Текст книги "Collecting Cooper"

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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chapter twenty

Adrian is exhausted. Stopping at Theodore Tate’s house added over an hour to his journey. The house was in the base of a cul-de-sac, with the back fence looking out over a different street. He was able to see through a gap into the backyard. He watched Tate break ground with a shovel, but didn’t hang around after that. He was pushing his luck as it was. He had parked down a side street a few blocks away, where he seriously doubted Tate would be driving, and had killed time walking up and down the street trying as hard as he could not to be noticed while he waited. He figured everybody was too busy being hot to pay him any attention. They were certainly too busy to pay him any attention when he convinced the cat to come to him. Adrian was good with cats. He always has been. He thought cats and dogs would have a sense about what he was capable of doing to them, but they didn’t seem to. It was weird. He didn’t know for sure the cat belonged to Tate. It was laying in Tate’s yard, but cats tended to get around. He took the gamble, and it’s obvious from Tate’s reaction that the gamble paid off.

He’s returning home much later in the day than he wanted. Cooper will be angry at having been kept waiting so long, but Adrian knows the present will make up for that. The sun is peaking in the sky and there is dust in the air and a hot wind is steadily picking up speed from the northwest. In warm winds like that he finds his itches become worse. He pours a glass of water and sets about making some sandwiches. The house doesn’t have any power, and the best he can do to keep the slices of sandwich meat fresh is to store them in a cooler. As long as he replaces the meat every couple of days it doesn’t go off too much. He’ll try to remember to pick some up later on today on the drive back to Tate’s house.

The more he thinks about Tate, the more he starts to think about what he would be like if added to the collection. Both cop and killer. It’s certainly worth considering.

The girl in the bedroom wakes up when he opens the door. The look of fear that was in her eyes for the first two days is no longer there, instead there is seething hatred. He imagines part of her wishes he had killed her already, but of course he’s not going to kill her. He moves his gaze from her eyes to the curves of her body, and sometimes he wants to touch those curves, to feel them beneath his fingertips, and sometimes, and thank God his mother never found out, he’d lay awake at night and imagine what kind of curves Katie, the girl from school, would have. She actually reminds him of Katie, similar hair, similar eyes, and he wonders if she remembers him from months ago when he first approached her. He’s aware he smells of petrol, but she smells far worse. He was stupid, he realizes, to have stood among that crowd of people smelling the way he did, stupid for that and lucky nobody noticed.

“I have these for you to wear,” he says, and he rests the clothes on the end of the bed. Her own clothes weren’t appropriate for what he wanted, so he had cut them from her and discarded them in the bin. “I’m going to clean you down a little,” he says, and rests a wet towel over her leg.

She flinches but doesn’t answer him because she can’t, just the same murmurs that can’t take shape around the straw to become words.

“Do you remember me?” he asks.

She shakes her head. The hate has gone from her eyes and now it’s back to fear.

“I tried talking to you,” he says. “It was the last Monday night before Christmas. You were working. I told you that you looked like a girl I used to know. It was hard for me to talk to you,” he says, “hard for me to talk to anybody. It went against all of my instincts, but I found the courage to come up to you and you rejected me. You shouldn’t have done that,” he says. “You shouldn’t have been mean to me.”

All the hardness falls from her eyes and she starts to cry.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says, “but don’t try anything, he adds, holding up a knife. “You’ve been here for nearly three days and you don’t have the strength to fight me. Trust me, I’ve been in your situation,” he says, which isn’t exactly true but close enough. He leans over and cuts through the rope. She doesn’t move. She’s lost weight since being here and doesn’t look good. Her face is more . . . hollow, he would say, for lack of a better word. And pale too, white and damp with sweat.

“I’m not going to hurt you, I promise,” he says, and it’s true. He isn’t going to hurt her. But she shouldn’t have made him feel bad. “You can’t go around being mean to people,” he tells her, wiping the towel over her, her skin wet and breaking out in goose bumps. “You made me feel bad about myself.”

