The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (21 page)

Munroe sat with Alina on the stairwell landing, sweat-drenched and waiting out the remainder of the day, where Alina might, if they were lucky, catch a glimpse of whoever had been with Bradford the night the belt had been taken.

Two men walked out of the facility entrance. Alina straightened, said “Oh!” then sighed and said, “No.”

Another false positive.

After the first three, Munroe had ignored the rest.

Another half hour of nothing and Munroe said, “I have to work late tonight—into the morning. It’s the type of thing that would be better if you stayed at the hotel.”

Alina’s lips pressed together. She wrapped her arms around her knees and said, “I will come with you.”

“You’ll be safer in the room.”

Several minutes of silence passed. As if picking up where they’d left off, Alina said, “I will come with you.”

Munroe glanced at her. “At the hotel, you’re in one place, behind a locked door. If you come with me, I can’t promise that you won’t get hurt. If things go badly, I can’t promise that I won’t leave you behind.”

Alina nodded, contemplating. She said, “Jiro will find me at the hotel and there I am, alone, behind a locked door, with no one to see him come or go.”

“There’s no trail for him to follow to find you.”

“Someone already found you without a trail.”

“That’s different,” Munroe said, and she turned back to watching the facility entrance.

“He is very well connected,” Alina said. “Government. Police. Business. Like a small army to do what he says. He has to make an example of me. We don’t see him, but his people are looking and I don’t want to be in the hotel alone when his men come.”

The facility doors opened again. Alina glanced up, but still nothing.

They stayed on the landing until the workday ended, and then Munroe retrieved the Ninja and parked it at the side of the building, down a pedestrian path, near a dozen bicycles and a single scooter. The evening came, the sky darkened, and shortly after nine, Okada left the building with a group of several men.

Munroe nudged Alina and they jogged down the stairs for the bike, sudden action after so much waiting. Okada and his workmates drove in two cars, and Munroe followed, keeping a long line of vehicles between them.

Twelve-hour days at the office weren’t enough. Now came the after-work in snack bars, which were hostess club lite, or karaoke clubs, hostess clubs, or
izakaya
, which were drinking establishments.

Several kilometers took them to a strip of pavement just wide enough to get off the road. The two cars parked. Beside the parking strip was a single structure, old and worn, with wooden walls and a clay tile roof. Neon at the door and window clashed with the serenity of the paper lanterns that hung off wide, curved eaves. Munroe continued past.

Finding a break in traffic, she looped a U-turn, pulled off the road, and squeezed the Ninja backward into a narrow alley between buildings just up the road. Bradford hadn’t been joking when he’d said she’d be grateful for the Mira’s smaller size, but even the car needed conventional parking.

Munroe tugged off the helmet and Alina did likewise, asking no questions, making no conversation, but remaining a pebble in Munroe’s boot all the same.

Okada left the bar shortly after eleven while the rest of his coworkers remained. He wasn’t falling down drunk, but clearly not sober. He put key to ignition and Munroe smiled. In a culture where conformity meant everything, Okada was a rule breaker—or at the least, a rule bender.

Society cast no shame on public drunkenness, rarely required ID for alcohol purchases, turned a blind eye to minors drinking, and viewed inebriation as a pressure valve: a socially acceptable excuse for inexcusable behavior.

But there was zero tolerance for driving under any influence.

High-end restaurants and
izakayas
often refused to serve alcohol to drivers. Police checkpoints for breath analysis were common. Okada, simply by getting behind the wheel, risked the loss of his license, fines, and years in prison. Munroe followed him east, toward the mountains, in the same direction they’d gone on the night Bradford had been arrested.

They were in the hills when he turned off, into a neighborhood of square and modern houses, neat and tidy, squished tightly in long stretches of single-lane alley-width streets.

Munroe increased the distance, following the reflection of Okada’s taillights against the road to guide her in a delayed turn-by-turn. She stopped before the entrance to his street, left Alina with the bike, and walked ahead to watch as he maneuvered his car backward into a space between light pole and house, parking so narrow it would have been reserved for motorcycles back in Dallas. He went from the car up the plant-hedged walkway to the front door, and lights turned on upstairs.

Munroe returned to Alina and crawled the bike away.

The upstairs light had been Okada’s wife, waking to welcome her husband home, to prepare his food and heat his
ofuro
, to do laundry as he ate, and then to clean up his mess when he was finished. If she was traditional, she would also rise again in five hours to prepare the bento he’d take to work and lay out his clothes.

Things were changing, but many still adhered to the old ways: some out of habit; some out of cultural expectations; some because tradition bound wives to their husband and his family and a myriad of time-consuming rules and societal roles; and some because marriage—no matter her education, talent, aspirations, or value—was a death knell to her career that would soon find her fired, leaving her no other option. But the light in Okada’s window only said that a wife who’d already fed and bathed the children, put them to bed and gone to bed herself, had risen when he’d come home.

