The Private School Murders

by James Patterson

  “The three of you are grounded until further notice. School. Home. That’s all. Tonight, after what I’m sure will be a very awkward dinner, you will go to your rooms.”

  Hugo said, “Jacob, just saying, maybe you take your military training too seriously.”

  “You think so? I’ve saved hundreds of people in my lifetime. How about you? Any of you ever save a life?”

  Harry and I looked at each other. I’d never felt so intimidated.

  “I didn’t think so. I’ll see you at dinner. We’re having whatever is in a can or a jar. Keep your expectations low.”

  22

  That was it? We were grounded?

  One summer, Hugo got a Big Chop for talking back to Maud. He was sent to boot camp in Hawaii, where he harvested prickly pineapples for two months in the blazing sun and slept in a guarded barracks at night. He was eight. Grounding, for us, was nothing.

  I gathered my brothers for a conference in Hugo’s room. I said, “We have to talk.”

  “You don’t even have to say it, Tandy,” Harry said. “We screwed up. What if we had been kidnapped? There’s some precedent for that. What was Jacob supposed to think?”

  “Malcolm and Maud never worried where we were,” Hugo said. He kicked at the knees of his tattered life-sized stuffed pony, a baby gift from Uncle Peter.

  “They knew we could take care of ourselves,” Harry said. “Jacob doesn’t know that.”

  “Our parents were self-involved,” said Hugo. “They only cared if we were insubordinate. Or if something we did came back on them.”

  “So what are you saying?” I asked Hugo.

  “We don’t expect people to care.” He flopped down on his back, lying diagonally across his mattress with his arms crossed over his chest. “Jacob actually cares about us. Us!”

  Like it was the most impossible thing to fathom. Which it kind of was.

  “It’s weird, but… I think you’re right,” I said.

  “But how can he? He’s barely known us for a week,” Hugo said.

  “Maybe he’s suffering a loss?” Harry suggested.

  “Maybe he doesn’t have any kids of his own. Or maybe they died,” Hugo said.

  “Or maybe he likes us,” I added. “Maybe he likes us and he cares and he’s responsible. Isn’t that enough?”

  I let this very alien idea—alien to the Angel kids, at least—sink in. Then we went together to Jacob’s door.

  When he opened it, Hugo said, “Jacob, we’re sorry we were so thoughtless.”

  “In our defense, we’ve never been held to account for our whereabouts during the daytime, but still,” Harry said, “we were wrong. We’ll never go off your radar again.”

  “Is there something we can do to make this up to you?” I asked. “Within reason, of course.” I smiled.

  Jacob put his hands on his hips. “What do you suggest?”

  “I’ve got a hundred bucks,” I joked.

  “And I’ve got fifty,” said Harry.

  “You can’t pay the man off! He’s Israeli military!” Hugo said, wide-eyed.

  “So we’ll treat for a Chinese dinner out. How’s that? If you’ll accept our apologies, Jacob,” I said.

  Jacob cracked a small smile. “Apologies accepted.”

  Then he did the unthinkable. He hugged us. All three of us and Jacob in one big group hug. Even I was moved. But it was Hugo who started to cry.

  Harry and I exchanged a look and backed off so that Jacob could hug Hugo and only Hugo. My little brother just sobbed into Jacob’s chest. He let go of a whole world of pain that he’d been expressing in every way but sadness.

  “I didn’t understand I could hurt you!” Hugo cried.

  “It’s okay. I’m here for you,” Jacob said. “I’ve got you now. We’re all going to be fine.”

  23

  My phone rang, jolting me out of a bottomless sleep.

  I fumbled around at my bedside table and grabbed my phone. It was C.P., and it was barely light out. I rubbed the bleariness from my eyes and checked the clock. It was just after six thirty in the morning.

  I answered on the third ring. “What’s up?”

  “Tandy,” she whispered, her voice strained. “It happened again.”

  “What?” I asked, swinging my legs over the side of my bed, fully alert. “What happened again?”

  “Look.”

