Read Online The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel by Taylor Stevens - Free Book Online

steps they took, rushing for their cars, as if they shared a common fear.
    Munroe pulled the Ninja as close to the corner as possible, and with the bike rumbling, she called Bradford to let him know she’d arrived.
    She got his voice mail and hung up without leaving a message.
    He’d been late before; slow to answer before.
    Half the windows in the facility reflected the dark of empty offices. Security lights in the parking lot blinked on in the evening light.
    Munroe called again, got Bradford’s voice mail again, hung up again.
    On another night she would have attributed the lack of response to an extended meeting or to the insane work hours that kept him late into evenings and over weekends. But tonight her instincts rose and the texture between beats of silence hinted at more.
    The clock on her phone now said eight o’clock.
    He’d asked her to pick him up at seven-thirty.
    Munroe sent a text and with each passing minute of nonresponse, the slow roil of fear and uncertainty stretched higher, from deep down in the pit of her stomach, where the churning always started before bad news arrived.
    She slid off the bike and stared in the direction of the facility’s doors. Called Bradford again. No answer again.
    Anxiety filled her diaphragm in anaphylactic response to the allergen of experience: a life in which those few she grew close to, that she dared to love, were inevitably torn from her by death’s wretched breath.
    Munroe left her helmet beside the one bungee-corded to the passenger seat and, on autopilot, strode for the doors.
    At the security desk she asked for Bradford.
    Instead of phoning, as was typical, the uniformed guards told her to step aside and wait, then conversed in hushed tones.
    The roiling thickened, suffocating in its prescient awareness that fate had come to snatch away the one she loved once more.
    The guards came to an agreement. They made a call and then, with false reassurance, told her the wait would be but a moment longer.
    Munroe heard the hurried, shuffling footsteps and knew from the beat that they didn’t belong to Bradford. Tai Okada rounded the corner, his face a guise covering agony.
    He didn’t sign for her, didn’t request a temporary badge.
    He motioned to the front doors and said, “Please, let’s go outside.”
    Fight or flight instinct collided with itself, because in the moment she could neither fight nor flee, and she followed silently, treading water with every lurch, drowning in each forward surge.
    Okada stopped ten or more meters down, the building to his back at the midpoint between two windows where there’d be less chance of being overheard. He brushed hair out of his eyes. He fidgeted, his hands seeking each other, then releasing again.
    Munroe stared at him.
    “The police came for Miles today,” he said. “They took him.”
    The words filtered from his mouth into Munroe’s ears, and on hearing them she almost laughed with a heady rush that made her dizzy with hope.
    Bradford was still alive.
    “Why?” Munroe said.
    “A woman has been killed in the building. They say Miles killed her.”
    Elation dissipated into a vortex of convolution and error.
    Given the life that Bradford had led, he wasn’t an innocent man.
    War made murderers out of honest men—proclaiming guiltless by law what the conscience would later bear in shame—but there was innocence and then there was innocence, and if Bradford had targeted a kill, then the body would have disappeared and the evidence scattered and never found.
    Munroe took a step into Okada’s personal space, forcing him to look up at her, and like a five-year-old on constant replay, she said, “Why?”
    “They found the body this morning,” Okada said. He stepped to the side, out from under her glare. “She was killed this morning, early.”
    The answer was a nonanswer, information without connection, but the hair on Munroe’s arms rose in recognition nonetheless. Bradford had received an early morning call and