The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  Okada slurped fat noodles. He chewed and swallowed and then shook his head. With his face still to the food, he said, “The mother followed because she wanted to know and she wouldn’t have stopped until she’d seen him clearly. That’s different from being confused in the middle of a crime. She didn’t hesitate, she knew immediately.”

  “You thought she’d pick someone else.”

  “Kobayashi,” Okada said, and he drank from his bowl. Broth finished, he put the dish down.

  Munroe angled the chopsticks and lost the noodles. All along, Okada had suspected his own boss. It meant something that he confided as much to her. She glanced at him and Okada offered a hint of a bashful smile.

  “Kobayashi hated Miles from the day of his arrival,” he said. “He spread rumors and lies and ensured that we tracked every movement, every paper he looked over, every person he spoke with. The understanding was that we were looking for reasons to eject him.”

  Complicated, Bradford had said.

  “I thought perhaps the murder was Kobayashi taking matters into his own hands to rid the company of a problem that wouldn’t go away.”

  “You never said anything. Not to the police—not to your superiors.”

  “I had only suspicions,” Okada said. “In the end, they were wrong.” He stared down at the counter and shook his head. “This whole thing, nothing but a way for Tagawa to murder his lover.”

  “It wasn’t,” Munroe said. She took another bite and chewed long and slow. Okada’s posture and expression pressed her for more.

  “Meilin was convenient,” Munroe said. “She was emotionally involved and their relationship was such a secret that she made an easy victim. At a stretch, killing her might have solved two problems at once, but Tagawa’s primary motive would have been to discredit Miles and remove him from the facility.”

  “How is that possible? Tagawa was in support of a contractor.”

  “Yes,” Munroe said. “Bringing in an outsider was his idea.”

  Okada pushed his glasses up on his nose, flicked the hair out of his face, and then stared at her. His silence stated the obvious: It made no sense for an executive to create disagreement and conflict, pushing to hire someone, only to turn around and frame that person for murder as a way to get rid of him.

  Munroe toyed with her food. It also made no sense for an entrenched professional to invite this level of scrutiny. Not even if there were two factions playing cat-and-mouse, fucking with each other, and the woman’s murder and Bradford’s setup had been a way to threaten or retaliate against Tagawa for bringing an outsider in.

  “Someone else could have murdered the woman,” Munroe said. “Without a motive, we only have conjecture, conspiracy, and circumstances.”

  The proprietor took away Okada’s dish and Munroe motioned for him to take hers as well. Okada said, “At the very beginning, you asked me about the belt. If it didn’t come from Miles, where did it come from?”

  “Someone stole it from him.”

  “Do you know who?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But not Tagawa?”

  “Not directly,” she said. The belt that had killed the woman had been taken from Bradford at the hostess club. Someone from the facility had brought him there three times. The accountant who had invited her out had fit Alina’s description of the men who had accompanied Bradford. The accountant was indirectly linked to Tagawa through RFID interactions before and after each of Bradford’s visits to the club, and Tagawa was the murdered woman’s lover. Munroe tapped fingers against the table, rhythm to thought, questioning what she’d missed because even with these connected pieces, the puzzle was still missing its frame. “If things were that obvious,” she said, “I would have never asked for your help.”

  “You were right from the beginning,” Okada said. “Whoever did this took a lot of risk. If the person who killed Meilin only wanted her dead, they could have made her disappear quietly.” Okada studied her face, searching for something, magic maybe. “Do you think Tagawa did it?”

  “There are always answers, Tai. The trick is figuring out how to ask the right questions of the right people. Your wife is out of town, right?”

  “She said she would go.”

  “So we leave tonight.”

  “We leave?”

  Munroe pulled out Tagawa’s file and placed it on the countertop between them. Dillman, smart as he was, had protested against useless busywork with a valid argument: Whoever the thief is could be exactly who they claim to be with not one data point of inconsistency. And her response in attempting to placate him had been just as true: Sometimes what you’re looking for doesn’t look like what you’re looking for.

  She needed to know Tagawa.

  Needed to know what she was looking at.

  Munroe ran a finger down the text and stopped at the biographical data that showed his family address. “His mother is still alive,” Munroe said. “That would be a good place to start.”

  Munroe called Dillman from Shin-Osaka, the station from where she and Okada would catch the shinkansen, the high-speed rail that connected the major cities. “Not going to be able to make the after-work thing tonight,” she said. “Can we postpone?”

  “First thing tomorrow? I’ll be here early,” Dillman said. “Let’s go for coffee.”

  There was no way she’d be back that soon.

  She hated lying to the guy, but he was in the office and the calls were recorded and the last thing she needed was an alert to a change in her routine, so she opted for obfuscation. “Soon as I make it in,” she said. “I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  They left for Hiroshima on a train that pulled to the platform to the second of its arrival time and moved out again within a minute: a smooth rush of hundred-mile-an-hour-plus speeds that took them from city to city, through tunnels, along the occasional glimpse of countryside, and let them off less than two hours later in a city where everything was opposite to Osaka’s crowded, wire-strung, tiny streets. Here straight, wide avenues were bordered by air and space and relatively modern buildings, the type of municipal planning found in newer cities—those that weren’t forced to build around centuries of history—but in this case was the result of annihilation.

