I unlatched the chain and swung the door open. I was wearing pajamas, of course; chick-yellow ones with dinosaurs chasing butterflies. Not exactly what I would have chosen for a meeting with the police.
Detective Hayes, the bearish one, said, “What’s your name?”
“Tandy Angel.”
“Are you the daughter of Malcolm and Maud Angel?”
“I am. Can you please tell me why you’re here?”
“Tandy is your real name?” he said, ignoring my question.
“I’m called Tandy. Please wait here. I’ll get my parents to talk to you.”
“We’ll go with you,” said Sergeant Caputo.
Caputo’s grim expression told me that this was not a request. I turned on lights as we headed toward my parents’ bedroom suite.
I was climbing the circular stairwell, thinking that my parents were going to kill me for bringing these men upstairs, when suddenly both cops pushed rudely past me. By the time I had reached my parents’ room, the overhead light was on and the cops were bending over my parents’ bed.
Even with Caputo and Hayes in the way, I could see that my mother and father looked all wrong. Their sheets and blankets were on the floor, and their nightclothes were bunched under their arms, as if they’d tried to take them off. My father’s arm looked like it had been twisted out of its socket. My mother was lying facedown across my father’s body, and her tongue was sticking out of her mouth. It had turned black.
I didn’t need a coroner to tell me that they were dead. I knew it just moments after I saw them. Diagnosis certain.
I shrieked and ran toward them, but Hayes stopped me cold. He kept me out of the room, putting his big paws on my shoulders and forcibly walking me backward out to the hallway.
“I’m sorry to do this,” he said, then shut the bedroom door in my face.
I didn’t try to open it. I just stood there. Motionless. Almost not breathing.
So, you might be wondering why I wasn’t bawling, screeching, or passing out from shock and horror. Or why I wasn’t running to the bathroom to vomit or curling up in the fetal position, hugging my knees and sobbing. Or doing any of the things that a teenage girl who’s just seen her murdered parents’ bodies ought to do.
The answer is complicated, but here’s the simplest way to say it: I’m not a whole lot like most girls. At least, not from what I can tell. For me, having a meltdown was seriously out of the question.
From the time I was two, when I first started speaking in paragraphs that began with topic sentences, Malcolm and Maud had told me that I was exceptionally smart. Later, they told me that I was analytical and focused, and that my detachment from watery emotion was a superb trait. They said that if I nurtured these qualities, I would achieve or even exceed my extraordinary potential, and this wasn’t just a good thing, but a great thing. It was the only thing that mattered, in fact.
It was a challenge, and I had accepted it.
That’s why I was more prepared for this catastrophe than most kids my age would be, or maybe any kids my age.
Yes, it was true that panic was shooting up and down my spine and zinging out to my fingertips. I was shocked, maybe even terrified. But I quickly tamped down the screaming voice inside my head and collected my wits, xsalong with the few available facts.
One: My parents had died in some unspeakable way.
Two: Someone had known about their deaths and called the police.
Three: Our doors were locked, and there had been no obvious break-in. Aside from me, my brothers Harry and Hugo and my mother’s personal assistant, Samantha, were the only ones home.
I went downstairs and got my phone. I called both my uncle Peter and our lawyer, Philippe Montaigne. Then I went to each of my siblings’ bedrooms, and to Samantha’s, too. And somehow, I told them each the inexpressibly horrible news that our mother and father were dead, and that it was possible they’d been murdered.
3
Can you imagine the words you’d use, dear reader, to tell your family that your parents had been murdered? I hope so, because I’m not going to be able to share those wretched moments with you right now. We’re just getting to know each other, and I take a little bit of time to warm up to people. Can you be patient with me? I promise it’ll be worth the wait.
After I’d completed that horrible task—perhaps the worst task of my life—I tried to focus my fractured attention back on Sergeant Capricorn Caputo. He was a roughlooking character, like a bad cop in a black-and-white film from the forties who smoked unfiltered cigarettes, had stained fingers, and was coughing up his lungs on his way to the cemetery.
Caputo looked to be about thirty-five years old. He had one continuous eyebrow, a furry ledge over his stony black eyes. His thin lips were set in a short, hard line. He had rolled up the sleeves of his shiny blue jacket, and I noted a zodiac sign tattooed on his wrist.
He looked like exactly the kind of detective I wanted to have working on the case of my murdered parents.
Gnarly and mean.
Detective Hayes was an entirely different cat. He had a basically pleasant, faintly lined face and wore a wedding ring, an NYPD Windbreaker, and steel-tipped boots. He looked sympathetic to us kids, sitting in a stunned semicircle around him. But Detective Hayes wasn’t in charge, and he wasn’t doing the talking.
Caputo stood with his back to our massive fireplace and coughed into his fist. Then he looked around the living room with his mouth wide open.
