The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (24 page)

“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.

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.”

“What?”

“Come on, Sam, stop breaking my balls. Just give me the number.”

“This is my rodeo,” Walker said. “You report to me, not the other way around. You have something to give to the lawyer, it goes through me.”

Munroe dropped into reptile mode. “That’s fine,” she said. “Talk to the lawyer about the so-called murder weapon, ask him how much the case hangs upon that detail, because it’s not as much of a one-of-a-kind belt as they’d like to believe. I’ve got another one right here.”

Walker was quiet for a moment. She said, “I’ll e-mail you the details,” and hung up.

Munroe dialed Warren Green again, went through the same exchange with the same faceless voice, and then the line clicked over to elevator music and Munroe closed her eyes, counting up the minutes, past the ones and into the tens.

This was due diligence, a thread she had to either tie off or pursue.

Green finally picked up near the twenty-minute mark.

“My man,” he said. “Tried calling you back. What’s been going on?”

“Arrest, followed by mayhem and general unhappiness,” Munroe said.

Green paused for a beat and said, “Who is this?”

“This is Miles’s conscience,” she said. “Miles’s brain and body are currently unavailable seeing as they are in jail, awaiting trial for a murder that he may or may not have committed—I say not, the prosecutor says otherwise—and there are a few phone conversations on record of you and him chatting it up like good buddies. This is a heads-up that there may eventually be less friendly people throwing questions your way. Rumors say he might have been attempting to procure a technology of interest on your behalf. True?”

There was another pause. This time slowly, Green said, “You want to run all that by me again?”

“Which part?” Munroe said. “The part about Miles getting arrested or the part about him stealing trade secrets for you?”

“The part about his arrest,” Green said. “He wasn’t working for me, stealing for me, or doing anything for me—that’s a rumor that needs to die. What happened, and is he all right?”

Munroe had expected denial—regardless of the truth, denial was the only answer—but sincerity underlined Green’s words: no hemming or hawing or ass covering. His concern went straight to Bradford and that pointed toward Green speaking the truth. “He’s okay as he can be, given the circumstances,” she said, “but the finger-pointing in your direction is real.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Green said. “Miles and me, we go way back. We keep in touch—have done it that way for years. He’s told me about work, I know that’s some crazy shit they got goin’ on down in the lab, and I know he’s been twitchy, especially over these past three weeks. Before you ask, no, I don’t know the details. If I did, I’d give ’em to you, honest to God. But like I said, Miles and me, we talk, so given the context of this here conversation I’m goin’ out on a limb and guessing you must be Michael.”

“Yeah,” Munroe said, and she waited, offering Green the chance to fill in the blanks, all the while weighing his version of events against the transcripts.

Green said, “There anything I can do to help? God knows he’s a magnet for trouble, but good Lord. Arrested? Murder? You think it’ll stick?”

“Still sorting through it,” she said. “On the surface, it looks bad. Someone went to a lot of effort to make sure he was the only suspect. If you have any connections in Japan who’d be willing to throw their weight around, ask questions, make sure the local officials know that he’s got friends in high places, that would be helpful.”

“Let me make some calls,” Green said. “See if I’ve got anyone owing me favors who happens to be in the right place at the right time.”

“I’d appreciate it,” she said. “I’m dropping off the map, so anything you’ve got, give it to his office.”

“That Samantha, she still the one running things there?”

“She’s the one.”

“Woman’s a bulldog. Take off a man’s leg if he’s not careful.”

“She’ll do good by whatever you send her way.”

“You got it,” Green said, and gushed on about Samantha Walker. Munroe listened through the headache until finally Green got the hint in her silence, said good-bye, and hung up.

Munroe shut the computer and leaned back on the bed.

The conversation wound round and round inside her brain. She sat up and opened the laptop again and reread the transcripts.

People saw what they wanted to see, believed what they wanted to believe, and the conversations could be played off as the banter between friends or the scheming of industrial espionage, depending on the point of view.

Gut instinct would have her believe Green, if not Bradford, but in the big picture truth didn’t matter much. The phone calls to the United States, whatever the insiders at ALTEQ believed they meant, were a dead end: a sideshow she’d had to follow through to closure. Munroe stood and pulled Green’s name down off her web.

Test them to find out where they are sufficient and where they are lacking.

