The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  She kicked him again, letting frustration loose, and then stopped and glared. She took a breath and glanced around, taking stock of yet another mess.

  Her backpack was on the bed, its items strewn.

  Munroe stepped over the broken jaw for the bathroom.

  She washed the knife in the sink, rinsed blood spatter out of her hair, tore off her shirt, and replaced it with one from the backpack.

  She went over the room with a washcloth, wiping down every surface, including—especially—the vase on the floor by the knife man’s head.

  With the washcloth wrapped around the knife hilt, Munroe dipped the blade into knife man’s blood and smeared the blood across the shirt of the broken-jawed man. She would have flicked spatter patterns, too, if it wouldn’t have complicated her own exit. She placed the knife into broken jaw’s hand, wrapped his fingers around the hilt, and clenched his fist in her fist for a good set of prints. She left the blade out of reach beneath the desk, stuffed the washcloth and the bloodied shirt into her backpack, then packed up the last of her belongings and stepped out into the hall and shut the door.

  The hotel had no security cameras—nothing but the desk clerk’s word to document that she’d been present. By leaving these men alive, she could flip the burden, could be spared living on the run as a murder suspect while trying to solve Bradford’s problem, and worst case—if everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong and then worse—they could claim she’d struck first and they’d retaliated in self-defense. But these were criminals in her hotel room.

  Someone on the hotel staff had given the bleeding tattoos upstairs a key. Calling the police to deal with that mess would most certainly raise questions the hotel would rather avoid. Immigration had her thumbprints on file and the front desk knew her face. But all foreigners looked alike, and she’d provided false information upon check-in. If law enforcement did come after her, if they were able to connect her activity hotspots, and if she’d been sloppy enough to leave anything in the room that they could use to find her, then she deserved whatever followed.

  The flight, the fight, the adrenaline dump, and the need to destroy and shower off evidence brought Munroe in for her first day of work later than she’d intended. The desk and the chair were in her office, as she’d been promised. She ignored them. The furniture and the workspace had been a bid for legitimacy. The building entry would be her office: crossroads between the three arms of the facility, where every employee, from executive to the janitor, was guaranteed to pass at least twice each day.

  Munroe parked herself at the edge of a hall and, for no seeming purpose other than to introduce herself and waste time with useless conversation, she stopped everyone who went by. An hour in, Dillman showed up carrying a thin folder and wearing an expression of blatant unhappiness.

  Munroe said, “Hello, Makoto or Dillman, never Mac. What can I do you for?”

  Dillman’s lips pinched, as if he couldn’t quite tell if her words had been a welcome or an insult. He said, “I’ve been assigned as your liaison.”

  Munroe looked him up and down. “Well, that won’t be much fun for either of us, will it?”

  “Not my decision,” he said. “Kobayashi-san’s orders.”

  Munroe nodded, the only thing she could do, and parsed this curious turn, trying to slot it within the puzzle.

  If Dillman was only meant to keep tabs on her and report back to his boss, then it made sense. But the position required reading and translating documents, interpreting conversations and navigating corporate culture. Dillman, as much foreign as he was local, was an odd choice for the job. “How’s your written Japanese?” she said.

  “Good enough.”

  Munroe leaned back into the wall. Good enough was subjective. If she actually needed to rely on him, good enough had the potential to create all manner of complications. But she didn’t, and so she opted for manipulation instead.

  “That couldn’t have been easy if you didn’t grow up here.”

  “Making up for lost time sucks,” he said.

  In that moment, in spite of herself, in spite of Bradford’s distaste for him or that Dillman topped her list of suspects in Bradford’s downfall, Munroe liked this hafu. “The pitfalls of being a third-culture kid,” she said.

  “Yeah?” he said. “You know that term?”

  “Parents were missionaries.”

  “Dad was military,” he said, “then private contractor.”

  “Your accent is awfully Australian for an American military brat.”

  “Five years in Sydney. Parents divorced when I was fifteen and I moved back here with my mom.”

  Munroe winced and said, “Ouch. All the unspoken rules and lack of tolerance for nonconformity? Props to you for pulling that off.”

  “Yeah,” Dillman said, “kind of made everything else easy by comparison.” Then changing the subject, he held up the folder. “Personnel roster. Tai says he was working on these before—before, you know.”

  Munroe motioned for the pages. Dillman handed them over.

  She flipped through the names, all of which had been on the lists on Bradford’s drive. Munroe handed the documents back. “Let’s take a break,” she said, and nodded down the hall, “do a little strategy, a little planning.”

  They walked in uncomfortable silence to Bradford’s office and Munroe swung the door wide to the room’s single chair and lonely desk.

  Dillman looked at her first, then at the chair.

  “Go on, take it,” she said. “I’ll stand.”

  He tossed the folder onto the desk, and with arms crossed he swung the chair around and sat. “Okay, Mr. Michael,” he said, just slightly taunting, but without any of the hostility that he’d shown Bradford, “let’s do your thing.”

  Munroe sat on the desk edge and picked up the roster. “In addition to these, Miles had others,” she said. “I’d like you to start with the others.”

