One In A Million (The Millionth Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  “Thanks for everything tonight, Juanita. You can go home now,” Tamara said, keeping her back to her.

  Silence for a few seconds, then, “Are you sure?”

  Tamara nodded curtly and made her way into the family room, her back still to Juanita as she took off her suit jacket and tossed it onto the couch. “Absolutely. Thanks so much for the soup.”

  “Okay then. Have a good night.”

  She heard Juanita gather her keys and bag, walk to the door and leave. The loud click of the door lock snapping into place betrayed Juanita’s efforts to close the door softly.

  The rest of the house was quiet, save for the low hum of the refrigerator. Tamara looked at the mantle over the fireplace where a collage of framed photos was arrayed to show happier times: their wedding photo, a picture of Janie in her first soccer uniform, a Christmas photo at their favorite cabin in Big Bear. There was also that great shot of Kyle from his famed sushi-making class; he survived one lesson and decided it was far easier to buy and eat it than it was to make it.

  The years had come and gone so fast. But always, in those photos, they were together. First she and Kyle, then the dogs, then the addition of each child as their family grew.

  The pictures overwhelmed her with loneliness.

  And now God only knew where Kyle really was.

  THEY WERE in the manager’s office just off the front desk at the Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. It was a sparse room containing a single desk with a leather chair and two guest chairs jammed up against a wall opposite the door. Napoleon and Parker stood while Paul, the night manager, sat at his desk, the sweat on his forehead glistening under the fluorescent light fixtures in the ceiling.

  “So what do we have here on the surveillance tape, Paul?”

  “I’m sorry, Detective Napoleon, but—”

  “It’s Villa, Paul. Napoleon is my first name.”

  “I apologize. I’m still waiting for my supervisor to call me. I mean, I don’t know the legalities of releasing the tape to anyone just yet.”

  Napoleon rolled his eyes to the ceiling in an “Are you shitting me?” gesture to the universe. He wanted Paul to feel so ridiculously stupid that he would surrender his objections and get the hell out of their way. It seemed to have an effect.

  “Here we go, Parker,” Napoleon said as he wiped his sleeve across his runny nose. “Another one who has watched too many episodes of Law and Order or CS-fuck-me-up-the-ass-I.”

  Standing to Paul’s left, Parker leaned against the wall and shook his head.

  Obviously rattled, Paul cleared his throat. Napoleon had sized him up for gay the moment he’d met him, so the anal visual had been intentional. Everything Napoleon did had intentionality to it, at least on the job. Off the job he was as unintentional about as many things as he could be.

  “Detective, I—”

  “First off, Paul, we aren’t taking the tape right now so you aren’t ‘releasing’ anything. Second, we need to view it as soon as possible so we can glean any evidence off it we can. And lastly, while your supervisor is sleeping with his ass up in the air and dreaming about dolphins and sunshiny days, we have a dead girl going into rigor right now on your property and on your damn watch.”

  The ass-in-the-air comment was, again, intentional and meant to give off the appropriate homophobic vibes that unsettled most gay men and that was anything but appropriate in real life. In truth, Napoleon didn’t care who anyone slept with, as long as they didn’t steal from or murder each other in the process. As for the use of the word “rigor”? It was a hip little term that would feed into Paul’s CSI vernacular. Always let someone feel like they’re in the know when they don’t know shit but have something that you need.

  Be it the gay comments or the TV lingo, it worked. Paul cracked. He straightened the edges of his desk calendar, thought for a moment and then, nodding, he said, “Okay, gentlemen. I see your point, Detective. Back through this door is the security room. It’s at the end of the hall and to the left. At this hour only Ralph is on duty, and last time I checked, he was out front trying to keep any guests from getting in the way of everything. I’ll take you down there and let you in myself.”

  Napoleon gave Paul a little two-handed Buddha bow in mock thanks. Paul seemed to deem it sincere. Whatever.