—MASTER SUN TZU

At the back of the lunchroom, in the closet where paper goods, cleaning supplies, and assorted restocking items cluttered disorganized shelves, Nonomi Sato pulled a threaded lens out from a hole in the wall.

She stood quite still, both hands gripping the edges of the palm-size viewer, replaying what she’d recorded. She studied facial expressions and body language, and with each replay the anger grew. The new foreigner was
tall and thin,
as she’d been told, but
likely weak and easily intimidated,
no.

No, no, and
no
.

That assessment was wrong to the point of blindness.

This Michael was younger and smaller than the cowboy, yes, but his eyes were ice and his body moved with the control of a warrior. He’d tensed soon after Sato had peered through the eyepiece—not enough that most people would have noticed the way she noticed—but he’d felt her, had known he was being watched, and had refused to give in to the human urge to turn and look.

The cowboy, removed, had been replaced with an enigma.

Sato shoved the microcamera into the case that held the viewer, anger burning higher. How could anyone, with any sense of strategy or understanding of human nature, have missed such simple observations? How?

Those who didn’t know the plans of competitors couldn’t prepare alliances. She’d thought she’d known, but no.

Blind, ignorant,
worthless…worthless…worthless…

Limited time, work hours, and circumstance had compelled her to rely on a weak alliance, to use the observations of another in the same way she’d used him to drill this hole right here after his overconfident, ignorant analysis had lost her the advantage, forcing her to scout for herself.

The victorious warrior took a stand on ground where she couldn’t lose, but she, based on his faulty assessment, had chosen the wrong ground when sending hirelings to corner the newcomer in the garage. Even accounting for exaggeration and shame avoidance, even if half the report was true, the newcomer could have easily killed all three, he simply hadn’t.

The victorious warrior won first through strategy and then went to war.

Likely weak and easily intimidated…

She’d relied on defective thinking and hadn’t properly qualified the men to do the intimidating; she’d sent men to intimidate the weak.

Worse, through faulty strategy she’d shown her hand.

Sato took a breath, then smoothed down her skirt. Anger opened the mind to weakness. Emotional excitement spurred carelessness in battle. She waited for the heat to pass.

The newcomer had good instincts.

That was a problem.

That was
absolutely
the problem.

The cowboy had carried a different kind of instinct, manly and survival-based, dripping of pheromones, testosterone, and war. Backstabbing and blindsiding had taken him down because a direct attack would never have worked. This younger one would require a different strategy still.

Sato grabbed a stack of napkins—the pretense that had brought her into the storage area—and mindful of the voices and conversations that came and went on the other side of the lunchroom’s paper-thin divide, she strode back in and with a huff refilled the napkin dispenser.

Such trivialities were beneath her job.

When the air had cleared of bad energy, she stepped beyond the two young men, with their early-morning bento and their manga, for the vending machines, for a bottle of jasmine tea that she drained in long swallows.

The sun couldn’t be set back on its course or the days undone, but she could shift, formless like water, and launch again when least expected.

She could use the enemy to defeat the enemy.

Sato tossed the garbage, and with the satchel slung across her shoulder, left for the entry. She’d taken a risk, breaking from her pattern to observe the newcomer, but relying on the faulty word of an ally required gaining her own knowledge.

She had what she needed now.

The terrain had been set and the match begun.

To win by avoiding conflict would be the highest form of victory.

She could fight—she’d never be a victim like that poor woman in the stairwell, Muay Thai in Bangkok’s alleys had seen to that—but she was no fighting fuck toy. Asian girls with their big doe eyes and tiny bones, kicking butt through martial arts and throwing weight that would make a sumo proud, were such a sexist cliché. When force became necessary to win the battle, it meant she’d already lost the war.

She preferred stealth, preferred to let others do the dirty work when muscle was needed, and only got her own hands muddy if she must. Brains were by far the better weapon. The human race proved this in seven billion ways: weak and breakable life forms at the top of the food chain, overrunning the planet like yeast on sugar, all due to rich neural networks and dense gray matter.

And she was a most prime yeast specimen.

Sato stood in line for screening outside the elevator.

The line moved forward, and she with it, and discomfort crawled up her skin, as if someone watched her now just as she’d been watching.

Sato handed the guard her badge, refusing to give in to the human urge to turn around and look.

Her instincts, too, were good.