The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  Yuzuru Tagawa, her boss, as the head of operations, had legitimate reasons for interacting with a senior accountant, but the consistency and timing stuck out as anomalous. Tagawa had been on Bradford’s drive as one of the company executives, had been on her short list due to his link in the chain of Bradford’s hiring, and here in Hayashi’s connections Tagawa showed up again within three days on either side of each of Bradford’s visits to the hostess club.

  Wary of falling prey to the same bias she despised in those who would imprison Bradford, Munroe set down the pen and stared at the spread-out pages. Twenty-twenty hindsight was a beautiful thing but not a divining rod and she didn’t believe in her own ego enough to condemn a life simply because the hunch felt right and the circumstances fit.

  Her thumbs tapped out thought and analysis in irregular beats against the table. Time passed, people came and went, and four times employees she’d previously bantered with in the hallways stopped to say hello, one more inconsistency. She held the same position that Bradford had, yet except for the men in Dillman’s department, they interacted with her without the fear and suspicion they’d displayed toward him.

  The room filled with the lunch crowd. Okada entered without food and, pulling out the chair beside her, kept a healthy distance from both Munroe and the table. He sat, shaggy hair hanging over his thick glasses, posture saying he would have preferred anything other than to be there right now, eyes staring large from behind his lenses as if wanting an explanation.

  Tone flat, he said, “Kobayashi-san told me to talk with you.”

  Munroe turned slightly to see him better. “Did he tell you why?”

  Pleading, as if in having requested him she’d demoted him in a way that working with Bradford never could have, he said, “Michael, you already have the help you need.”

  She said, “There are some things that only you can do.”

  The night air, polluted with light, carried the rumble of evening trains and, with the thinning traffic, less of the city’s sense-dulling fragrance. Munroe left the facility for the far end of the lot, where she’d parked Bradford’s car, and pulled out to the street, watching for patterns in the rearview.

  Things being what they were, trackers would have been placed on the Mira long before they’d been put on the Ninja, and things being what they were, she expected another tail.

  Bradford had known about the trackers. At the least, he had to have suspected. In retrospect, the signs were all there. He’d left his phone behind that night he’d used her as cover to case the hostess club in Kitashinchi, a gesture that had been sweet in the moment, a way of ensuring that work wouldn’t encroach on what little time they had. And they’d gone on foot, supposedly to avoid the hassles of finding parking—lies behind the mask, now just more details rearranged in the maddening clarity of hindsight.

  Headlights filled Munroe’s rearview mirror. A different set of lights than those of the night before, and a much different driving pattern.

  She changed lanes and so did the lights.

  She meandered and the car followed, much closer than the sparse traffic warranted, much closer than anyone following a tracker had any right to be.

  The mental map changed shape again; mind adding, including, connecting through the abstract from hostess club to Bradford to Jiro to the facility.

  She caught two shadows in the front seat, possibly a third in the back.

  Munroe flipped the blinker and, taking her time, took a corner.

  The car kept tight behind through each random turn and double back. The driver made no attempt to hide that he was there or any effort to communicate. He simply was, like a headache that wouldn’t go away, and so Munroe burned time and distance, routing toward high population areas where multiple stop-starts burned fuel faster. The guys behind her with their bigger car would inevitably run out first.

  Lights in the mirror flashed brighter, flooding the Mira’s interior. The hood behind drew close enough that with a touch of speed, or a hint of her brakes, its grille would plow into her.

  Munroe nudged the accelerator.

  The headlights closed the distance and then the Mira jerked, as if it had been hit with a battering ram.

  Munroe toed the gas and the little engine took up speed reluctantly.

  The lights in the rearview trailed behind and then moved in closer.

  The next bump came harder.

  Munroe gripped the wheel, scanning options, running the odds.

  The driver behind her didn’t let off the gas the way he would have if he wanted her out of the car, checking for damage. And he didn’t try to nudge in beside her to push her off the road, into lampposts, barriers, or buildings.

  He wanted her to go faster.

  Making the point, the grille slammed hard into the rear and the Mira juddered. Her options were limited. Brake, and the car behind would plow into her and the Mira would accordion and crush directly into an intersection; speed up, race through these narrow streets that had no stoplights or stop signs, and she invited vehicular homicide or its local equivalent, if a wreck didn’t kill her first.

  The next slam sent Munroe’s chest hard into the seat belt and her neck snapped back. Ahead the roads were empty. No pedestrians, no bikes. She stomped on the accelerator and raced through the intersection blind, bracing for a crunch of metal and death.

  She cleared through, the lights right up behind her.

  Strategy arrived by way of a neon arrow and a parking garage ahead, promising room to maneuver just across the next junction.

  The grille bumped her again.

  Munroe punched the gas and peeled into the intersection. She slammed a foot onto each pedal and pulled the wheel hard. The Mira spun out, little tires crying against the pavement, chassis shuddering under tension it had never been built to handle. The car lurched to a stop, body angled nose to wall, but off the street.

  Munroe threw off the seat belt and dumped out the passenger door.