  They found a business hotel ten minutes away by streetcar, far enough off the city’s center, shopping arcade, and memorial sites to avoid the tourists. Munroe paid cash for two rooms, gave a key to Okada, and left him for the relief of solitude, much-needed sleep, and the pressing awareness of time.

  Less than ten days to preempt Bradford’s indictment.

  She couldn’t afford this detour and yet couldn’t afford not to make it.

  —

  They reconvened with the sun, took a streetcar south toward the coast in an hour of stop and start to the ferry docks, and reached Miyajima, the Island of Gods, before the day had fully come alive. On Miyajima the deer roamed free, and shrines and temples drew the faithful and the curious by tens of thousands each year, and a gauntlet of awning-covered stores funneled them to the great torii, massive, vermilion, adorner of postcards worldwide, balanced under its own weight on the seabed.

  They bypassed the tourist route, taking side roads, skirting deer droppings, following Internet directions up steep hills toward the far edge of the city. Beyond a copse of maple trees, along an unpaved path, they found the house that matched the online map, and an old wooden door with an overhead so low that Munroe’s head would have hit it if she’d stood straight.

  Okada knocked and called out a hello. Water babbled somewhere nearby and a birdcall answered the knock. At last the door slid open and a woman in her seventies, barely five feet tall, if that, stood blinking out at them.

  She was bent slightly at the waist, her hair pulled up tight beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat, and one gloved hand carried the glove of the hand that was bare. The woman smiled a smile of proper politeness and bowed.

  Okada bowed low in return and Munroe followed his lead. The woman bowed ag
ain and Okada again and Munroe again because she had no choice, until at last the ritual of who was humblest had ended and Okada, in the story that they’d agreed on during the trip down, presented himself as an archivist and Munroe as a foreign student.

  “We were told that your family has lived for generations on the island,” he said. “Please would you honor us with your knowledge of recent history?”

  Whatever the woman’s day might have already held, she set it aside as though she had all the time in the world. She welcomed them into a home that smelled of dust and earth and sweet musty straw, and opened shoji to a sitting room with a small floor table that looked out over the garden. She brought tea and sweet bean cakes, and when the rituals of serving and receiving had been observed and the woman had grown comfortable with Munroe’s ability to converse, Munroe guided the exchange to the woman’s knowledge of island history, to her life, and from there to her husband and children.

  Munroe had needed to know Tagawa.

  Needed to know what she was looking at.

  The woman brought pictures. She traced her family tree, and those of the neighboring families, and spoke of her husband who had passed away ten years prior. Munroe sipped tea while her legs fell asleep below the knees and the story she’d come for surfaced in the folds and seams of a mother’s pride, waxing strong in fragmented details of her only living son and the honor he’d restored to the family after the older brother had been held responsible for theft in the company he worked for. Suicide was there in the background, and other details deviating only subtly from Tagawa’s work file, deviations that wouldn’t have been worth investigating on any other day.

  When Munroe had heard enough to know that she’d not wasted time in coming, she thanked the woman for her generosity and Okada excused them both on account of ferry and train schedules. They returned to Osaka, an identical trip in reverse made mostly in silence and small talk, dancing around the edges of questions and answers.

  Thirty minutes from Shin-Osaka station Tai Okada said, “I know you learned something important from the mother. I’d like to understand.”

  Munroe glanced at him, at his shaggy hair and the clothes that on their second day of wear didn’t seem all that different from his daily sloppiness. In this, he gave off an air of carelessness, of something less than smart and easy to dismiss, but his disguise was better than the one she wore. Okada knew; he was simply second-guessing his judgment after having wrongly suspected his boss of murder.

  “What if it had been your brother?” she said. “Wouldn’t you try to regain honor for your family, take revenge, ruin the one who did this?”

  Okada didn’t answer.

  “How long has Tagawa been with the company?”

  “Longer than me.”

  “Just over five years,” she said. “How long has the lab downstairs been working on this secret project?”

  “Quite some time.”

  His caginess was irritating. Okada had made progress but was still influenced by having been born in a culture of shaming, afraid of making mistakes and the humiliation of being wrong. “Come on, Tai,” she said. “There are no incorrect answers, and I know you see it.”

  “Nearly six years,” he said.

  “Which is?”

  “Close to the same time the brother committed suicide.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Motivation.”

  “It doesn’t work,” he said. “If a man sets out to destroy a company, to steal from a company, maybe even to recover the same technology that resulted in his brother’s firing, why be the one to push for an outsider to come when that outsider’s specific purpose is to discover his plans?”

  “Pushing to find the thief makes him look innocent.”

  “But we never suspected—nobody could have suspected Tagawa as the source of the theft—he is perfect in every way. Bringing in the outsider ruined everything.”

