A Million to One: (The Millionth Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  But she and Detective Parker had agreed last night that this would be their story, while they had stood in front of Victoria Brasco’s darkened house, like two people sharing a nightmare, and waited for the first patrol car to roll up the driveway.

  She had been hysterical, collapsed there on the front lawn, until he’d jerked her to her feet and almost yelled at her to pay attention.

  “Listen to me. You have to calm down,” he said, his eyes bulging as he ran his fingers through his hair.

  “What? What do you want!” she screamed into his face, wanting to close up and go away, into herself, to a back room in her mind where no light of comprehension burned.

  “They’re never going to buy what happened here, do you understand that?”

  Tamara became indignant. “Why should I give a shit about what they buy or don’t buy?”

  Parker grabbed her by the shoulders. “Because they will think you and I, one of us or both of us, aided and abetted in his escape.”

  “What?”

  “Think! Think about it. He’s gone. Just… poof! Gone? Sure. Would you buy that?”

  Tamara’s eyes darted in all directions, like those of a panicked bird. He was asking too much of her to think straight right now. She could barely stand. Finally she managed a speechless shrug.

  “Now, toss in a glowing gray guy who disappears with my partner on a mission to hell… ?”

  He stopped, released his grip on her and stepped back before he covered his face and shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m saying any of this. It’s nuts.”

  Tamara watched as he spun around and walked down the driveway. “Hey!” she shouted.

  He pivoted and walked back to her. He grabbed her by one elbow, a little too firmly. “They’ll put us on psych eval. For a day at least, up to three if they so choose. This case is so damn hot they’ll maybe even take it to a judge and extend that to a week or more, who knows.”

  Tamara was dismissive. “They can’t do that.”

  Parker smiled. “Mrs. Fasano. They can and they will. My partner is gone. That’s a missing cop. The suspect we were after? He’s gone too. So add a missing fugitive. Our stories will sound lame, like we’re in on it somehow, or stalling, or worse. If they can’t find a way to pin any charges on us? They’ll transfer us to the psych ward at County. It will be weeks, maybe months, before you see your kids again.”

  A stone fell against Tamara’s heart. Everything she’d done had been to help Kyle and spare the children any pain. All to no avail. “Oh my God… please. I can’t deal with this. I can’t.”

  The distant sirens were growing closer; the minutes before they were no longer alone were now dwindling.

  “You can and you will. Look at me!” Detective Parker’s face was mere inches from her own now, his eyes boring into her. “Don’t let your memory betray you.”

  “What?”

  “Think back now. You were here. We arrived. Do you remember that?”

  Tamara nodded.

  “Stop right there. Now. My partner and I told you to wait here, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Then… listen closely. I’m gonna keep this brief. Because the longer a lie gets the more frayed it becomes, and that’s what they… shit, we… me… fucking detectives… are trained to look for.”

  Her nose was running from all her crying. She sniffed and blinked hard at him before nodding again.

  “Forget everything that happened after that and replace it with this, okay? You, my partner and I were all standing here when we heard a commotion in the house. Detective Villa ordered you to stay here and ordered me to go around to the back of the house. Got that?”

  “Okay, but—”

  “No ‘but’ nothin’! You didn’t see anything else. You heard shit. That’s it. A bunch of yelling and screaming but—and don’t mess this up, because they will tear at the words you give them like wolves if you give them any—you couldn’t understand what was being said. Just shouts. No words. No clarity.”

  He’d grabbed both of her arms again and was shaking her gently. She pushed him back a bit.

  The sirens were only blocks away now.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Fasano. I just wanna get this right. Okay?”

  For some reason, he briefly looked like a little boy, afraid but trying to be brave. “It’s okay,” she said, this time reaching out to him to grab his hand. It was a small gesture but it seemed to bond them in the moment, and calmness came over her. “Okay. Fine. I’m listening, okay?”

  He sighed heavily in the staggered rattles of arrested panic. “Good.”

  “Then what, Detective?”

  He thought for a moment. “I ran around back. Then yelling and screaming. Then silence, okay? The next thing you knew, I ran back here to ask you if you’d seen anything. You said no. You asked the same thing of me. I said no. End of story.”

  “What? That’s it?”

  “Yes, now wait here a second,” he said, holding up his index finger. Then, shocking her completely, he took off running across the lawn. For just a second she thought he was ditching her, then she realized he was covering—or actually making—his tracks: he ran to the back of the house with quick, athletic strides, then returned.

  “What if they ask for more?” she pressed as he came to a stop back at her side.

  He was a little breathless from the sprint. “There is no more. They can’t make more out of nothing. Remember that. So give them as close to nothing as you can.”

  The harsh red and blue lights of the police cruisers rounded the curved road that led up to the property, bouncing in patchwork patterns off the trees and shrubs that had been covered in the dark of night.

  “They’ll be here any second,” Detective Parker said. “We got it straight, right?”

  “Yes,” Tamara replied firmly, feeling in control for the first time in hours.

  That’s really when she should’ve known better, that something bad was going to happen, because the one thing absent from her life since this had begun was “control.”