  “Can do those, can do these,” Dillman said. “Can do whatever you want, but it’s a waste of time.”

  The talk of Bradford’s work had been a throwaway to test his reaction. He’d given it nothing but genuine dismissal.

  “That so?” she said.

  “Whatever you’re looking for, whatever he was looking for, you’re not going to find it in these.” Behind the tone, seeping into his posture, was a subtle taunt that disguised wholesale irritation, with her, with Bradford, and with the waste of company resources and time that had come from bringing in the outsiders. “Every person in this facility has been vetted,” he said, “first by the hiring department when checking references, then by a battery of interviews and psychological tests, and finally by the security team—multiple times. Every file in the personnel records scoured. Part of the annual review process involves pulling each record, updating and reconfirming the information.” Dillman sighed and tapped the folder on the desk. “And, of course, anything Miles questioned, Tai would have gone over one more time. The personnel records are a dead end.”

  Munroe waited until the silence drew long enough for Dillman’s smug assurance to offer surface cracks.

  “How long have you been at this?” she said.

  “Since I started with the company. Three years.”

  “Did you, personally, look into these backgrounds?”

  “A fair number of them.”

  “I’m not calling your intelligence, integrity, or ability into question,” she said. “Not calling anyone’s work into question. But here’s the thing: if—and that’s an assumption—there’s someone in this company who’s been stealing technology, then they’ve also been at it for a long time.”

  She inched her shoulders down toward his. “You have to look at it this way. We only have two possibilities: Either everyone who works here is who they say they are or they aren’t. If they aren’t, then this person or persons knew what they were getting into. They knew everything about their life would be scrutinized—especially someone with a high security clearance. The last t
hing they would have done would be to offer a map.”

  “What are you saying?”

  This time an undercurrent of ice ran through his words.

  “Sometimes what you’re looking for doesn’t look like what you’re looking for.”

  Dillman stared at her and Munroe stared back.

  “You’re going to start from the beginning,” she said. “Every piece of family history, medical history, education, travel, anything you’ve got. You’ll need to corroborate each detail without relying on a single piece of information in your files.”

  Dillman’s stare turned blank.

  “If you’re looking at a school, track down a number that’s not officially listed, talk to someone who didn’t know your employee. If you’re investigating a family, turn to neighbors or former teachers or coaches to see what they can verify. You get the idea.”

  “That’s a lot of work,” Dillman said.

  “Yes,” Munroe said. Investigative immersion that would leave him no time for breathing down her neck like an oafish wolf, frightening the field animals away as she walked the halls.

  “It’s wasted work,” Dillman said. Hostility flickered beneath the ice. “Whoever the thief is could be exactly who they claim to be with not one data point of inconsistency. This is stupid. Not to mention we’re dealing with Miles’s work and anything he touched should be rejected out of hand.”

  “Why?” Munroe said.

  Dillman hesitated. Munroe crossed her arms and smiled a fake smile. Dillman, as foreign as he was Japanese, wasn’t averse to conflict. “Go ahead and say it,” she said.

  “Look at what he did. Look at who he is. Everything he handled is toxic.”

  Munroe leaned toward him and said, “You vetted Miles’s background before he was contracted, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “You personally?”

  “Yes. What does that matter?”

  “Did you find anything troublesome? Anything indicating he was mentally unstable? Lacked professional judgment? Wouldn’t be capable of handling the project he’d been hired for?” She paused and changed inflection for emphasis, “That he might be a murderer?”

  “That has nothing to do with anything. Murderers don’t walk around wearing a sign. Capable people are capable of atrocious things.”

  Munroe slapped her leg and sat up straight. “Agreed. Let’s start with that. We both agree that Miles is a capable man—capable of killing, yes—but a professional nonetheless.”

  Dillman nodded, slow and guarded, as if aware of having set himself up for a verbal trap, but not yet quite sure how.

  Munroe said, “To get this contract, he wasn’t just capable, he was extremely capable. So you have to ask yourself if a man like Miles, a man perfectly able to kill an opponent and make it look like an accident, would have been stupid enough to murder a woman and leave both body and murder weapon behind for someone to discover, then just hang around waiting for the police to arrest him?”

  Without missing a beat, Dillman said, “Absolutely. If the price was right, if there was some reason, like buying time to get stolen material on its way to the buyer. We’d see it as stupid, sure, but for him, a decade in prison might be worth it if the money was still waiting when he got out.”

  Munroe shook her head in mock chiding and, continuing with faux sadness, said, “Wouldn’t he at least have removed his belt? Only the worst kind of idiot would have left that behind.”

  Dillman didn’t answer.

  “Think about it.” She put a hand on his shoulder, using proximity to imply camaraderie: us against them. “The files he had are a place to start,” she said. “If I’m wrong, then we’ll have eliminated them and can begin fresh. If I’m right, then we save time and you get to be the company hero.”

  Dillman’s glance darted up and his expression, holding back, still revealed far more than it should have. Munroe pressed the issue, just like cold reading.

