The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (29 page)

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.

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.”

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.”