Nevermore: The Final Maximum Ride Adventure (27 page)

My gaze turned
to the angry face of my ten-year-old “little” brother, Hugo. From the look of outrage he directed toward the cops, I got the feeling that he felt they were villains, and that he wanted to take Sergeant Caputo apart like a rotisserie chicken. The thing is, Hugo is probably as strong as a full-grown man. I thought he could actually do it.

What else could Hugo do?

He sat in the “Pork Chair,” a pink upholstered armchair with carved wooden pig hooves for feet. He looked adorable, as he almost always did. He was wearing an enormous Giants sweatshirt over his pajamas. Because Goliath was his biblical hero, he allowed a haircut only once a year, so
it had been eleven months since Hugo’s last trim and his brown hair eddied down his back like a mountain stream.

My twin brother, Harrison—aka Harry—sat on the red leather sofa across from Hugo. You would like Harry; everyone does. We’re fraternal twins, of course, but we look very much alike, with dark eyes and hair that we got from our mother. I wear my hair below my shoulders, sometimes with a headband. Harry’s hair has curls that I would die for. He wears Harry Potter–style dark-rimmed glasses. We both twirl our hair with our fingers when deep in thought. I do it clockwise, and he does it in the other direction.

Harry also has a great smile. I guess I do, too, but I almost never use it. Harry uses his a lot. Maybe he’s the only Angel who does, actually.

That night, Harry wore painter’s pants and a sweatshirt with the hood pulled half over his face, which told me that he wanted to disappear. His breathing sounded wheezy, like he had a harmonica in his throat, which meant an asthma attack was coming on.

Samantha Peck, my mother’s kind and beautiful live-in personal assistant, had spent the night in the apartment, behind our locked doors. She worked for Maud, and that made her a suspect, too. She stood behind Hugo with her hand on his shoulder, her sandy-colored braid cascading over her pink satin robe. Her face was drawn and pale, as if
her heart had stopped pumping. I thought she might be in shock.

Caputo pointed at Robert’s TV, which broadcast static 24/7. He said, “Can someone turn that off?”

Hugo said, “We never turn it off. Never.”

Caputo walked to the wall and pulled the plug.

For an instant, the room was completely quiet, as Caputo watched us to see how we would react. I found myself wishing more than anything that my older brother, Matthew, would suddenly appear. I had tried to reach him several times, but he wasn’t answering his phone. He may not have been on the best terms with our parents, but I wouldn’t be able to entirely focus until he had been informed of their deaths. And Matthew, I was sure, would know how to deal with these police officers.

Sergeant Caputo shoved his sleeves up farther on his forearms and said, “The penthouse is a crime scene. It’s off-limits until I say otherwise. Are we all clear?”

I thought about how my parents would have wanted us to behave in this situation.

My mother was like a perpetual-motion machine, never stopping, hardly sleeping at all. She seemed to barely notice people—even her children. Her strength was in analyzing financial markets and managing the billions in her exclusive hedge fund.

My father co-owned Angel Pharmaceuticals with his
younger brother, Peter. He was a chemist with a gigantic brain and enormous gifts. Unlike my mother, Malcolm engaged with us so intensely that after a few minutes of contact with my father, I felt invaded to the core.

Even with all their faults, Malcolm and Maud had had their children’s interests at heart. They tirelessly taught us to harness what they called our “superhuman powers”: our physical strengths, our emotions, and our remarkable IQs.

Our parents wanted us to be perfect.

Even in this situation, they would’ve wanted us to behave perfectly.

You can probably imagine that the constant press toward perfection might affect your relationships with others and the expectations you have of yourself. It’s like being a camera and the subject of its photographs at the same time.

That’s screwed up, right?

Still, somehow the Angel kids survived this—perhaps by a means that I might describe as…
not entirely natural
. But we’ll get to that later.

For the moment, I decided to use the skills my parents had driven into all of us, and to refuse to react the way Caputo wanted me to.

“Of course, Officer Caputo,” I finally responded to his demand. “We wouldn’t want to interfere in your very thorough investigation.”

I would just have to wait until the officers were out of my way.

Confession

If only Caputo could interrogate Robert. You see, Robert sees stuff. He
knows
stuff. About the Angels. About me.

Such as: He knows about the time I put my foot right through his TV screen.

On purpose.
Or so I’m told.

I don’t even remember it. But I know it happened because one day I was the best lacrosse player at All Saints, and the next day I woke up in the hospital with fifty stitches in my foot and leg.

In the hospital, Malcolm and Maud’s stern faces had looked at me without sympathy. Maud said she never thought lacrosse was good for me, anyway. (I would never play again.) Malcolm announced that my Big Chop was going to be repairing Robert so that he was as good as new. (My efforts were, sadly, flawed; that’s why Robert only watches static these days.)

And that’s pretty much all they’d told me. You don’t demand answers from Malcolm and Maud.

Hugo was the only one who saw what happened. He said I flew into the apartment in such a rage that he hid behind the Claes Oldenburg sculpture and watched me kick the hell out of Robert, screaming,
“They killed her. They killed her!”
My foot crashed through Robert’s screen with the force of a wrecking ball, he claims.

