Confessions of a Murder Suspect td-1 Read online

  “Damn you, Hugo,” Peter spat. “You little SOB!”

  “You need to get Mr. Wolfe to the hospital,” I said, sounding very cool, even though I was this close to running out the door screaming. “I’ll take that computer.”

  “The hell you will.”

  Hugo assumed a determined batter’s stance and held the bat angled fiercely over his shoulder. “I’d give her the laptop, Uncle Peter. If I were you. If I wanted to walk out of here.”

  Uncle Peter seemed paralyzed, no doubt distracted by Wolfe, who was still howling in pain. I took advantage of his moment of confusion and yanked the computer out of his hands, then jumped back out of arm’s reach.

  My uncle gave me a look that could kill. But he didn’t move toward me. He’d been shut down by a ten-year-old.

  “There’s nothing on that computer that will mean anything to anyone but me. I need your father’s records.”

  “You can have them when I’m done.”

  “Fine. Knock yourself out, Tandy.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  Uncle Peter pulled out his phone and punched a few buttons. “We need an ambulance,” he said, sounding more disgusted than worried. “There’s been an accident.”

  I pulled Hugo into his bedroom and locked us inside. Uncle Peter knocked and said, “Tandy, just give me the computer. It’s my property.”

  I said nothing.

  “Go to hell!” my uncle shouted through the door.

  “You first!” Hugo shouted back. “Take the express train.”

  “And, Hugo, you’ll be going to juvie for this latest transgression. You’re an animal.”

  Hugo and I huddled together as the paramedics came and went. Then, finally, the apartment was quiet again.

  Hugo had his bat under the covers with him.

  “We aren’t safe here,” he said. “We aren’t safe anywhere, are we?”

  77

  I waited for Hugo to fall asleep, then slipped out of bed and got busy prowling through the files on the computer—work that was grueling, boring, and maybe even pointless.

  The data was all highly technical. There were symbols instead of words. Chains of symbols instead of paragraphs. What text I could interpret was just as Uncle Peter had said—all very specific to the work of Angel Pharma.

  I spent an hour opening folders before I came to a file marked “Prometheus.”

  I got a strong and heady feeling that I’d just found the right door. Maybe? Was it okay to hope? Please?

  The Greek myth of Prometheus had been Malcolm’s favorite. From the time we were toddlers he’d told us the story about the Titan, a champion of mankind, a wily guy who outwitted the greatest god, Zeus. Prometheus had stolen fire and given it to mortals. That ticked Zeus off, so he gave Prometheus a major Big Chop: Prometheus was chained to a rock, and every day his liver was eaten by an eagle… only to grow back at night… and then get eaten all over again the next day. Try to imagine that.

  In light of what I’d learned, I wondered if my father saw himself as Prometheus, the giver of gifts to humanity through his mysterious pills.

  I opened the Prometheus folder and found hundreds of documents that I could actually read—and mostly understand. This was the treasure trove of information I’d been looking for. I skimmed and absorbed and comprehended charts and lab notes and monographs describing the pills.

  Uncle Peter had told me that the pills were largely made of natural ingredients. And that was true.

  Mostly true.

  And also—it was a gigantic lie.

  Take this formula, from page 631, for instance: Harry’s red sleeping pill contained St. John’s wort and passionflower, potent apothecary herbs that promoted healthy sleep and balanced moods and also made pretty decent antidepressants. But there was another ingredient in that compound—AP-T1-4—that I didn’t know and was unable to find on the Internet.

  What was it? What did it do? What kind of side effects could Harry be having from it?

  My blue pills were called HiQ. They contained natural ingredients that enhanced brain function, including uridine 5'-monophosphate, a nucleotide that stimulates neurons in the brain. But along with the list of natural ingredients and fillers, I found another mystery component: AP-33a.

  My yellow capsule was called Lazr. Lazr was made of bacopa monnieri, a plant extract that improves memory and motor learning. Like the other pills, Lazr also contained an unknown additive: AP-101.

