The Murder of an Angel

by James Patterson

“Because if you doubt that, you haven’t been listening to me, Dr. Robosson. You’ve simply been placating me and wasting three full months of our lives.”

  “Of course I’ve been listening to you.”

  “You said I’m not paranoid,” I said to her with all the power I could muster.

  “You’re not paranoid. But you’re definitely a victim of too much brutality, both circumstantial and deliberate. I want you to rest, dear. You’re very safe. Leo is outside now, watching the door. And he showed me his gun.”

  I smiled.

  “I’ll see you at lunchtime,” said Dr. Robosson.

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  Every time I called her Mom, I thought how much I wish my actual mom had been anything like her, anything at all.

  I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

  Five days after I was admitted to the Waterside Center for Those Who Can’t Cope or Don’t Want To, Dr. Robosson released me back into the larger pool of misfits inhabiting New York City.

  I couldn’t wait to go home, but I also couldn’t quite bring myself to call Leo. I wanted to walk for a bit and gather my thoughts in the crisp air.

  Bundled up in my coat, scarf, hat, and boots, I walked east from Waterside in the morning light. I caught the downtown express at Dyckman Street, transferred to the local at 125th, and eventually came up for air on 72nd Street, just a few blocks south of the San Remo.

  I was walking uptown on the sidewalk between the looming apartment buildings on my left and the wide avenue of Central Park West, when a deep masculine voice called out, “Hey, Tandy!”

  Who, me?

  I looked up and saw that a black BMW was slowing as it approached. There were two men inside the car: the driver and a passenger, who seemed to be beckoning to me.

  I was squinting into the sun, asking myself, “Do I know these men?” when a glint of sunlight hit something metallic in the passenger’s hand.

  I stopped moving. Every bit of me, including my brain, froze solid. That man was pointing a gun at me.

  As sweat broke out over my entire body, the passenger took aim. I dropped to the sidewalk and rolled behind a parked car. I was hugging its rear tire when three sharp cracks rang out.

  Yes, they were gunshots.

  Jesus Christ. Someone was really trying to kill me. Again.

  I felt cold, sick, and absolutely terrified, but I stayed balled up in a crouch as the BMW drove past. Then it was gone, but was I safe? Or was the shooter now walking up the street getting ready to take another shot at me?

  I got out my backpack and dug around until I found my phone. I had to call 911.

  But no. Not so fast, Tandy. My phone was dead.

  What now?

  I inched up from the sidewalk and looked around. I saw no black BMW, no man with a gun advancing on me. But I did see a yellow cab slowing to pick up a woman with a walker who was waving him down.

  I jumped out of my hiding place and ran between this poor woman and the taxi. I may even have shoved her aside in my rush.

  She yelled out, “Hey! That’s mine!”

  “Sorry,” I said as I got in, pulled the door closed, and locked it.

  I was shaking from the adrenaline overload, but I had to get it together. I shouted at the reflection of the driver’s hard eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Twentieth Precinct. Eighty-Second between Amsterdam and Columbus. Floor it,” I said. “Fly.”

  I was thrown against the backseat as the driver peeled away from the curb. He made a hard right and sped up Amsterdam.

  Was this guy on speed? In a way, I hoped he was.

  It was only a ten-block ride to the police station, but I had to call Jacob now. I grabbed the hand strap and put my mouth up to the holes in the Plexiglas divider separating me from the cabbie.

  “Please, I need to use your phone.”

  “If I do that, miss, I’d have to let anyone use it.”

  “That makes no sense. I’ll pay you for the call.”

  His eyes flashed to the rearview mirror. He looked angry. Definitely unstable. I probably looked that way, too.

  He said, “I’ll bet you not only have no phone, but no money, either.”

  “What did you say?”

  He braked hard at a light, then turned to face me through the scarred plastic divider.

  He said, “Show me your money. Or get out.”

  Was he insane? Yes. But I needed him.

  I was panting, my heart going a hundred miles an hour. I shot him the dirtiest look possible, but I went through my wallet and pulled out my American Express Black Card.

  “I need to use your phone,” I said. “Now.”