She tries to slap him and he pulls back, she mostly misses but one of her nails stings his face. He grabs her by her ankles and drags her off the bed. She flails at him with her arms but can’t reach. She hits the floor, her head bangs heavily against it and her eyes roll upward. She goes limp.

He is disappointed in her. He drags her away from her own mess, leaving a greasy trail. He picks her up and carries her into the bathroom and rests her in the bath and rinses her down then dries her. When he undressed her a couple of days ago it was new to him. He’d never undressed a woman before and it felt kind of, well, kind of nice. Kind of like how he always imagined it would be with Katie. When all this is over, he might look for more women to undress. Of course, dressing her is much harder. He can’t use a knife for that. He struggles with her, rolling her over the floor while tugging on her clothes, thinking this is pointless since Cooper will strip her down anyway, but doing it because stripping her down will be important to Cooper. It will be part of the ritual. As much as he enjoys the idea of undressing future women, he certainly doesn’t want to go through this process again. The dress is a little big for her, which makes it somewhat easier. His face is sore, and when he reaches up his finger comes away with a spot of blood from where she scratched him. He looks at the scratch in the mirror, then wipes away the blood. It’s not very long, only a few centimeters, but now that he knows it’s there it hurts.

“You hurt me,” he says, but she doesn’t respond. He’s tempted to try and remove the glue from her lips. He could wipe nail polish remover across them, but he’ll wait because Cooper will like her more this way. Her chest raises and falls steadily, a soft, raspy wheeze comes from her throat, the sound identical to the one the old fridge at the halfway house used to make.

He lifts her up and carries her to the basement door. She is much lighter than Cooper and he thinks even lighter than when he first brought her here so he doesn’t need the dolly. He knocks first on the basement door before opening it, thinking Cooper would like that more than just barging in. It’s a small simple sign of respect, one that was never afforded to him whenever the Twins locked him down here. The Twins were a pair of orderlies who used to work here, and for fun they would lock patients down here and make them hurt. The sun has moved to other parts of the house and not much light is getting downstairs, so he hooks the lamp under his fingers before heading down.

“She’s for you,” he says. He lays her on the floor, careful to keep her limbs from tangling beneath her, before turning on the lamp. Cooper is standing at the cell door looking at him, an expression on his face that Adrian has seen on other people before this, notably his own mother when he started soaking her in petrol yesterday morning.

“What . . .” Cooper says, but doesn’t finish.

Adrian hopes Cooper isn’t turned off by the dress. He’d have liked to have put her in something sexier, but all he had was a dress he took from his mother’s house. He took other things too that morning. Food, mostly. And money. “I found her in town,” he says. “Isn’t she perfect?”

Cooper’s face is pressed up against the glass. “Jesus, Adrian, Jesus, this is insane. Totally insane.”

“I found her on Monday night,” he says. “Isn’t she perfect?”

“I . . .” Cooper says, then nothing else.

“You’re lost for words,” Adrian says. “I know what that’s like. See, I told you I can take care of you. I took care of your house. I burned it down.”

“Oh Jesus, my house,” Cooper says. “And this girl. Adrian, Adrian . . .”

“I wanted to do something nice for you,” he says. “And I know you like women and I thought you’d like this woman and I used my own initiative. I want to help you, Cooper. I like helping my friends,” he adds, hoping Cooper believes he has other friends.

Cooper says nothing. Adrian finds the silence unsettling. He’s spent many days and nights down here in silence, and back then he got used to it. Now it hurts. “You said the very thing I liked about you the most is the one thing you can’t do locked up down here. But you were wrong, Cooper. See? I can bring them to you. As many as you need,” he says, hoping Cooper won’t want many, hoping that if Cooper does, taking girls like this one will only get easier.

“I . . . I don’t know what to say,” Cooper says. “Is she mine?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, okay. Good, that’s good,” Cooper says. “So . . . so I can do with her anything I want?”

“Of course,” Adrian says, smiling. He’s happy Cooper is getting the point. “Are you going to have sex with her?”

“Is that what I did with the others?”

“I think so.”

“Then yes, of course, I’d love to have sex with her. It’s just that, well . . . ah, it doesn’t matter.”

