “The belt was the murder weapon,” the lawyer said. “The office is busy, there are appointments. You can call again another time.”

  Details at last.

  “The victim never cried for help,” Munroe said. “Are you aware of how difficult it is to get a loop over someone’s head when they’re struggling and then cinch it tight enough to choke them? This isn’t something that happens in a second or even ten seconds, and it’s nearly certain to leave traces of evidence as the victim claws for life.”

  “The victim was intoxicated,” he said, but with just enough of a hitch that she knew she had his attention, if for but a moment.

  “Drugs? Alcohol?” she said. “Completely incapacitated?”

 
“The toxicology report is out of the office.”

  I don’t want to answer.

  Munroe said, “Have you considered the possibility that someone other than your client drugged and killed that woman?”

  “You are wasting my time,” the lawyer said, now with an edge of anger. “This is the Japanese system, not the American system. We don’t make a joke of our courts with a circus of excuses, staging a show to sway an audience. The judges examine the evidence and weigh its merit, and there is much evidence against my client. This panel is no friend to arrogance. Without accepting responsibility, without remorse, my client will suffer.”

  Munroe said, “You haven’t spoken with your client yet, have you?”

  “Until the investigation is complete, I am limited.”

  No, I haven’t seen him, much less spoken with him.

  Without anything resembling attorney-client privilege, that was just as well. Munroe said, “If your entire strategy revolves around negotiating for leniency, you might as well convict him yourself.”

  “My client refuses to speak,” the lawyer said. “This has created difficulties at all levels of the investigation. Unless he cooperates, he will experience the full weight of the law, and I cannot do my job in the shadow of such senselessness.”

  The words were like cleansing air.

  There would have been long strings of interrogations spread between lack of sleep, minimal food, and meaningless offers of mercy if only Bradford would tell them what had happened. But he hadn’t. Hadn’t even given them material to account in their own words what they claimed he’d said or admitted, and without even an interrogation summary, the prosecution would be forced to rely entirely on evidence.

  “I’ve been patient,” the lawyer said, “but this time has not been useful.”

  She said, “The only thing connecting your client to the victim, other than circumstantial evidence, is the murder weapon, but there’s no proof that the belt was his. I have his belt in my possession.”

  There was a pregnant pause. “You have what?”

  “I have his belt. And why would a nonaddict willingly get high that early in the morning, much less while at work in a company that treats its employees as potential criminals? Did the investigators ever search for evidence that your client purchased or had access to the intoxicant in her system?”

  “His DNA and fingerprints are all over the murder weapon.”

  “Not just his,” she said. “Also others’.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “He didn’t wear the belt into the office that morning,” she said. “You haven’t looked at the security footage, have you?”

  The lawyer’s voice was less arrogant now. “Without a confession, the facts surrounding the murder weapon bear more weight.”

  “I’m offering you another way to look at the evidence,” Munroe said. “You want to win? You should accept my help.”

  A duplicate belt wasn’t enough to set Bradford free, and the footage of him going without the belt for those weeks prior to the murder wouldn’t do much, either. These were doubts, insidious doubts, to taint the certainty of evidence. Getting the lawyer to question his own bias was a start. Getting the investigator and the prosecutor to do the same would be a whole other challenge.

  Munroe searched the wall, with its web of interwoven connections and lies, seeking not to eliminate but to include, hunting for the larger picture hidden in the abstract. Hiring an outsider had created a rift in company leadership. On which side, she wondered, did the person who’d murdered that woman fall? Perhaps neither, though it continued to defy reason that a professional thief, undercover and entrenched, would have willingly brought such a level of scrutiny into the workplace as part of removing Bradford.

  That was an inconsistency that just wouldn’t let go.

  Munroe left the hotel for the facility. She was late to work but erratic hours and unpredictability were good for the opponent’s soul. She was altruistic in that way.

  Noboru Kobayashi’s assistant nodded politely when Munroe entered the anteroom, and she ushered Munroe to a small sofa to wait. Of all the evils on the map of possibilities inside her head, coming to the head of corporate security was the least of them.

  The wait dragged on past twenty minutes. When the door opened, two young men from the NSA side of things stepped out. Seeing her, their expressions darkened with accusation and mistrust and they walked quickly through.

  Voice soft and bow low, the assistant motioned Munroe inward.

