Confessions of a Murder Suspect by James Patterson Read Free Book Online

metal bar came down across our laps and locked with a loud
clank
—although there was still a considerable amount of space between our bodies and the bar. The train began to roll forward. “Here we gooooo,” Malcolm sang from behind me. “Hang ooooooon.”
    The car rolled slowly at first, chug-chug-chugging as it went up the incline. For a moment we hung over the boardwalk. We could see the moving dots of color below, and the other rides, and even the beach and the horizon.
    And then, with a breathtaking and shocking suddenness, it all dropped away. My stomach flipped over and my eyes watered and I gripped the lap bar with both hands.
    It was the most incredible feeling.
    I was
flying
.
    As the car hurtled toward the boardwalk, Harry let outa piercing scream that could be heard over the shrieks of our fellow passengers—and probably across the whole island. I looked at him and saw that his face was crumpled, completely transformed by terror.
    I turned away.
    I could see myself as if from above, leaning into the wind, looking into the next dip and rise, feeling one with the roller coaster, seeing everything. I didn’t want it to stop.
    But it
did
stop—because of Harry’s wailing, blubbering, unceasing meltdown. The man in the striped shirt slowed and then stopped the roller coaster as it pulled into the station.
    The bars went up.
    Malcolm reached toward me to lift me out of the seat, but Maud picked me up instead and said to Malcolm, “You take
him
.”
    We left Coney Island in a hurry. I wrapped my legs around Maud’s waist and pressed my face against her sunny yellow bust. Harry clutched Malcolm’s hand and was being dragged along, sobbing the whole way.
    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
suddendeaths
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