One Plus One (The Millionth Trilogy Book 3)

by Tony Faggioli

  The little girl disappeared after school that day, on her walk home, when Murietta was supposedly checking in to end his shift—the manager saw him. After that he’d gone to Pep Boys to buy a gas cap. The clerk there remembered him too, because he accidentally bought a locking cap and brought it back in a minute later to exchange it for a normal one. Both places were at opposite ends of town. From there he supposedly went home, though nobody saw him.

  They could’ve dug deeper. But the obvious answers were too easy to grab at; they already had a good half-dozen registered sex offenders who lived in the area, one of whom was much more likely to be their guy.

  Napoleon shook his head and began to walk into the complex, past one flight of stairs and to a second. When he came to the door of Murietta’s old apartment he stopped cold, recalling a moment from over a decade before as if it were yesterday.

  “Apartment nine,” Napoleon said with a sigh. The door stood there, as if it were looking back and taunting him. It was the same, practically unchanged, the “9” still tilted slightly to the right. Ten years and the landlord hadn’t even bothered to straighten out a door number.

  They found out later that Murietta brought the girl here after grabbing her on the drive from his work site to the Pep Boys. Bastard had locked her in the trunk while he went in to shop for his gas cap.

  “Quit calling her that,” he said to himself firmly, boxing with his mind. “She’s not ‘the girl.’ She had a name.”

  Napoleon put an arm out to the wall to steady himself, but his emotions still choked him. He didn’t want to say it. Their names made it personal. Their names made it, made them, more real. But feeling the overwhelming need to, he mustered the courage. “Esmerelda. Esmerelda Trejo.”

  The day grew still. A cat skittered through the weeds to his left.

  He’d made them watch Disney movies between assaults, and then fed them applesauce. “Disney movies,” Napoleon said. “My God.”

  The pain in his heart was almost crippling.

  He fought it, but in the end it was no use.

  Some places you leave behind for a reason.

  And oftentimes the reason is wrong.

  CHAPTER 9

  AFTER BREAKFAST THE MONSTER stuffed her back into the trunk like so much luggage, being careful, Tamara noted, with how he approached her and held her. She tried at first to put up a fight, before he bear hugged her from behind, picked her up and shook her a few times like a rag doll. This made Tamara think the better of it. There would come a time for a fight, but it was not here and now.

  Once she was back in the trunk he forced her head down into one of the corners, the heel of his hand pressed meanly into that soft space between her shoulder blades and just below her head. “I’ll snap your neck if you move, you understand?”

  “Why? Why are you doing this?” she cried out.

  “Just shut up!” he screamed as he tied her up again.

  “Please don’t tie my hands to my feet again, it hurts too much.” She felt pathetic for pleading with him, but the small of her back still ached horribly from being hogtied the day before

  He paused. She felt the trunk carpet tickling her lower lip.

  “Fine. But if we stop and you start kicking around back here? I swear…”

  She nodded meekly and then studied his actions: he moved very quickly to tie her up the rest of the way. Even with her wrists and ankles bound, he then checked and double-checked the ropes, as if he had OCD or something. No. It wasn’t that. She recalled his sudden agitation and realized something astonishing: he was afraid.

  On some level he was afraid of her. Perhaps it was because he remembered the solid shot she’d delivered to him in the foyer back at the house, when she’d been off by just an inch, one inch that could’ve prevented all of this, and he knew it. She could hurt him. She’d proven it. And so now he was going to be careful whenever he came near her or removed her ties.

  But that was okay. No one could be careful all the time.

  After a few minutes she heard sounds of him packing the car. He was mumbling to himself again, something about not wanting to let someone down, about doing a good job and about being a good boy. She strained to listen to the words before deciding it was useless to try to interpret crazy talk.

  The car sank a bit when he got in, then she jumped when the motor started and music began blaring. Black Sabbath. Great.

