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

  “T-Tamara,” he managed, swallowing hard.

  Her voice sounded scared. “Kyle? Kyle where are you. No… wait—”

  He felt the blood draining from his arms and legs. Dammit. There was a distinct chance he was going to cry. What a coward. You do this, and then you cry?

  “Listen, babe, I…”

  But she cut him off. “Kyle.” It was his name voiced as a plea. He could tell she was crying, probably still upset about their fight on the phone earlier.

  “Tamara, listen… I don’t know what’s happened, but I’ve really messed things up, baby.”

  “No.” She spoke sternly this time, one word, a flat command that startled him. It was out of place. How had she gone from crying one second to such a—

  “The police are here, Kyle. They want to speak with you.”

  He sat involuntarily, his legs collapsing beneath him on the dirt gravel next to the wall of a Circle K in Beaury, the small town he’d arrived at when the light cocoon around him had receded, when he’d finally decided to stop and make the call.

  No. This wasn’t how he wanted her to find out.

  “What are you talking about?” he managed, complete denial now flooding both spheres of his brain, his emotions drowning in panic. This must be what shock feels like. I’m going into shock.

  “They want to know what happened with Caitlyn,” Tamara replied, a hint of accusation in her voice.

  “Tamara, it’s not what you think. I mean, it’s—”

  “Dammit, Kyle! I don’t have time for this! The kids are asleep and there are cops in the house and I don’t know what the hell is going on but…” She was crying now. He heard her say something to someone and then the phone was jostled before a new voice came on the line.

  “Mr. Fasano? This is Detective Villa with the LAPD.”

  The world grew dizzy. Is this really happening? Yes, it is. Oh my God. It is.

  Kyle managed to summon four words, but like some sort of spell, they brought him a little energy. “I didn’t do it.”

  “I have no reason to doubt you, sir, but the fact of the matter is we need you to come home so we can discuss it.”

  “Discuss what?”

  “Whatever it was that happened tonight,” the detective replied.

  Be it the shock, the numbness, the horror of the moment or whatever, Kyle felt a fleeting sense of panic, and he almost did a crazy thing: he almost laughed. Surely only guilty people laughed in such situations. But wait, he was guilty. But not of what they thought he’d done. He imagined that this man on the phone with him, Patton or Attila or whatever the hell his dictator name was again, would be the one to laugh, actually, if Kyle tried to tell him the real story, of Caitlyn, The Gray Man and teleporting to Torrance and wrestling a demon boy on a bicycle.

  “You would never believe me,” he thought, and then to his dismay realized that he’d actually spoken aloud.

  “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation, Mr. Fasano, but we have to talk, sir.”

  “I didn’t do this!”

  “I’m sure you didn’t, sir,” and he said it so kindly, so smoothly, that Kyle almost missed the tiniest tone of condescension in his voice. It was the same tone Kyle used with the kids from time to time when they didn’t finish their dinner or brush their teeth before bedtime.

  Anger welled up in him, firing the circuits to his brain. “She wasn’t normal,” Kyle managed.

  “Sir, please, can you just tell us where you are?”

  “You have no idea what’s going on.”

  “Nor can we, until we get a chance to talk. I can send someone to pick you up if you need me to. Where are you?”

  Kyle’s imagination went into overdrive. He saw himself being hauled away in a police cruiser, being questioned and no doubt being jailed. Then he thought of Tamara and the kids, the scrutiny and the humiliation. A second mortgage on the house would be next, no doubt, for bail and to hire a good attorney—if he even got bail.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Mr. Fasano, the situation you’re in is serious, and we need you—”

  He could hear Tamara, demanding the phone from the detective and telling him to leave the house.

  “Ma’am, he needs to listen to us, and so do you.”

  Kyle felt his panic returning. “You let me speak to my wife, you asshole!”

  “Mr. Fasano, you need to come home.”

  “Give me the phone! Now!” Tamara screamed in the background.