Several streets over, Munroe found a park and playground and waited there, utilizing a bench as a bed, ignoring Alina, studying the stars, allowing memory and strategy to take her to the random places memory often did. When the night had deepened enough, Munroe rose, left Alina with the Ninja, and followed the streetlights to Okada’s little blue Nissan.

Munroe inched beyond Okada’s car, into the carport and the semicluttered space between the side of his house and the iron bars of the neighbor’s vine-covered fence. She scooped several stones out of the gravel and dropped them to the ground.

No dog barked. No lights turned on. No windows opened.

She tossed a few more against the concrete steps leading up to the sliding door and then others through the gaps in the siding around the pier-and-beam foundation. The house remained quiet.

She tried the screen on the side door, whose glass had been left open for air circulation. The screen slid open. As with so many other home owners in Japan, the Okadas hadn’t bothered locking doors or windows.

Boots off and carried in one hand, Munroe stepped up into a single room divided by a dining table, with a spotless kitchen on one side and an open living area on the other. Baskets of children’s toys and game controllers took up almost as much space as the low-slung table and couch. She paused long enough to confirm that the downstairs was empty, then slipped into a tiny hall, past the
genkan
, and rounded up tightly curved stairs, pausing on each step, testing for sound.

Munroe found the wife and two small children in one room—futons filling the floor space and the sleepers tangled up in sheets and light blankets like campers in an oversize tent. Okada was in the room two doors down, with only one futon on the floor, snoring away. That was common, too—wives and husbands sleeping in separate rooms after the children came along.

Munroe knelt on the tatami beside his sleeping form and placed her free hand over his mouth. He kept sleeping, so she nudged him and his eyes snapped open, first dully, and then in terror.

“Shhh,” she said.

He nodded frantically.

She removed her hand and said, “Get some clothes on, we need to talk.”

It took him a moment to draw the connections, but then they clicked. “What are you doing here?” he hissed, and then shock gave way to anger and he propped himself on an elbow and glared at her. “You’re in my house. My house!”

“Shhh,” she said again. “I’ll wait.”

Munroe turned her back to him and no movement happened, so she glanced over her shoulder and said, “I’m in your house, Tai. Your wife and children are down the hall. Shouldn’t you be motivated to get
me
out? Put some clothes on, let’s go.”

Okada mumbled and grumbled, then pulled pants on and then a shirt and shoved his glasses onto his face. Munroe followed him down the stairs. He grabbed slippers from the
genkan
and shuffled into them when he stepped out the side door. He glared when Munroe sat in the door frame, stuffing her feet back into her boots, and then walked sullenly beside her until they were several houses down the street and he challenged her again.

“You were in my house.”

“Yes,” she said, “and now I’m out of your house. You should be happy.”

She continued to the far end of the park, away from the Ninja and Alina, whose shadow Munroe could just make out. She motioned toward a bench, but Okada stayed standing.

“I apologize for coming into your home,” she said. “I would have preferred something else, but this is the only way to talk privately. I need your help and I don’t want to make you my enemy.”

Okada’s expression remained unreadable.

Munroe pulled out the security pass and held it toward him. “Did you know about this?” she said.

Okada reached for the pass. Angled the plastic to catch light from the nearest street lamp and then handed it back. “I didn’t realize it would be you.”

“Do you know why he wanted it made?”

Okada shook his head.

“You’ve been tracking my movements these past few days?”

“Of course,” Okada said. “That’s my job.”

“When were you planning to confront me?”

“What have you done to yourself, you look like a man?”

“When did Miles have the badge made?”

“I don’t remember the exact day, maybe four or five weeks ago.”

Munroe ran the calendar pages in her head.

That pushed back to somewhere around the second time Bradford had gone to the hostess club, definitely before the fight, definitely before he’d brought her in to take a look around and talk about the Chinese women over lunch, which gave credence to what he’d said about having processed the paperwork with the intention of giving her what she wanted. And pointed to why he hadn’t.

She said, “Miles asked you to help me because he trusted you.”

“I don’t want that honor,” Okada said. “Never asked, never offered to help him, or you, or anyone. I’ve already done all that I can.”

“You did offer,” she said. “You might not have realized it, but you did.”

He leaned forward ever so slightly, as if his body begged her to explain.

“The nail that sticks out gets hammered down,” she said. “You know the proverb?”

“Everyone knows the proverb.”

“You’re that nail, Tai. You may not stick out to the people around you, but you do to people like Miles and me. He could see it, I can see it, and by being different from everyone else Miles worked with, you invited him to trust you.”

Munroe paused, waiting for Okada to interject, and when he didn’t, she said, “I’ve already set up my position in the facility. I’ve had things that have kept me from being at work full-time, but tomorrow I intend to take over Miles’s responsibilities. I’ll be there, each and every day, long days, until they throw me out.”

“This has nothing to do with me,” Okada said.

