Free Ultraviolet by R. J. Anderson Page B

I can’t say for certain what the police will do, but I can tell you that the Youth Criminal Justice Act is very strict about what it takes to get a valid confession from anyone under seventeen. First, the police would have to take you into a comfortable interview room and read you a lengthy statement of your rights—including the right to consult a lawyer, the right to have a parent present, and the right not to make any kind of statement to the police at all. You’d have to confirm that you’d understood everything they’d just told you, and then clearly state that you had chosen to waive those rights, before making your confession on video and audio tape. Is that what happened?”
    I shook my head.
    “Then no matter how many times you said you’d killed Ms. Beaugrand, that statement would not be admissible in court. Especially in your case, because there are questions of mental health involved.”
    “But could they still charge me, if they found other evidence? Like . . . Tori’s blood on my hands, or on the ring I was wearing?”
    “Without a sample of her blood for comparison, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell if it was hers,” he said, “only that it wasn’t yours. They might be able to identify her DNA, but it would take at least a month, perhaps two, for those results to come back from the lab. And even if they did find a match, that wouldn’t be enough evidence to charge you with murder, not by itself. Especially since so little time passed between the time Ms. Beaugrand was last seen and the time you returned home. To lay a charge against you, the police would have to be able to explain how you murdered her and disposed completely of her body, in such a fashion that no trace could be found, in less than an hour.”
    I let out my breath slowly. So as long as the police didn’t find any more evidence against me, I should be safe. For now.
    “So,” said my lawyer. “Back to the appeal. Now you’ve seen what your psychiatrist has to say, do you still want to go through with it?”
    It was a good question. Reading Dr. Minta’s comments in my patient file had shaken my confidence—he was the expert, after all, and he seemed to have no doubt that I was dangerously ill. And I couldn’t deny that only a few days ago I’d been feeling and acting pretty crazy. What if I was really as deluded as Sanjay, and just didn’t recognize it? What if I really did need the antipsychotics, antidepressants, and antianxiety pills I’d been taking?
    And yet . . . that would mean my mother had been right all along. That her fears about me, her reluctance to get close to me, had been justified.
    No. That, I refused to believe.
    “Yes,” I told my lawyer. “I want to go through with it. Just tell me what I need to do.”

FIVE (IS GREEN)

    After two days on my new schedule, I’d been looking forward to the weekend. Not only because it would bring my appeal that much closer—
next Wednesday, next Wednesday,
chanted a little voice in my brain—but because it meant two days without group therapy or Dr. Minta. By Saturday morning, two Yellow Ward patients had been discharged, four had gone home on weekend passes, and six more had piled into a van with a couple of aides to go shopping and see a movie. Pine Hills was so quiet I might even have found it pleasant, if I hadn’t been trapped there with virtually nothing to do.
    But the library was open, and although I still found it difficult to read I managed to dig up a few old books on tape— including, to my surprise,
War of the Worlds
by H.G. Wells. I wondered how a story about aliens invading earth had made it through the selection process, especially with people like Sanjay around. But it looked like it might be interesting, so I pulled out the battery-operated cassette player and slipped the first tape in.
    The Martians had just launched their first attack against the helpless human race, and the narrator was fleeing the scene, when an aide knocked on the