  A weak, feeble and drawn voice split the air between them. “She was the devil.”

  Tamara and Parker looked in shock towards the house. The front door was open and there was a young man with tousled black hair standing there, blood all over his chest. He was leaning against the doorjamb, his eyes wide with madness, his breath wheezing in and out of him with a bubbly sound like boiling water. He looked at them with desperate, terrified eyes and spoke again. “She was the devil and she tried to kill me and then she pulled him with her to some awful place, I heard it, the sounds, there was so much screaming. My God, my God, my God.”

  Tamara’s heart plummeted as the police cars came shrieking into the driveway and the boy ran past them in a panicked run for help. Blood spilled from his mouth as he screamed at the officers leaping from their cars. “She pulled him to hell, she pulled him!”

  Weapons were drawn. The paramedics were called. All the while, the boy kept ranting.

  Now, in this interrogation room, the lights were so bright it almost hurt. When she snapped out of it, she realized that she’d been gone quite a while. The coffee on the table was no longer steaming.

  They’d had a plan.

  Then that boy had shown up.

  Tamara lowered her head into her hands and exhaled in frustration.

  There was an old quote she couldn’t fully recall, about plans and mice and men.

  DETECTIVE EVAN PARKER sat with his hands folded in his lap in the watch commander’s office in the Monterey Police Station. It was a room of subdued hues, the gray walls and mint-green linoleum floor looking dirty beneath the fluorescent track lighting overhead.

  Seated nearby was Monterey PD Detective Eric Ivy, his white shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, which were propped on his knees, his chin resting on his thumbs, the rest of his fingers interlaced. The pose was nearly one of prayer, which was what Parker was sure Ivy was going to turn to next, because, well, they’d been
going in circles now for nearly ninety minutes, going nowhere and back again.

  Opposite Parker and sitting behind his desk was Sergeant Denny Schmidt, running out of patience and clearly long beyond any thoughts of prayer. He looked like he would’ve preferred to jump to a little intimidation by now. But not Ivy. He looked like he could go another hour with the questioning before he even needed a sip of water.

  They’d both been cordial and professionally respectful when they first brought Parker in. No games. No trickery. Just fellow law enforcement professionals trying to huddle up and figure things out together. But that boy who came running out of the house with the horror-movie face was complicating things on too many levels, probably babbling to uniform cops at the hospital who were relaying things back to the interview room.

  Then the calls started rolling in from Los Angeles: first the captain, then the DA’s office. Parker’s lack of answers were perplexing to them at first, then annoying and now were building to some nasty point between exasperating and infuriating. In the midst of it all, Parker learned that Murillo and Klink, his fellow detectives from LA, had been dispatched to help with the mop up, but, really, they were only glorified errand boys sent to retrieve Parker and bring his ass home.

  That is, if he was allowed to go home.

  “So you know how this goes, Parker. Let’s do it again,” Ivy said matter-of-factly, like a math tutor just trying to help with an equation.

  Parker nodded. “Can we at least not go back to the beginning? Can we start in San Diego?”

  “I’ll do you one better,” Ivy said. He bit down on his lip. “Let’s start at Mrs. Brasco’s wine shop.”

  “Shit. This is getting us nowhere,” Schmidt interjected. He reached over his desk and rearranged some of the framed photos he had there, evidently so he could get an unobstructed view of Parker as he leaned way back in his chair.

  Ivy motioned towards Schmidt in an “easy now” kind of gesture, never looking away from Parker in the process. “Go ahead, Detective.”

  Parker sighed. “Okay. We had tracked the suspect here, to Monterey, based on evidence gathered in Beaury from the computers at the public library there, where Fasano had evidently been hot to track down his old high school girlfriend, Victoria Duncan, now with the married name of Brasco.”

  “Your office says that you had detectives in your precinct back home in LA lookup her contact info,” Schmidt said. It should’ve been a question, but it wasn’t.

  “Yes.”

  “So why’d you go to her place of business first, instead of her home?”

  “Judgement call.”

  “Did you call the business?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Didn’t want to tip them off. By that point we were worried she might be with Fasano, maybe helping him to hide.”

  “Which was wrong,” Schmidt added, his voice tense. He had red hair and a graying red mustache. He squinted at Parker with shifty blue eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses.

  So far, Parker noticed that his only weakness as the interviewee was whenever either of them made a run at Napoleon, either for the decisions he made or the things they thought he’d overlooked. Each time Parker felt a rage in the pit of his stomach. Neither of these men had any idea at all of the sacrifice his partner had just made for someone he’d never even met, all in the name of justice, universal or otherwise.

  “Look. You know the game. It’s almost always a fifty-fifty split,” Parker said, looking Schmidt dead in the eye.

  “Yeah. But that fifty-fifty starts getting slippery when you pick wrong as many times as you guys did,” Schmidt countered.

  Ivy jumped in. “Sergeant. Please. Let him finish.”

  Parker suppressed a smile. He might be a rookie detective but he recognized the shift instantly. Up until now it was “Eric” and “Denny,” all informal between them, with all the respect of title going Parker’s way. But now things were going formal, which meant that Ivy wasn’t so sure of Parker’s innocence anymore.