  “I’m not coming home,” Kyle said. Again, just four words. But these four felt like stitches, sewing him to his fate.

  “Sir, I strongly suggest you rethink that.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Sir…”

  “Tell my wife I love her…” Kyle despised himself as he felt his throat catch and the tears came, all while on the phone with another man, and a stranger at that.

  “Mr. Fasano, you need to tell her that yourself. Just let us pick you—”

  “You tell her that she knows I would never hurt anybody.”

  There was more screaming and yelling now. A third voice joined the discussion, probably another cop, and he was telling Tamara to calm down.

  “Mr. Fasano, let’s just talk a bit here…”

  Suddenly, all those movies where the cops need a certain amount of time to trace a call came racing to Kyle’s mind. He was on his cell phone, and they had GPS these days and…

  Oh shit!

  Kyle stepped away from the side of the Circle K and smashed his phone to pieces against the wall, leaving gray and white plastic chips like glitter below a sea of graffiti across the red bricks.

  My God. Oh my God. What now? They’re after me. They’re gonna be after me now. What if they already tracked my location?

  He felt sick with adrenaline and nervous energy, both coursing through his veins and colliding in his stomach. Wiping the back of his hand across his eyes, he felt hot sweat on his neck as a brief gust of wind raced over the Circle K. He should have looked up Victoria’s address before he smashed the phone. He should have done his homework, something, a little scouting for data before cutting off his main avenue of information.

  No. No, it was good that I didn’t. They would have all that data on their end now too if I had.

  They would know where he was going and who he was looking for. Now they didn’t. That was his only edge. They knew where he was though, or they would shortly. He had to get moving, no matter what direction.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out its contents: a toothpick, a hundred and eighty-four dollars and his ATM card, which he had pocketed at the bar after paying the tab, too much in a hurry to get going with Caitlyn to worry about putting it back into his wallet. The card would be shut down soon. Or they might wait to use it to trace his movements. He needed to find a bank and get what money he could.

  He turned from the wall and looked up. The sky had gone from flat black to the deep black that harkens the true dead of night, the color of time between one and two in the morning, when only insomniacs and grave yard shifters roam the earth.

  The buses wouldn’t be running for a while. A cab would be too obvious and provide a witness to where he would be dropped off. He wanted to get moving but it was obvious that now was not the time. He was thinking too much.

  Stop. Find a bank. You’re going to need money. There’s a boulevard up ahead, looks like about two miles. Just start walking and hope you get lucky.

  So he did, his head swiveling, his eyes trying to pierce the darkness, hoping that between here and the boulevard he didn’t hear the whooshing of any bicycle tires.

  NAPOLEON LOOKED AT PARKER. “The line went dead.”

  Mrs. Fasano stood at her kitchen counter in tears, looking both confused and furious. She grabbed the phone from Napoleon, spun and threw it against the couch. “Get out!” she yelled.

  A small voice came from the hallway adjacent to the kitchen. “Mommy?” A little girl, about ten or eleven, s
tood there in the half-light cast from the kitchen.

  Napoleon glanced at Parker, who looked like a man who had just crapped in his pants. Being a beat cop and roughing up tweakers was one thing, but this sudden jaunt down the back alleys of domestic bliss turned upside down had obviously thrown Parker for a loop.

  That’s what you get, dipshit, for staring at her tits on the way in, looking her over, making yourself too much at home, popping off about her marriage. She was hardly going to like us after tonight, but she didn’t need to hate us.

  Napoleon sighed. When the kids arrived it was time to exit anyway. “Ma’am, I’m gonna leave my card.”

  Tamara glared at Napoleon before speaking to her daughter. “Janie, go to your room.”

  “But Mom…”

  “Now!”

  Tears welled in the little girl’s eyes and she hesitated before, much to Napoleon’s relief, she retreated back into the hallway. Napoleon’s gut told him that she hadn’t gone back to her room though, just far enough away to keep listening, and why not? Her mother was crying, and two strange men were in the house.