Adrian is confused. “What doesn’t matter?”

Cooper sighs. “I’m going to have to say no, Adrian. You’re going to have to take her back, or kill her yourself. I’m sorry.”

“Why?” he asks, his voice gaining in pitch.

“No reason. But I appreciate the gesture, I really do. If only . . . ah, nothing.”

“If only what? Please, just tell me,” he asks, desperate to know.

“This is stupid,” Cooper says. “It’s just that if I’m going to have sex with her, I can’t do it in front of anybody. I can’t have an audience. I’m going to need privacy.”

“Privacy?”

“See, I told you it was stupid, and now you probably hate me and think I’m being ungrateful and a bad friend.” Cooper turns away.

Adrian steps up to the door. “I don’t hate you,” he says, desperate for Cooper to believe him. I think I understand,” he says. “You don’t think you can . . .” he searches for the right word, and settles on perform. “You don’t think you can perform if I’m watching.”

“Exactly.”

“So if I don’t watch, you can sex her?”

“And kill her, if that’s what you want, Adrian.”

“Is it what you want?”

“Of course.”

“Then it’s what I want too,” Adrian says, smiling.

“There’s one more thing.”

“What?”

“Ah, now I feel really silly, and you’re going to say no.”

“Go ahead and ask,” Adrian says. His eyes are wide open and unblinking as he stares at Cooper, hanging on his every word. This is why he wanted Cooper here. For the stories. For the excitement. For his collection.

“I was thinking it would be cool if I had sex with her, and you were to help me kill her when I was done.”

“You want me to kill her?”

“Just help me. You’ve never killed before, right?”

“Right,” he says, but that’s not true.

“So, I’m thinking that as a favor to you for bringing her to me, and to make sure you’ll bring me more, I’d like you to join in. Just on the killing, though, not the other stuff.”

“I don’t know.”

“I really want to kill her, Adrian, I really do. I have a strong need growing inside of me. Also . . . there’s one more thing. I’m going to need a knife.”

“A knife?”

“Exactly! I appreciate it, Adrian, I really do,” Cooper says, and he claps his hands together and starts rubbing them. “See, sex isn’t the same unless you can do some cutting along the way. It doesn’t have to be a big knife, but it needs to be sharp. I’ll wait here while you get it.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“Trust me, Adrian, it’s going to be fantastic. And she’ll be the first of many. How long until she wakes up? What did you to do her?”

“I knocked her out,” he says. “I don’t know when she’ll wake up. Are you really going to kill her?”

“Of course.”

“How do I know you’re not just saying that so you can try to escape?”

“Where would I go? You’ve burned down my house. This is all I have now, I’ve accepted that, and I’m not going to sit in my cell brooding for the rest of my life. I’m going to make the best of it.”

Adrian realizes he’s made another mistake. Even if he believes Cooper, there’s no way of getting the woman into that cell without being vulnerable to attack. Why didn’t he think this through better? He’s learning, that’s why, and things will only be better next time. One of two things will happen—Cooper will hurt her, and then they can become best friends. Or Cooper will try to hurt him. There has to be another way. Has to be. His mother would know what to do. He’s starting to think he killed her too soon. He can hear her voice. “A blessing is only half a miracle.” He doesn’t need a miracle here, he only needs to be smart.

“I need to think about it,” Adrian says, “and then I’ll decide,” he adds, and then it comes to him. There is another way. It’s perfect too. Cooper will get his gift and then Adrian will know if what Cooper is saying is for real or just another lie.

“I’ll be back in half an hour,” he says. He leaves the lamp on the coffee table, makes his way upstairs and closes the door behind him.

chapter twenty-one

The sun seems to get a degree hotter for every degree it moves further to the west. The shadow from the fence grows slimmer. The sun comes around the tree and Daxter’s grave is flooded with sun and the bandages on my feet and hand are stained with dirt. I feel angry and frustrated that I couldn’t have done anything more for him. I feel stupid for feeling so sad for Daxter while Donovan Green and his wife are going through much worse with their daughter. I stare at the grave thinking a lot of things, many of them stupid, many of them morbid, none of them motivational. My knee has swelled more since the digging. The paramedic would be upset with me if he were here.

