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

autopsy report?” I asked.
    Caputo was coming down the stairs and overheard me.
    “There’s no ‘we,’ Tammy. We’re the cops. You’re a suspect. Prime suspect, in my opinion.”
    “You may call me Tandy. You may call me Ms. Angel. But please don’t ever talk down to me again.”
    “Or what?”
    “Don’t bother testing me, Sergeant,” I warned. “Angels always,
always
ace their tests.”
    “All the more reason you make an ideal suspect. As far as I can tell, Angel is a pretty ironic name for this family.”
    “We don’t particularly relate to the spirits, if that’s what you mean.”
    “You know what I mean. You guys don’t exactly wear halos.”
    “Neither do the thirty-four other Angels in the Manhattan white pages. Halos are
so
last season, anyway.”
    My attempt to sound like a normal teenager went over well. He smirked.
    “Cute, kid. We’re leaving now, but don’t skip town. We’ll be seeing all of you Angels again very soon. Especially you, Miss Indian Cooking Stove. Especially you.”

18
    The police and CSI techs finally pulled down
the crime-scene tape at the top of the stairs and left our home, taking with them my parents’ computer hard drives and notebooks, as well as cardboard file boxes filled with objects from my parents’ bedroom.
    A wave of inexplicable anger washed over me, which I immediately quelled. If only I had someone I could commiserate with about this invasion of privacy, about the way everyone was treating us like murderers instead of grieving children.
    But I had no friends to call. I hadn’t even thought about what it would be like to go back to school after everything that had happened, and I didn’t trust anyone there,anyway. Since the murders, Harry and Hugo had been spending most of their time in their rooms. I was a loner, like they were, but I had never before felt loneliness quite like this.
    I went to the semicircular bay window behind the piano and looked down onto Seventy-second Street to watch the police load up their vans with my parents’ belongings. It was unlikely I would ever see these things again; I was certain they were doomed to languish in storage in some dark police facility.
    A herd of reporters stampeded toward Hayes and Caputo, and then followed the cop cars and crime-scene vans on foot, shouting for attention as the police vehicles took off toward the precinct on West Eighty-second.
    The band of reporters reassembled at the front gate, and I watched the attractive newscasters flipping their hair and fastening microphones to their collars, using the backdrop of the Dakota for their on-air reports.
    I tried to imagine what Maud would have thought of all this, if she’d ever imagined her death at all. Surely she would have chosen something dignified at the age of ninety or so—maybe a quick cerebral hemorrhage after a full day of work. She wouldn’t have wanted the
Post
, the
Daily News
, Fox News, and
Entertainment Tonight
fluttering around the building, picking at the details of herlife. As much as she revered success, she detested the mass forms of communication that reported on the successful. Call it yet another contradiction that my parents embodied.
    I went across the hall to our home theater, with its plush velvet seats lined up in front of a gargantuan screen that doubled as a television when we weren’t watching movies (strictly educational films, of course). I clicked to a news station, and a reporter that I had actually just seen from the window was now looking out at me from the TV screen, saying:
    “With his brother, Peter, Malcolm Angel owned Angel Pharma, a multinational drug company. Maud Angel was founder and CEO of a successful hedge fund, Leading Hedge, which has come under SEC scrutiny in the last few weeks.
    “Still, the Angels died at the pinnacle of success. Their motto was ‘yes we can,’ long before Barack Obama campaigned with that slogan.
    “The Angels leave four children ranging in age from ten to