One In A Million (The Millionth Trilogy Book 1) Page 16

  Despite his desire to understand what he was hearing, Kyle felt faint.

  “Hey, Gray?” It was the first time Kyle had called him that, and it felt oddly reassuring.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t feel right. I’m exhausted. And this little chat of ours isn’t helping.”

  The Gray Man blinked. “Yes. Of course. Your body isn’t meant for that much power. We have to get you someplace. You need more sleep.”

  “Someplace?”

  “Yes. Shelter. Where you can be administered to.”

  “Administered to?”

  The Gray Man helped Kyle stand as the bus came to a stop just outside downtown Carmel. They walked out together, the other passengers clearing a bit of a path. “Sorry. So sorry,” The Gray Man said. “My friend gets very bad car sickness.”

  One old lady with a small piece of Samsonite luggage rudely refused to move. The Gray Man looked at her sternly and said, “He’s going to throw up any second now.” She moved.

  Once they maneuvered out of the bus, The Gray Man helped Kyle across the street and through the parking lot beyond, then over to a small grassy area beneath a massive tree with long, reaching branches. He guided Kyle to the base of the tree and made him lie down.

  “What are we doing?” Kyle murmured.

  “Don’t worry. No one can see us.”

  Kyle closed his eyes and was out almost instantly, once again falling into a deep sleep that settled all the way down into his bones. He woke once, briefly, and was amazed to see that the night sky, so full of stars, had descended down and around them, as if the universe itself were his cradle. A small orb-like fire burned a few feet from Kyle, and he saw The Gray Man talking to two other men that were bathed in light, just a few feet beyond.

  They were speaking of forces at work and battles past.

  Before he slipped again into the depths of sleep, he could’ve sworn he heard The Gray Man say Tamara’s name. But that was silly.

  How could she be wrapped up in all of this?

  TAMARA RUBBED her eyes and sighed. The day had mercifully come to an end. The phone calls had continued flooding in, and each merited a glance at caller ID. But it was never Kyle. Every few minutes she checked her email on her phone. Nothing there either. He was off whatever grid there was. This scared her because it implied his guilt, and each time her mind wandered down that path it was like a stray dog: it began getting into things it shouldn’t—like why she wasn’t good enough to keep her husband faithful, like what it was that Caitlyn did so well that she didn’t, or like how someone she thought she knew so well could betray her like this. So she called her mind back to her side and kept it on a tight leash.

  Trudy’s arrival from the airport was the godsend it was expected to be. When she’d first gotten there, a news van from KCOP had been partially blocking the bottom of the driveway, so Trudy called the police and had it removed for trespassing. She’d even made Tamara laugh, in spite of herself, by confronting a bold reporter who’d made her way up the driveway to the front door. Tamara had no idea a girl could moonwalk in heels, but as the reporter retreated back down the driveway in the face of Trudy’s advance the only thing missing was the Michael Jackson music.

  A little while later though, it was Trudy who made Tamara cry. Tamara was resting in the den, snuggled under a warm blanket, and was drifting off to sleep when she heard Janie’s little voice, more innocent than usual, in the kitchen. She’d snuck out of bed somehow and was speaking softly with Trudy.

  “What happened with Daddy?” she asked.

  There were a few seconds of silence, and then Trudy replied: “He maybe made some bad decisions, honey, hopefully not, but it’ll be okay. You just gotta help me take care of Mommy, okay?”

  Tamara’s tear supply seemed never-ending, and once again she found their hot sting rolling down her cheeks.

  Yes. Kyle had “maybe” made some bad decisions, and because of them, Tamara needed to be taken care of now, by her friends and family. How was that fair? And why was her grief beginning to metastasize into shame? She’d done nothing wrong.

  Later she heard Trudy take the biggest bullet of all: another call from Kyle’s mother. She stayed on the phone with her for nearly a half-hour, consoling her, of all things, as if Kyle’s mother was a dear confidant who could be trusted with all the inside information. Trudy told her that Tamara was sleeping and that nobody knew anything for sure yet, so everyone needed to stay calm, for Kyle’s sake. Very smart.