I finally push myself away from the table and go back inside. I pop a couple of anti-inflammatories and a few more painkillers and I go hunting for some bandaging in the bathroom. I call Schroder and he doesn’t answer. A minute later Donovan Green calls me and I don’t answer. It’s the circle of life. What am I going to tell him? That I might have just seen his daughter burn to death? That when I went inside I took the stairs before searching the ground floor, that there was no reason to that decision, that next time I might have taken the ground floor first, that his daughter might have burned in there because of a fifty-fifty chance that I got wrong?

I hobble outside to the car. I’m able to keep my left leg straight while using my right to switch between the accelerator and brake. My face is feeling a little sunburned from yesterday and when I scratch at an itch on my nose it feels like I’m clawing my nail an inch deep. Traffic is blocked near town where an RV has turned the wrong way into a one-way street. It hasn’t hit anything, but none of the drivers coming toward it felt like pulling out of the way to give it room to turn back around, and there’s a chorus of swearing and advice being thrown from dozens of directions as more traffic backs up. I switch on the radio and there’re a couple of DJs talking about the death penalty. They talk about Emma Green and how her disappearance is proof that New Zealand needs to bring back capital punishment. They’re saying what the rest of are thinking—that whoever took Emma has hurt other girls in the past, and harder sentences would save future victims. It’s all commonsense stuff. Kill the really bad people and they can’t hurt good people, and who could argue with that? Only really bad people. The DJs are saying they should start with the Christchurch Carver. They’re coming up with ways in which they would execute him, starting out with the clichés like hanging or lethal injection before delving, or devolving, into more imaginative ways that make me seriously wonder about the two men giving the commentary. Then they throw open the lines to the public, to Steve from Sumner who thinks they should start setting these guys on fire, to James from Redwood who thinks we should go old school and stone these bastards in front of rugby-sized crowds in rugby-sized stadiums, then to Brock from Shirley who says nothing beats a good, slow cutting in half right down the middle where they dangle the guy upside down to keep the blood in his brain so he doesn’t pass out as fast. I turn off the radio and pray to God I never piss off Steve, James, or Brock.

Once I get past the blocked RV, traffic thins out. I miss two more calls from Donovan Green. I pull into the university parking lot and stop in a handicapped spot. There’s a student sitting in a shopping cart with another student pushing him along a sidewalk, both of them laughing.

I limp to the psychology department wishing I had crutches. I struggle with the stairs, leaning on the handrail along the way. A couple of people pass me and stare at me while pretending not to stare at me, I can see part of them wants to offer to help, but the bigger part doesn’t want to suggest that I need the help. It’s like opening a door for a person in a wheelchair and not knowing whether they’re going to say thank you or fuck off. I reach the second floor where all the offices are lined up. There’s a montage of photographs on the wall of faculty members, the kind of thing you’d see where dead people were being remembered, small hand-sized portrait shots forming a grid. I search through them for the man who lit the fire and decide it could have been about half of them. Cooper Riley is among them, his hair not so gray and more of it in the photo. I head down the corridor. Everything up here looks old enough to predate the very subject of psychology. All the office doors are blue and they’re all labeled by name and Cooper’s office is no different in that aspect, but very different in the fact there is crime scene tape crisscrossed over the door. There’s a large poster pinned to the wall between two of the offices labeled Personality Study with flow diagrams and long complicated words that give me a headache. Nobody is around. I try the door. It’s locked. I take out the keys I found in the front door to Cooper’s house. One of them fits. I pull down the tape and toss it onto the floor. The blame will go to the students.

The air in the office is thick and stale. The desk is pine and there are dents and scratches covering the surface, and nothing on top of it shares any of the same angles. The desk drawers are open and the filing cabinet is open and the computer is running and there’s fingerprint powder on plenty of flat surfaces. The police came here looking for any clue as to what happened to Cooper Riley. I can imagine Cooper being the kind of guy to keep everything in straight lines and if he were to come into his office right now he’d be pretty upset. My cell phone rings and it’s Schroder.

