Confessions: The Private School Murders Read Free

brother, my mouth dry.
    “No one told me,” he said, digging around in his pocket. “I took this.”
    Harry showed me the picture on his phone. My already weakened stomach clenched, and I grabbed his arm to steady myself.
    “Sorry,” he said, gritting his teeth. “Should have warned you it was ugly.”
    “It’s okay,” I told him, clearing my throat. I turned and started for the park. “Let’s go.”
    We sprinted across the broad expanse of Central Park West against the light and entered the park by a blacktop pathway. Harry steered me to the right, just past thepretzel cart Hugo lived for, and we ran the thirty yards through a tunnel of shade trees to John Lennon’s memorial in Strawberry Fields, darting around strollers, joggers, and Rollerbladers.
    It was clear where Adele’s body was. The vultures were already circling. And by
vultures
, I mean press.
    I elbowed through a group of Korean tourists wielding their camera phones and wedged open a sight line to the famous mosaic with the word
Imagine
set into the middle of a triangulated path.
    Adele Church’s body was right there, at dead center.
    The blurry photo on Harry’s phone had in no way prepared me for the reality. Adele was lying on her back as if she’d fallen from the sky. Black bullet holes had punched through her chest and stomach, and her white-and-pink plaid coat was drenched with blood. I was close enough to read Adele’s expression as stark disbelief even as her wide-open blue eyes went dull from death.
    Bile rose up in the back of my throat, bringing tears to my eyes. I turned to Harry and pressed my face into his shoulder, biting down hard on my lip as I tried not to cry.
    This was one of those moments. One of those moments when I would have given anything not to feel. I couldn’t wrap my brain around why anyone would want to kill sweet, totally innocuous Adele. I wanted to strangleevery member of the growing crowd of tourists who were angling to get a better view of her poor broken body.
    Most of all I wanted to scream at her to just
get up
. That this couldn’t have happened. Not to someone I knew. Not to someone our age.
    Not to one of the very few people at school who were occasionally nice to me.
    “Take a breath, Tandy,” Harry whispered, which was odd, considering he was usually the one on the verge of a nervous breakdown, not me. “Focus on something else. What do you think happened to her?”
    Harry knew me so well. Piecing together evidence would focus me. It would make me feel like there was something I could do. I was all about productivity.
    I turned to look at the body, trying to force myself into cool indifference, and drilled down deep into my analytic left brain.
    “There’s a lot of blood,” I said under my breath. “She didn’t die instantly. Three shots and her heart was still pumping after at least two of them. She knew what was happening. She knew she was—”
    I paused and cleared my throat. I didn’t want to go there.
    “I wonder if she saw the shooter.”
    Harry frowned ponderously. He was about to ask mesomething when police sirens blew in bursts, startling everyone. The crowd separated as cruisers and unmarked cars streamed onto the scene of the crime. When the first cops to arrive got out of their gray Chevy, I froze. It was Sergeant Capricorn Caputo and his partner, Detective Ryan Hayes—the two cops who had been first on the scene of my parents’ deaths.
    Sergeant Caputo was tall and gangly, with a severe jawline, slick black hair, and an all-black wardrobe. Plus he was a total ass. He prided himself on being the tough guy, and his behavior could skew anywhere from rude to downright mean. Still, if you were as observant as I was, you might notice the checkered socks showing under the cuffs of his pants, which took the edge off his hard-core persona. While Detective Caputo was a general pain, he was focused. He lived his job.
    His partner, Detective Hayes, was the opposite: a solid man, competent