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  “All right. Tell me what I should do.”

  “First, you have to wipe your fingerprints off the knife.”

  As Zack carried out his command, Jeremy went on, “Now go wash your hands with hair bleach.”

  “I don’t think we have hair bleach in the house. My Mom doesn’t use it.”

  “I already took care of that, buddy. The bleach is under your bed; you bought it two days ago, you just don’t remember that.”

  “Oh, cool.”

  Jeremy was right: Zack indeed found a can of hair bleach under his bed.

  “What about the knife?” Zack asked Jeremy while washing his hands in the bathroom. “Shouldn’t I throw it out or hide?”

  “That’s too risky and not particularly helpful, Zack. Just leave it in your parents’ bedroom. Police find murder weapons at the crime scenes all the time, there’s nothing unusual about it. Your fingerprints are not on the knife, so you should be okay. Besides, this knife is not from your kitchen, I hope you noticed that. It’s a brand new knife, you bought it three days ago.”

  “Did you tell me to do that?”

  “I just gave you the idea, buddy. And you obviously liked it.”

  “Okay, cool.”

  “Now let’s talk about the story you tell the cops. You were asleep all night. You saw nothing, you heard nothing. And try to blame it on burglars. It’s a perfectly plausible theory. Burglars, especially junkies, have been known to kill. Meth heads would rape their own mothers to get the money to buy drugs, Zack. Please don’t forget to mess the house up so it will look like it just got robbed.”

  “Sure, Jeremy. By the way, you said I’d bought the knife three days ago. Does it mean I decided to kill Mom and Dad three days ago?”

  “We began thinking about it way before that, buddy. Maybe a couple of months back. But it doesn’t really matter now anyway, does it?”

  Just before calling the police, Zack did what, according to Jeremy, was going to divert suspicions away from him and send the cops on a wild-goose chase: he pressed his sixth finger against the knife blade.

  “Don’t worry, buddy,” Jeremy said. “I have total control over this particular fingerprint. The print you’ll leave on the knife will be completely different from the one you’re going to give to the cops.”

  One of the first things the crime scene investigators did upon arrival was take Zack’s fingerprints. They told him they were trying to separate his parents’ and his fingerprints from those of the perpetrator—or perpetrators. However, Zack had a feeling that deep in their hearts the investigators were hoping to pin this double murder on him.

  Was he concerned that Jeremy might have exaggerated his ability to change his print? Just a little bit. Zack saw no reason to mistrust Jeremy, so he decided not to dwell on this issue. He was going to find out the outcome pretty soon, anyway.

  While they waited at the police station for Aunt Clarisse to come pick Zack up, Jeremy shared great news. “Your father was smart enough to insure his life for half a million bucks,” he said. “Your mother was the beneficiary of that policy, but since she’s dead, too, that money is yours.”

  “Half a million? Holy shit!”

  “Yeah. But there’s a wrinkle: you won’t be able to lay your hands on that cash until you turn eighteen.”

  “I have to wait for almost two years even though it’s my money?”

  “Yeah, buddy. That’s one of the disadvantages of being too young. The judge will appoint a guardian to keep an eye on that money, I reckon it’s going to be your Aunt Clarisse, so you will see some of that cash pretty soon after all. Not much, of course, but better than nothing.”

  4.

  Aunt Clarisse turned out to be not so bad.

  “I’m going to hire the best lawyer in town if they try to hang these murders on you,” she told Zack. “I’m not letting them get away with anything.”

  He was happy to learn that Aunt Clarisse wouldn’t trust the cops as far as she could throw them. One of her favorite police stories was the previous summer’s incident at the Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk when a cop had ticketed her for an empty beer bottle sitting in the sand a feet away from her folding chair.

  “I kept telling him it was not my bottle, but this idiot wouldn’t listen,” she said. “He was one of those bicycle cops, so it doesn’t surprise me at all he was so dumb and stubborn. And I bet the rest of these guys, including their chiefs, are not much smarter.”