  As if she were a ghost summoned by his thoughts, little Janie reappeared and it was her defiance, not her tears, that broke Napoleon’s heart. “I won’t go, Mommy. I won’t! Who are they? What are they doing here? Where’s Daddy?”

  Mrs. Fasano put out her arms, and the little girl raced to her side. As he walked towards them, his hand outstretched with his business card, Napoleon noticed that Mrs. Fasano’s left hand was under her daughter’s chin, cradling it. She used her right hand to wipe the tears from her own eyes before she took Napoleon’s card.

  “Thank you. I will forward this to our attorney in the morning, and I promise you I will be speaking to your boss at that time as well. How dare you come into this house and act this way towards me?”

  Amazingly, Parker opened his mouth again. “We’re just trying to get to the bottom of—”

  “Oh you will get to the bottom, trust me, I’ll see to it,” Tamara shouted. “Now get out!”

  Napoleon nodded, and he and Parker exited the home with Mrs. Fasano and the child following behind them. She slammed the door at their backs as they made their way off the front porch before Napoleon heard the lock and deadbolt being engaged.

  “Great job, Parker,” Napoleon seethed as they walked to the car.

  “What?” Parker protested.

  “To Protect and to Serve,” Napoleon added wryly, then sneezed twice.

  They got into the car and Napoleon waited until they pulled onto the street before he let Parker have it. “Okay, dumb shit, listen up. The next time you tag along with my ass, you better keep your asshole mouth puckered shut, are we clear?!”

  “Hey, man!”

  “Don’t ‘hey, man’ me. You’re a damn trainee! Your job is to learn, not take the lead. You do know that, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No ‘but’ nothing! You jackass, are you trying to impress me? Earn a gold star or something? The captain’s gonna have my dick in a vice over this one, all because I couldn’t keep some greenhorn in his damn place!”

  “She wasn’t cooperating and—”

  “She never had a chance to. Everything you did was wrong.”

  “Look, man, I thought—” Parker again tried to interject.

  “There! Right there is problem number one. You thought. Therefore you weren’t.”

  “I wasn’t what?” Parker said defiantly.

  “You weren’t attuned to the attitude or the body language of the interviewee. Had you been, you would’ve noticed she was ours from the moment we arrived. She was worried. She wanted the same damned answers to the same damned questions we did, you numb-nut.”

  “Hey, man, I don’t appreciate the name calling, dude.”

  “Dude? ¡Ay Dios mio! Él no conoce su cabeza de su culo.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “That you don’t know your head from your ass! I ain’t your dude, or your pal, or your Brokeback Mountain running buddy, you got it?”

  “Shit. Okay. Calm down.”

  They drove down Angeles Crest Highway to the 210 Freeway in silence, Napoleon needing to reload on throat lozenges, one inside each cheek, to offset the extra pain from all the yelling. He was beginning to ramp up for another round of brow beating when his fatigue accelerated from dog-tired to bone-weary.

  He looked over at Parker, who sat stiffly with both hands still gripping the wheel. Kid had pride. That might be good someday, when he knew how to use it. He needed help in the smarts department, but what person in their first week at McDonald’s didn’t screw up, much less as a detective on their first murder case? For a second Napoleon felt a little bad for him.

  “She wanted to know where her husband was, Parker.”

  Parker nodded slowly, chin out.

  “What wife doesn’t want to know that—heck, to be fair, what husband doesn’t—at one o’clock in the morning before two cops show up at the door? Had we handled ourselves like proper gentleman, had we been supportive, acted worried and concerned, had we played up the kid angle properly… you know, like, ‘We don’t want the children waking up in the morning asking where their father is, right?’… then her mommy instincts would’ve come out in a healthy way, instead of the momma-bear-snarling-her-fangs-at-us-on-the-way-out-the-door way we just experienced.”