  Kobayashi stood, offering more of that same overstretched welcome that he’d proffered the first time. “Have a seat,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m between appointments and only have a few minutes.”

  “I’ll be quick,” Munroe said. “I need an additional liaison for three days. I’d like Tai Okada, if you can spare him.”

  Kobayashi remained standing and his face drifted into a scowl of contemplation. “My departments are already short-staffed,” he said. “This would deprive me of another man we already don’t have.”

  Munroe stood, as if his objection had settled things and now she would go, and offered the closest thing she had to a threat. “I understand completely,” she said. “Knowing how management feels about outsiders, I wanted to bring the issue to you first. If you haven’t got the manpower, I’ll subcontract out.”

  Kobayashi’s scowl softened. “Please sit,” he said, and when Munroe returned to her chair, he returned to his. “I appreciate you coming to me first,” he said. The rest of him said that she’d backed him against a wall and he was none too pleased. “With the way my departments have been separated from the work you do, focus has been divided. The liaison allows us to pull together and coordinate. We can find a way. Three days?” he said.

  “Hopefully not more.”

  “Additional personnel, I can manage,” he said. “Another department head is more complicated. You originally said you preferred to work with someone other than Okada.”

  “I had thought starting fresh would be the better option,” she said. “That was a judgment error.”

  “I see,” Kobayashi said, though clearly, more than anything, he was trying to see what true meaning lay behind the request and how he might sidestep unforeseen complications.

  “Things have been going well in your integration?” he said.

  “Very much so.”

  “You’re making progress in the work?”

  Now he was just fishing.

  “Yes,” she said, and stood. “When should I expect Okada?”

  Kobayashi eyed her, steely. “If I can make that arrangement,” he said, “he should be available tomorrow.”

  He walked with her to the hall and stayed in the doorway, watching her go, just as he’d done on her first visit, and the pieces on the mental diagram shifted slightly to the right, making space for new data.

  Munroe took the stairs to the mezzanine and found Dillman waiting at the base, arms crossed, eyes tracking her progress as if he’d come there knowing exactly where and when to find her.

  Munroe flashed her badge, RFID chip included. “Are you tracking me?”

  Dillman handed her a large, thick envelope. “Perks of the job,” he said. “Saves time. How’s Kobayashi-san?”

  “He sends his regards and says don’t fuck anything up. What’s this?”

  “The after-work stuff you wanted, redone by me.”

  Munroe stopped, cocked her head, and smirked. “Really?”

  “I’m not even a fish,” he said, and handed her another envelope, this one thinner. “Everything I could pull on your accountant friend, Nobu Hayashi.”

  Munroe glanced down at the envelopes. Hayashi, by inviting her out to a hostess club, had made himself the prime suspect as the English speaker who’d been with Bradford the night the belt was stolen. That, in turn, made every one of his connections within the facility potential accomplices.

  “Anyone else know you’re looking at this?” she said.

 
“Sent the night shift out for a break at two this morning,” he said, “Cleaned the queries out of the log files when I was finished.”

  Munroe sniffed and wiped away fake tears. “You make me proud.”

  “Don’t get used to it,” Dillman said, and turned to go. Over his shoulder he added, “And find someplace else to look through those because I’m still using your office.”

  —

  This early in the day, the break room was quiet. Several faces glanced up when Munroe entered and then went back to whatever they were reading or eating. Two men, foreheads on the table, eyes buried on their arms, missed her arrival entirely.

  She took a chair at the back, pulled the pages out of the thicker envelope, and looked them over. Nothing jumped out as incongruent. The value in the new data would be as a control against the originals, a way to spot anything that might have been withheld the first time around, and the originals were at the hotel.

  Munroe emptied the thinner envelope, although thinner was relative.

  Dillman had been thorough, or perhaps passive-aggressive, giving her fifty-eight pages of tiny text and columns, sixty days of dates and time stamps and data tables, phone logs, the to–from of e-mail headers, browser history, and the goldmine of RFID matches on every employee that clocked the same location as Nobu Hayashi for more than thirty seconds a hit.

  Pen in hand, Munroe started at the beginning, marking and notating, flipping forward and then back again, redacting first what she knew to be unimportant and then what she assumed to be of little consequence, searching for whatever patterns might be buried within the extraneous. An hour in, she stopped and drew a circle around Yuzuru Tagawa’s name.