  The car made a U-turn to the left, the tires digging into the desert dirt, and then it was back onto the bumpy road to the highway. She took a deep breath and wondered where they were off to next, but this only started a chain reaction of questions. What would he do when they got there? What if he wasn’t alone in this? Would he rape her? If there were others, would she be gang raped? Was he going to kill her? Was she actually going to die this way? How in her life could she ever have foreseen this as her end? Each thought another brick, building in her a wall of panic.

  So she stopped herself, and again, she prayed. A simple prayer of the Franciscan order that her father had taught her in Bolivia.

  Most High, Glorious God,

  Enlighten the darkness of our minds.

  Give us a right faith, a firm hope and a perfect

  Charity,

  So that we may always and in all things act

  According to Your Holy Will.

  Amen.

  It was as if the prayer were a gateway to the past. Instantly, desperately, she was thirteen again, in the jungle with her father, meditating as they waited for a few people from the village to visit them before they were to go and forage for mushrooms and chickpeas.

  “Dad? Why are we saying a Catholic prayer?” she asked.

  He smiled warmly, as he almost always did when she was curious about things. “As Christians we acknowledge the true prayers of other believers of Jesus Christ, as well as our own.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, Tamara. Think about it. We do the same with our music too, don’t we? We have our hymns that we treasure, sure, but don’t you also love ‘Ave Maria’?”

  Tamara nodded.

  “Because it’s beautiful, right?”

  “Yes,” she replied, then thought for a moment about why it was beautiful, before adding, “Because I feel God in that song.”

  “Exactly. So? Did you feel God in this prayer?”

  She let out a small laugh. “Yeah. Actually, I did.”

  The birdsong of the jungle, normally chaotic and overwhelming, waned a bit as she watched a dragonfly cross between them and then down into a thicket of grass, the sunlight caught in its wings and gathered to the metallic green tint of its body.

  Her father watched it too before he continued. “As you get older, remember that: not to turn away from anything that you feel God in, be it a song or a prayer or, especially, a person. God talks to us in many ways, at many times and in many situations.”

  His brown hair was partially windblown and his light brown eyes were wrinkled deeply at the edges, his cheeks tan beneath a stubbly beard. Tamara had always wondered at her father’s eyes, always searching and yet always seeing somehow. There in the jungle that day he was more alive than she’d ever seen him, his faded blue t-shirt and tan shorts cast against the deep green of the jungle leaves and surrounding foliage. She realized then that you could love someone forever, really, without even trying.

  They practiced the prayer a half-dozen more times and, for whatever reason, it was one of the easiest ones she’d ever memorized.

  Because it spoke to her, there that day beneath the harsh Bolivian sun as much as it was speaking to her now, in the trunk of a car that belonged to some psychopath.

  “God speaks to us in all situations,” she whispered into the dark.

  And boy, she was in quite the situation now.

  Somehow the darkness of the trunk had grown deeper, not lighter, in the face of the prayer. The music blared and before long the madman was singing along, occasionally shouting a profanity or two for no good reason, as they
sped down the highway.

  After a while she began to slip into despair, worried that maybe this was it, that God had simply forsaken her or that she’d used up all her “God chips” to save the kids, and she was fine with that, if that was the case, but still, it was sad to die this way. This was a horrible thing that happened to other people, not you.

  Why? Why has this happened, God?

  Then she felt it: a fourth presence, there in the car, with her, the madman and God. It was a dark and foreboding presence, like an unwelcome guest at the table. From it emanated a profound hopelessness and a tempting call to revisit bad times and sad memories, and its attendance seemed to envelope the car in an evil cloud that permeated the trunk and scraped at her skin. Whatever it was, it was now riding shotgun to wherever they were headed.

  They rolled to a stop, but only briefly, before the car turned right and accelerated again. Tamara shuddered in relief. Just keep driving, you crazy bastard. Don’t pull over. Because I know for a fact that I don’t wanna see who you’re with.

  She was cold and her fear only multiplied when she suddenly heard something up front: there was a second voice now.

  She strained as hard as she could to hear it over the droning tires and her own labored breathing, and when she finally did, her heart sank.

  It was singing.

  Singing right along with the monster.