  According to my growth chart, I’d been taking Lazr since I was one year old. Fifteen years!

  What was AP-101? AP had to stand for Angel Pharmaceuticals. But I found no mention of any of the mystery ingredients in any other Angel Pharma materials or on their websites.

  The next file I opened looked like a log of some kind. Each notation had a date and time, followed by descriptive notes about my brothers and me. One from just a few weeks earlier caught my eye: “Tandy showing increased levels of concentration thanks to extra dosage of HiQ, e.g., reading for six hours with no distractions or movement other than turning pages.”

  How could my father have known I was reading for six hours straight without moving? I remember the novel well; it was one I’d self-selected, for once, because he and Maud were out that day. But if they were out, how did he know what I was doing? Who spied on me for him? I already knew that Uncle Peter was wrapped up in all this, and Samantha had been keeping secrets with my mother for years. Could it be possible one of them was also watching us for our parents?

  I closed the Prometheus folder and thought about my father as a tireless Titan, developing performance-enhancing drugs at Angel Pharma, using these drugs to help his own kids achieve every kind of success, and then exporting the drugs to be used on kids in other countries, with the grand goal of spreading Angel-like perfection throughout the world.

  Had my father really been a morally driven, visionary genius with a superior intellect? Or had he been a crass capitalist exploiting his own children for profit?

  Was he courageous or shameless?

  I thought I knew the answer.

  My father was both.

  78

  I locked the lab up tight and returned to the living room, where I had done the six hours of straight reading noted in the journal. I had no other starting points, and besides, it was nice to just sit next to Robert and think sometimes.

  I leaned back in the chair and pretended to read a book. I turned my head slightly to the left, and then to the right, to see from what places in the room someone could have been watching me, unnoticed. I’m always very aware of my surroundings, so it disturbed me that someone could have been close by without my knowing it. But when I looked around the room more closely, I saw that there were plenty of places where a person could stand unnoticed behind a giant sculpture, or even hide behind an open door. It just seemed so… cliché, like something right out of a bargain-bookcase mystery. Still, I had to admit that it was possible, and very probable, that someone had consistently observed me in the room that day without my notice.

  That’s when it hit me: No one needed to be in the room to spy on me. My parents were highly equipped for any task. They had money, technology, staff. And Malcolm was a scientist.

  I jumped out of my chair and started scanning the surrounding walls, my heart pounding so hard I felt almost light-headed.

  I was running my hands over the molding above Robert’s TV when I noticed something that just didn’t look right. Sure enough, there was a tiny glint like a winking eye in one of the rosettes carved into the wood. It was almost invisible—unless you were staring right at it.

  Which I was doing. Of course, maybe I was just seeing things.…

  By that point my heart had started galloping—a very uncomfortable feeling. I dragged my chair over to the wall, climbed up on it, and got as close as I could to the little glass object above me. I stood there long enough to absorb what my eyes were telling me.

  I was staring up at a tiny hidden camera.

  I
went and ransacked the drawers in the kitchen until I found a screwdriver. Then I went back to the chair, under the glinting camera lens. It was only glued on, so it was easy for me to pry out even while standing on tiptoe.

  I studied the little gizmo, which was the size of a shirt button. It was wireless.

  It was incredible.

  It was scandalous.

  This lens could mean only one thing: My parents had been spying on me. They’d used my cell phone to track me when they’d ambushed my escape. There was no reason to believe they weren’t filming me, too. All of us.

  We were experiments, after all. Scientists need to observe their experiments as much as possible to compile comprehensive data. The facts you glean from dinner conversation just aren’t enough.

  I suspected that the data on every move my siblings and I had made—perhaps as long as we’d been alive—was hidden somewhere in this apartment.

  With a surge of anger, I threw the tiny camera as hard as I could against the wall. I hated it with a passion. I wouldn’t rest until I had destroyed every hidden camera in the apartment.