  My phone beeped, and I opened the link C.P. had sent me. There, six inches from my still-gummy eyes, was a breaking news story: TEENAGE GIRL FOUND DEAD IN CENTRAL PARK.

  Below the headline was a photo of a blond-haired girl lying curled on her side on the Bow Bridge.

  “Oh my God,” I gasped, my free hand fluttering up to cover my mouth. I brought the phone back to my ear. “C.P.… I can’t even… did you know her?”

  “No idea who she is. Who she was. They don’t name her in the article. But you can bet we’ll find out before school starts. I’m sure the entire Upper West Side is texting about it right now.”

  “Of course they are,” I agreed, getting up and reaching for a pair of jeans. My hands were shaking. “This is unbelievable. Another murder right across the street.”

  “Get up and get dressed,” C.P. said. “I’ll meet you downstairs in half an hour.”

  “You sure you want to come to the dead zone?” I asked bitterly, looking out the window across the park.

  “Not funny, Angel,” she replied. Then the line went dead.

  I dressed fast, then downed a cup of milky coffee and a buttered roll. As I brushed my hair, I ran a search on the latest murder.

  I found a story on the news feed.

  Marla Henderson, 17, was found dead at approximately 5:30 this morning on the Bow Bridge in Central Park. Bystanders at the scene say that Ms. Henderson appeared to have been shot. Police refuse to comment on an ongoing investigation.

  Harry, Hugo, and I left for school together and found C.P. pacing outside the Dakota’s gates. Her posture was tense, and her eyes darted everywhere.

  “Guys, I need some girl time with C.P.,” I told my brothers.

  “Yeah,” C.P. agreed, latching on to my arm like it was a life preserver. She looked Harry up and down. “Girl time. Girl blather. Just us.”

  Harry narrowed his eyes and shoved his hands into his coat pockets. He looked, somehow, disappointed. “Whatever you two are up to, don’t get caught.”

  Harry and Hugo set off up Central Park West. As soon as they crossed Seventy-Second, I turned to C.P.

  “We’ve got to make this fast,” I said, thinking of Jacob, our talk last night, and my new vow to myself not to disappoint him again. “I can’t be late. I mean it. I can not be late to school.”

  24

  We made a mad dash across Central Park West and kept going over the blacktop path, taking a left through the glorious woods in the park called the Ramble, and then kept running toward the lake. It took about ten minutes from the time we left my corner to the moment we pulled up as close as we could get to the western side of the Bow Bridge.

  Usually, the bridge is magical, a genuine and well-deserved tourist magnet. It spans and is reflected in the serene twenty-acre lake and looks like something out of a painting by Claude Monet. In warm weather, rowboats skim the water and sunlight glorifies the romantic boathouse restaurant, as well as the Fifth Avenue skyline.

  Right then, the scene was anything but poetic.

  The entire area around the Bow Bridge was blocked off by police cruisers and pedestrians standing four or five deep outside the crime-scene tape.

  C.P. and I were at the edge of the crowd with all the other rubberneckers. We couldn’t see the scene, but we soon realized we’d scored a prime spot. Right next to us, a reporter was interviewing the gray-haired woman in biking gear who had discovered Marla Henderson’s body at dawn. She gripped the handlebars of her bike like she was afraid she might faint if she let go.

  “I was out for my morning ride when I saw this young girl lying on the bridge, right over there,
in this really awkward position, and when I got closer I could see that she wasn’t breathing.”

  “So what did you do?” the reporter asked.

  “I ran over to her, of course. I saw blood all over her clothing. I put my hand on her neck and her skin was cold.” The woman covered her mouth with her pale hand, and I could see that she was trembling. “Oh. It was horrible. Horrible. Poor dear little thing. I called the police, and they were here in about five minutes. That’s all I know.”

  My phone pinged—the Google alert I’d put on Marla Henderson, who was by now on her way to the medical examiner’s office.

  I read the alert out loud to C.P.