  The grille with the headlights and shadows sped by. She stared after the car, legs shaking, data sorting, questions tumbling, adrenaline racing.

  The vehicle peeled a corner and the engine noise faded into the distance. The night went quiet and all that remained was her, the Mira, bright vending machines, a group of pedestrians far, far down the street, and the buildings standing in mute witness on either side.

  Munroe opened the driver’s door and stood, eyes on the seat, seeing without really seeing. The boys in the garage with their pipes had been a warning, meant to wound and intimidate. Jiro’s men in her room, with their knives, had been revenge. This had been a setup for an accident, for criminal charges, to remove her from the facility in the same way Bradford had been removed.

  Whatever she’d just escaped tonight would inevitably come back in another guise. This was just the warm-up.

  Munroe reached the facility just after seven and found Dillman in her office, hunched over the desk with papers spread out, pen in hand, marking notations. He glanced up when she entered and, with a bare huff of acknowledgment, returned to what he’d been doing.

  “You spend the night here?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “No after-work activities?”

  “Would have been nice,” he said. “Could use a drink.”

  “How about some sleep?”

  “That, too.”

  A second chair had shown up in the office a few days ago. Munroe spun it toward her and, straddling it backward, sat just off the end of Dillman’s elbow, waiting for him to finish his notes, searching for hints of discomfort that might point out his involvement in the car that had chased her down.

  She rested her chin on the chair and shut her eyes in a long, tired blink. If the enemy’s goal was to wear her down, they were succeeding. Exhaustion was cumulative. She’d managed a few hours stretched out on her hotel floor, waiting for another followup attack that had never come.

  Dillman swung his chair around and handed her several pages.

&nb
sp; Munroe took the documents and scanned them. This was the second dossier he’d completed since she’d given him the fact-checking project. He was working on the third, and at the rate he was going, it’d be a year before he finished everything on the external drive.

  “Are you busy after work tonight?” he said.

  Munroe glanced up. She hadn’t expected another invitation to trouble quite this soon. Stress lined Dillman’s eyes just beneath the lack of sleep, but he smiled, cocky and disarming. She said, “You’re not going soft, are you? Trying to build team spirit with me and all that?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Just stuff I’d like to discuss about these files.”

  “I can make time now.”

  “Better not,” he said. That made it clear that either he wanted to talk to her away from the listening ears and prying eyes or he was part of the plan to get rid of her. The only way to find out was to go.

  “After work, then,” she said, and to set boundaries and test for a motive, added, “Something nearby. I’m short on time.”

  Dillman didn’t hesitate. “I leave at eight.”

  “I’ll meet you out at the front,” she said. “You can follow me.”

  He nodded and went back to his papers. Munroe looked over the dossier and, satisfied that he’d been thorough—at least for a first pass—placed the documents on the desk, patted his shoulder, and left him there.

  She found Okada in his car in the parking lot, as agreed. He’d not asked where they were going or why they were working off-site. He said nothing when Munroe slipped into the passenger seat and continued to say nothing on the five-minute drive to the station.

  When they walked from the car to the ticket machines, Munroe handed him a handwritten address and a small transit map on which she’d highlighted a stop.

  Okada studied both and said, “Where is this? What is this?”

  “We’ll miss the train,” she said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  She waited until they’d boarded and had pushed to the back of the car. “The murdered woman’s parents,” she said.

  Okada looked at her as if he didn’t quite get it, so she took him through her first official day at the office, the interview, the victim’s friend, and the two details no one seemed bothered enough to follow through on: that the woman had had a boyfriend at the facility—presumably someone in upper management—and that she’d never cried for help.

  “The police investigators may have looked into it,” Okada said.

  They should have, if they’d been thorough, but with Bradford in custody as an easy culprit, Munroe had her doubts. Okada was her avenue toward answers because here, her foreignness was a repellent to forthrightness, and kanji, the complicated written language that comprised thousands of logograms, was a code that locked out her natural ability to find pattern in sound.

  Circumstances forced her to trust a partner.

  She’d searched Okada hard for signs of betrayal and had found nothing. If, indeed, he was part of Bradford’s downfall, then he was brilliant beyond her level of skill, and any attempt to thwart him would be fruitless, anyway.

  Okada was a mitigated risk.

  Munroe slid the backpack off her shoulders, pulled out a stack of page-size headshots culled from personnel files, and handed them to him.

  Suspicion that the boyfriend had been the one to murder the woman and, by implication, set Bradford up, didn’t make it true, but based on statistics and Occam’s razor, the boyfriend was a damn good possibility.

  Okada flipped through the pictures.

  With each new face his fingers gripped harder and his lips pressed tighter, until his expression hardened into a facade of nothing. She’d handed him the top executives from Bradford’s list, mixed with mostly random employees as a way to limit bias, and if a picture told a thousand words, Okada held a novella accusing one among his bosses of murder.

  In a near equivalent to turning his back on her, Okada pushed the pictures into her hand and stared out the nearest window.

  The train rocked on in a fit of stops and starts, ever closer to the station where they’d change lines, where Okada could, if he wanted, leave her to sort out this mess on her own. He said, “If I involve myself, will I be in danger? Is my family in danger?”

