Текст книги "Collecting Cooper"

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

chapter twenty-two

Cooper’s head is much better today, but it’s still throbbing a little and he’s tempted to take the pills he found in his pocket yesterday. The wound on his chest is starting to itch and when he touches it with his fingers they come away damp with blood and something else too, something that’s not quite yellow. If he doesn’t eat something soon he thinks he’s going to go crazy.

He recognizes the girl. Shoulder-length red hair that is knotted and frayed. Her skin is pale and flushed. She can’t be any more than twenty. A student? Perhaps a former one. Even one from this year—there are always so many. Or it could be somebody from the supermarket, a checkout teller, some girl he’s made idle chitchat with while his groceries were scanned before he swiped his credit card. Maybe a hairdresser from the mall, a Jehovah’s Witness who banged on his door one morning, a receptionist at his doctor’s office. He’s seen her around but can’t place where. She’s in a dress that’s too big for her and covered in flowers that, under the lamplight, all look pale blue. It’s something his mother would wear in the summer.

Jesus, his mother . . . she’ll be a mess. His mother will be eighty years old in July, and already the family is planning a huge party for her. His sister is going to fly back from the UK—and he suspects she might be flying back now because of what’s happened, assuming people even know he’s disappeared, which they must do if it’s true what Adrian said about burning down his house. He hopes his mother is holding up okay. She’s a strong woman. Has been ever since his dad walked out on them when Cooper was twelve years old. He hasn’t seen him since. Has no idea whether the man is even alive and doesn’t care. But his mother . . . he owes her everything. With a weaker mother, his life would have taken a different path. When he was fourteen years old, he stole a car. He and his friend got drunk, and they crashed it. Neither of them were hurt, but his mother came and picked him up from the police station and didn’t say a word on the way home, didn’t say a word until the following morning when she made him breakfast.

He had apologized, and she had told him she wasn’t the one he should be apologizing to, that he should be apologizing to his future self, that it was his future self he was damaging. He didn’t care. Back then he didn’t care about much except that his dad had left, and how good beer tasted when he snuck out at night to meet his buddy. She made him write himself a letter for the future, in which he told himself how sorry and how stupid he was. She made him write down how much he had hurt his mother. He did that too. Then she went into her room and cried. When she came back out she sat down with him and ate breakfast and told him she felt sorry for the man she was going to give that letter to in ten years’ time. She never gave him that letter. Instead things changed. Every day she would tell him whether his future self would be happy or disappointed with his actions. He started to care about that future self. He didn’t want to grow up to be like his dad. He started to study harder. His grades were good.

When he was twenty years old, he had an affair with the next-door neighbor. She was fifteen years older than him. He thought he loved her. One day her husband came home with a shotgun and put a hole in her before putting one in himself. Nobody saw it coming. Cooper was never sure whether the husband knew his wife had been cheating, and he suspected that if he had known and who with, there would have been a shotgun shell reserved for him too. The husband was the cliché, the quiet man who didn’t speak much to people, and Cooper couldn’t figure out how he hadn’t seen it coming. It fascinated him. People were different, they ticked differently, and he wanted to understand them. He felt the loss of losing his lover, but he felt no guilt, and that interested him too.

Right now, he needs to understand Adrian and, if he can get this woman to wake up, get her to understand what’s going on.

“Hey,” he says, loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be heard by her. He bangs against the door and gets the same result. Adrian said he’d be half an hour. The clock is ticking. He’ll aim for twenty minutes to be on the safe side. Cooper bangs against the window. He needs the girl to wake up, and to wake up now.

And she does.

Slowly.

Her eyes stay closed and her hands creep up to her face and start probing. She looks like she’s coming out of a very deep sleep, probably a nightmare. Her skin is red and patchy and her face is flushed, except for the dark gray smudges beneath her eyes. Her hands explore the straw sticking out from her mouth. She pulls on it gently but it doesn’t budge. For the first time he realizes her lips are glued shut. He calls to her again but she doesn’t respond. In fact she looks like she’s passed back out. Her fingers have stopped moving and her hands have collapsed onto the floor. It takes what feels like an hour but is only two minutes before there’s any further movement. She rubs at her eyes slowly and then they open. He can see her looking around but she can’t focus on anything. He taps on the glass and she looks in his direction but doesn’t register his presence.