  His aunt’s fears were not unreasonable; there was no doubt the cops had Zack’s name on the suspect list. A year or two ago, he had read about a teenage boy in Chicago who had hired a couple of his schoolmates to murder his parents. What was the reason for such wrath, you ask? His folks had not allowed him to smoke and grow weed. Pretty stupid, right?

  5.

  Two days after butchering his parents, Zack had to face another test of character—an interview with a detective at the police station.

  Detective Roger Hall appeared bored. To be fair, he was probably tired, not bored, but who the hell cared anyway? He was leaning back on the chair, his hands on his thighs, staring at Zack silently with his unblinking eyes. Mister Hall must have thought he had a penetrating look that could scare a suspect into spilling the beans. Well, even though his drilling gaze might have worked on other teenagers, it did nothing for Zack.

  “You’re staying with your aunt, right?” Hall asked after a brief introduction. He exchanged glances with Aunt Clarisse, who was sitting by her nephew’s side, intently listening to their conversation.

  Zack nodded. “Yes, Sir.” He’d been making sure to keep from smiling and to look very somber: according to Jeremy, it was very important to seem genuinely grieved in the presence of police and relatives.

  “Just humor them,” Jeremy had advised him early on. “It’s not the right time to be arrogant, buddy. This will save you a lot of headache down the road, I promise.”

  Zack had agreed with his suggestion wholeheartedly.

  “Have you been back to your house yet?” the detective asked

  “No, Sir, I haven’t.”

  What a stupid question: the place was still a crime a scene, and Zack had no idea when it was going to be cleaned up.

  “What do you think the burglars stole? Did you notice if anything valuable is missing from your house?”

  Zack shrugged his shoulders. “I really don’t know, Sir.”

  “Did your parents keep significant amounts of cash at home? Was there expensive jewelry in the house?”

  Zack immediately smelled a trap in the question and decided to play ignorant just in case. “I don’t know, Sir. I guess it’s possible.” His answer was surely going to please Jeremy, who had instructed him to volunteer no information to the police and be as vague as he could.

  Judging by the puzzled expression that flashed across his face and the direction of his stare, the detective had just noticed Zack had six fingers on his right hand. It was obvious Zack’s extra finger had piqued his interest, but, out of politeness, Hall made no comment on it.

  “Do you take drugs?” The detective asked.

  “No, Sir, I don’t.”

  “How about pot? You’ve never tried pot?”

  “No, Sir, I haven’t.”

  “How about your friends? Do any of them use drugs?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve never asked, to tell you the truth.”

  “Okay.” The detective nodded, pensively staring at Zack. “Do you have a lot of friends?”

  “I have a few. Real friends are hard to find.”

  “Yes, that’s true.” The detective nodded again. “Do you like school, Zack? What’s your GPA, by the way?”

  Zack bet he knew the reason for this question. He had heard about a fourteen-year-old boy who had shot his father dead in a fight over bad grades, and, apparently, so had the detective.

  “School is all right. My GPA is three point seven.”

  “Oh, impressive. You’re somewhat of a nerd, aren’t you?” Hall
smiled. “That’s a good thing.”

  “I guess you can say so.”

  “And you don’t like to cause trouble, do you?”

  “No, Sir, I don’t.”

  “Do you hang out with troublemakers? There are a lot of lowlifes out there who would love to take advantage of a kid like you, Zack.”

  “No, Sir, I don’t.”

  “Very good.” The detective wrote something in his notepad. “So did you see the killers’ faces? Did you hear their voices?”

  “No, I didn’t see their faces or hear their voices. I was asleep when it all happened.”

  There was no doubt the detective knew Zack’s story since one of his colleagues had written it down the morning after Zack had murdered his parents. The sneaky cop was just trying to catch him in an inconsistency.

  “Do you have any ideas about who these people could be?”

  Zack shook his head. “Maybe they were drug addicts. Maybe they needed money to buy drugs. They must have cased our house before they broke in.”