“Where are you?” he asks. “The sketch artist just showed up at your place.”

“Shit. I completely forgot. Tell him I’m on my way.”

“Listen, there’s no record of Cooper Riley reporting any crime,” he says. “Why did you want to know?”

“So you’re on the case now?”

“Two fires in two days. It could be connected, so yeah, I’m on the case. The fire department will know for sure hopefully later on today.”

I tell him about what the neighbor said.

“And you think our Melissa X did that to him?”

“I think so.”

“Why wouldn’t Riley report that?”

“That’s the question. Why wouldn’t a victim report being a victim?”

“Happens every day, Tate,” he says. “You know that. Only about one in seven rapes are reported. Could easily be the same psychology behind that as what happened to Riley, assuming what the neighbor said is true,” he says.

“Can you access his medical records?”

“I’ll try to get a warrant.”

“How’d the search of Riley’s office go?”

“It hasn’t turned up anything. We’re hoping forensics will find something at the house or Cooper’s car once we can go through the ruins, but it’s not looking hopeful.”

“I’m thinking of taking a run out to his office,” I say, leaning against the edge of the desk. “See if I can spot something you missed.”

“Are you trying to offend me?” he asks.

“No. It’s like you say, I have an eye for this kind of thing. So, are you cool with that?”

“That depends, Tate. Are you already there?”

“What if I was?”

“Then you’d be entering a crime scene, which can go a long way to damaging whatever case we’re building up here.”

“Technically it’s not a crime scene,” I tell him. “Come on, Carl, what can it hurt if I take a look around?”

“I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes,” he says. “Last thing I want is you messing things up.”

He hangs up. I start flicking through the files on Cooper’s desk the same way somebody else would have earlier today. They’ve gone through all the student and staff files because so far that’s the only link between Cooper Riley and Emma Green. Maybe an ex-psychiatry student who was pissed off about a failing grade wanted to get even. Maybe he blamed Emma Green somehow too.

I check the filing cabinet and the files have been jammed in one direction and obviously thumbed through, they cover this year’s students and last year’s students but don’t go back any further. I think about Melissa and whether she’s the reason Cooper Riley has become Professor Mono to his neighbors. If she was, she could have been a student here. He had to interact with her somehow.

I step out into the corridor and move down to the next office. A plaque on the door says it belongs to Professor Collins. The door is slightly ajar and I knock on it and open it the rest of the way. A man sitting behind a desk looks up at me. He has wiry gray hair and eyes that are too big for his face and his ears stick out almost ninety degrees. The office has the same layout and same view as Cooper’s, only nowhere near as messy.

“Can I help you?” he asks.

“Professor Collins?”

“Just like the door says,” he says, smiling and leaning back in his chair. “You’re not a student,” he says, “so you’re either a reporter or a cop. I’m going to go with cop. Am I right? You’re here to ask questions about Cooper Riley? I’ve heard his house burned down this afternoon, and you guys were searching his office an hour ago.”

“Well done, sir,” I say, stepping inside.

“Please, take a seat,” he says, and I sit opposite him, stretching my leg out in front of me. “So, any word on Cooper?”

“None yet. How long have you worked here?”

“Going on fifteen years,” he says.

“You know Cooper well?”

“What do you think happened to him? Do you think he’s going to be okay?”

“We’re looking into it,” I tell him. “Please, anything you can tell me might help.”

“Sure, I knew him well. We have offices next to each other. We’ve both been working here the same amount of time. We both went to each other’s wedding and sometimes we’ll still have dinner together.”

“How long has he been divorced?” I ask, aware these are things that Schroder already knows.

“Hmm, let me think. Three years ago, give or take. His wife moved on, you know. Met somebody else. I heard they met online. Happens all the time these days. It’s an interesting psychological phenomena, really, how people form online relationships to find a connection in the offline world. I’m actually thinking of writing a paper on it.”

“She still around?”

He shakes his head. “Australia, last time I heard, but Cooper never talks about her. Just one day she was in his life, the next day she wasn’t. It’s a shame. They’re both good people, but it didn’t work. It happens that way sometimes,” he says, but he doesn’t follow it up by saying he’s thinking of writing a paper on it. “Cooper took it pretty hard.”

