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.”