The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (40 page)

Munroe left Hara for the kitchen, and with the bedroom door open so she could hear him and he could hear her, she pulled together ingredients from his meager food supply and made a meal. She left the dishes in his sink unwashed, set an alarm, and slept a few hours on his couch with the subtle groan of his yanks and tugs playing in the background.

When she returned to the bedroom just after dawn, he was still awake.

She checked his wrists, red from the struggle. She pulled the cloth out of his mouth and he gulped greedy breaths. “I don’t want a lot,” she said, “just the contact information for your employer.”

He choked back a crazy laugh. “I don’t have anything to give you.”

She stuffed the cloth back into his mouth. “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow,” she said, “but eventually.” She turned and left him there.

When business hours rolled around, she left the apartment long enough to call Bradford’s lawyer and held her breath when he picked up. “The charges will be dropped,” he said. “My client will be released.”

“When?”

“There is paperwork, there are formalities. It may be another day or two.”

“Did the investigators get a confession from the killer?”

“It’s not possible for a man in my position to know. Regardless, circumstances have changed.”

Munroe’s hands shook and she tried to calm the rapid breaths that were fast turning to hyperventilation. “Information has a way of doing that,” she said. “Does his office in the United States know?”

“The news came only fifteen minutes ago, I’ve not yet made any calls.”

“I’ll take care of it,” she said, and he rang off.

Commercial flying time out of Dallas was a minimum of sixteen hours—longer, depending on the connections—and if Walker caught the first flight available, she might possibly make it to Osaka before Bradford was released.

The fourteen-hour time difference put Walker in the early evening, and without time to waste collecting a computer or hunting down prepaid cards, Munroe put the battery back into her phone and dialed directly from her cell to Samantha Walker’s, waiting impatiently through the long rings, hoping that an international number on display would be enough for Walker to take the call.

When Walker answered, her voice was tinged with the kind of rushed distraction that came from juggling several things at once. Munroe said, “Miles is going to be released. I don’t know when, the lawyer will have that information. Get a flight booked and be ready to pick him up.”

“Wait,” Walker said, and Munroe could hear the mental brakes lock up. Everything else on the other end came to a standstill. “When did you get the news—how did you get it?”

“Five minutes ago from the lawyer. I don’t have any details. If you want them, you’ll have to call him.”

“You’re not going to be there when he’s released?”

“Can’t promise to make it,” Munroe said. “Better to be sure that someone is.”

“I’ll be on the first flight out,” Walker said, and the line went dead.

Munroe turned her face to the sky and the moment swept in, dry and thirsty, waiting for rain. Repressed emotions came rushing hard, uncontrollable, like a wall of water off the ocean. She let them come, and when the surge receded, the wash took with it the detritus and left a barren landscape in its place.

This wasn’t over yet. Not for her.

Using Hara’s keys, she let herself back inside the building and into the apartment with its new furniture smell, stale air, and the muffled yells of captivity from the bedroom.

Thirst was a weapon, as was hunger, and fear of the unknown, and fear of the knife. Hara broke long before a better man would have—the price paid for being soft and pliable, for living out an infiltrator’s fantasy within a civilian mind, for being a fool.

She only cut him twice and that more theatrics than damage, more drama than pain. When he caved, she dripped water down his throat in exchange for information. By the time he was finished, she had phone numbers, e-mail accounts, and a name that might or might not mean something; she had geolocation tags and copies of correspondence, and Hara offered up his secrets, giving her access to his own understanding of the workings of the facility.

Knowing that Dillman was working on Sato’s file, that he’d discovered something worth discussing with Munroe outside the facility, Hara had reported as much to his handlers. They’d given him leeway in fixing the problem. Killing Dillman had been his idea, and he’d carved out his own promotion in the process. Munroe could have admired his cleverness, justified his actions in a perverse way, might have excused him if there’d been any long-term strategy to what he’d done. But he’d reacted without artistry or intuitiveness, just short-term thinking and blind ambition, ignorant of far-reaching consequences and oblivious that his actions were a greater threat to Sato’s entrenchment than Dillman had originally been.

Hara was a thug, a minion: dull and incapable of seeing beyond immediate gratification, unable to make sacrifices for long-term gain. She despised him for that weakness, and having made him bleed and stolen from him what he valued most, she wouldn’t squander life energy killing him.

Dillman’s murder investigation was still open, and there were always anonymous tips. The proof was there if anyone was willing to look. She’d make sure they did.

Hara would claim she’d kidnapped and tortured him.

He had no way to prove it.

Munroe worked through the apartment, wiping down the few things she’d touched, cleaning blood streaks off the floor, washing away the few traces of evidence she’d left behind. In Hara’s bathroom she found a handful of pill bottles, brought them to him, and had him read the labels.

The best she could do was a combination of pain medication and antihistamines, and she stuffed enough pills down his throat to push the limits between oblivion and overdose.

