The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

“What’s the special occasion?”

  “Do we need one?”

  “Now you’re being tricky.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “It’s a maybe.”

  “What if I beg?”

  “I’ll accept groveling.”

  “I’ll be home at eight.”

  She smiled. “See you at eight.” She stared at the clock on her phone. So far out of the city, she’d have to push to get to the apartment in time. This was fate tempting her.

  Munroe shoved the phone into her pocket and pulled the helmet on. Bradford had said another month or two until he finished this contract, but that was wishful thinking. The job would drag on indefinitely, and she could only last so long within the constraints of societal control that accompanied safe predictability, ignore so many of the same stares and glares and fake friendly smiles, visit so many temples and shrines, spend so much time bathing in ancient culture, touch the limits of nuance in flower arranging and so many tea ceremonies, before she lost her goddamn mind.

  Munroe checked behind her and eased back onto the road, giving the Ninja speed slowly, holding back against the addiction that called her to open up again and hurtle, bike screaming, into peace. If Bradford’s goal was to keep her alive until his job was finished, something was going to have to give.

  It would soon.

  And she’d come to wish she’d not been so careless with that thought.

  Munroe knew, even before she parked, that something was wrong. The hints and whispers, like blank spaces on a cluttered canvas, were in the posture of those who headed out of the facility’s front doors, in the way they clustered in groups while walking for the train, in the furtive steps they took, rushing for their cars, as if they shared a common fear.

  Munroe pulled the Ninja as close to the corner as possible, and with the bike rumbling, she called Bradford to let him know she’d arrived.

  She got his voice mail and hung up without leaving a message.

  He’d been late before; slow to answer before.

  Half the windows in the facility reflected the dark of empty offices. Security lights in the parking lot blinked on in the evening light.

  Munroe called again, got Bradford’s voice mail again, hung up again.

  On another night she would have attributed the lack of response to an extended meeting or to the insane work hours that kept him late into evenings and over weekends. But tonight her instincts rose and the texture between beats of silence hinted at more.

  The clock on her phone now said eight o’clock.

  He’d asked her to pick him up at seven-thirty.

  Munroe sent a text and with each passing minute of nonresponse, the slow roil of fear and uncertainty stretched higher, from deep down in the pit of her stomach, where the churning always started before bad news arrived.

  She slid off the bike and stared in the direction of the facility’s doors. Called Bradford again. No answer again.

  Anxiety filled her diaphragm in anaphylactic response to the allergen of experience: a life in which those few she grew close to, that she dared to love, were inevitably torn from her by death’s wretched breath.

  Munroe left her helmet beside the one bungee-corded to the passenger seat and, on autopilot, strode for the doors.

  At the security desk she asked for Bradford.

  Instead of phoning, as was typical, the uniformed guards told her to step aside and wait, then conversed in hushed tones.

  The roiling thickened, suffocating in its prescient awareness that fate had come to snatch away the one she loved once more.

  The guards came to an agreement. They made a call and then, with false reassurance, told her the wait would be but a moment longer.

  Munroe heard the hurried, shuffling footsteps and knew from the beat that they didn’t belong to Bradford. Tai Okada rounded the corner, his face a guise covering agony.

  He didn’t sign for her, didn’t request a temporary badge.

  He motioned to the front doors and said, “Please, let’s go outside.”

  Fight or flight instinct collided with itself, because in the moment she could neither fight nor flee, and she followed silently, treading water with every lurch, drowning in each forward surge.

  Okada stopped ten or more meters down, the building to his back at the midpoint between two windows where there’d be less chance of being overheard. He brushed hair out of his eyes. He fidgeted, his hands seeking each other, then releasing again.

  Munroe stared at him.

  “The police came for Miles today,” he said. “They took him.”

  The words filtered from his mouth into Munroe’s ears, and on hearing them she almost laughed with a heady rush that made her dizzy with hope.

  Bradford was still alive.

  “Why?” Munroe said.

  “A woman has been killed in the building. They say Miles killed her.”

  Elation dissipated into a vortex of convolution and error.

  Given the life that Bradford had led, he wasn’t an innocent man.

  War made murderers out of honest men—proclaiming guiltless by law what the conscience would later bear in shame—but there was innocence and then there was innocence, and if Bradford had targeted a kill, then the body would have disappeared and the evidence scattered and never found.

  Munroe took a step into Okada’s personal space, forcing him to look up at her, and like a five-year-old on constant replay, she said, “Why?”

  “They found the body this morning,” Okada said. He stepped to the side, out from under her glare. “She was killed this morning, early.”

  The answer was a nonanswer, information without connection, but the hair on Munroe’s arms rose in recognition nonetheless. Bradford had received an early morning call and because of that she’d taken him in an hour ahead of his routine. “Tell me everything you know,” she said.

  Gaze focused on the sidewalk, Okada said, “I cannot.” He twitched with the nervous right-left of a man expecting to be caught, questioned, and accused. Munroe measured the unspoken.