“I’m going to need a liaison,” she said. “I need to know what you know, Tai, give me that and I’ll find someone else to work with. If you were in my position, who would you avoid? Who would you be afraid of? Who are you afraid of now?”

Okada shuffled to the bench and sat beside her, staring out into the overgrown grass.

Munroe reverted to easier questions. “Let’s start with the woman who died,” she said. “What did Miles have on her?”

“Nothing,” Okada said. “She was quiet and kept to herself. Did her job every day. Went home. After this whole thing happened, I pulled her records again and couldn’t find anything worth flagging.”

“What about a reason to kill her? Was she sleeping with anyone in the company—one of the bosses, maybe? Did she have access to anything that would have allowed her to accidentally stumble on damaging information?”

“The police will have looked,” he said. “I have looked also, trying to find connections. There’s nothing unusual in her hiring, no special favors or courtesy involvement. She was a biochemist, part of the research and development, but not down in the lower lab, which you already know. Everything was routine, done through the proper department, all her paperwork in order, and nothing unusual regarding payments or schedule. No disciplinary problems. No suspicious activity.”

“Did anybody try to stop you from looking into her history after she died? Redirect attention elsewhere? Focus on other things?”

“The opposite, actually, I was encouraged to keep digging.”

“By whom?”

“Kobayashi-san. He’s head of security, my boss.”

“You found nothing in her personal life?”

Okada shrugged, as if to say that was beyond the scope of his department.

“What about the other security team, they looked into her, too?”

“Both departments coordinated. Kobayashi-san led the investigation.”

“All of the people involved in this investigation believe Miles is guilty?”

“He was arrested. If he wasn’t guilty, the police would have let him go.”

Munroe ran a palm over her hair and counted ten long seconds before responding. She could have written off Okada’s stance as a quaint by-product of a rule-revering, order- and authority-deferring society, except it mirrored a common American belief that prosecutors only pursued the guilty and everyone who claimed innocence was lying. Shit like this only reinforced her misanthropy.

She whispered, “That doesn’t answer the question.”

Okada leaned forward. He laced his fingers and stared at them while seconds ticked on. Finally he said, “This came as a surprise, even for those who didn’t like Miles and weren’t happy he was hired. But who would want to believe he didn’t do it? That would make the police wrong, and if this is true, the murderer could be any one of us.”

“It’s easier to believe the foreigner did it,” Munroe said. Easier for everyone from law enforcement to company executives to the casual observer to simply accept the first story at face value and eliminate the need for hard questions and hard choices.

Okada said, “Kobayashi-san is the one I am afraid of, because he is my boss. But he’s not your boss. For you it is Tagawa-san, head of operations, do you know him?”

“We’ve met, but that’s not the kind of fear I’m talking about. Who hated Miles most?”

“Dillman,” Okada said. He pronounced it Dee-ru-ma-nu. “
Hafu
. You’ve met him, I think.”

“
Hafu
?” she said.

“His mother is Japanese. Father is American.”

“Ah,” she said, “half. Miles suspected him for theft?”

“Not a suspect, an annoyance. Miles found ways to make Dillman show his anger and lose face. Dillman hated him most.”

“Enough to murder someone to get even?”

“I don’t know who killed the woman,” Okada said.

“Miles went to Kitashinchi a few times with others from work. Did you know anything about that?”

“This type of after-work drinking, socializing, is very normal,” he said.

“Yes, mostly. Did you know he’d gone?”

“I think so,” Okada said.

“He never mentioned anything unusual?”

Okada shook his head and then paused, as if he wasn’t entirely sure, and she allowed him time to think back and count the days.

“Maybe yes, but not with words,” Okada said. “He behaved differently.”

“Explain differently.”

“It’s not possible to explain,” he said. “The difference was air, something felt but not touchable.”

“When did that start?” she said, but she knew the answer before Okada spoke it. The last time they’d discussed this, in the
takoyaki
seating area the night Bradford had been arrested, Okada had said Bradford had changed, had become more private, after she’d come into the office. But her day in the office had also been the final night Bradford had gone to the hostess club. He hadn’t changed because he’d learned something from her, he’d changed because the belt had been stolen.

Confirming this, Okada said, “The last time.”

“Do you know the men he went with?”

“If it’s important, then it may be possible to learn.”

“Without bringing trouble on your own head?”

Okada smiled slyly, as if she’d pleased him by acknowledging his predicament, and he gave a curt nod.

“That would help,” she said, and then in a long-shot reach, “For certain you have no idea who Miles suspected?”

Okada’s hands tensed, as if he committed some discomforting betrayal. “We spoke of many things, insignificant things, but he never mentioned suspects.”

“It must have been hard, being taken away from your department.”

Okada shifted, as though her concern embarrassed him. “I received honor in learning from someone with such experience.”

“And to spy on him? Report his movements to your own boss?”

Okada didn’t respond.

Munroe stood and took a step away from the bench. “I like you, Tai,” she said. “Miles liked you. You know more than you think you know, so watch your back, okay?”