  “True,” Munroe said, and she waited for the first half of the equation to fully sink in. In a way, it wasn’t fair to Okada; she had far more pieces of the puzzle than he did, but she wasn’t toying with him. He’d see the picture easier if it was laid out piece by piece than dumped in one big pile.

  She said, “What if he’d been getting away with it for years and was certain he wouldn’t be discovered? What if someone else in the company was stealing the same secrets and undercutting his plans and payments, and what if Tagawa couldn’t figure out who they were but felt confident enough in his own invisibility to take the risk of hiring someone to find the competing thief?”

  Okada’s eyes widened. Possibilities danced behind them. “Do you think?” he said. “Is it possible that Miles suspected the wrong person? The right person? You know what I mean.”

  Bradford had certainly suspected something, but if he’d known who or what, he wouldn’t be sitting in jail right now. Munroe studied the seatback in front of her. “He didn’t know,” she said.

  “Then why? Why would someone like Tagawa, if it is Tagawa, take all this risk?”

  “It’s possible Miles was close without knowing what he knew. Maybe Tagawa felt a trap closing in.”

  They both fell silent and Munroe’s thoughts kept churning.

  Bradford hadn’t known; she didn’t know: didn’t know which of the players had set Bradford up or why; had no plausible alternative scenario to offer the prosecution in exchange for a murder weapon and easy answers; had nothing solid enough to grind the wheels of injustice to a halt while the countdown to Bradford’s formal charges kept ticking steadily on.

  On the street outside the facility, four police cars were parked up against the curb. Two more vans idled in the parking lot. Okada slowed the car, squeezing between oncoming traffic, and stopped before they reached the gate.

  Munroe studied the entrance, the sidewalks, the half-empty lot that should have been filled to capacity: no movement outside, not even the stray employee coming or going, giving high odds that the facility had been locked down and employees held for questioning.

  Hands on the wheel, eyes straight ahead, Okada said, “Do we go to work today?”

  “This look familiar to you?”

  He nodded.

  “Same number of police cars as last time?”

  “There are more now.”

  Munroe turned back and faced front. She had no doubt that whatever had happened in their absence would point to her in the same way the belt had pointed to Bradford. “I don’t have a choice,” she said.

  The irony of innocence was that reacting to fear looked the same as reacting to guilt. Of course I sat and waited. You would have done the exact same thing. “You do what your instinct tells you,” she said, “but if you don’t go, they’re going to suspect you of something.”

  Okada sighed and, with the heaviness of a convict approaching a firing squad, put the car back into gear.

  “They’re allowed to lie and they’ll try to trick you if they think you’re hiding something,” she said. “Don’t offer any information you aren’t asked for and don’t try to be smarter than they are.”

  Far too many innocent people, cooperating because they had nothing to hide, had lost years of their lives on the mistaken belief that the truth would set them free. If this had been a country where they’d had a right to a lawyer and a right to remain silent, she would have simply told him not to speak at all.

  —

  The entrance was empty, the facility quiet, and the uniforms at the desk stopped them on their way to the stiles. Gruff to the point of disrespect, they ordered Okada away from Munroe and then stood between them to enforce the separation while radios crackled with coded talk and barely concealed excitement.

  An officer arrived within a minute. Okada didn’t look at Munroe as he was led away. He’d be okay. She was the one they wanted.

  Two additional officers arrived less than a minute later. They hustled Munroe to a conference room without so much as an attempt at broken English and left her there with an underling standing guard at the
door.

  Time ticked on and in the silence Munroe rested her head on the table and fell asleep. She woke to the door opening. The clock had moved forward twelve minutes.

  The newcomer took a seat across the table.

  Munroe laced her fingers atop the veneer and gave him a nod.

  He was in his mid-thirties, with a bull neck, close-cut hair, manicured hands, and a tyrant’s air of authority. She assumed he was rank—possibly detective.

  He ignored the acknowledgment and dismissed her with a glance at the paper he’d carried in. “Your name?” he said.

  His English was functional, his accent thick.

  So much for pleasantries.

  “Munroe,” she said. “Michael.”

  He ran his finger down a column of small print, as much a show of theatrics as her finger-lacing nod had been.

  He demanded her ID and work permit and she gave him a Spanish passport and a copy of her company paperwork.

  “I’m not an employee,” she said. “I don’t work here, only advise.”

  He thumbed through her passport, glanced at the photo page, then set it on the table.

  “Your relationship to Makoto Dillman?” he said.

  With that, Munroe’s stomach roiled and it took a conscious effort to keep shock from escaping onto her face. Strategy shifted; synapses raced for connections, reorienting in rapid-fire sequence. She’d expected that whatever had happened would point back to her, but Dillman? She said, “Coworkers.”

  “The last time you saw him?”

  “Around eight yesterday morning.”

  “Last time you spoke to him?”

  “On the phone, about one yesterday afternoon.”

  “One ten in the afternoon,” the detective corrected.

  Munroe nodded, conceding a point that merely confirmed these were but control questions on a polygraph of human behavior. He was testing for lies. Not here for answers but to confirm what he already knew.

  “Where were you this morning?” he said.