  I paced in circles for a minute, trying to get myself under control. My heart felt like it might burst, so I took deep, calming breaths. At least no one had been in the room with me when I was reading that day. Cameras weren’t any better, of course, but maybe I could rest slightly easier knowing that I had leapt to a conclusion about Samantha physically spying—

  My pacing halted when it hit me like a brick that I might have been onto something the first time. After all, who was the expert with cameras in the apartment?

  Samantha.

  My heart sank. Could Samantha have been helping with my parents’ experiments? I suddenly realized how naïve it was of me to think it could have been any other way. She spent more time with us than either Malcolm or Maud. She had scores—maybe hundreds—of files of photos of us. And family videos.

  So what about hidden videos?

  It might be possible that she wasn’t just Maud’s personal assistant. She could have been our parents’ lab assistant, too.

  79

  I quickly woke up my brothers, and we congregated for an ad hoc meeting on Harry’s bed.

  “Look at this,” I said, showing them the wicked little gadget. “I found it in the living room. It’s a camera.”

  “A camera? Like spies use?” Hugo asked. “Awesome! How was it planted?”

  “It was just glued to the molding,” I said to Hugo. “And it’s not awesome. It’s terrifying. Someone has been watching us.”

  “Who do you think put it there?” Harry asked, still stunned.

  “Who do you think?” I looked at him with the answer plain in my eyes.

  “Sick,” Harry said, shaking his head. “That’s sick.”

  “Help me, Harry,” I urged. “Please. I can’t sleep until we go through the entire house and find every camera—if there are more of them—and remove them. I have a vision of some creepy lab assistant in a back room at the factory getting paid to take notes on us. Or even worse… maybe Uncle Peter is monitoring us.”

  Harry got it instantly and pulled on a sweatshirt. We were not going to allow ourselves to be violated like this anymore.

  “I’ll help you, too,” Hugo offered, like it was a game.

  And so the three of us searched the apartment for several hours. It was a slow and grueling task. I was making my way through the kitchen, and Hugo was on hallway duty, when I heard Harry calling me into the study.

  “Here’s another one, Tandy.” He held out the gadget to me. “You were so right.”

  I paused, examining the tiny unit and rubbing my temples.

  “No… no, Harry. I was so wrong.” My head was starting to hurt.

  Harry gave me a quizzical look. “Huh?”

  “Dad wouldn’t put a camera in his own study, would he? If he were studying us, he wouldn’t bother putting a camera in a room he rarely allowed us to spend any time in.”

  “Tandy, we’re not dreaming. These are real. Someone put these here. Who else do you think could have done it?”

  I rolled the little camera around in my palm. “Samantha is a real possibility, of course,” I said. “She has complete access, and she’s interested in cameras. But I don’t see any motive for her to do that, unless it was at Malcolm or Maud’s bidding.”

  By now Hugo had joined us. “Maybe Maud wanted the cameras to spy on Malcolm,” he suggested. “On account of the affair and all.”

  “An excellent thought,” I said, thinking how disgusting and sad it was that the ten-year-old in the room was the one to come up with that theory. “But I have another one.”

  The name of a particularly saccharine-sweet filmmaker had just popped into my head. “Mr. Crosby could have planted a camera when he was interviewing our parents.”

  “Creepy Crosby, spying on us?” Harry said. “That’s a little far out, Tandy.”

  “We’ll have to see. It’s just a hunch. I have a couple of questions for our friendly and talented neighbor.”

  We dressed quickly. With the tiny camera in my hand, I led my brothers out of the apartment and over to Mr. Crosby’s door. I looked at my watch. It was almost eight AM; he should be awake. He would definitely be awake in a few seconds.

  I rang the doorbell, and when Nathan Crosby didn’t answer right away, I rang again. When I turned around to say to my brothers that we had to rethink and regroup, I saw that I was alone.

  Harry and Hugo had just disappeared.

  “Harry? Hugo?”

  I felt every single hair on my body standing on end.