  “What makes you think they were druggies?”

  “I saw what those scumbags did to my Mom and Dad. No one in his right mind would have done that. They had to be on meth or something.”

  When he was about to wrap up the interview, the detective asked, “Do you have a Facebook page?”

  “Yes.” Zack nodded.

  “Can I have a look? I’ve been thinking of getting one, too.” Hall smiled and moved the laptop closer to Zack.

  Zack could hardly keep from laughing: the detective must have believed he wouldn’t figure out the actual motive behind this sudden interest in his Facebook page. You see, Mister Hall had been apparently hoping that his young interviewee was dumb enough to leave incriminating messages on a social network site. And Zack had no doubt there had been plenty of real life examples of such idiotic behavior on the criminals’ part.

  “Sure.” Zack gave Hall his email address, which the detective immediately typed into the Facebook search field.

  While scanning Zack’s Facebook page, Hall said, “And one more thing. Would you be willing to take a lie detector?” The detective shifted his eyes from Zack to Aunt Clarisse to see her reaction. “It could help us eliminate you as a suspect.”

  “Do you really think that I would murder my parents?” Zack asked in a moderately indignant tone; that was another piece of advice Jeremy had given him: he should exhibit innocence at every opportunity but not overact.

  “No, no, Zack, I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just saying that a polygraph could put a lot of questions to rest and save us all time.”

  “Should I do it, Clarisse?” Zack put his hand on his aunt’s wrist. “I think I’m going to do it. I want all this to be over as soon as possible.”

  “Are you sure, Zack?” Clarisse asked. “I don’t want you to do anything you feel uncomfortable about. They can’t make you take the lie detector.”

  “I have nothing to hide. And if that’s what it takes to prove I didn’t kill Mom and Dad, then that’s what I’ll do.”

  When they were leaving the police station, Jeremy said excitedly, “Excellent job, buddy! You definitely have a lot of potential. You will go far, my boy, I’m sure of it.”

  Needless to say, Zack almost shit his pants with pride and delight.

  6.

  His lie detector test results were exactly as he had expected. With Jeremy’s help, Zack had managed to get the machine to confirm his complete innocence, having beaten every devious trick the police polygrapher had tried on him. Of course he was not out of the woods just yet as far as the murder investigation was concerned, but it had been a major positive development for him nonetheless.

  A day later, Zack received even more good news. Aunt Clarisse told him that it looked like the police had cleared him as a suspect in the murder of his parents, which had to mean that Jeremy’s fingerprint trick had worked. But being off the hook with the cops was not the only reason for Zack to rejoice. The fact that the trick had worked proved irrefutably that Jeremy actually existed and wasn’t just a figment of his imagination (not that Zack had ever doubted Jeremy was real).

  “I heard they have a couple of promising leads, but I bet it’s bullshit,” his aunt said.

  Was the fake fingerprint on the knife one of those ‘promising leads’? You bet your ass it was.

  “Now you see I can do a little magic,” Jeremy said when they chatted about the success of the fake fingerprint.

  Three days after the police interview, Zack went through what Jeremy called ‘a confidence building exercise.’ This little adventure was a lot of fun and made Zack feel like that boy in Karate Kid, who had had to endure a series of travails before he began to believe in himself. The exercise involved Lenny Walden, Zack’s schoolmate, who was seventeen years old and had an intellect and a maturity of a sixth-grader.

  Lenny was a classic bully and had been harassing Zack on a regular basis by calling him nasty names, giving him wedgies, kicking and slapping him here and there, taking his lunch money—the usual stuff, nothing particularly cruel or vicious, you know. And honestly, it didn’t really bother Zack all that much. He sure was annoyed, but his feelings had never been hurt because he realized that imbeciles like Lenny were simply unable to control their cretinous instincts. Zack responded to Lenny’s badgering by silently despising him and trying to make his encounters with this moron as short and few as possible.

  Would he have been happy to see Lenny get a taste of his own medicine? You bet. But Zack had no desire to waste his time plotting revenge against the worthless buffoon whose GPA was at least one full point below his.