  “Okay. I hear ya,” Parker said, sounding encouraged, taking one hand off the wheel, relaxing a bit now. You were a jock, weren’t you, Parker? Napoleon thought. You’re going to be all about the whole “coach me up and put me in” approach, aren’t you?

  “We’re their friends, Parker. Remember that. Perp. Perp’s mamma. Perp’s priest. I don’t give a shit. We’re their friends first, until we get what we want, at least. If they help us, then we can be their friends forever. I don’t wanna hurt nobody. I got enough enemies.”

  “What if they don’t help us?”

  Napoleon sneezed again and wiped his sleeve across his nose. It was starting to get damp with snot, like when you’re a little kid and pay the tissue box no mind. “People been killing other people for forever and a day, Parker. People like me and you been trying to catch ’em for just as long.”

  “So, what about Mrs. Fasano?”

  “She gets a pass for now, because we never gave her a chance to be our friend. We never got a read on her. If we had, maybe she would’ve told him to turn himself in, like we wanted, instead of what just happened.”

  “What do you mean?” Parker asked, looking at Napoleon.

  “You heard it. She stonewalled us. She shut him down on the phone. She doesn’t want us to find him. At least not now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because in some cases it goes like this: husband bangs pretty little office girl for a few months, but pretty little office girl is a gold digger who has college tuition to pay off or gets mad when he won’t fall in love with her and leave the wife, whatever, and so she starts to fleece him, or maybe she threatens to tell the wife or cost him his job for banging a subordinate. So husband runs to wifey, who loves him, or doesn’t really, but doesn’t want to lose all she has and go back to square one because of some little home wrecker. Together, the loving couple has a brilliant idea to off the bitch and make it look like a suicide.”

  “You think that’s what happened?”

  “I dunno yet. But I doubt it. I think she’s just protecting her turf and her man’s back right now, until she gets the real scoop from him.”

  “And when she does?”

  “Let’s just say I have a feeling she’ll come around to our way of thinking.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. There’s that age-old saying, Parker. Can you guess which one?”

  Parker mulled it over for a little too long before he finally said, “The one about hell hath no fury?”

  Napoleon smiled. “You bet your ass.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Even if he’s only slept with this girl, I’m
going to want a divorce.

  Tamara looked at the clock on the nightstand in her bedroom: 1:43 a.m.

  If he’s slept with her and murdered her…?

  She cut her thoughts short. It was too horrible to even imagine. She ran her fingers through her hair and pulled at the roots, using the pain to keep herself awake. Then she tried calling her best friend Trudy, who was in New York on a business trip. No answer, so Tamara left her a message. It was barely Saturday morning. If Trudy partied with co-workers the night before – which was highly likely – there was no telling what time she’d call back.

  Tamara didn’t think she was rational enough right now to trust her judgment, but Kyle had sounded guilty. They’d talked so briefly, the conversation unnatural and stiff, but a wife gets to know her husband, inside and out, like dust knows an old book.

  He hadn’t made a flat proclamation of innocence, which is what she would’ve expected after all these years together. So was he guilty of the affair, the murder, both or neither? How many pieces of this story was she missing?

  She thought of Caitlyn and felt nauseous. Tamara had seen her once, when she’d stopped by Kyle’s office to get some paperwork signed for the addition on the house. Caitlyn fit the MO of the sales reps at Kyle’s company: young and pretty. But she dressed a little sluttier than the others, which might’ve been an omen of sorts. Now she was dead, and the police thought that Kyle had something to do with it and…

  She was stunned at the emotions that began to overcome her, a vitriolic mix of rage, sorrow, jealousy and self-loathing on repeat, like a music playlist that she couldn’t pause or turn off. She repressed her sobs so as not to wake Janie, who was breathing softly next to her, having refused to go back to her own bed after the police left. She’d seen too much and had too many questions in her little head, which forced Tamara to lie to her to get her to settle down. “The police have mixed up Daddy with someone else, honey. They just need to talk to him to clear things up.” Half-truths, yes, but there was no reason for both of them to go through the night without any sleep.