“Can you tell me when he had his accident?”

He looks confused. “Accident? What, a car accident?”

“Not quite.”

“Then what kind of quite?”

“Can you recall a time when he was off work, maybe for a month or so? Quite suddenly? Would have been around three years ago, around the time of his divorce.”

His eyes flick to the left as he tries to recall, then slowly he shakes his head and his mouth turns into an upside-down smile. “Not that I can remember.”

“He wasn’t sick all of a sudden and couldn’t show up?”

“I’m sure he was. It happens to us all at some point. Life does get in the way of work, detective. Why, does his being sick in the past relate to his disappearance now?”

“I’m not sure,” I tell him.

“Try the administration office,” he tells me. “They’ll have all those kind of records there.”

I follow Collins’s directions to a building more modern than the rest, large tinted glass frontages overlooking a concrete fountain that’s currently home and toilet to a dozen pigeons. There’s a foyer that is like a doctor’s waiting room, with students sitting in chairs reading textbooks or magazines while waiting to talk to somebody. The woman behind the desk is in her late forties and has hair pulled tightly back into a bun and glasses that hang around her neck on a thin chain. Her perfume is sharp and I can feel the hint of a hay fever attack lurking. She’s wearing a blouse that has cat fur caught around the buttons.

“How can I help you?” she asks, smiling up at me.

“You know we searched Cooper Riley’s office earlier?” I ask, hoping she’s going to make the same mistake Professor Collins made, and she does.

“Yes, of course. Everybody knows.”

“There’s something else you may be able to help us with,” I tell her. “There was a time when Riley took a month or more off work. Possibly around three years ago. Can you look that up for me?”

She doesn’t answer me. Instead she puts on her glasses and adjusts the distance between the lenses and her eyes as she looks at a computer monitor, then her fingers fly across the keyboard.

“It’ll take a minute,” she says, and about ten seconds later she finds it. “Here we go. You’re right,” she says. “Almost three years ago. April through to May. Five weeks in total.”

“I need to get a look at names and faces of his students from that year.”

“Why?”

“Please, it’s important. We’re trying to save Cooper’s life,” I tell her.

“Is it true his house was burned down?”

“It’s true.”

“There are hundreds of students from three years ago,” she tells me.

I need to check them all for the arsonist, but that can wait till Schroder gets here. “Just the female ones.”

“I guess I can print them out,” she says. “It’ll take an hour, unless you can narrow down who you’re after.”

“What about students who dropped out during the year? Around the same time Professor Riley was off work?”

“Why? You think that means something?”

“Please,” I tell her, “we need to hurry.”

“Hmm . . . let me see,” she says. She taps at the keyboard again. “Four female students dropped out during that time.”

“Any of them named Melissa?”

“Melissa? No, none of them.”

“Can I see their photographs?”

She twists the computer monitor toward me and I have to lean over the desk to get a better view, entering her perfume zone in the process. She cycles through the photos. She gets to the third one when I stop her for a better look. The eyes look familiar.

“I remember this girl,” the receptionist says.

“You do?”

“Not so much her, but her parents. They came in here looking for information.”

“What kind of information?”

“Anything that would help them track her down. She went missing. Oh no,” she says, making the connection. “You think the same thing that happened to Emma Green happened to her?” she asks, tapping the monitor.

I don’t think so. I think these two girls ended up with very different fates. I think the girl on the screen might be the woman who attacked the Christchurch Carver and killed Detective Calhoun. This could be the woman that put Professor Riley in hospital three years ago. Her image has been in the papers and all over the news, an image taken from the video I watched yesterday, but that image isn’t the same as the one I’m looking at now. Similar, but not the same, different haircut, different color hair, a little less weight around the face—but it’s the eyes. Those eyes are the same, I’m sure of it.

Cooper Riley would have known it too. He would have seen the news and he would have known who she really was, and he never came forward to the police.

Why would that be? Is he still afraid of her?

Or is there something he’s hiding?