Confessions of a Murder Suspect

9

“Do you want to go to your room, Harry?” Hayes asked. Harry nodded vigorously. “Go ahead. I’ll stop in and talk to you privately in a few minutes.”

Harry shot out of his seat and ran to his room, bawling like a baby. Caputo looked dumbfounded, like he’d never seen a teenager cry before. Which was strange, because just minutes earlier he had been acting like we were all murderers for not crying our eyes out.

After a moment passed, Detective Hayes sat next to me on the red leather sofa. “Tandy, tell me your movements of the last six hours. We have to do a complete report, you understand. It’s necessary for us to know where everyone was when your folks were killed.”

“They weren’t folks,” I said. “Trust me on that.”

I sketched the details of my evening for the detective, telling him about my homework and the time I’d spent doing research on the effects of radiation on shellfish in the Pacific. I talked about dinner, but mostly just to say that my father, an expert cook, had made the meal himself. I had watched. He had been teaching me how to cook, although I had yet to be allowed to touch anything he was going to serve. “Watch me and learn my movements to perfection so that when you first attempt to do it, you can’t fail,” he’d said.

I was about to give Detective Hayes the ambassador’s name and number when his phone rang and he excused himself. When he returned, he asked me, “And how did your parents seem at dinner?”

I had thought Maud seemed a little off, maybe preoccupied, but I didn’t say so. I also skipped over any mention of the ambassador, and I felt fine about the omission. I’d been in the same room with the ambassador every minute that he was in our house, and besides, that overstuffed, freeloading bureaucrat was too self-involved to ever commit murder.

I had just made a mistake I would pay for later.

“The food was excellent, as usual, and we all had a good time at dinner,” I told Hayes. “I said good night to them before I went to bed at eleven.”

“Your bedroom is right under theirs,” Hayes said. “Did you hear any strange sounds, anything we should know about, Tandy?”

He was working me softly, trying to get to me to open up, but I had nothing for him. I had nothing for my own investigation, either.

I said, “I was asleep by eleven fifteen. And I sleep like a stump.”

“How does a stump sleep?” Hayes asked with a smile.

He was patronizing me. To be fair, sometimes I look younger than I am. I’ve got small bones and features. I rarely use makeup. Girls’ size-eight clothing fits me. As a result, people often underestimate me—which is how I like it.

“I sleep deeply,” I said, “but my brain works overtime, organizing everything I’ve learned during the day,” I told him. “I do some very good work in my sleep.”

Hayes said, “All right, Tandy. Duly noted. Works in her sleep.”

He had run out of questions for me, but I had a few questions for him. And as long as he answered them, I didn’t care if he patted me on the head while he did it. It takes a lot to set me off; I’ve been thoroughly trained to control my emotions.

“As far as I could tell, Detective Hayes, no gun or other murder weapon was found. There was also no forced entry into the apartment. Valuables are still in my parents’ room: a two-hundred-thousand-dollar work of art and several pieces of jewelry. This wasn’t a robbery, correct?” I said. “So what is your theory of the crime?”

Sergeant Caputo had been watching Hayes interrogate me, and he was not amused. He certainly didn’t want to cede control to a teenage girl wearing dinosaur pajamas.

Caputo bent so close to me, I could count the hairs in his unibrow, and the ones curling out of his nose, too.

“Tessie, I think you know a lot more about what happened to your parents than you want to say. Help us understand what happened here. Take a deep breath and tell us what you know. The truth feels really good when you just let it go.”

I pulled back and said, “I told you the truth. I was sleeping. Like a stump. And I didn’t wake up until I heard sirens. After that, you were pounding on the door.”

I flashed what Harry calls my Anne Hathaway smile at the cops and said, “Thank you for your help in our time of need.”

“Are we being dismissed?” asked Detective Hayes.

“Ah, finally, the right question,” I replied.

“And the answer to that question is no,” Caputo said. “We’ll go when we’re done, and for your information, Child Protective Services is on the way.”

Samantha jumped up then. “Mr. and Mrs. Angel elected Peter Angel to be the children’s guardian in case of an emergency. Peter just texted me to say that he’ll be here shortly.”

Uncle Peter? Despite the fact that he was now our closest living relative, he was the last person I wanted to see—a busybody who had once proved to me he was not to be trusted. But that’s a story for another time.