  “I’m here for a job,” she said. “I do the work, my company gets paid. I’m in, out, and gone. You’re here for the long haul. Six months after I leave, who’s going to be remembered as the one to have fixed this mess? Me or you?”

  Dillman’s lips twitched at the corners, but he remained silent.

  “Blame falls on me if I’m wrong,” she said, “and you can always claim that you’d been forced to follow my lead. If you have a problem with that, if you can’t do the work, let’s get things sorted out now. I’ll ask Kobayashi-san to assign me someone else.”

  Dillman, arms still crossed, said, “I can do it.”

  Munroe motioned for a piece of paper and scribbled down ten names that Bradford had left behind. They would keep Dillman busy for a while, and if she needed more, she’d get them off the drive and bring them in by hand, because here she’d use no e-mail, make no calls, and provide no digital footprint for the security department to spy upon. Anything that leaked out of her investigation would come by word of mouth from Dillman or his superiors, and that would eventually stop if she tweaked him just right.

  Munroe handed Dillman the paper and he scanned the names.

  She’d given him the emotionally easy ones. No bosses, no workmates, only employees in the security-level lab. But those files, with the extensive background checks that had already been performed, held the most detail and would require the greatest amount of time to scour and verify.

  “I want to see the route you take to whatever information you gather,” she said. “I want a trail of names, numbers, and notes for all conversations. Take your time and be prepared to redo the work through other routes if the ones you took don’t work for me.”

  Dillman sighed, then stood. “Is that all?”

  Munroe nodded and waited until he was halfway out the door. “Just out of curiosity,” she said, “do you keep tabs on the after-work activity that goes on here?”

  Dillman stopped and turned. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you track who from this facility goes to the izakayas and clubs and karaoke bars with whom?”

  “Sometimes those details show up extraneously. We’ve got several hundred employees and that means a lot of after-work activity.” Dillman paused, just a little too fake to be innocently sincere, and said, “Why do you ask?”

  Munroe shrugged, humoring him and his lies with lies of her own. “Maybe we’re looking for more than one person,” she said. “If that’s the case, the only reasonable place to conspire would be away from the watchful eyes of you and your men.”

  “We’re not the police,” Dillman said. “Our job is to keep proprietary information from leaving the facility, not watch the movements of our employees after hours.”

  “Okay,” she said, but there was no way that a company that screened its employees and spied on them so consistently from within the building simply lost all interest once they stepped out the front door. “Then I’ll take whatever you can turn up over the past sixty days.”

  Dillman held up the paper with the ten names she’d written and with obvious sarcastic deference said, “Where should I place your new request in order of priority?”

  “Head of the line,” she said. “I want it tomorrow.”

  Munroe stood in Bradford’s hallway, breathing in the unmistakable stench of garbage left rotting in a hot enclosure for too long. From the genkan to the ofuro, from the bedroom to the kitchen, nothing in the apartment had been disturbed.

  Munroe opened the windows. Tied up the trash and hauled it to the front, then collected perishables from the fridge and dumped them into another bag and tossed that out, too. She rifled through the bedroom armoire and pulled out the rest of Bradford’s clothes while irritation over law enforcement’s reckless indifference to searching for the truth burned her from the inside out.

  She stared into the closet and the puzzle wound back again to the murder and why it had been the Chinese woman to die, and Bradford’s belt, always the belt.

  He’d made three trips from work to the same hostess club.
<
br />   The first two would have been intended to acclimate him to the environment so he’d be more pliant when the trap was finally sprung. Enter the thugs who worked for a club owner tied to organized crime and by implication—through fee, favor, friend, or fiat—to someone within the ALTEQ facility.

  The only reason any of that effort made sense was because of the belt’s uniqueness. It pointed to Bradford like a fingerprint.

  But the belt was the only thing linking Bradford to the Chinese woman’s murder. Everything else was circumstantial, and if the investigators weren’t going to be thorough enough to search for corroborating evidence or eliminate the possibility that someone else had used an identical belt to frame him, then all was fair in war, if not love.

  Bradford’s DNA would have been all over the belt at the crime scene, but if the events at the hostess club had transpired the way Alina had described them, and if the fight in the street had followed in that same way, then it wasn’t just Bradford’s DNA on the belt, and the DNA of Bradford’s attackers couldn’t have been cleaned off without also cleaning off evidence of Bradford.

  Either way, the result was the same.

  The dirty laundry in the hamper, still beside the cupboard in the bedroom, had plenty more DNA to turn a new belt into an old one.

  The prosecutor could take his prima facie evidence and choke on it.

  —

  The boutique in which Munroe had bought the belt had no website. She’d paid cash, so she had no credit-card merchant authorization to work with, and no longer had the receipt. An hour of searching online maps, followed by a few international calls, netted her a phone number.

  Munroe ordered a replacement and then dialed Capstone in Dallas.

  The same male voice answered and he put Munroe directly through to Walker’s line without a wait.

  Munroe said, “I need the number for Miles’s lawyer.”

  “Why?”

  “I have something I need to hand over.”