  Hell. Parker wasn’t even sure of his own innocence anymore. He should’ve never let Nap go with—

  “Detective? Please continue,” Ivy said.

  Parker complied. “Sure, if he’s done Monday morning quarterbacking.”

  “Hey listen, man–” Schmidt spat, rocking forwards in his chair.

  Ivy again held up his hand. “He’s done, Detective. Go on.”

  Nodding, Parker continued. “So… we went to the wine shop. A guy there—”

  “Who you thought was an employee.”

  “Yes. Who we thought was an employee. He told us that Mrs. Brasco had just left with someone.”

  “A man.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who fit Fasano’s description?”

  They had Parker clean here. No getting around it. They’d blown it by not asking for a description.

  “We assumed it was Fasano.”

  “Jesus. You assumed?” Schmidt said with a shake of his head.

  “Ya know, Sergeant… fuck you,” Parker said, contempt dripping from the words. “You’re acting like this isn’t the third damn time you’ve heard all of this.”

  Schmidt glared at him as the room went silent.

  Ivy leaned back and crossed his arms.

  Happy now? Parker thought. They’d broken his visage a bit. Now Ivy would no doubt move to console. To bond.

  “Easy now, Detective Parker. We’re on your side, man.”

  Bingo.

  Parker wanted to say: I don’t know who’s on my side anymore. Instead, he bit his tongue, smiled weakly and replied, “Yeah. Look. I’m sorry. I’m exhausted.”

  “We’re almost done. Just one more run at it.”

  Parker nodded. “Okay. So we tried to trace her steps, first to the beach and then to a bar on the pier.”

  “And nothing.”

  “Nope. Scared the shit out of a couple on the beach is all.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Dunn, of Bridgewater, Connecticut. Yes. They called it in right after.”

  “Yeah. Well. She fit the description of Brasco, and from a distance, the husband was a possible for Fasano. Plus, they were arguing pretty bad, so we thought we had something.”

  Parker shook his head, this time in genuine disappointment. That’s when they should’ve known, he and Napoleon both, that the whole thing was going south. They were chasing phantoms.

  One of whom had happily taken my business card at the wine store.

  “So we went to the bar.”

  “And what goes down there, again?” Schmidt chimed in.

  This was the tricky part, because someone had no doubt talked to the bartender by now as well. Or they would be shortly, to see if things matched up.

  The only part of the story properly contained is between Mrs. Fasano and me, he thought. If she hasn’t cracked.

  But he knew she wouldn’t. Not out of any loyalty to him, mind you, that was Hollywood bullshit, but to the only loyalty you could really count on in a person: their loyalty to themselves. Her life was screwed, her husband probably dead. She wouldn’t risk going to jail and losing her kids too. Not a chance in…

  He stopped the thought short, not missing the irony.

  “No Fasano and no Mrs. Brasco. Instead we get a story from the bartender about the night prior. Evidently Fasano was in there and tripped out over something on the television. Started ranting, fell over. He got it together enough to pay his tab and then fled.”

  “So what was on the television?” Schmidt asked.

  “Uh… hurricane news or some shit,” Parker answered.

  “Mm-hmm,” Ivy said with a slight nod. “Okay. Then you left the bar?”

  “And went back to the wine shop.”

  “Where you confirmed that they had no male employees?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, who in the hell was this guy?”

  More irony.

  “We don’t know. We found the business card I’d given him ea
rlier. But it was burned.”

  “Where’s the card now?”

  He didn’t know why, but even though the card was still tucked into his pocket, he lied. “With my partner.”

  “And where’s your partner?” Schmidt asked suddenly.

  The question was offensive, and by this point, it was meant to be. They knew damn well what Parker had been claiming since the minute the squad cars pulled up to the Brasco residence: that he had no idea at all where Napoleon Villa was.

  This time, Parker noticed that Ivy didn’t move to check his partner.

  So be it. It was game on, then.

  “I told you. Many times. I don’t know.”

  “Detective. You, of all people, know why we’d have a problem with that, right?” Ivy asked firmly.

  Parker nodded.

  “And it doesn’t help when we have a twenty-three-year-old barista from Starbucks, who was evidently in that house to give a good boning to Mrs. Brasco, now insisting that he saw her turn into some sort of demon and fall with your suspect through a hole in space, like in some damn Star Trek episode, right?”

  That fucking kid. He was a problem. Parker ran his hand through his hair. No containing that info. It was running around like a scalded dog.

  But it didn’t matter, because Parker truthfully wasn’t there for that supposed moment. Even if, deep down, based on what he knew and saw outside the house, it was most likely true.

  “So?” Parker asked.

  Ivy leaned in. “So, what do you make of that?”

  Parker shook his head and looked first to Ivy, and then directly at Schmidt.

  “Seriously? You’re kidding, right? All it tells me is the kid’s batshit crazy.”

  CHAPTER 4

  THE NEXT INKLING OF thought came to Kyle with the kiss of a heavy fog upon his face and the feeling of wet ground below him. For a second he thought he was back in Monterey, under the pier, and that maybe this had all been a bad dream.