  A few minutes later they entered a small, dimly lit security room. Opposite the door there were two black desks against the wall, with twenty-eight monitors above them: one showing the main entrance, another the rear, one the utility entrance near the kitchen, another outside over the parking lot, and one each for the hotel’s twenty-four elevator entrances on each floor.

  After being shown in, they received a brief explanation of how the equipment worked, which wasn’t all that complicated really. Then Napoleon gave Paul a dead-eyed stare. “We’ve got it from here. You probably want to get back to the front desk in case things start getting out of hand with the guests.”

  Paul hesitated briefly, but then he nodded curtly and left.

  Napoleon and Parker began rolling the recordings back one by one, keying on the lobby camera first, which most everyone had to pass when checking in.

  After rewinding them, they let the cameras tell the story in chronological order. First they focused their attention on the parking lot camera. It was mounted above the parking booth, which had been unmanned with the gates up and lights out.

  On the tape Napoleon watched a blue BMW 323i pull up and park.

  It was the same car the night bellhop had seen Caitlyn Hall arrive in earlier in the evening with “some guy.” Parker had already canvassed the parking lot earlier, found this very vehicle and run the plates. The car was registered to a Mr. Kyle Fasano of La Canada, California.

  On the tape, a man, presumably Mr. Fasano, exited the vehicle on the driver’s side and began making his way around the back to the passenger’s side, evidently to let his lover or lay or whatever she was out of the car.

  But then Napoleon noticed that Mr. Fasano did something interesting: he hesitated.

  At the back of the car Fasano stopped and just stood for a moment, his left hand on the trunk.

  “What’s he doing?” Parker asked.

  But to Napoleon it was obvious by the perplexed and doubtful look on Fasano’s face.

  You’re married, aren’t you? You were deciding, one last time, weren’t you, Mr. Fasano? About whether or not you really wanted to do this. “He’s thinking,” Napoleon replied.

  “With a firm piece of ass in the car?” Parker chuckled. “What a dipshit.”

  Napoleon sneezed and kept watching the tape as, evidently, the last domino of Mr. Fasano’s conscience fell; he was around the car and opening the door for his princess.

  Caitlyn Hall got out of the car and kissed him, long and hard, and began pulling him towards the hotel.

  “Vroom, vroom,” Parker snorted.

  “Shut the hell up, will ya?” Napoleon snapped.

  As they entered the hotel the main lobby camera caught them both, clear and up close.

  This was always the oddest part of a homicide for Napoleon: seeing someone so alive not so very long ago who was now simply dead. Mr. Fasano’s motivation was now obvious. Ms. Hall was beautiful, in a blue dress and red heels. She had long blond hair and a Pilates body that some young girls seem to have without actually doing the Pilates.

  Seeing their likely suspect clearly for the first time, Napoleon noted that Kyle Fasano was, indeed, built like a baseball player. Tall and broad shouldered, he arrived with perfectly combed hair, his jacket cut to fit and open, his tie loose and hanging below the confident smile of a man who had just hit the jackpot with the twenty-something little spinner who was hanging all over him.

  As they checked in, Napoleon noted that it was Caitlyn who used her credit card for the room. She was smiling and laughing, the camera catching her perfect white teeth, which were now scattered like Chiclets across the parking lot outside.

  From the front desk the two made their way
to the elevator and up to their room, the camera in elevator bay three showing them kissing heavily on the ride up. Then the camera on the twenty-third floor caught them exiting and hurrying to their room number.

  The room door closed and then whatever happened, happened.

  There was no sign of them as Parker fast-forwarded at four times the speed through nearly the next two hours of footage, then suddenly Fasano emerged from the hotel room, half naked and in a panicked state. Charging the elevator, he looked over his shoulder ever few steps before cramming himself through the elevator doors when they finally opened.

  Up to this point Napoleon had seen a happy, confident man on camera. But now Fasano was a man seemingly afraid for his life. He frantically pressed the down button until the doors closed, then dressed hurriedly in the elevator, emerging into the lobby looking as if he’d been dressed by a blind man, his shirt tucked in on one side in the front and the other in the back, no jacket, no tie, his hair in all directions and his face drawn.