He has eighteen minutes left.

“Miss, hey, miss, wake up, wake up. Please, you have to wake up.”

He watches her jaw move as she tries to speak. Then he sees it all coming back to her, her memories flooding with emotions. Her face tightens and her eyes grow wider and her hands probe faster at her face, especially at her lips, and she starts to cry. She sits up and looks around the room before holding the edges of the dress up to stare at it for a few seconds. Finally she locks her gaze on him. Her jaw moves again and he thinks she’s trying to scream. She turns away from him and her head pauses in the direction of the bookcase, the lamp casting her shadow over the books and trophies, and he’s sure if she could another scream would be coming.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he says, holding up his hands even though she can’t see them. “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to help you.”

She puts her palms on the ground and pushes herself further away from him. Looking through the cell window, and with her lips glued shut, it’s like watching a show on mute.

“Please, please, I’m not here to hurt you,” he says. “I’m a friend. I’m in the same situation as you.”

Sixteen minutes. Maybe more.

She gets to her knees. Both of them are scuffed and become even more scuffed as she tries to get to her feet. She loses balance and falls forward and he can hear something in her wrist crack. He winces at the sound. She starts to cry again. Another minute is lost. “Please, can you open the door?” he asks. “Is there a latch there? Or a lock?”

She doesn’t look at him. She cradles her arm and curls up into a fetal position. She’s wasting time and he can feel himself becoming increasingly frustrated. Even angry. He wants to get out of the cell and shake her. She’s going to blow their chance and she’s going to die and he’s going to die and if she just focused, if she could just get hold of herself . . . Christ, if only he could slap her!

“We’re going to die down here if you don’t start helping me,” he says, only she isn’t listening. Out of a desperate need to do something, out of instinct, he turns and looks around his cell for something to help, but of course there’s nothing, only a ratty old mattress and a spring bed and a bucket a quarter full of his own piss and vomit that smells worse today than yesterday. He looks back at the window. She hasn’t moved.

Stay calm. Baby steps.

He takes a deep breath. “My name is Cooper,” he says, clenching his fists down low where she can’t see them. He tries to smile at her but ends up grimacing. He has to return to the basics, he has to return to psychology 101. “I bet your family is worried about you,” he says. “My family is worried about me. Help me help you see them again. Can you open the door? Please, please, take a look at the door.”

She looks up at him. She seems to figure out if she’s a prisoner here and he’s a prisoner here then they’re on the same side. She tightens her jaw and her eyes clear and for the first time since waking up she seems fully aware of herself.

Twelve minutes left.

“We need to be quick,” he says, “before the man who took us comes back. You have to help me, then I can help you. I promise we’re going to get out of here,” he says. She looks around the room, and it seems to Cooper that she’s seeing it for the first time. She turns in a circle and stops when she’s looking directly at him.

“The door,” he says. “Can you unlock it?”

She nods, but doesn’t move.

“We have to hurry,” he says, “and we have to stay quiet.”

She takes a step toward him, and then another, and finally she’s directly on the other side of the glass. He keeps waiting for her to back away and curl into a ball again but she doesn’t. She looks through the window at him and tries to see beyond, and he steps aside slightly so she can get a better look, only the lamplight doesn’t hit much of it. Up close, her face is sunken in and she looks tired and underfed and there are small blisters growing around the edges of her mouth. At least he thinks they’re blisters.

“I can find something to remove the glue,” he says, keeping his voice low and calm, no traces of panic, no hint that he desperately wants her to hurry the fuck up. “It won’t be hard, I promise.”