  PARKER APPROACHED the bedroom door and then, for no good reason, he hesitated, staring blankly at the doorknob. Droplets of doubt and hesitation sprinkled through his mind haphazardly, mixing with a strong sense of foreboding.

  It was the same feeling you had when going door to door with your M16 through some shit-small village in country. Which door was the enemy behind? What did it matter when your mind felt like it could be any door and every door at the same time? But he wasn’t in country, he was in a house in a well-to-do neighborhood in Los Angeles, and this wasn’t a reconnoitered location where the Taliban were thought to be holed up, but a little girl’s bedroom.

  Yes… but the same bedroom that the little girl herself had gone to great lengths to avoid entering earlier, not even wanting to grab a change of clothes. Why?

  He stood still, listening at the door, feeling ridiculous and stupid and yet totally justified on some level with his behavior.

  A lot a shit had gone down that made little or no sense, most of it bad. Still. The only way to get past being frozen like this was to reach, turn the doorknob and open the door. So he did.

  It swung open quietly and something struck Parker immediately: the light from the hallway outside seemed to enter the room and disappear into the inner darkness, instead of illuminating anything. The sense of foreboding he’d felt seconds earlier was now expanding. The soldier in him screamed danger and the cop in him told him to draw his weapon. He was just about to do so when he heard Trudy O’Hara’s voice from the other end of the hall.

  “Detective?”

  He knew it was rude, but his instincts were in control of him now: he answered her without looking her way, keeping his focus on the inside of the bedroom. “Yeah?”

  “The kids want to leave.”

  To the left he could make out the far corner of a dresser. Toys and stuffed animals were on the floor and a white bookcase stuffed end to end was to his right. He focused his attention around the room like a laser. Something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t get a fix on it.

  Then he noticed them: the bedsheet and comforter were on the floor between the door and the bed, but not tossed there haphazardly as if perhaps the little girl had been lying on the floor playing at some point. No. They were strung out and twisted tightly, as if a struggle had ensued in here, with one end of the comforter disappearing under the bed.

  “Detective?” Ms. O’Hara’s voice was firmer this time, but laced with something too: a bit of desperation that forced him this time to glance her way. When Parker did, he immediately noticed Janie Fasano; she’d wrapped herself almost entirely around Ms. O’Hara’s waist, her little arms gripping her tight, one eye peering out at Parker in terror from behind Ms. O’Hara’s jacket.

  Parker knew better, but he had to ask. He just had to. “Janie? What happened in here?”

  Instead of answering, Janie suddenly released her grip and bolted out of the hallway and into the living room. Ms. O’Hara was about to say something when her eyes suddenly widened and diverted to the open bedroom door that Parker was standing in front of.

  He never should’ve looked away.

  When the door slammed in Parker’s face he immediately jumped backwards, drawing his handgun instinctively and blindingly fast. Then, like an idiot, he just stood with his gun pointed at the door.

  “What the hell?” Ms. O’Hara let slip.

  Parker blinked and took a deep breath. Something was behind the door, he could feel it, but the last thing he needed to do was look like a nutjob or scare Ms. O’Hara and the kids. On that last point though, at least with Ms. O’Hara, it was probably too late now.

  He spoke firmly. “Nothing. Just a window left open. With what’s gone on in this house though, I’m obviously a little bit jumpy. Sorry, Ms. O’Hara.”

  She blinked at him twice before saying, “It’s Trudy.” Then she went after Janie.

  Parker gathered himself together but, now alone, still didn’t holster his weapon.

  There was no open window in the bedroom. No way. No how. Something had closed the door. Sometimes you just had to walk away, but now was not that time. What if that sick bastard Troy hadn’t fled the house? What if he’d beaten Tamara Fasano senseless, given up on getting the kids and dragged her in there? The odds were long, and in his heart Parker sensed it not to be true. Surely Murillo, Klink and the arriving officers had swept the home yesterday. But he had to verify, because, well, bedroom doors didn’t just close themselves.

  There was a small group of LAPD officers on scene to help secure the home.