  “Someone looks like he messed up,” Parker commented.

  “Yeah.” But Napoleon said it because he was tired of training right now and just as tired of talking. In truth, Napoleon wasn’t so sure. Something was off. But these were “for later thoughts,” which is what Napoleon liked to call thoughts he would hash through in the wee hours of the morning when a case wouldn’t let him go and he couldn’t sleep. He could already tell that this was going to be one of those cases.

  Parker reached across the console, nearly spilling a half-empty bottle of Gatorade in the process, and switched the view to the exterior entrance camera. There, outside the lobby doors and just off-camera to the right of the bellhop stand, was Fasano again. Just standing there.

  “What’s he doing?” Parker asked.

  “He stopped and turned around, as if something caught his attention off-camera.”

  “Hm.”

  They watched Fasano stand there for a few seconds more.

  Then, he disappeared.

  “What the hell?” Napoleon said.

  Parker leaned into the monitor and tapped the glass. “Did something block the lens?”

  “I dunno. I don’t think so,” Napoleon replied.

  “Well people don’t just disappear. Everything else is still there: the stand, the planter, the—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I get it Parker.”

  “The video just tweaked or something.”

  “Like I said, I dunno. But right now that’s less important to me than the obvious.”

  Parker looked at him with genuine curiosity.

  “He’s not acting like a man who just tossed a girl out of a window, a girl who should be splattered about seventy-five yards from where he’s standing when last we saw him in the video. Yet he doesn’t even look in that direction when he comes out.”

  “You ask me, he was scared shitless and guilty as sin coming out of there.”

  Napoleon sniffed and stared hard at the monitor.

  “Yeah. Sure. But maybe not of murder.”

  CHAPTER 5

  They stood just off Artesia Boulevard in Torrance, near the on-ramp of the 91 Freeway. Fifty-plus miles, Kyle thought. They had just traversed that distance in the blink of an eye. Incredible.

  “So it begins,” The Gray Man said, as if he had done this many times before.

  “What begins?” Kyle asked with some effort, his lungs expanding, as if he’d held his breath for the entire ride. His hands were sweaty and his neck damp.

  “Do you remember this place?”

  Kyle hesitated. “Sort of… I mean, my dad lived just down the street.”

  “Yes. But what else?”

  A mild Santa Ana wind blew in from the east, shifting Kyle’s pant cuffs and warming him even further. “I’m not getting you.”

  “Over there,” The Gray Man said, pointing at a 76 station across the street.

  Still confused, Kyle took note of the gas station. It seemed new and shiny at first. Then his mind began to reassemble all the surrounding buildings and yards, fence posts and businesses, the bus stops and benches, until he had most of the details he needed for his memory to be properly jogged. As if by some odd sort of time travel, the 76 station was replaced by…

  “A Pizza Hut. There used to be a Pizza Hut here.”

  “Yes. Good,” The Gray Man said.

  “But I don’t get it. I mean, I think I only came here a few times…”

  “Once. You came here one time.”

  Still stuck, it took a few seconds to click, and then she came to Kyle’s mind like a Post-it note from the past. “Victoria?”

  The Gray Man nodded.

  “What does she have to do with any of this?”

  The Gray Man sighed. “You broke her heart that night, Kyle.”

  Up beyond the ramp, the traffic on the freeway was heavy. The sound of tires moving at high speed along the road mixed with a crosswalk button chirping in the distance. Kyle shook his head and shrugged. “We were kids, man.”

  The Gray Man nodded in a way that reminded Kyle of the only time he’d ever taken golf lessons, when the instructor had barely suppressed his impatience as Kyle repeatedly whiffed at the ball.

  “I mean, what, we were seventeen or eighteen. Our whole lives were ahead of us.”