  Later that night, as the kids slept, Tamara and Trudy sipped wine on the couch in the den and watched as the moon hovered over the pool in the backyard. They talked about how crazy life was, and then they did what any reasonable adults their age did on a bad day: they watched repeats of Seinfeld.

  When those were over, the news came on. Trudy moved to change the channel, but Tamara asked her not to. She needed an update of some kind, any kind, even if it came from the enemy.

  She was astonished by this feeling, but it was true. The police, the press. She was already beginning to think of them as the enemy, to her family and also to Kyle, as if Kyle still needed to be defended somehow. This was huge for Tamara, internally, to know that deep down she still believed in him.

  The story had been pushed down a few leads already, but before long a Captain Bennett of the LAPD was on the screen. He was of some girth, with peeling red cheeks and a deep voice. He rattled off the facts. Kyle was still a person of interest. They were approaching the case as a “likely” homicide. Caitlyn was finally named as the “victim,” and what made it worse, far worse, was that she was the daughter of someone important: an Assistant District Attorney of Los Angeles.

  She heard Trudy curse under her breath before taking another sip of her wine.

  In addition, Caitlyn’s mother was quite the philanthropist. A daughter from a wealthy family in Pasadena, she was an ex-Rose Parade beauty queen, headed the local chapter of the Red Cross, and both she and her husband were heavily involved with Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.

  Tamara’s stomach squirmed. Shit, Kyle, you picked the wrong girl to mess up with.

  Law enforcement within the state of California as far north as San Francisco and as far south as San Diego were now involved in the “investigation” and “continuing search” for Mr. Kyle Fasano, as were authorities in Nevada and Arizona. Kyle was urged to turn himself in. Anyone with knowledge of his whereabouts was to call their local police department. If seen, he was not to be approached, as he “could be dangerous.” It seemed to Tamara that the gears of some massive machine were beginning to turn, and she wasn’t surprised. When a beloved child of the rich and powerful dies, things happen far more quickly than they seemed to for anyone else.

  “You good?” Trudy asked, reaching across the couch to pat Tamara’s knee.

  “I miss him. I’m mad as hell, Trudy, but I’m worried sick about him.”

  Trudy put her glass of wine aside and sat closer to Tamara and hugged her. “I know, Tam-Tam. It’ll work out. It will.”

  Tamara took comfort in her college nickname as she rested her head against Trudy’s shoulder. It was from their time together on the women’s volleyball team, a take on Bamm-Bamm from the Flintstones. Tamara was a presence at the net, and she had a mean spike that was punctuated by that little chant whenever it was successfully executed.

  “Why did he do this, Trudy?”

  Trudy scoffed. “Men. It’s clichéd, and it’s no excuse, but they screw up.”

  “But I thought I was making him happy. I thought we had a good life,” Tamara sniffed and shook her head.

  “Don’t do this to yourself,” Trudy replied firmly. “It’s not your fault, and you damn well know it.”

  “But if he were happy—”

  “A lot of things make up a person’s happiness.”

  “But I—”

  “You what? Built a home for him? Loved him? Gave him two beautiful babies? Worked full time just like he did?” Trudy sat upright a
nd took Tamara by the shoulders. “We’re not going to do this, okay? This is not some sappy, bullshit Lifetime special where we’re going to let you blame yourself for your husband being stupid enough to risk it all to screw some little whore, okay?”

  Tamara nodded.

  They were silent for a minute before Tamara dealt with the last elephant in the room. “But what if he really did kill her, Trudy?”

  “Jesus, Tamara.” Trudy reached over and finished off her glass of wine. “If he did that, then we’ll get you through that too. Somehow, someway.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, but we will.”

  Tamara was about to delve further into this when her phone buzzed.

  It was a text message.

  From Ben.

  She ignored it.