She wouldn’t cry if she’d guessed wrong.

“I’m going to let you live,” she said. “You talk about me and you’ll be dead in a week. Understand?”

Hara nodded and eventually drifted off into a medicated fog.

She unbound him and gathered the sheets and stray threads and bagged them together with the dish towel she’d shredded, then wiped down his room to catch blood drops, stray hairs, and footprints. She’d spent thirty-two hours in that apartment, with his cries muffled and his torment heightened by tricks of the mind: long enough for Walker to get from Dallas to Osaka; long enough for the bureaucracy to move its slow way through the release process.

Munroe stood in the doorway, staring at Hara’s unconscious body, then left the apartment and the building, carrying the bag of evidence far across town, to mix with wet garbage behind a grocery store. She then turned for the precinct where Bradford was housed and the hope that she might watch him walk out into the light, a free man.

Munroe took a cab to within a block of the detention facility and continued on foot to the bus stop with its unobstructed view of the building’s front doors. Ear buds blaring to block sound and voices and unwanted emotions, Munroe leaned into a beam that supported the small overhang and there she waited.

She’d returned Bradford’s things to the apartment, had tucked his passport and valuables back where they’d once been and rehung what clothes were still clean. She’d cleared out everything of hers that mattered and thrown away what didn’t. Walker would return with Bradford to collect what was his and turn over the keys. They wouldn’t stay long. They’d be eager to get out of the country lest fate tempt good fortune and find freedom taken away once more, but there’d been no reason to leave remnants of her presence as a form of torment—for Bradford, for Walker.

Munroe’s stay would be longer, if not by much.

She’d told Sato the truth when she’d said there was nothing the woman had that she was inclined to chase and had lied by omission. Nothing Sato had, true, because why steal from a thief when for far less risk she could draw payment for silence from those who employed the thief?

She’d gone after Hara to learn who pulled his strings, and he’d handed over the entire puppet show. She’d have to disappear, build a subterfuge, and then disappear again. She’d need time and distance, but the challenge was seductive.

At just after five, the lawyer’s car pulled into the lot.

Samantha Walker rode shotgun.

The car parked. Driver and passenger stepped out.

Jet-lagged and exhausted as she must be, Walker oozed charm and sensuality, as had always been her way. Physically, she was everything Munroe wasn’t: petite, voluptuous, and exotic. This was the first that Munroe had seen her since those first months following the explosion, when Walker’s days had been counted in terms of nurse cycles and visitation hours and then gradually segued into assisted living and physical therapy. Now the visible scars were few, the limp less noticeable, and her thick black hair as luscious as it had been before.

The biggest damage had been on the inside.

The lawyer and Walker strode together for the building’s front doors and in their interaction it was clear, even from a distance, who called the shots. For Walker, the leash and the way she maneuvered men on her lead was merely a way of facilitating business. The lawyer, like Warren Green, like most who came in contact with her, was oblivious to the reality that nothing he fantasized or projected would ever materialize.

They entered through the front and time came and went, marked by the progression of music tracks and buses and passengers and traffic signals: a process that was repeated again and again and again, until movement across the street flashed color beyond the doors and then Walker and the lawyer and Bradford stepped into the lowering sun.

Bradford was haggard and his eyes were dark from lack of sleep, but he tipped his face up to the sky and breathed deeply, then he smiled.

Munroe’s heart beat hard and her insides churned, urging her to rise and walk, to reach for him, to hold and touch and kiss.

The hurt welled up, like a fire devouring everything in its path, and although she stepped away from the bus stop and stood alone on the edge of the curb, she never attempted to cross the street.

Seeing him, she could breathe again, she could hope again, and the emptiness and the solid walls she’d relied on to block out emotion began to bleed from her, melting in thick fat drops from her fingertips to the pavement, only it wasn’t her body that shed but her eyes, and not blood but tears.

Walker, who’d had her arm looped with Bradford’s, who’d smiled at him with that smile that men couldn’t resist, let go and climbed into the backseat of the lawyer’s car. Bradford stood for a moment, his hand on the car’s roof.

His eyes scanned the area, because he knew.

In spite of all evidence to the contrary, in spite of what Munroe had said and done, he knew, and his gaze at last fell on her and their eyes connected.

He stayed frozen that way, as she remained across the street, and time ground to a halt while traffic continued on between them.

Bradford put his fingers to his lips and turned them toward her, and she raised a hand with the universal sign for love. They stayed like that for a moment, an hour, a day, until a bus pulled between them and Munroe boarded it. From the window she watched Bradford’s face when the barrier between them passed and he understood that she was gone, watched him stay rooted to the spot with one hand on the roof and his eyes on where she’d stood, until she was out of sight.

He knew that she would come, just as he knew she’d return.

And she would return to him again, when she’d finished what she’d set out to do, and then perhaps, when they’d both healed and mended, they could slowly begin anew in the understanding that what they’d shared had never been lost, merely delayed.