How could I do that? I’d need almost superhuman strength. When I asked Matthew, he shrugged and said only: “It’s a piece of art, Tandy. It’s not industrial strength.”

More important, though, was
why
I would do that. Could I really have been talking about my dead sister, Katherine?

Was I accusing Malcolm and Maud of killing their eldest daughter?

And why don’t I remember it at all?

Caputo was still
pacing and coughing, giving us the evil eye and warning us that if we crossed into the no-go zone of the penthouse suite, he would have us removed from the apartment.

“I’m doing you a favor, letting you stay downstairs. Don’t make me sorry.”

I stared back at the menacing detective and remembered what it had been like growing up here in the Dakota—a gated island on an island. It was one of the few places in the world where I felt secure.

Yet Malcolm and Maud Angel weren’t the first people to be killed at the Dakota. Everyone knows that Mark David
Chapman gunned John Lennon down right at the front gates, where the police cars were now parked. And just two floors below us, the actor Gig Young killed his wife and then shot himself.

Now my parents had been murdered in their own bed by an unknown killer for a reason I couldn’t imagine.

Or maybe I could… but I digress. Those are very private thoughts, for later.

As I sat beside Harry, under the withering gaze of Sergeant Caputo, crime-scene investigators trooped through the private entranceway that very few New Yorkers had ever seen, even in photographs. They crossed the cobbled courtyard and used the residents’ elevators to come upstairs, which was strictly forbidden by the cooperative’s bylaws.

Sergeant Caputo had banned us from our parents’ suite—but I
lived
there. I had rights. And I had already taught myself basic criminology.

I learned all about JonBenét Ramsey when I was six, the same age she’d been when she was murdered. She had been an adorable little girl, seemingly happy and unafraid and loving. I was so moved by her death that I wrote to the police in Colorado, asking them why they hadn’t found her killer. No one wrote back. To this day, her killer has not been found.

The unsolved Ramsey case had inspired me to read up on the famous forensic pathologists Michael Baden and Henry Lee. I had consumed practical guides to homicide investigations, so I knew that the longer it
took to solve a crime, the more likely it was that it would never be solved.

I wasn’t one to trust authority. Who knows, though—maybe Caputo and Hayes
were
decent cops. But my parents were just a case to them. That was all they could ever be.

Malcolm and Maud were my
parents
. I owed them. I owed it to myself, and to my siblings, to try to solve their murders.

The fact is, I was the ideal detective for this case. This was a job that I could—and
should
—do. Please don’t think I’m completely full of myself when I say that. I just knew that my doggedness and personal motivation would trump any training these guys had.

I am an Angel, after all. As Malcolm always said, we get things done.

So as I sat in the living room that night, I took on the full responsibility of finding my parents’ killer—even if it turned out that the killer shared my DNA.

Even if it turned out to be me.

You shouldn’t count that out, friend.

Are you familiar with the phrase
unreliable narrator
? Maybe from English-lit class? It’s when the storyteller might not be worthy of your trust. In fact, the storyteller might be a complete liar. So given what I just said, you’re probably wondering: Is that me?

Would I do that to you? Of course I wouldn’t. At least, I don’t think I would. But you can never tell about people, can you? How much do you really know about my past?

That’s a subject we’ll have to investigate together, later.

For now, back to my story. I was about to begin the investigation of my parents’ murders. While the two detectives conferred in the study, out of sight, I climbed the stairs
to the long hallway in my parents’ penthouse suite. I flattened myself against the dark red wall and averted my eyes as the techs from the medical examiner’s office took my parents away in body bags.

Then I edged down the hall to the threshold of Malcolm and Maud’s bedroom and peered inside.

An efficient-looking crime-scene investigator was busily dusting for fingerprints. The name tag on her shirt read
CSI JOYCE YEAGER
.

I said hello to the freckle-faced CSI and told her my name. She said that she was sorry for my loss. I nodded, then said, “Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”

CSI Yeager looked around before saying, “Okay.”

I didn’t have time for tact. I’d been warned away from this room and everything in it, so I began to shoot questions at the CSI as if I were firing them from a nail gun.

“What was the time of death?”

“That hasn’t been determined,” she said.

“And the means?”

“We don’t know yet how your parents were killed.”

“And what about the manner of death?” I asked.

“The medical examiner will determine if these were homicides, accidents, natural deaths—”

“Natural?” I interrupted, getting fed up. “Come on.”

“It’s the medical examiner’s job to determine these things,” she said.

“Have you found a weapon? Was there any blood?”

“Listen, Tandy. I’m sorry, but you have to go now, before you get me in trouble.”

CSI Yeager was ignoring me now, but she didn’t close the door. I looked around the room, taking in the enormous four-poster bed and the silk bedspread on the floor.

And I did a visual inventory of my parents’ valuables.

The painting over their fireplace, by Daniel Aronstein, was a modern depiction of an American flag: strips of frayed muslin layered with oil paints in greens and mauve. It was worth almost $200,000—and it hadn’t been touched.

My mother’s expensive jewelry was also untouched; her strand of impossibly creamy Mikimoto pearls lay in an open velvet-lined box on the dresser, and her twelve-carat emerald ring still hung from a branch of the crystal ring tree beside her bed.