She nods again, and then she looks down at the door. She continues to cradle her injured wrist under her opposite armpit as she works at something with her free hand. There is squeaking as metal is hinged up and down, a dead bolt he assumes. It’s tight, and she has to work it a few times and then bang as it slides open and hits into place. The door opens a crack. He puts his hand on it and pushes, thinking this is too easy, then thinking it ought to be easy when the person holding you captive has the mind of a child.

Ten minutes left.

The door swings open. He steps into the basement. The air is just as cool on this side of the door. She flinches when he wraps his arms around her and holds her tight. “Thank God,” he whispers, and he has the urge to sob into the side of her neck. He pulls back. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, holding her shoulders, but she doesn’t seem to believe him.

“We need to find something to use as a weapon,” he says, and he moves over to the bookcase. He couldn’t get a good look from his cell window, but there is plenty of history on these shelves, including a couple of knives that have come from his house. He picks up the largest one, it’s a dull blade that forty years ago belonged to a man who stabbed his parents, a dull blade that he bought in an auction for just under two hundred dollars. Right now the blade feels priceless. It makes him feel as powerful as the previous owner must have felt. His briefcase is on the floor. He kneels down and pops the catch that does work and opens the lid. Everything inside is messed around. He rakes his fingers through the contents.

The camera is missing.

If it fell out when the briefcase got damaged, if Adrian doesn’t have it . . .

This changes everything.

He closes up the case. He picks up the lamp and heads to the steps. Even though he was banging on the door a few minutes ago, he’s desperate to stay as quiet as he can now. In a world well away from this, his house has turned to ash, his life ruined, but nothing could be worse than being stuck down here forever. The basement door will probably be locked, but compared to the cell, even the basement feels like freedom. If it’s locked he’ll just wait on this side of the door until Adrian comes back. He can’t see things playing out any other way than him being forced to kill his captor. He has to. If he doesn’t, he risks too much. He’ll kill Adrian and the police will give him a hard time. The one thing he knows for sure is how eager the police are to get a conviction, no matter what the circumstances are. He’s seen it before. He’s seen them lock away men they’ve known are innocent, and there have been proven instances where they’ve planted evidence to get a conviction.

He’s going to kill Adrian and save this woman’s life and end up going to jail.

He comes to a stop halfway up the staircase.

The police are going to be a problem.

The missing camera an even bigger problem.

He carries on up the stairs. He crouches down and puts his head against the door but can’t hear anything beyond. There are so many possibilities waiting out there.

The girl is two steps behind him. She looks unsure of what’s about to happen.

Ultimately it’s the missing camera that makes his mind up for him. If it’d been in his briefcase, then things could have turned out differently. It’s a shame, because he truly was grateful for the girl’s help.

He still has eight minutes left. That’s plenty of time.

“There’s something I should tell you before I open this door,” he says, “because so far I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

chapter twenty-three

I stand outside Cooper’s office, reading through Melissa’s file while waiting for Schroder. Only it isn’t Melissa X anymore. It’s Natalie Flowers. She was nineteen years old when she became a student at Canterbury University. She was studying here for two years before wanting to get a degree in psychology. She took it for three years before taking criminal psychology, where she entered Cooper Riley’s class. One and a half months after joining his class, she dropped out. At the same time Cooper Riley took five weeks off work. I do the arithmetic. Melissa X in the video I saw would have been around twenty-six years old. She looked a little older, but maybe she has an old soul.

I get tired of waiting in the hall, and my leg is hurting from all the walking, and in the end I decide there’s no harm in waiting in Cooper’s office. I sit down behind the desk. I go through the basics, opening the drawers, going through anything I can find. I keep looking outside, I have a perfect view of the path that leads to the psychology department. I’ll have time to get out when Schroder shows up. I move the mouse and the computer monitor becomes active. There’s a desktop showing an island surrounded by clear water Cooper might have dreamed of visiting. I navigate my way through the files, finding nothing of interest. There isn’t anything personal on it, only work related. I glance over a few of the topics that Cooper is teaching and it’s very dark stuff, the kind of stuff that gives good people bad dreams and bad people good dreams. I look for any mention of Natalie Flowers and there’s none.

