Confessions of a Murder Suspect

CONFESSION

You probably wonder how I could even consider a ten-year-old boy as a possible suspect, don’t you?

Maybe you’ve never seen a six-year-old gleefully hack at a teddy bear with a butcher knife.

Boys will be boys, you say? You think Hugo was just playing a game of knights and ninjas?

Unlikely. If Hugo were playing knights, he’d be wearing the complete set of armor (made out of tin) that Malcolm had custom-made by the costume shop at the Metropolitan Opera. If he were playing ninja, he’d be wearing his junior-sized balaclava and using his replica samurai sword.

Instead, he was a hundred percent Hugo, Spider-Man pj’s and all. He slashed and sawed at the teddy bear he and Maud had just built together at the Build-A-Bear Workshop for his birthday. He called the bear Malcolm.

And he laughed and laughed and laughed.

He was already a sociopath, and he was just out of kinder-garten.

I didn’t think much of it at the time. It was the family way.