  “ ‘Marla Henderson was shot by assailant or assailants unknown. Ms. Henderson was seventeen, a junior at Brilling Day, an all-girls school on West Ninety-Second Street. Mrs. Valerie Henderson, Marla’s mother, told WXOX that she wasn’t discovered missing until the call from police this morning.’ ”

  “So she did go to private school,” C.P. said, shuddering. “It’s too real, Tandy. I mean, someone is killing girls just like us, practically right outside your door.”

  I shoved my phone back into my bag, questions colliding in my mind like a thousand tiny Ping-Pong balls. Had Marla’s killer been waiting for a teenage girl to come through the park? Or had he been stalking this particular girl? Had Marla Henderson, Adele Church, Stacey Blackburn, and Lena Watkins been shot by the same person?

  Were they all victims of a pattern killer?

  “What’s going on in that beautiful, twisted little mind of yours, T?” C.P. asked.

  “I’m wondering if a serial killer is hunting private school girls who live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.”

  “Stacey Blackburn was shot on Fifty-Ninth Street.…”

  “I know, and what I found online said she lived on Eighty-First and Central Park West,” I told her, biting my bottom lip as I glanced around at the trees and the buildings, the clouds in the sky that seemed to graze the tops of the highest skyscrapers. “I wonder where Marla lived.”

  “Okay, that’s the first full-body shiver I’ve ever had in my entire life,” C.P. said. “At least, the first one that didn’t involve a hot guy.”

  My phone buzzed and I yanked it out again. It was a text from Harry.

  You’ve got twelve minutes.

  “Sonofa—”

  I grabbed C.P.’s hand and ran.

  25

  I was breathless and sweaty by the time I got to the choir loft. Harry gave me a withering look, but I knew he was just busting my chops. Mr. Thibodaux entered the room seconds after C.P. had found her seat and I’d stashed my books under my desk.

  I did my best to focus and even ask appropriate questions at the appropriate times, but I kept seeing images in my head of Marla Henderson in a semifetal position on the bridge and Adele Church lying on the IMAGINE mosaic with bullet holes in her chest.

  After school, trying not to think too much about disobeying Jacob again, I headed toward the Twentieth Precinct station house, a brown-tiled and granite-faced building on the pretty tree-lined block of Eighty-Second Street. As I entered the vestibule, I ordered my many splintered thoughts, mentally rehearsing what I wanted to say. On my right was a display of photos of officers from the Twentieth who had lost their lives on 9/11, and across from that, an honor roll of valorous officers across the decades.

  I went up a couple of steps to the main floor of the station house, cut through the disheveled group of chatting middle-aged community organizers, and approached the clerk stationed behind a Plexiglas window. She looked up from her book and greeted me with a toothy smile.

  “I need to see Sergeant Caputo,” I told her.

  “Oh, he’s awfully busy, dear, like a dog chewing at his fleas. Why don’t you leave him a note and I’ll see that he gets it?”

  “It’s what I’d call urgent,” I said. “I can wait.”

  Her expression turned sour. She looked me up and down. I was dressed entirely in black, including my nail polish. I got the feeling she didn’t approve.

  “Your name is?”

  “Tandoori Angel.”

  “And why do you need to see Sergeant Caputo so urgently?”

  “It’s personal,” I told her. “Just tell him who’s here. Trust me. He’ll see me.”

  I sat on a bench in the oak-and-linoleum waiting room and stared at the bulletin board across the way. Apparently, the city would pay a hundred dollars for any guns turned in, no questions asked. I thought of the gun Jacob had used to kill the snake, and the gun or guns used to kill all these innocent girls.

  I gotta say, I definitely felt better knowing my guardian was armed.

  “Tootsie Angel!”

  I looked up to see Caputo standing over me with a steely look in his opaque dark eyes. I shot the toothy lady a triumphant look. She rolled her eyes and went back to reading her romance novel.

  “What trouble are you into now, missy?” Caputo asked.

  “Could we talk privately?” I asked, standing. “I have something personal to discuss with you.”

  “Anyone ever tell you what a pain you are?”

  “No, sir,” I said plainly. “Nobody ever has.”

  He snorted and said, “Okay, follow me.”