  He’d seen what had happened to Bradford. By asking, he told her that he knew there was more and that she owed him the truth.

  “I’ve been threatened a few times,” she said.

  The train stopped. They got off to make the connection and Okada held up a hand for her to wait. He pulled out his phone and dialed, and Munroe listened in on half a conversation full of misdirection and sidestepped conflict that concluded with Okada’s wife agreeing to take the children to visit the grandparents for a week.

  He faced Munroe with uncharacteristic directness. “If your assumptions are wrong,” he said, “please keep me away from the repercussions.”

  “If I’m wrong,” she said, “and you never speak of what we do or where we go, then you’ve only ever been an assistant. I’m just a dumb gaijin, after all.”

  “If that’s the best that you can do,” he said. “Tell me, please, who do you suspect in all of this?”

  Munroe shook her head. “I honestly don’t know.”

  Okada nodded. They walked again and Munroe studied the back of his head. He hadn’t asked for her thoughts as a way of learning her mind; he’d asked because he had his own suspect and wanted to compare notes without showing his hand.

  From the station they found a stationery store. Okada purchased a funeral money envelope and Munroe slid several bills inside, the best they could do for a gift without knowing the family’s beliefs and customs.

  They took a tram south into Nishinari, one of Osaka’s twenty-four wards, and walked dirty streets, where drunks slept in the shadows of unkempt buildings. Hand-painted signs in front of stores, restaurants, and doya—inns that rented matchbox rooms and shared showers—catered to the area’s poverty with rock-bottom prices. They passed by cardboard and clapboard and Okada winced for the fifth time in as many minutes.

  Munroe said, “First time here?”

  He nodded.

  Nishinari was different from the rest of the city, from the rest of the country really: home to Japan’s largest red-light district, and to the closest thing the city had to a slum. Nishinari was where the homeless congregated and where most of the day laborers and immigrants lived.

  They found the parents on the third floor of a five-story walkup, sandwiched so tightly between adjacent buildings that laundry drying on the narrow balconies touched the opposite walls. Rust stains marked pitted concrete and from open windows exotic fragrances, spices and herbs and incense, spoke of homes far away.

  At the apartment door Munroe kept against the wall. She wasn’t hiding, per se, merely providing room for conversation to progress without the distraction of a foreign face with its added reason to refuse to talk.

  Okada knocked. Footsteps reverberated through shoddy construction.

  The mother answered and Okada bowed deeply, offering the funeral envelope with sincere condolences.

  The mother let out the slightest gasp of choked-back tears, and when Okada’s hands were free again, he showed her the stack of pictures and asked her if she would look.

  The woman stood in the doorway a long moment, as if trying to decide whether to invite him in or send him away. When she spoke, her Japanese was coarse with accent and suppressed tears.

  “I have friends coming,” she said. “I don’t have any time.”

  Okada bowed again and Munroe nudged his foot before he had a chance to apologize and lose their opportunity forever.

  “Only one question, please,” Okada said. “If you would, help me understand about your daughter’s boyfriend before this horrible event.”

  “Boyfriend,” the woman said, and she spat the word. “He was no boyfriend. An older man, a married man, too good to meet the family, too good for Meilin.”

 
“Did you know him?”

  “Know him?” the woman said. “Boyfriend!” She spat harder, as if the word was an insult. “We didn’t know him. We followed her to get a look at this man. Wasted youth. Wasted beauty, and now she’s dead.”

  Then the tears began to flow.

  Munroe nudged Okada’s foot again.

  He hung his head in solemn sympathy, and when the woman’s crying subsided, Okada offered her the first of the pages in his hand and said, “Was this the bastard who stole your daughter’s youth?”

  Munroe leaned her shoulder into the wall and smiled. Okada had promise. He was learning, reading his quarry, adapting on his feet.

  The woman handed the picture back, and one by one, Okada gave her the others. Time went on forever as the papers shuffled and the woman sniffled and smells from inside the home roiled out stronger with the hint that something might soon start burning.

  “This man,” the woman said, and she shoved a picture back. “This man, this man.” She sniffed. “I have no time right now.” And she started crying again, soft heaving sobs, and she shut the door in Okada’s face.

  Okada stood blinking and, without turning, thrust the page toward Munroe. She took it and glanced down at the face of Yuzuru Tagawa, head of operations, Bradford’s boss.

  —

  The noodle shop was a counter and seven stools behind a wooden sliding door capped with hand-painted paper lanterns. The grill behind the counter, with its wok and boiling pots, made the room hotter than the already hot outdoors. A fan in the corner transferred the heated air from one spot to the next.

  Munroe waited until food had been ordered, the steaming bowls attacked with chopsticks and the meal half consumed, before scratching at the pall of silence that had settled in in the aftermath of their visit.

  The mother’s tearful identification of her daughter’s suitor was a far leap from fingering a murderer, but the implication was there.

  Munroe offered Okada an out: a chance to walk away without the burden of knowing. “The mother could have been wrong,” she said. “Mistaken identity and eyewitness confusion has sent many an innocent man to prison.”