  CHAPTER 19

  Napoleon and Parker had doubled back on the route they’d just traveled. The open spaces and dead lands of the 5 south, mixed sporadically here or there with farmlands, was a boring repeat of the same areas they’d passed while going north, but now, at least, it had given way to new areas, hilly and lush in parts, ocean side properties in others, each landscape bearing witness to the schizophrenic nature of a state that wanted to be all beach but in reality was mostly desert.

  The sun was holding court, the guest of honor in a pure blue sky. As they passed through Carlsbad, Napoleon found it ironic that the same sun that was tanning the pretty bodies along the coastline here was burning the necks of the field workers in the orchards off to the east in Temecula, Southern California’s version of wine country. Napoleon wasn’t a wine drinker, but he wondered if these pretty people could taste the sweat of the workers in the Cabernets or Pinots they so carelessly consumed.

  He and Parker split the night shift on the drive down, each able to sneak in a good chunk of sleep, and Napoleon felt oddly refreshed. His body was welcoming the fact that he was feeling better, his throat was no longer hurting and his chest was beginning to clear.

  “You hungry?” Parker asked, stirring in the passenger seat.

  “I know you are,” Napoleon replied.

  “McDonald’s is off the next exit.”

  “Yeah. Screw it. I could eat. Drive-thru?”

  “Nah. I gotta crap. And I need some coffee.”

  Napoleon shook his head. “For a young guy, you have a really weak colon, Parker. You crap three times a day, like a baby, or what?”

  Parker rubbed at the sleep in his eyes then ran a hand through his hair. “Dude. You have no idea.”

  “Dude? Well, it’s—”

  “—better than homie,” Parker finished through a yawn.

  “I doubt Fasano has made it this far, this fast.”

  “Not by bus. If he jacked a car? Different story.”

  Napoleon eased the car into the slow lane and took the next exit, the sight of the Golden Arches a mile off to their left with nothing but farmland as a backdrop. “I dunno. I don’t see him as having any clue whatsoever how to jack, or steal or hot-wire a car.”

  “You leaning towards bus?”

  “Yep. Or he hitched a ride with a trucker.”

  “His picture’s gotta be almost everywhere on the news by now.”

  “Everywhere locally, maybe, but truckers don’t always watch the news, or might get paid a little cash not to, if you know what I mean.”

  “Ya think?”

  Napoleon smiled. “Truckers are just another shady fraternity, like bikers, like any gang. Shit. They might be the shadiest.”

  “Hey. I take offense to that. I got a cousin who’s a trucker.”

  “Yeah?”

  “After his second strike, he had no choice.” Parker chuckled.

  They pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot and got out of the car.

  “He got a trucking job with two strikes, huh?” Napoleon poked.

  Parker shook his head. “Nope. Got his own rig. My aunt helped him. Sub-contractor now.”

  “Ah. So you’re saying he’s working cash gigs. Ten-four. Sounds like he’s a regular Boy Scout.”

  “He’s a nice young man,” Parker said with a serious face, “who pays his taxes.”

  They laughed and went into the McDonald’s. The breakfast menu being an all-day thing now made Napoleon happy. Life always seemed much simpler to Napoleon with an Egg McMuffin in one hand and a dependably perfect hash brown in the other. The coffee was good and strong. Parker, true to his word, took two sips and was off to the can.

  Napoleon’s cell phone rang, and he was relieved to see it was forensics. About damn time.

  “This is Napoleon.”

  “Nap. Beecher here. You got a sec?”

  Napoleon was immediately encouraged. He’d been hoping all along that Beecher was the one who caught the case on that end. She was a solid vet who started with the force a few years before Napoleon.

  “For this case? I got all the time you need.”

  Beecher scoffed. “Be careful what you wish for.” And it was the way she said it, like a drunken skeptic, which instantly worried Napoleon.

  “Well. Shit. Let’s hear it.”

  “You know who this girl is, don’t you?”

  “Assistant DA’s daughter, yada yada.”

  “There ain’t no ‘yada yada’ on this one. I guess this guy was gonna run for local office or something. Conspiracy theories are flying, and, well, it’s ruined the plans of some very important people. This place is crawling with press too.”