He couldn’t believe how we lived.
And I can’t say I blame him.
He took in the eight-hundred-gallon aquarium coffee table with the four glowing pygmy sharks swimming circles around their bubbler.
His jaw dropped even farther when he saw the life-size merman hanging by its tail from a bloody hook and chain in the ceiling near the staircase.
He sent a glance across the white-lacquered grand piano, which we called “Pegasus” because it looked like it had wings.
And he stared at Robert, who was slumped over in a La-Z-Boy with a can of Bud in one hand and a remote control in the other, just watching the static on his TV screen.
Robert is a remarkable creation. He really is. It’s next to impossible to tell that he, his La-Z-Boy, and his very own TV are all part of an incredibly lifelike, technologically advanced sculpture. He was cast from a real person, then rendered in polyvinyl and an auto-body filler composite called Bondo. Robert looks so real, you half expect him to crunch his beer can against his forehead and ask for another cold one.
“What’s the point of this thing?” Detective Caputo asked.
“It’s an artistic style called hyperrealism,” I responded.
“Hyper-real, huh?” Detective Caputo said. “Does that mean ‘ over-the-top’? Because that’s kind of a theme in this family, isn’t it?”
No one answered him. To us, this was home.
When Detective Caputo was through taking in the décor, he fixed his eyes on each of us in turn. We just blinked at him. There were no hysterics. In fact, there was no apparent emotion at all.
“Your parents were murdered,” he said. “Do you get that? What’s the matter? No one here loved them?”
We did love them, but it wasn’t a simple love. To start with, my parents were complicated: strict, generous, punishing, expansive, withholding. And as a result, we were complicated, too. I knew all of us felt what I was feeling—an internal tsunami of horror and loss and confusion. But we couldn’t show it. Not even to save our lives.
Of course, Sergeant Caputo didn’t see us as bereaved children going through the worst day of our tender young lives. He saw us as suspects, every one of us a “person of interest” in a locked-door double homicide.
He didn’t try to hide his judgment, and I couldn’t fault his reasoning.
I thought he was right.
My parents’ killer was in that room.
READ MORE IN
CONFESSIONS OF A MURDER SUSPECT
NOW AVAILABLE IN PAP
ERBACK
JAMES PATTERSON was selected by readers across America as the Children’s Choice Book Awards Author of the Year in 2010. He is the internationally bestselling author of the highly praised Middle School books, I Funny, Confessions of a Murder Suspect, and the Maximum Ride, Witch & Wizard, Daniel X, and Alex Cross series. His books have sold more than 275 million copies worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors of all time. He lives in Florida.
MAXINE PAETRO has also collaborated with James Patterson on the bestselling Women’s Murder Club and Private series. She lives with her husband in New York State.
BOOKS BY JAMES PATTERSON FOR YOUNG ADULT READERS
The Confessions Novels
Confessions of a Murder Suspect (with Maxine Paetro)
Confessions: The Private School Murders (with Maxine Paetro)
The Witch & Wizard Novels
Witch & Wizard (with Gabrielle Charbonnet)
The Gift (with Ned Rust)
The Fire (with Jill Dembowski)
The Kiss (with Jill Dembowski)
The Maximum Ride Novels
The Angel Experiment
School’s Out—Forever
Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports
The Final Warning
MAX
FANG
ANGEL
Nevermore
Nonfiction
Med Head (with Hal Friedman)
Illustrated Novels
Maximum Ride: The Manga, Vols. 1–6 (with NaRae Lee)
Witch & Wizard: The Manga, Vols. 1–3 (with Svetlana Chmakova)
For previews of upcoming books in these series and other information,
visit www.ConfessionsofaMurderSuspect.com, www.MaximumRide.com,
and www.WitchAndWizard.com.
For more information about the author, visit www.JamesPatterson.com.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Prologue
1
2
Confession
1 : Dead Reckoning
1
2
Confession
3
4
5
6
7
Confession
8
9
10
Confession
11
12
13
14
Confession
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Confession
26
27
2 : Shadows of the Past
Confession
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
Confession
60
61
62
63
64
3 : The Storm after the Calm
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
4 : The Grandest Gongo of them all
87
88
89
90
91
92
Confession
93
94
95
About the author
Books by James Patterson for Young adult Readers
A Preview of Confessions of a Murder Suspect
Find Out How Confessions Began
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 James Patterson
Excerpt from Confessions of a Murder Suspect Copyright © 2012 James Patterson
Image of woman © Fashion B / Shutterstock
Image of blinds © Peter Glass / Arcangel Images
Image of Dakota © 2013 by Howard Huang
Jacket design by Tom Sanderson
Jacket © 2013 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
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Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
First ebook edition: October 2013
ISBN 978-0-316-20766-9
For more about this book and author, visit Bookish.com.
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