  He passed his phone through the small door, and I called my uncle. No answer, so I left a message and held on to the armrests. Five minutes later, the cab stopped across the street from the brick and stone precinct house. I swiped my Amex through the card reader, left the bastard a generous tip, then sprang out of the cab.

  I saw Caputo and Hayes halfway down the block, getting out of their squad car. I would recognize them from ten thousand feet away—in the dark.

  Sergeant Capricorn Caputo is about six feet tall, stringy and dark-haired. His pants cuffs stop four inches above his ankles, and he has a vivid tattoo of a goat—his zodiac sign—on his left wrist. He’s never in his life been called nice.

  Detective Ryan Hayes is his partner’s total opposite. He’s stocky with thin brown hair, is a family man with kids, has no visible tattoos, and doesn’t hide his soft side.

  These were the cops who had come to our door when my parents had died. They were sharp, which I liked. But they had rushed to a faulty judgment that one or all the Angel kids had killed their own parents. That led to all-night interrogations, borderline harassment, and three of us being charged with murder and jailed.

  Of course, the charges didn’t stick.

  No kidding. We hadn’t done it.

  After I solved the case, Caputo and Hayes knew I was solid. I worked other cases with them, solving those, too, and we had even become friends. Now I made my hands into a megaphone and called down West Eighty-Second Street, “Sergeant Caputo. Detective Hayes. It’s Tandy…

  “I need help!”

  The squad room was tiny, crowded with four desks, four detectives, and no windows. I fixed my eyes and the force of my personality on Caputo and Hayes and said, “A man just fired three shots at me through a car window on Central Park West. It was a drive-by, but the shooter knew me. He called my name.”

  “So who was it that took shots at you, Tandy?” Hayes asked me. He looked worried.

  “I don’t know. But I have a pretty good idea who paid him to do it.”

  I quickly sketched in the horrific and humiliating recent events—the imploding lawsuit, the airplane crash, my history with my uncle, whom Caputo and Hayes had met.

  “I have a lot of bad stuff on him, and—no lie—it all adds up to motive. It has to be Uncle Peter,” I said. “He’s tried to have me killed before.”

  “What happened exactly?” Hayes asked me as Caputo rooted around in his desk for a working pen. I told the detectives everything I knew about the shooter, which was pretty damned little: two seconds of staring at a car and a gun, and about ten seconds of hugging a tire.

  “My take on it? He had to be a professional,” I said.

  Caputo said, “A pro? And he missed? You’re not dead, right?”

  “I ducked.”

  “And so he, what, figured out that you’d be on that block at that moment in time, and so he was ready to bump you off?”

  “I don’t know how he knew where I’d be.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “BMW. A black sedan.”

  “Year?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Plate number?”

  “I wish. It happened too fast.”

  “The shooter. Was he white, black? Did he have facial hair?”

  “White. I didn’t see any facial hair.”

&nbs
p; Hayes asked, “Did anyone else see this drive-by?”

  I said, “I was hiding behind a parked car.”

  Caputo stared at me, tapping his skeletal fingers on the desk as the other cops in the room talked loudly into their phones. How had that shooter known where to find me?

  “Listen, Pansy, I don’t know what you expect me to do. You can’t identify the shooter, don’t have a plate number, and there couldn’t be more than fifty thousand BMWs in this city. Gimme a break.”

  “You know me. You know I don’t make shit up.”

  Caputo sighed. “Candy, if the shots were fired and no one got hit and there’re no witnesses, I’ve got nothing to go on and neither do you.”

  “Don’t say if. It happened,” I said, slapping Hayes’s desk, hard. “So let’s go to the scene and find the evidence. You can look for shell casings. Bullet holes. You can make this official. Besides, you owe me.”

  Hayes rubbed his chin and said, “Cap, we’re not busy. We should do this for Tandy.”

  I beamed at Hayes.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thanks very much.”

  Our sirens screamed as we sped down CPW toward the spot between Seventy-Third and Seventy-Fourth where I’d almost been shot.