  If Okada had known nothing, or he’d had nothing more to offer, he would have framed his statement differently. She took a step back and then walked away.

  Munroe waited down the street in the dark, watching the facility entrance and the parking lot as the hours ticked on and Okada’s few sentences played a taunting torment inside her head. She drained the battery on her phone searching for an idea of what she might be up against if a murder charge was now her enemy.

  She was killed this morning, early. They say Miles killed her.

  The police came for Miles today. They took him.

  Unless Bradford’s phone had been confiscated the moment he set foot inside the facility, whatever happened had happened early enough that he could have called to warn her of the shit storm headed their way.

  He could have called and asked her for help in getting a lawyer.

  He could have called to let her know that he wasn’t fucking dead.

  In the dark she waited, poison spreading, until nearly midnight when Okada left the building. He took his time beneath the lights, finding his keys, unlocking the car, sorting through papers with the dome light on, before turning the ignition and pulling out onto the road.

  Munroe didn’t bother with stealth when she followed. She wanted him to know she was there in the same way he’d allowed plenty of time to ensure that she’d seen him. He drove carefully, yielding fully at intersections, stopping for yellow lights, driving at just the speed limit on the two-lane thoroughfare that led out of the city, hemmed in on both sides by seemingly solid lines of apartments and businesses, restaurants, shopping centers, wooden houses, and the occasional rice paddy, glaring in its anomalous luxury of comparably wasted space.

  Okada turned off the main road, traveling along curves and hills, until at last he pulled over into a tight slice of gravel beside a takoyaki shack, its telltale octopus-embossed red-paper lanterns hanging dark and foreboding from the eaves.r />
  Munroe remained on the bike while he walked to the vending machines, lit brightly against the night, and purchased and retrieved a drink.

  He continued beyond the shack for the seating area.

  She slipped off the seat and, helmet in hand, followed.

  The fragrance of starch and oil and spices still hung in the air, and ambient light from the vending machines kept the screened-in porch, like the shack and the lanterns, from plunging into total darkness. She found Okada on the far end of the bench that lined the nearest of two picnic tables, staring at the can of beer resting between his hands.

  He didn’t look up when she sat across from him.

  “Do you come here often?” she said.

  She spoke in Japanese, absorbed over the past two months, as she had when she’d worked with him in Bradford’s office, because information would flow easier if Okada didn’t have to sieve betrayed confidences through the filter of a language he didn’t speak fluently.

  Eyes on the beer, he said, “My wife has family nearby. We come with the children for dinner sometimes. It’s a quiet place and you can watch the road.”

  As if to make his point, a set of headlights lit up the shack in passing and then silence swallowed them again.

  Okada took a long swig of Asahi, set the can back on the table, and reached for a pocket. He slid a thumb drive in Munroe’s direction.

  “Surveillance footage,” he said. “The body was discovered just after seven. The police were there by seven-thirty. They arrested Miles at eight and took him right away. You can see for yourself and make your own conclusions.”

  She’d dropped him off at seven.

  “Do you know where Miles is?” Munroe said.

  “No.”

  “Where was he when they came for him?”

  “In his office, sitting at his desk.”

  “Just waiting for them to take him?”

  Okada glanced up with the oddest smile—curious, not happy—and she took that as a yes and ran the numbers, the timing.

  “Did he know?” she said. “Was he aware of the body?”

  Okada’s odd smile shifted into a stare of bafflement.

  “Assuming he wasn’t the murderer,” Munroe said. “Did he know?”

  “When the victim was discovered, he was also called.”

  “You were with him?”

  Okada nodded.

  “Step by step,” she said, “describe his reaction exactly as you remember.”

  Okada brought the can to his mouth, took a long swallow. Then, staring at his hands, thumbnails tracing lines in the can’s sweat, he said, “The stairway door was blocked open, there were already others in the stairwell. We walked down together to reach them and when we rounded the midpoint we could see the victim below. Miles stopped and stared at the body, then continued slowly. He knelt beside her and studied her, but didn’t write notes or take any pictures. Then he stood, looked at me, said he would be in his office, and walked up and out.”

  “That was it? Just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  Munroe said, “Who accused him?”

  Okada glanced at the drive on the table. “There is evidence,” he said.

  “Evidence or not, the police arrested him almost immediately. For it to have happened that quickly in a building of several hundred potential suspects, someone had to have pointed them to him.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Does anyone know?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “It would be very difficult.”

  She let that line of thinking drop. In his very Japanese way he’d just told her no.

  Okada said, “Have you known Miles a long time?”

  “I know him better than most people.”

  “He’s good at what he does?”

  “Very,” she said, and left off the part about what it meant to work private security in war zone countries.

  “Most people at work see him as incompetent,” Okada said. “He wasn’t welcome, and that made him enemies.”

  “He’s not incompetent.”