  When Jeremy told him that killing Lenny Walden would boost his self-esteem and make him tougher, Zack didn’t argue and simply asked what Jeremy had in mind.

  “We’ll improvise,” Jeremy replied.

  Luring the bully into their trap proved to be very easy; all Zack had to do was stand idly in the schoolyard within Lenny’s sight, talking to Jeremy.

  “Who are you talking to, cocksucker?” Lenny barged in. “Are you talking to yourself? What a loser. Why are you so retarded?” He began to guffaw.

  “Cocksucker?” Zack raised his eyebrow. “Good thing you mentioned that. Would you like me to suck your dick?”

  Lenny spent a few moments digesting his words, then replied, “What the hell are you talking about, moron?”

  “I’m serious. I’d really like to suck your dick, Lenny. Let’s go find a quiet spot where no one can see us, and I’ll blow you.”

  Amazingly, Lenny bought his lie and took the blow job offer at its face value. Zack had a feeling the guy might have already gotten a bj from a dude in the past, maybe even more than once.

  They met ten hours later in a dark alley two blocks from Lenny’s house. After ensuring they were alone and unseen by prying eyes, Zack proceeded to murder Lenny.

  “Just imagine that your hand is a knife, a razor sharp machete, buddy,” Jeremy told Zack as he gazed at his next victim. “I promise you it will work. Power of the mind, buddy. Believe in the power of your mind.”

  Imagine that his hand was a razor sharp machete? It sounded like fun.

  With gritted teeth, Zack unclenched his right fist and straightened the fingers, making a karate chop hand—he immediately thought of Bruce Lee, whose poster he’d seen on the wall of his friend’s room years before. A moment later, he threw his hand, firm as steel and fast as an arrow, towards Lenny’s solar plexus, all the while picturing a massive shiny machete in his head. To Zack’s surprise, neither the T-shirt fabric, nor the skin was able to stop his hand from moving deeper inside the boy’s stomach.

  He moved his hand around inside Lenny’s body for a few seconds, fishing for something to grab, and finally managed to get hold of an intestine (well, at least it felt like one). By that time Lenny, who had put up no fight and kept silent during the whole ordeal, was on his last breath. As soon as Zack drew his hand out, clutching a gut in his fist, Lenny dropped to the g
round like a puppet with cut strings. Zack regarded with curiosity the intestine he was holding (in the twilight it resembled raw homemade sausage) and then let go of it. The entire bowel pulling scene was pure horror movie gold, he thought. Pouring water on his bloodied hand from the plastic bottle he had brought with him, he began to walk off.

  “Did you like it?” Jeremy asked. “Don’t you feel stronger now?”

  Zack was happy to admit he had loved the experience. “What if I kill Aunt Clarisse next?” he asked.

  “That’s not a good idea, buddy. If your auntie ends up stabbed to death and you have no alibi, police may get suspicious about you and reopen your folks’ case, which you need like teeth in your asshole. You’ll have to wait a few years before popping that broad.”

  “Okay.”

  7.

  Two days after the Lenny Walden adventure, Jeremy announced their next project. “Now that we know you’re not a pussy, we’re going to find Doctor Shepard Stevenson,” he told Zack.

  “Who is he?”

  “He is the only one who can help you with your condition, buddy. You don’t want to kill again while sleepwalking, do you? That could get you in trouble someday.”

  Zack thought about asking if Jeremy meant killing again in general or only while asleep but decided to avoid the whole discussion and replied, “I guess.”

  “He works at the Memorial Hospital. We have to go there immediately.”

  “Okay.”

  Their plan hit a little snag when Zack came to Memorial and inquired about an appointment with Shep Stevenson.

  “Doctor Stevenson is not with our hospital anymore,” replied a plump receptionist by the name of Sheila. “He left four years ago.”

  “Where can I find him? It’s very important,” Zack pleaded. “It’s the matter of life and death.”