  The closer we got, the more anxious I became. I was starting to doubt myself. Had that shooting really happened? Had an unknown shooter really tried to kill me? How had he known how to find me? He could have tracked my phone using GPS, but my phone was dead.

  I pointed out where I’d been walking when I saw the gunman. Caputo and Hayes gloved up and then unspooled yellow crime-scene tape, closing off the chunk of sidewalk I’d identified. They began to walk along the sidewalk. I saw them stop, stoop, and keep walking. Would they find pockmarks in the wall of the building, or maybe spent shells in the street, or bullet holes in a door or window?

  And most importantly, would Caputo and Hayes find enough evidence to arrest my uncle Peter?

  I watched Hayes talking to a doorman, and then my cop friends were stripping off their gloves, ripping down the tape, and stuffing it into a trash can.

  Caputo came back to the car and, sneering, got in. Hayes confirmed what I had already guessed.

  “We found no shell casings, no weapon, no evidence of any kind, Tandy. I’ll file a report in case something turns up.”

  “You still have my number?” I asked him.

  “I’ve got everything I need. We’ll give you a lift home.”

  I said to Hayes, “Tell me you believe me.”

  “I believe you. But there’s nothing to follow up. Do you understand, Tandy? We’ve done our best.”

  Why had there been no evidence of the shooting? Was this the right block? Had I gotten it wrong?

  When we got to the entrance of the San Remo, I told Hayes I could take it from there. As the elevator rose to the sixteenth floor, I talked to myself.

  I listed Peter Angel’s crimes against me and my siblings, added up all the potentially deadly assaults that involved black cars and automatic weapons, house fires and knockout drugs, a kidnapping, having my memory wiped in a mental institution, a fatal car crash, a downed airplane, and about fifteen years of ingesting Angel Pharma drugs.

  It was an outrageously long list, but I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I was furious and trying to keep a lid on my emotions so that I could think logically.

  I had no doubt that Peter was going to keep trying to kill me until he had done it. All evidence proved that he’d try to destroy my siblings, too. And with Katherine, he likely thought he’d succeeded.

  The man kept trying and missing.

  How long would it be before he got it right?

  Jacob was waiting when I opened the front door. He was red-faced and clearly distraught, saying, “Tandy, my God. What happened? I got your message, but when I called back, I got someone who didn’t know what the hell I was talking about or who you were. And he hung up on me. Did you say someone shot you? Are you hurt?”

  I hugged my dear old uncle and then sang, “Lots of bad things keep happening, Uncle Jake. Lots of bad things. Lotta lotta lotta bad things. Lotta—”

  “Shhh, Tandy, shhh. I’ve got you.” He put his hands on my shoulders. “I’m here. You can count on me.”

  I felt the stress relax a bit and looked up at Jacob. “I’m sorry for scaring you and for not calling you back. My phone was dead. A man I don’t know fired three shots at me,” I said. “He missed. This time.”

  “Oh my God. Tell me everything,” said Uncle Jake, walking me into the living room. Daylight was streaming through the windows from across the park, filling the apartment with a feeling of lightness and hope.

  I didn’t trust it.

  I sat on the edge of the sofa, and Jacob took the chair. I told my uncle about the men in the car, my discussions with the cops, and how things had been left.

  “No evidence. No case. Good-bye and good luck. Jacob, I’m a tough kid, right? I can take a lot. But no joke, I can’t leave the apartment without a shitstorm raining down on me. Is this all for real or just my imagination?”

  “I was at All Saints when you called,” Jacob told me. “Oppenheimer asked me to come in.”

  “Okay,” I said, asking myself, What now?

  “He’s suspending you for an indeterminate period, to be decided.”

  “What? Why?”

  I was genuinely shocked. I had missed some time, but I could make it up. This term was just starting.

  “He doesn’t think you’re well enough for school. He said you’ve missed a lot of days and that you were heard talking to yourself in class before the accident. He says you behave as if you’re on drugs. That’s what he said. Have you been using drugs, Tandy?”

  Fury bloomed in my mind like a black flower.

  “He thinks I’m on drugs?”

  “You’re not taking those pills again, are you, dear?”