  “An illusion,” Okada said, “also fueled by gossip and rumor, because his presence shames us, highlighting our failed effort. I was with him almost every day. I saw how he worked. Smart and very professional in a non-Japanese way.” Okada’s face rose to meet hers and, for the first time that evening, he made deliberate eye contact. “Maybe too professional,” he said.

  Munroe read through the implications, hating the dance of avoidance and Okada’s inability to simply say what he suspected.

  “You are also professional,” Okada said.

  “That what Miles told you?”

  Okada looked out into the dark, his lips pressed together in a barely audible hum. “You know my position before Miles came? My responsibility?”

  Munroe shook her head.

  “On-site security,” he said. “That’s my department.”

  “Which half is that?”

  “He had a nickname for me. He called me Feeb, you know what it means?”

  Munroe nodded. “You were demoted because of him?”

  “Promoted,” Okada said. “I did assistant work, but not as an assistant, more as a guide through the language and culture. In exchange I learned from him about how we might improve our operations, hands-on, daily learning. We talked often. Mostly work, sometimes personal things, you could even say like friends. That changed after you spent the day at the office. He told me you were very helpful, but he became private after that. It’s not my place to say. I assume he learned something and was afraid to speak of it.”

  Munroe studied the table. Beneath the pocked and cigarette-burned plastic cloth her fingers picked and pulled at her cuticles while threads of betrayal wound between fear and confusion, pushing her toward anger. She’d offered Bradford her help. Every single day, begging for something to do, and without fail he’d turned her away. Yet he’d used her that day she’d come to his office and never allowed her to know it.

  She shoved against the hurt, trying to force the emotion into silence, but it wouldn’t stay; she sought detachment and couldn’t find it; she turned her thoughts toward Okada’s implications, toward the unanswered questions, but they rebelled, running back injured.

  Munroe exhaled imaginary smoke and studied an invisible point above Okada’s head, then picked up the thumb drive.

  “Thank you for this,” she said. “Why take the risk?”

  Okada emptied the last of the Asahi and tossed the can into a nearby garbage can. Without looking at her, without answering, he stood and returned to his car.

  Time passed in the dark while the poison thickened, and when at last sitting and stillness became their own destructive force, Munroe returned to the bike and then to Bradford’s apartment. She’d expected to face a crime scene but found the hallway empty. Eventually the police would come, they’d have to come, violating Bradford’s home in a search for motive and corroborating evidence, but she’d be gone by then.

  She unlocked the door to quiet orderliness and the familiar fragrance of Bradford’s cologne lingering in the air, mixing the surreal into something only half-true. Munroe shut herself inside, closed her eyes, and leaned against the door. Then slammed the back of her head into the metal frame.

  The pain was distraction, a break from the denial and disbelief that threatened to swallow her whole. She’d spent years running from the hope of happiness because in emptiness she had nothing to lose. She’d stayed away from Bradford to protect him, and now, having finally given in and tasted peace, here they were again, unable to escape the orbit of loss.

  Munroe crossed the hall for the bedroom and paused in the doorway, mocked by the unmade bed, the clothes on the floor, the armoire doors still half open as Bradford had left them, in a rush to get to work after that early-morning call: fate’s cruel laughter at what was, and what wasn’t, and what had possibly never been.

  She grabbed the laptop f
rom beneath the pillow and took the computer to the living room. She inserted the thumb drive and found surveillance footage as Okada had promised. She watched through multiples of what were mostly chronologically ordered viewpoints of the same thirty-minute time frame, but only when the body was removed from the stairwell did she begin to understand.

  The victim was one of the Chinese women that Bradford had pointed out over lunch. Tightened around her neck, presumably the weapon that had killed her, was a belt that Munroe would have recognized at any distance, no matter how grainy the footage. She paused the clip and leaned closer, staring at the black-and-white pixilated strip of leather and gaudy buckle. She traced her thumb against the image, replaying what Okada had said, correlating Bradford’s actions with what showed on-screen.

  Bradford had known he was trapped from the moment he saw the body. Even if he’d run, he never would have gotten off the island, and running would have only confirmed his guilt. So he’d waited for the police to come.

  And never called.

  Munroe stood and, fists clenched, strode to the bedroom.

  She threw open the armoire doors and tore through Bradford’s things.

  He’d obviously not been wearing the belt when he was arrested, but it wasn’t here either. God, he would never be that stupid.

  She slammed the doors and returned to the couch, closed her eyes and rubbed her palms over them. She walked backward through the days, attempting to account for the last time she’d seen the belt—a couple of weeks, perhaps—hating that she’d never thought to question where it was.

  She went through the footage again, searching for clues in what remained invisible. The murder itself had taken place off camera: a body left behind with only the smallest glimpse of the killer’s hand. Nothing available in the moments before or the moments after, no lead-in angles from other cameras that would give a view of who this person was, and the only way for that to have happened was for the footage to have been tampered with.

  There was a limited number of people who had access to the security systems, but Bradford was one of them and she would place money on it having been his clearance that had accessed the files.