  “Officer Meyer!” Parker shouted.

  It took a second, but Meyer called out from what sounded like the kitchen, “Yes, Detective?”

  “You got any more uniforms out there with you?”

  A few seconds hesitation and then, “Yeah. Two here with me and two on the porch.”

  Parker pointed his gun at the door again, just in case whoever was in there was listening and decided to run out.

  “I want the two on the porch to circle around outside the girl’s bedroom window. Second bedroom from the front of the house. You three come here. Now.”

  This time there was no hesitation. Just a flurry of activity. When the three officers turned the corner and saw that Parker had drawn his weapon they all did the same, their looks of confusion erased by concern.

  “Is this why the lady and kids just ran outside?” Meyer whispered.

  Parker nodded. “I was about to go in when it slammed shut on me. Maybe the window in there is open… the wind… or…”

  “Or maybe we got someone in there,” one of the uniforms added. It was not a question. Her badge read “Benitez.”

  “I dunno how, Beni,” Meyer whispered. “We cleared it earlier.”

  “Crawl space, maybe? Or an attic door in the closet?” she replied.

  Parker made eye contact with each of them, gave the silent finger count to three, and then opened the bedroom door and charged in, Meyer, Benitez and the other cop fanning out behind him in a semicircle. Benitez checked behind the door and cleared it before Parker and Meyer cleared the inside of the closet. The third cop, tall with blond hair, advanced past them all and to the window. “Locked,” he said flatly.

  The room being cleared, they all lowered their weapons.

  But, looking down, Parker’s blood went ice cold: the sheet and comforter that had been twisted on the floor were now gone.

  He was about to say something but he bit his tongue. They’d think he was crazy, for sure. He’d just gotten back into the captain’s good graces; the last thing he needed now was a report, or worse, rumors, s
preading that he’d gone Section 8. Instead, Parker waved his hand to get everyone’s attention and pointed to the bed.

  They looked skeptical, and rightfully so, because the space between the bed frame and the floor wasn’t all that wide. But from his employee photo, Troy was a real skinny bastard too. It was possible.

  Reaching down in one fluid motion that was full of adrenaline, Parker grabbed the edge of the bed frame and yanked the bed, box, mattress and all, up and over.

  The four of them stood with their guns fixed on a poorly vacuumed patch of carpet and nothing more.

  “No one ever cleans under the bed,” Benitez said sarcastically.

  Feeling just a tiny bit like an ass, Parker holstered his weapon as the other officers followed suit. On the other side of the bedroom window Parker could see the shadows of the two officers that he’d foolishly pulled into this exercise.

  The tall blond cop, Parker now noticed that his badge said “Shaw,” walked over to the door and checked the hinges. “Maybe they’re in tight or something?”

  “Yeah,” Meyer said with a shrug.

  Shaw opened the door a few times but it refused to move an inch, much less close itself.

  It was time for damage control. “Hmm,” Parker said, “musta just been a freak thing.”

  “Yeah?” Benitez asked warily, glancing at Parker as if she were sizing him up a bit.

  “The O’Hara lady was here when it happened too,” Parker added for insurance. “Whatever. The room’s clear obviously. Let’s hit it.”

  The uniforms filed out of the room ahead of him, and as Parker followed, he looked back one more time.

  There had been a bed sheet and comforter on that floor. There had been.

  He was as sure of it as he was sure the sky was blue and that babies crapped their diapers.

  And he was just as sure, damned near positive in fact, that he knew where they’d gone.

  Something under the bed had taken the sheets.

  And it wasn’t dust bunnies.

  CHAPTER 10

  KYLE NOTICED THAT IF the man had still been alive, he would’ve most certainly been bleeding everywhere; most of his insides were missing and a few ribs were blown outward. As he approached them cautiously, his dead eyes turned to The Gray Man. His body shuffled awkwardly, like a deck of cards, one shoulder corkscrewing grotesquely higher than the other with every third or fourth step. Off to the left, the teenage boy hopped off the box in front of the livery and waved his arm at the little girl to stay where she was.