The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (30 page)

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 again 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.

“I was several places this morning. What time specifically?”

Tone dry, sarcastic, as if he deigned to humor her just once but wouldn’t tolerate insubordination, he said, “Seven-twenty-eight, specifically.”

Munroe’s stomach clenched again, data reordered again, yesterday’s phone call to Dillman replayed in her head:

I’ll be here early
, he’d said.
Let’s go for coffee.

I’ll get there as soon as I can.

He’d believed she’d be there.

Someone else had believed she’d be there, too.

“I was in Hiroshima at seven-twenty-eight this morning,” she said.

The detective glanced up, his face such a betrayal of thought, that the words when they came were merely déjà vu. “Your access badge shows you in the facility at seven-twenty-eight,” he said.

“I have tickets, receipts, and a traveling companion.”

“Why were you in Hiroshima?”

“Research as a consultant.”

“No one in the company could confirm your location. Why were you in Hiroshima?”

“Research as a consultant,” she repeated.

The detective glanced up.

Munroe made direct eye contact and reached for her wallet. She placed one of the
shinkansen
ticket stubs on the table.

In her head she said,
I wasn’t here when Makoto Dillman was murdered.

In her head he said,
No one said anything about a murder.

And in her head she’d just admitted to having knowledge of the crime and increased her chances of arrest.

Out of her mouth she said, “I was in Hiroshima this morning.”

She knew the risks of talking and had rolled the dice.

The detective picked up the ticket stub, looked it over, jotted notes on his paper, took her passport, and stood. “Don’t leave the facility without authorization,” he said, and then he and her passport and a portion of her alibi walked out the door.