  Napoleon was sneaking a swig of his coffee and almost spilled it on his chin. “Great.”

  “Yep. You really caught the case of the year this time.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Like the clap.” Beecher sighed.

  “Great. Okay. Moving right along.”

  “My, my. The consummate professional.”

  “No. My partner, who just traded up from patrol, is already in the shitter, or I’d be there letting loose myself over this, trust me.”

  Beecher had always had a smoker’s laugh, and she unleashed it now. “Well, as you can imagine, this was expedited all the way down the line. Six Flags fast. The coroner’s office has the results and so do we. You ready?”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “You sitting down?”

  Napoleon rolled his eyes and jammed the rest of his hash brown into his mouth. “Quiff-fugginaround.”

  “She was cooked.”

  The hash browns were a bad idea. They got stuck in his throat, but Napoleon forced them down and waited. There was no need to ask it, the words hung there like they might never land.

  Beecher took the silent cue and kept rolling. “From the inside out, it appears. Like, shit, I dunno, he put her in a microwave. Her exterior—”

  “Her exterior?”

  “Yeah, ya know, her damned skin, and most of her muscle tissue, wasn’t burned at all.”

  Napoleon couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “So… what the hell?”

  “Her internal organs, brain, heart, liver, gallbladder, spleen? Cooked black.”

  Napoleon took a deep breath and tried to calculate these facts against the crime scene. “But the hotel room window, it was melted, right?”

  “That’s where things really take a turn,” Beecher mused. That old scientist’s fascination that was so familiar to Napoleon now permeated her voice. “That was from a different heat source.”

  He still had a quarter of his McMuffin to go, but Napoleon was no longer hungry. Instead he downed the coffee, hoping the caffeine would wake him up, sure that he was mishearing Beecher at almost every turn. “A… different source?”

  “Yep. So we got it figured this way: he cooks the girl, melts a hole in the window and chucks her out.”

  “Beecher. Please. You’re not that stupid. Who’s the ‘we’ that has it ‘figured out’?”

  There was a short silence at the other end, then: “The cap and the DA’s office, mostly.”

  “But of course.”

  “I don�
�t see it either. No microwave big enough, at least in the hotel, to do this.”

  “The hotel kitchen?”

  “We checked. A walk-in oven is there. But—”

  “—that would have cooked her outside-in.”

  “Exactly.”

  “The glass? In the hotel room? How was it heated?”

  “Maybe a blowtorch. But I doubt it. There was a fluorescent-cobalt-blue-type singe around the opening. I recognized it immediately. Sulfur. It melts a bit like wax, hence the drips along the upper edges, which you could barely see because it was glass—I mean, partly because the glass had melted, and partly because it was night.”

  “So… then what?”

  “Nap. I’m not going to lie. I have no clue. I mean, if we take this logically, step by step, it’s clunky at best. I mean… he would’ve had to kill the girl off-site by cooking her in some microwave range of some kind, or with a microwave weapon—”

  “Weapon? C’mon. This guy isn’t with the CIA, Beech. Besides, we have the video. He walked in with her.”

  “I know. But, whatever, he cooks her somehow, kills her. Then he has a blowtorch, which he uses to heat the glass, super-hot—why so high on the window I have no idea. Then he chucks her out. He must’ve melted the sulfur onto the hole first too. It was all over her face and hair… Well, what was left of her face and hair.”

  Napoleon took in a deep breath and sighed. “Beech, you gotta know that this all sounds like complete horse shit.”

  “I know. But cut us some slack. We had to put this girl together again like Humpty Dumpty, Nap. I mean, the parking lot grit was still in her eyeballs.”

  Parker returned to the table, his face and hair having been wetted down.

  Napoleon motioned to him. “I’m on with forensics.”

  Parker nodded and took a huge bite of his McMuffin.

  Napoleon took a deep breath and grunted. “So, is there any other way to cook a body from the inside out?”

  Parker stopped chewing.

  “We’re checking. Unlikely. I mean. She walked in with him, which means if there were a way to do this to her, it had to happen after she got to the room or…”