Confessions of a Murder Suspect (26 page)

Harry pulled up Matty’s chart and checked the uptick in SPD against the date of Peter’s memo. They matched. The drugs had been increased, and the line on Matty’s chart rose accordingly. The chart was still open on the computer screen when the door to the lab suddenly opened.

Harry and I both jumped guiltily—we were in Malcolm’s private room, and we still had the instinctive fear of a Big Chop.

Hugo stood in the doorway, and he didn’t seem very surprised at what he saw. “So,” said my little brother, “you guys finally found out Malcolm’s secret. It’s about time.”

58

We didn’t have time to question
Hugo about his knowledge of the room until we were in the car. Harry and I agreed that we had to get to Matty right away, so Virgil was driving us to the Meadowlands, the Giants’ practice field, an enormous indoor enclosure next to the new stadium. Never mind that it was a Wednesday and that before all this happened, Virgil would have been driving us to school instead. I rubbed my temples with both hands. I couldn’t even think about going back to school.

“Hugo, how did you know about Malcolm’s secret lab? And why didn’t you tell any of us about it? How many times have you been down there?” I was firing off questions as quickly as I thought of them.

“I’d seen Malcolm go in the closet lots of times. One time he forgot to lock the door behind him and I followed. It wasn’t hard.”

“But why didn’t you say anything?” Harry asked.

Hugo just shrugged. “I never went into the lab. I just knew about it. Who cares about a stupid lab? Dad was a scientist, after all.”

This sounded suspicious to me, but I wasn’t sure how to reframe the question so I could pry some answers out of Hugo. We sat in silence as I thought, Harry brooded, and Hugo amused himself by hanging his head out the window.

When we finally arrived at the field, we quickly headed for where the “Ginats” were working out in full pads—running plays, butting heads. I saw Matthew catch a long pass, after which his coach motioned to him to wrap it up and head to the locker room.

He was trotting off the field as Harry, Hugo, and I ran toward him.

Matthew pulled up short and squinted at us. He had his fighting face on. “What are you guys doing here?”

“We need your help, Matty,” I told him firmly.

“Really? You need help from a
killer
?”

“Can you blame me for trying to find out who killed them?”

“What was it that Malcolm used to say? That you’re as sensitive as a truck?”

“Sure. I get high praise for my insensitivity.”

“Well, that’s certainly true.” He smiled. And when Matthew Angel smiled, he outshined any movie star you can name. “Look, Tandy. I adore you. You’re my sister. But the further I get from the Angel family tree, the fewer nuts will fall on my head.”

He turned toward the locker room again, and the three of us went after him like a pack of mutts running after a car.

“Matty, we need your help because… well, it’s just like you said in the beginning: One for all and all for one is the best way to proceed now,” I said. “The only way. So hear me out.”

“Keep me out of it. I have enough problems of my own.” He waved us away like we were gnats.

“Hey.”

Matthew stopped walking and turned to face me. “You’re not going to change my mind.”

I put
my
mad face on.

“If you don’t help us, we’re going to have to go public with what we know. I mean it, Matthew.”

“Get serious. I’m not afraid of you, Tandy.”

“We know about the pills. We found the charts. We’ll
find the formulas, too—I’m sure of it. But even now I can say with confidence that those pills have been behind your success, Matty. Your speed and agility. It’s called performance enhancement.”

“Really?”

“Really. It’s only because drug screens don’t catch Malcolm’s formulas that you haven’t been caught, but now we know. And if we talk, your career is
over
.”

Matthew said, “You’d go that far? You’d actually blackmail me? If you go public, all of us will be exposed. You, Hugo, and you, too, Harry. I guess you won’t be playing Lincoln Center again.”

Harry had been teetering on the brink of a meltdown for days, and at Matthew’s words, he finally lost it. He opened his mouth and let out a high C note. And held it. And held it some more.

If a shooting star could make music, it would sound like Harry’s high note. The other football players stopped short. Everyone on the field froze and pinned their eyes on my twin.

When Harry finally ran out of air, I said to Matthew, “With your help or without it, we’re going to clean up this mess. We’re going to do it right now. Are you with us or against us, big brother?”

59

Angel Pharmaceuticals occupies a daunting,
slate-gray, nine-story building on Eleventh Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, in the heart of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen district.

As we got out of the car, Matthew said to me, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“You have to ask? This is going to be the grand finale, Matty. You can thank me later.”

We climbed two flights of metal steps to a landing. I pressed the buzzer on the wall and looked up at the camera mounted above the door. A moment later the door opened, and we entered the building onto a factory floor.

The action on the floor was mesmerizing. The ceiling was at least thirty feet high. On one side of the vast
warehouse, ice cream–colored pills poured down chutes and were funneled into bottles that moved along a conveyer belt like little soldiers. The bottles were then stacked into cartons by faceless people in powder-blue masks, caps, and paper gowns.

This mechanized operation, those rivers of pills—just like the ones I’d been taking since I was old enough to hold a sippy cup—gave me the creeps.

“It smells like pills in here,” Hugo said. “Gross.”

On the other side of the floor, backup alarms sounded as forklift operators drove back and forth with pallets stacked with cartons, wheeling, reversing, and placing the cartons high up on shelves.

The cartons were labeled in Chinese.

And it might not surprise you at this point to learn that I can actually read Chinese.

The shipping address was Beijing, China. And the cartons were labeled with product names: “Strong As Ox Pills”; “Very Smart Children Pills”; and one I had to think about for a moment… and then I had it: “No Worries Pills.”

Even if I hadn’t been able to read the labels, I could have guessed at the contents of the cartons; I could smell ylang-ylang and viburnum in the air—and a particular fragrance that I thought of as “yellow.”

If I was right, the drugs that had been tested on us—XL, Lazr, SPD, and the others—were soon going to be dispensed far and wide. Angel Pharma was shipping our drugs
overseas
.

Had that always been the Angel brothers’ plan?

Hugo was taking pictures with his cell phone, and he didn’t care who saw him. He had no inhibitions. He was a certifiable genius and as strong as a wrestler. What would he have been like without the pills?

What would
any
of us be like without the pills?

Could I ever be normal?

And the most difficult question: Did I even
want
to be?

60

I led the charge with an
electric, righteous anger that I could feel all the way to the ends of my hair. We piled into the elevator, looked up at the rising numbers without speaking, and then poured out on the executive floor as soon as the doors opened. Even Matty looked determined as we marched directly into the main conference room without knocking.

Uncle Peter sat in a large chair at the head of a long glass table, and he was bent over his laptop. He looked up when we walked in.

“Take your seats,” he said. “Try not to smudge the table. What could be so important that it couldn’t wait, Tandoori?”

Just looking at my uncle’s smug and unpleasant face made my insides smolder. I thought about the memos he’d exchanged with my father, discussing our pills as if we lived in cages and would die in them, too. I waited until Matthew, Harry, and Hugo were all seated. I remained standing, pacing the conference room as I prepared to speak. I made sure to leave the door wide open so everyone nearby would hear what I was about to say.