James Patterson - Confessions of a Murder Suspect

My father said sternly, “Buck up, son.”

I never heard our mother call Harry “my angel” again. And for a long time, he was referred to as “the boy we found on the boardwalk.”

I was three, and three was all about meeeee . But do I regret that I hated my brother for being afraid?

Profoundly.

After the murders I was consumed by sadness for my brilliant and lovable twin, who had never been considered good enough, and would never be able to confront our parents as an adult.

I wanted to give in to my grief for Harry, and for my mother and father, too. But no tears would come.

What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I cry?

16

The day after my parents were murdered was a Saturday. For the first Saturday morning that I could remember, Malcolm wasn’t in the kitchen whipping up something green and stinking to infuse our brains with oxygen and steep our bodies in trace minerals.

There were also no calisthenics, no foreign-language drills, no pop quizzes on geopolitics or the state of the global economy.

The very atmosphere had changed.

It was as if one of the elements of the planet had disappeared; not water, air, fire, or earth, but something else. Maybe it was the rule of law, as Malcolm would call it.

I opened my computer and did a search for sudden deaths and black tongues and found terrible things that raised my eyebrows as high as they could go. I began a folder of questions with both answers and hypotheses and was still absorbed in my detective work when the police arrived for a surprise visit at 7:30 AM.

Again, I was the one who heard the buzzer and let them in.

We stood in the hallway, under a chandelier shaped like a sci-fi UFO, and the police began to grill me right there under its bright, blinking lights.

Detective Hayes looked as though he hadn’t changed his clothes from the night before. Sergeant Caputo wore a short-sleeved shirt and black slacks that stopped short of his black sneakers. He looked down at me as though I were a bug mounted in a lab.

“You didn’t tell me you had a guest for dinner last night. Why did you withhold information, Toodles?”

Some people might have been embarrassed at being caught in a lie of omission by a crude cop with a tattoo of a goat on his wrist, but it didn’t bother me. My parents had repeatedly told me that I had a “phlegmatic” conscience—which basically means it doesn’t work overtime—and that that was a good thing. Was either part of that true? I had no idea.

I fake-smiled and said, “Are you pretending you don’t know my name, Sergeant Caputo? Or is jabbing a suspect an interview technique of yours? I really want to know. I’m learning your craft, and I’m a fast learner.”

“You cost us valuable time, Candy. If we had known, we would have interviewed Ambassador Panyor last night.”

“I’m not supposed to speak to you without my attorney, but I’ll give you this for free,” I said. “The ambassador didn’t kill my parents. My father prepared all of the food, and I helped him. The meal was served in big bowls, family-style. My brother Harry and I ate everything my parents ate, drank everything they drank. We’re both perfectly fine, and apparently so is the ambassador. You can’t arrest him, anyway. He has immunity.”

“You should have told me, Tidbit. I’m moving you to the top of my list,” Caputo said.

He answered his phone, then opened our front door for a couple of CSIs. The three of them went upstairs to what I still thought of as my parents’ room.

We had truly been invaded by aliens. Rude and very nasty ones. And there was nothing we could do to stop them from infesting our home planet.

17

Funny moment in the middle of a tragedy .

Detective Ryan Hayes sat down on the Pork Chair and it let out a snuffle, a snort, and a ringing squeal.

He jumped up. “What the…?”

“Art,” I told him with a smile. A real smile, this time.

“Does the sofa bark or anything? Let me know now.”

“The sofa is mute,” I said.

“Fine,” Hayes said, but he eased himself down gingerly anyway. “Sit down,” he told me. “Please.” He looked through the Plexiglas top of the shark tank that served as a coffee table.

“These are real sharks?”

“Pygmy sharks. Hugo won them.”

“He won them? Like, at a carnival?”

I paused and decided it would be too hard to explain “Grande Gongos” just then. So I said, “These are real pygmy sharks. At an average of nine inches long, they are the second-smallest sharks in the world. Their stomachs glow green because they’re bioluminescent—they have special phosphorescent cells in their skin. It’s possible that the green light attracts prey to them. The sharks can’t see you because the tank is specially designed to block light—”

Hayes interrupted my monologue. “Your mother was a bit like a shark, wasn’t she, Tandy? No disrespect, but that’s what I’ve heard. She worked all the time, but still, she had some pretty unhappy customers lately. Very unsatisfied customers.”

“She wasn’t exactly Bernie Madoff. My mother was honest. Honest people can have enemies. My mother said whatever she believed to be the truth.”

“There was a massive lawsuit pending against her for manipulating investor returns. A man named Royal Rampling is at the helm of it. Ever heard that name before?”

My stomach lurched, but I ignored it. “ ‘In volatile times, not every client is a satisfied client,’ ” I said, quoting my dead mother. “Still. Let’s say she had a particularly disgruntled client who happened to be a homicidal maniac as well. How could this… Royal Rampling”—I forced the name out with some difficulty—“have gotten in, killed her and my father—”

“We’re looking at every possibility,” said Hayes, again cutting me off. “Let’s talk about something else. I wanted to apologize for my partner, Tandy. Caputo is a hound. Did you know that hare hounds can pick up the scent of a rabbit on concrete?”

“I did, actually,” I said truthfully.

“Then you know that if a rabbit runs across the road, an hour later a hare hound can still smell that the hare has been there. Cap Caputo’s like that. If there’s a trail, he’ll find it.”

“Thanks for sharing. When will we get the autopsy report?” I asked.

Caputo was coming down the stairs and overheard me.

“There’s no ‘we,’ Tammy. We’re the cops. You’re a suspect. Prime suspect, in my opinion.”

“You may call me Tandy. You may call me Ms. Angel. But please don’t ever talk down to me again.”

“Or what?”

“Don’t bother testing me, Sergeant,” I warned. “Angels always, always ace their tests.”

“All the more reason you make an ideal suspect. As far as I can tell, Angel is a pretty ironic name for this family.”

“We don’t particularly relate to the spirits, if that’s what you mean.”

“You know what I mean. You guys don’t exactly wear halos.”

“Neither do the thirty-four other Angels in the Manhattan white pages. Halos are so last season, anyway.”

My attempt to sound like a normal teenager went over well. He smirked.

“Cute, kid. We’re leaving now, but don’t skip town. We’ll be seeing all of you Angels again very soon. Especially you, Miss Indian Cooking Stove. Especially you.”