  “Life is never really ahead of us, Kyle, or behind. Such thoughts are tricks played on us, or that we play on ourselves.”

  “What?”

  “The present is all that counts, Kyle. The present moment. On that night you traded what you had for what you might have. For you it was all about the road ahead. For her, sadly, it was a detour. And a bad one.”

  Kyle thought of Victoria, of her long light-brown hair and dark eyes, of her slender body and firm breasts, of her thin lips that rarely surrendered a smile due to her shy and reserved personality that had always made her seem just out of reach. He’d pined over her in junior high and all the way through his senior year of high school, when he’d finally managed to get her attention in—of all places—their Econ Honors class.

  “She noticed you that day, didn’t she?”

  The wind picked up. An odd smell of pollen and motor oil began to blow into Kyle’s face. The asphalt near them changed from green to red beneath the matching traffic light above.

  “Yeah, she did.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  The Gray Man reached up to adjust his hat. “Quit lying,” he said softly.

  Kyle shrugged in frustration. “I was drawing, I think, on my notebook.”

  “Go on.”

  “What? I mean…” Kyle let the words dangle. He felt silly, but it was no use. This guy could read his mind anyway. “It was a road. On a beige notebook. Whatever.”

  “We’re wasting time, Kyle.”

  “Okay. Fine. Screw it. It was a road, disappearing into the distance. I used a black pen. At the end of the road there were clouds. I did a fade out around the edges with a No. 2 pencil. The lecture was killing me and I was bored. That’s all.”

  “She was sitting next to you, right?”

  “Yes. From day one. I couldn’t believe my luck. My fantasy girl since we were in seventh grade was right there at the desk next to me. It’s a miracle I didn’t fail that class.”

  “She noticed you drawing, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah. It caught her eye for some reason.”

  “No, Kyle. She noticed you. You drawing.”

  “Whatever.”

  “For all her shyness and reservation, yours was far worse. You were locked up in your sketches and short stories until you joined the football team, right?”

  “Yes. The damned football team. Hooray.”

  The Gray Man laughed. “You went from poet to warrior-poet, Kyle. That’s a tough combo for a girl to pass up.”

  Kyle shrugged again. To their right a homeless man was making his way into a parking lot near the opposite corner, passing a teenager who was sitting on his bike.

  “
Still, to this day, you will not accept that she noticed you instead of the drawing.”

  “She noticed both then—how’s that?”

  “You still haven’t described that sketch fully, have you?”

  “Oh, man. Are you kidding me?” Kyle sighed, pretending to try to remember what he could still, for some odd reason, remember in the greatest of detail, even to this day.

  “I wrote some weird words at the bottom, like it was an album cover or something.”

  “It was the words she commented on. Those ‘weird’ words, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Traversing the fields,” Kyle replied, laughing uneasily as he recalled the block letters he’d drawn with fading shadows.

  The Gray Man nodded. “Yes. ‘Traversing the fields.’ Sort of like you’ve been doing tonight. With me.”

  Kyle noticed that the boy on the bike hadn’t moved, and he seemed to be staring at them, though it was impossible to tell for sure in the dark. He was leaning on the handlebars, and his head was facing in their direction. It was nearly midnight; kind of late for a kid to be out riding his bike.

  “Yeah. I guess. So what?”

  “We are rarely better at living in the present than we are when we’re young,” The Gray Man answered. “As such, we’re never in a better position to appreciate what’s yet to come.”

  “Okaaaaay? So you’re saying that when I was seventeen I drew a picture—”

  “—of today. Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  Kyle shook his head. “This just keeps getting nuttier and nuttier.”

  The sound of the traffic slowed and Kyle noticed something strange… The traffic light was stuck on yellow. Looking around, he was stunned to see that the traffic was moving in slow motion, both on the street and the freeway beyond. Even the homeless man, inside the parking lot now, looked like a television replay on super-slow.

  But not the boy on the bike; he was riding in circle eight’s at normal speed. Head down one moment, looking over at them the next.