James Patterson - Confessions of a Murder Suspect

When Harry finally ran out of air, I said to Matthew, “With your help or without it, we’re going to clean up this mess. We’re going to do it right now. Are you with us or against us, big brother?”

59

Angel Pharmaceuticals occupies a daunting, slate-gray, nine-story building on Eleventh Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, in the heart of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen district.

As we got out of the car, Matthew said to me, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“You have to ask? This is going to be the grand finale, Matty. You can thank me later.”

We climbed two flights of metal steps to a landing. I pressed the buzzer on the wall and looked up at the camera mounted above the door. A moment later the door opened, and we entered the building onto a factory floor.

The action on the floor was mesmerizing. The ceiling was at least thirty feet high. On one side of the vast warehouse, ice cream–colored pills poured down chutes and were funneled into bottles that moved along a conveyer belt like little soldiers. The bottles were then stacked into cartons by faceless people in powder-blue masks, caps, and paper gowns.

This mechanized operation, those rivers of pills—just like the ones I’d been taking since I was old enough to hold a sippy cup—gave me the creeps.

“It smells like pills in here,” Hugo said. “Gross.”

On the other side of the floor, backup alarms sounded as forklift operators drove back and forth with pallets stacked with cartons, wheeling, reversing, and placing the cartons high up on shelves.

The cartons were labeled in Chinese.

And it might not surprise you at this point to learn that I can actually read Chinese.

The shipping address was Beijing, China. And the cartons were labeled with product names: “Strong As Ox Pills”; “Very Smart Children Pills”; and one I had to think about for a moment… and then I had it: “No Worries Pills.”

Even if I hadn’t been able to read the labels, I could have guessed at the contents of the cartons; I could smell ylang-ylang and viburnum in the air—and a particular fragrance that I thought of as “yellow.”

If I was right, the drugs that had been tested on us—XL, Lazr, SPD, and the others—were soon going to be dispensed far and wide. Angel Pharma was shipping our drugs overseas .

Had that always been the Angel brothers’ plan?

Hugo was taking pictures with his cell phone, and he didn’t care who saw him. He had no inhibitions. He was a certifiable genius and as strong as a wrestler. What would he have been like without the pills?

What would any of us be like without the pills?

Could I ever be normal?

And the most difficult question: Did I even want to be?

60

I led the charge with an electric, righteous anger that I could feel all the way to the ends of my hair. We piled into the elevator, looked up at the rising numbers without speaking, and then poured out on the executive floor as soon as the doors opened. Even Matty looked determined as we marched directly into the main conference room without knocking.

Uncle Peter sat in a large chair at the head of a long glass table, and he was bent over his laptop. He looked up when we walked in.

“Take your seats,” he said. “Try not to smudge the table. What could be so important that it couldn’t wait, Tandoori?”

Just looking at my uncle’s smug and unpleasant face made my insides smolder. I thought about the memos he’d exchanged with my father, discussing our pills as if we lived in cages and would die in them, too. I waited until Matthew, Harry, and Hugo were all seated. I remained standing, pacing the conference room as I prepared to speak. I made sure to leave the door wide open so everyone nearby would hear what I was about to say.

“We have evidence that you and Malcolm used us as lab animals, that you pumped us full of performance-enhancing drugs.”

There was a long silence as Uncle Peter took that in. Then he said, “You’re not joking, are you? That’s seriously what you think?”

“And then, so that you could own the patents on these drugs and, of course, take over the whole company, you killed our parents.”

Uncle Peter cringed. It was just a quick flicker across his features, like a flash of heat lightning. Then his face closed like a fist. He shot up from his chair and slammed his hands down on the table.

“ I killed Malcolm? You’re accusing me of killing my own brother ?”

“We have pictures of the factory,” I said, standing my ground. “We still have pills squirreled away in our apartment for comparison. Our parents’ deaths will make you close to a billionaire, Uncle Peter. That means you’re the only person with both access to our parents and the motive to kill them,” I went on, feeling the whole blazing truth setting me free. “If you admit your role in this scheme, if you confess to the killings, we’ll give you a chance to go to the police on your own. I think Philippe will be able to cut you a deal. Just confess .”

61

Peter rolled up his shirtsleeves and sat down again in his oversized chair. He wheeled it forward and clasped his hands on the table in front of him. He’d gathered himself during my speech, and his smirk was back, as if it had been riveted to his face.

“This ugly speech you’ve just given, Tandoori, is entirely speculation, and based on circumstantial evidence at best.” There was an angry thrum in his voice, like the lethal sound of a downed power line. The man was scary. “You have a theory based on a hypothesis. No witnesses. No physical evidence. And you expect anyone to believe this utterly libelous fabrication?”

“So you’re not denying it?” Matthew asked, clenching his fists.

“I could go into more detail about the memorandums between you and my father,” I said, “but we asked our driver to wait. Our next stop, Uncle Peter, is the Twentieth Precinct.”

“First of all, you little termites,” Peter said, staring at each of us in turn, “the pills aren’t drugs. They’re natural ingredients, supplements that are manufactured for export and sale outside of the USA. They don’t even have to be FDA approved. There’s nothing illegal about them, do you understand?”

“You expect us to believe that those pills we took our entire lives are made of rainbow dust and flower petals? Really?” Harry asked. I was proud of him for joining in the fight.

“I’m speaking, Harrison. My turn. Second, your father loved you. I don’t know why; it makes no sense to me at all. You’re all snots. But then, snottiness runs on your mother’s side of the family. The bottom line is that your father would never hurt any of you. You all did very well on rainbow dust and flower petals. I’d say that you excelled, in fact. You’re welcome , Tandoori. Children.”

He nodded at us, still sneering.

“Third, here are the facts. I founded Angel Pharmaceuticals. Me. I brought your father in as a consulting partner. He owned twenty percent of the firm when he died. That’s twenty percent of the debts, too, and right now, we’re underwater. So I would have been happy for Malcolm to have bought me out, understand? His death only adds to my problems.