James Patterson - Confessions of a Murder Suspect

“Take a guess, kid,” Caputo replied.

I clutched Harry’s hand for one last moment and said, “Don’t worry. Philippe will take care of us. I’ll see you soon.”

And then I took a deep breath and readied myself for what was next. This should be interesting , I told myself. A study in our law-enforcement system, criminology at work.

I was booked, given a baggy jumpsuit, and led down several steep flights of stairs, each step drawing me deeper into the hot, humid depths beneath the street. The walls of the prison were made of ancient-looking stone inset with iron gates. There were no windows. The whole place stank and was as dank as a dungeon.

It was a dungeon, actually, known throughout the city as “The Tombs.”

I was jostled roughly into a small room, where Officer Frye, a blocky woman from Criminal Justice, waited to interview me.

“It’s my job to determine if you’re eligible for bail,” she said with absolutely no inflection. “You can be held for up to three days until your arraignment.”

I could be here for three days.

And then what would happen to me?

I answered her questions about my age and my circumstances, and told her that I had never been arrested before. I couldn’t read Officer Frye’s mind, but when she was satisfied, she went to the gate and called for the guards. Did she actually think I was dangerous?

Maybe I was. Maybe I am. To put your foot through a TV screen , a voice inside my head pointed out, you need superhuman strength—and deep, primal anger.

And if I wasn’t on drugs anymore—drugs that I suspected might have been taming my emotions—who knew what kind of anger I was capable of?

Two prison guards marched me from the interview room and down another flight of stairs, toward a large holding cell filled with drunks and jeering hookers. And then there was me—a sixteen-year-old under suspicion of matricide, patricide, and obstruction of governmental administration.

My brief feeling of superhuman power shrunk with every step I took. This was a dangerous place, and there was nowhere to hide. I crouched in a corner of the cell, covering my face with my hands.

CONFESSION

Why does this feel so… familiar?

It’s not the claustrophobia. My whole world is claustrophobic. Always has been. That’s the life of an Angel.

It’s not the grossly bad attitudes of the administrators, or the total foulness everywhere around me, either. I can handle this New York correctional facility dreck. Tandy Angel is not frightened by jerk-off law enforcement trying to get media attention, right? That’s something I was raised to accept—that people will try to exploit us.

But there’s something else that’s ringing a bell, and it’s making me anxious. Jittery. And it’s getting worse and worse. Is it that I’ve not been taking my pills?

It’s the air, I think. Something subtle in the smell, a smell you don’t get anywhere in the day-to-day life of an elite Manhattan family. I can almost feel the olfactory receptors in my nose sending chemical signals to my brain, where the components are being lab-tested.

It’s the smell of an institution. The smell of the unwell, and the smell that you use to cover that stink. And it’s all mixed together with the reek of uncertainty, loneliness, and fear.

I haven’t been in prison before… have I ?

I’m getting a flash of memory now. I’ve been to a place like this before. I know it.

I have been institutionalized.

It feels shameful to say, but I have to say it. I have to start confronting it.

I was locked up for treatment. After he… was gone. Taken.

It was a place my own parents sent me to. A place where I was supposed to heal, but never totally did. A broken child is not something Malcolm and Maud knew how to handle.

So I stayed a little bit broken.

Please, Philippe—anyone!—get me out of here.

40

It felt like an eternity before I was extracted from the group cell and moved to a single cell for my safety. I felt sure Phil had done this somehow, and I loved him for it.

My private cell was as different from my bedroom in the Dakota as air is from ice. It was maybe five feet wide by six feet long, and furnished with a narrow, wooden slat for a cot. There was a toilet with no seat, and a caged fluorescent light outside my cell shot its death rays from high overhead.

Actually, things were looking up. At least I was alone.

I curled up on my sleeping board and at some point found myself thinking about the last time I had been left alone overnight in a dark, uncomfortable place. It was a chop in which I had to spend one night in the closet underneath the stairs. “Maybe you’ll learn to appreciate the comforts we’ve provided for you if they’re taken away,” Malcolm said. “Maybe you’ll reconsider your interest in so casually discarding the life that your mother and I have given you.”

My interest in discarding this life —well, that’s a topic worthy of another conversation.

I had always understood that our parents used reward and punishment to shape our characters. It was a dirty-dog shame that I’d gotten another Big Chop just hours before my parents died. I would never forget that they were angry and disappointed in me. If I had just kept my mouth shut, they might have left this earth with only good feelings about me in their hearts.

That’s if they actually had hearts, Tandy , said the little voice in my head—which was getting a lot louder the more time I spent in that god-awful place.

Of course they did , I thought.

Brains, yes. Hearts, debatable.

Still, they really knew how to make people happy. I turned my mind to the last Grande Gongo I’d won, the previous year. It was a spectacular prize: a trip to the west coast of Australia, where I swam with whale sharks over the Ningaloo Reef.

The whale sharks were totally awesome—so gentle and huge. I drifted along with one I called Oliphant for almost an hour. He was about thirty-five feet long, with leopard spots and three hundred rows of tiny teeth, perfect for sieving plankton out of the sea.

I was a tiny speck in scuba gear, and Oliphant was a rare and wonderful behemoth, like a living flying carpet beneath me. Can you imagine it? Whatever you’re imagining, double or triple it. That Grande Gongo was easily the highlight of my life.

My sister Katherine’s Grande Gongo was also a highlight of her life—and the end of it, too.

41

Katherine may not have been perfect in my parents’ eyes, but she was a perfect sister. Like her friends, she had a wild streak. She drank too much and had a secret boyfriend who was pierced and tattooed. And even though she lied to my parents—to everyone, really—and thought nothing of it (because she, too, was trained to not have much of a conscience), she was a true inspiration for me. I loved her so much.

Katherine was going to be an engineer and was only fifteen when she was admitted to MIT, probably the best university in the country for the next generation of top-flight scientists.