  “You cannot seriously be asking me that, Jacob. I sued to put Peter out of business over those pills and you ask me if I’m taking them?”

  He looked at me with the question still on his face. The black flower in my mind was now full-blown. It blocked out the sun.

  I snapped.

  “Don’t talk to me, okay? This is our apartment, not yours, so don’t talk to me. Get it?”

  Jacob snapped, too. “I’m your court-appointed guardian and your oldest living relative, Tandoori. When I speak, you will listen. And you will obey. Get me?”

  I flew up to my room and slammed the door. I was hyperventilating and had that feeling you get when you know you’ve hurt someone but still feel you’re right.

  I felt trapped.

  What the hell was I going to do now?

  That night, Jacob and I exchanged tearful apologies, and over the following two weeks, my life quieted down. At least, it looked calm on the surface.

  I didn’t leave the apartment without the panicky feeling that someone would call my name and then gun me down. I could see this so clearly, it was as if it had already happened.

  I took classes at home, Skyping with a witty college-girl tutor from NYU who had a keen knowledge of my high school subjects. I was luxuriating in my one-girl homeschooling program when C.P. started sending me spite mail. I got this one day: “James and I were just wondering, do you miss us, Tandoo?”

  Seeing the name James in an e-mail from C.P. felt like an unknown assailant’s bullet slamming into my rib cage and ricocheting around my chest cavity before ripping through my heart.

  I wrote, “You need to stop obsessing over me, C.P. It’s more than just a little pathetic.” I changed my e-mail account again, then went outside my room and called down to Jacob.

  “I need Leo to be my bodyguard tonight, okay?”

  Later that day, I wriggled into a skintight black crepe dress with a low-cut asymmetrical neckline, heels high enough to make me look at least twenty, and Mom’s wonderful spangled Madonna jacket. I slicked my hair back behind my ears and put on red lipstick and a pair of large black
shades.

  I looked like the very picture of Vogue Beverly Hills, eighties edition.

  Hugo said, “You look hot. For you.”

  Hugo’s broken nose was taped. He had two yellowish-black eyes, stitches in his upper lip, and a purple-green sunset of a bruise across his forehead.

  I said, “You, on the other hand, look like you belong on The Walking Dead.”

  Hugo laughed out loud, which made the rest of us laugh, too. Once we were all inside the bulletproof car, Leo drove Jacob, Hugo, and me to Carnegie Hall, one of the premier concert venues in the world.

  Because Harrison Angel was playing tonight. My wonderful talented twin had the stage to himself.

  Walking into the auditorium took my breath away with its grandeur. From the five-story-high tier of gold and red velvet seats that form an elongated semicircle to the glorious stage on which hundreds of eyes would be fixed all evening, the entire vast space is both a visual and an acoustic wonder.

  Around us, people were talking about my brother. I heard one elegant lady saying to her husband, “This boy—he’s something else, Bennett. I’ve been following him since his incredible debut in Paris. Prepare to have your shoes, socks, and jacket blown off. Hold on to your shirt and tie, too.”

  Concertgoers swirled around, finding their seats, the excitement on their faces making me so proud of my brother that my eyes welled up with tears—and he hadn’t even taken the stage.

  And then he did.

  Wearing a tux, looking like the romantic hero in a Victorian novel with his dark curling hair and brooding eyes, my genius brother bowed at center stage. After a rolling tsunami of thunderous applause, he sat down at one of the two pianos on the stage, the Steinway grand.

  I gripped Hugo’s left hand and Jacob’s right as the lights went down. There was an interminable silence as Harry sat on, his arms at his sides.

  Whispers fluttered up to the ceiling like trapped birds, and I was suddenly afraid for Harry. Did he have stage fright? Was he having a panic attack?

  For a moment, in the darkened hall, I thought I saw Katherine—and then Harry’s hands jumped to the keys of the Steinway and he struck the opening notes in the concert he called “Acoustic Electric.” His interpretation of “Black and White” by Reginald Trudeau resounded and filled the vast hall, and when I looked for my sister, I didn’t see her at all.