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 cr
ossed 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.