  80

  I pushed open our front door and called out to my brothers, then ran to the living room, where I saw that the French doors fronting our balcony were open.

  Harry was standing just inside the open doors, wide-eyed and pale. His hair seemed to be standing straight up from his head. He looked terrified. I followed his gaze out the open doors.

  The Dakota has steep roofs and tall gables and turrets, many dormer windows, and a few little balconies, like ours. Nathan Crosby has a balcony, too.

  I pushed the fluttering gauze curtains aside, and what I saw almost stopped my heart. My little brother, shoeless and shirtless, was crossing the narrow brick ledge that extended from our balcony to Nate Crosby’s.

  The ledge was not meant to be a footbridge. It was just a narrow band of fancy brickwork—nothing more than a decoration, really—and yet Hugo was digging his feet into it, finding fingerholds in the bricks above him and scrambling spiderlike across the gap, more than ninety feet above the sidewalk.

  I hissed at Harry, “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “I tried. He doesn’t listen. You know he doesn’t listen!”

  “Hugo!” I yelled.

  “Don’t call him,” Harry said. “Let him concentrate. If he should miss a step—”

  “Hugo!” I called out again. I couldn’t help myself.

  He turned his head, grinned, and said, “Don’t worry, Tandy. I can fly.”

  Oh, God, my too-brave little brother… He wouldn’t survive a hundred-foot fall.

  Hugo’s feet slipped as I watched him. I covered my scream with both hands, and, somehow, without even looking, he found his footing again. Then he lost a handhold and had to find another.

  I felt sick to my stomach.

  But within two minutes, Hugo had reached Crosby’s balcony, swung his legs over the railing, and planted his feet. He raised his arms, his fingers forming a V for victory, as though he’d just won an Olympic gold medal.

  “You’re wicked!” I shouted, sounding just like my mother.

  “Swim fast, die hard,” he shouted back at me. Where did a ten-year-old get a line like that?

  And just like that, I was once again reminded that nothing about our family was normal: Hugo was laughing with the sheer joy of being Hugo when he picked up a flowerpot and hurled it through Nate Crosby’s French doors, then climbed through the broken doorway.

  “
He’s barefoot!” I said. “There’s broken glass everywhere!”

  “Yeah. And that’s the least of our problems,” said Harry. “Let’s go.”

  81

  Hugo opened Nate Crosby’s front door from the inside and made a dramatic, goofy bow to me and Harry. “Welcome to my humble home.”

  “You think this is funny?” I said to my youngest brother. “You could have died, Hugo.”

  “Gone splat on the street,” Harry added. “Like pigeon poop.”

  Hugo laughed.

  I stooped, grabbed him by both shoulders, and looked right into his eyes. “Dying is permanent,” I said. “You don’t come back.”

  “I know.”

  “And by the way, you’ve definitely broken the law.”

  Hugo grinned—another Angel family member without remorse.

  I couldn’t deal with babysitting this nut on top of illegally breaking and entering, so I gave Hugo five dollars and asked him to go to the store for some Ding Dongs. Amazingly, he didn’t hesitate—I guess our stop at the bodega for forbidden foods had made him hungry for more. As soon as he was gone, I took what would probably be my only chance to investigate Nate Crosby’s home.

  I was thinking it all through again as I crossed through Crosby’s sparsely furnished living room. Nate Crosby had wanted to make a film about my parents. When they said no to his proposal, he probably got angry. And nursed a grudge.

  Crosby had been inside our apartment when he interviewed Malcolm and Maud; maybe he’d had an opportunity to plant the cameras then. If he didn’t do it himself, he might have paid the super, or even our housekeeper, to do it for him.

  Crosby’s film-editing room was right off the living room. He had an L-shaped desk and a top-of-the-line computer. There were several monitors on the long wall, and a huge TV and DVD player across from the desk. Next to the TV was a stack DVD jewel cases.

  I went to the cases and saw that they were color-coded and labeled ANGEL—and they were dated, going back a number of months.