  Caputo didn’t have an office. He worked in a bull pen, a horseshoe of gray desks against the windowed walls that faced the dark alley behind the building. Four detectives were manning their phones when Caputo rolled an extra chair around to his desk and indicated that I should sit in it.

  I didn’t waste any time.

  “Detective, I’ve brought an apology from my brothers and myself, for all the trouble we put you and your colleagues through yesterday.”

  I handed him a small creamy envelope with his name in cursive letters on the outside. He placed the unopened note on the corner of his desk.

  “That’s it?” he said.

  “No. I want to talk to you about Marla Henderson and Adele Church.”

  “What about them, Shandy?”

  “They were both shot within walking distance of each other, and I think there may be a connection between them.”

  Caputo said, “They knew each other?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So what’s your news flash?” He tapped his thumbs together.

  “Two other private school girls were also shot in the last month. Lena Watkins—”

  “Watkins?” he interjected. “She was a suicide.”

  “Really? There was no suicide note. And why would she shoot herself on the street?” I asked. “Maybe you could look into that?”

  No answer from Caputo.

  “And then there’s Stacey Blackburn.”

  He leaned back casually in his chair. “I don’t know that one, Prissy.”

  “She was shot in a liquor store holdup in Midtown, but the robber wasn’t caught. There’s no way to tell if Stacey was really a victim of an armed robbery, or if she was executed—just like Adele and Marla.”

  I finally had Caputo’s attention. He gave me the benefit of full eye contact, and I have to admit, I liked it. He was actually taking me seriously. Then he spun in his chair and typed into his computer. I saw that he was looking up Stacey Blackburn.

  “The gun that was found in Lena Watkins’s hand,” I said. “Could you see if it’s the same gun that was used to kill Stacey Blackburn?”

  Caputo said, “No one compared those incidents, Tandy. A suicide and a homicide. Nope. They weren’t run against each other.”

  I said, “I have a hunch—you get those, don’t you, Detective? I’ve got a hunch that Lena and Stacey were shot with the same gun, but after the killer left it behind with Lena he had to get a new one. He then used that gun to shoot both Adele and Marla.”

  “Well, ballistics is still out on Henderson, not that I could tell you if there was a match. Thanks for stopping in. Oh, and thanks for the apology. I’ll pin it on the bulletin board for all the guys to see.”

  Caputo stood u
p, all pale six feet of him. I stood up, too.

  “Just tell me this. Were the bullets the same caliber?”

  He gave me a long look. I made sure not to blink.

  “Both girls were shot with a thirty-eight. Now, don’t tell anyone I said so, Brandy. Or you and I are through. Clear?”

  I walked home on autopilot. I was sure I was right. Someone had put targets on private school girls. But I was also sure that I’d gotten through to Caputo. He was going to look into my theory. I could feel it.

  I was working with the NYPD. Unofficially, but still. I had contributed to the investigation, and if I turned out to be right, who knew what might happen next?

  CONFESSION

  I first met Caputo three months ago, the night my parents died. Harry, Hugo, and I were in bed. Samantha, my mother’s assistant, was in her room, also asleep in bed. Matthew was living with Tamara way downtown, but he had a key and he knew the ins and outs of the labyrinthine Dakota.

  When the police arrived, none of us knew that our parents were dead in their suite upstairs, and when questioned by the unsmiling Detective Caputo, we had no alibis except the unprovable “We were asleep.”

  The apartment was locked. There had been no forced entry.

  So Detective Caputo jumped to the obvious conclusion that we were prime suspects, that one or all of us had killed Malcolm and Maud.

  Not that I could blame him.

  We all had the means, the motive, and the opportunity. Every one of us in that tight family circle had good reason to kill Malcolm and Maud, who were, after all, very complex people whom many have described as monsters. Even me.

  Still, I wish I could have prevented their deaths. I miss them. I loved them and I think they loved us, in their own twisted way.

  But here’s a confession, my friend, and I tell you this with a true heart.

  We’re better off without them.

  I think maybe now we have a chance of becoming who and what we were meant to be. And I can’t keep Jacob’s words from scrolling over and over through my mind.

  “I’ve saved hundreds of people in my lifetime. How about you?”