I look at the photograph of Natalie taken on the day she enrolled here, I try to imagine what kind of thoughts she had back then, I wonder if she knew the person she would become, or if the Natalie back then was a completely different person. I imagine her sitting in front of the camera just as Emma Green would years later, each of them with smiles on their faces, a click of the shutter, a flash going off, a say cheese and then a next please as the photographer ushered them through, their image stored onto a . . .

Memory card!

Jesus, I’d completely forgotten!

I reach into my pocket, and there it is, the card I took from the camera in Cooper’s driveway. I slot it into the computer and it grumbles for a few seconds trying to read it. If we’re lucky, he has a photo of the man who took him. Or there’ll be a location, or at least something we can use to track him down. A new icon appears and I click on it to open the files, and it goes about the process slowly. I click on the first one and it takes about ten seconds to open, the computer drawing the image from the top, the rest of it coming into view an inch at a time. The second image opens much quicker as the computer gets into the swing of things. There are just the two images, and I flick back and forth between them until the door opens and Schroder steps inside.

“Jesus, Tate, how the hell did you get in here?”

“Emma Green,” I say, pushing my chair back from the computer. Despite the heat of the office, my skin has gone clammy and my spine feels chilled. “Jesus, Carl,” I say, my mouth dry. “I think Emma Green is still alive.”

“Look, Tate, you can’t . . .”

“For once, Carl, just shut up,” I say, and he does. “Take a look,” I say, and I nod toward the computer. He comes around the desk and I watch him as he looks at the photographs, the only sound in the office is the computer fan whirring and the occasional click of a mouse button. There is laughter and yelling from outside, students at work. Schroder’s sleeves are rolled up and he’s leaning forward with his hands on the desk and I can see goose bumps littering his forearms. He’s slowly shaking his head and I’m slowly doing the same thing. I stand up and Schroder takes the chair. I move to the window and stare out at the students in the sun below, all of them hovering a year or two either side of twenty years old with so much to learn, but there are things in the real world I pray they never have to see. The saying goes that a picture tells a thousand words. Looking at them, it couldn’t be more true. What they don’t tell us is an ending.

“We need to search the office again,” I say, still looking out the window. There’s a couple of students beneath a tree making out in the shade for everybody to see. They notice others are watching and start to get into it more, putting on a show. I want to throw a bucket of cold water over them.

“We’ve already searched it,” Schroder says.

“Yeah, but you were looking to see what happened to Cooper. You were looking at him as a victim.”

“And not a suspect,” he says. “Where the hell did you get these?” he asks.

“They were on a memory card. I found it at Cooper’s house.”

“Jesus Christ, Tate. You didn’t think of mentioning this earlier?”

“Actually, Carl, no, I didn’t. I forgot I had the damn thing,” I say, snapping. “Why the hell do you always have to assume the worst?”

He doesn’t answer.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, and then I tell him how I found the card. “And if I hadn’t been there on time, it would have gotten destroyed like everything else and you wouldn’t have those,” I say, nodding toward the computer where there are images of Emma Green lying on a floor with her hands tied behind her. In one photo she’s wearing the clothes she went missing in, in the next she isn’t wearing anything. She has duct tape over her eyes and none over her mouth. “You wouldn’t even know there was a connection.”

“We don’t know that she’s still alive,” he says.

“And we have no reason to suspect otherwise. What if Cooper was interrupted? What if he was planning on going back?”

“Back? You don’t think these were taken at his house?”

I shake my head. “I doubt it. She’s not gagged. These were taken where nobody could hear her scream.”

“We’ll know soon enough if there were any bodies in the fire.”

“Listen, Carl, there’s another connection too.”

“With who?” he asks. I hand him over the file. “Natalie Flowers,” he says, looking at the picture. “Who is she, another of Riley’s students?”

“She was.”

“Was? What happened, she go missing too?”

“In a sense.”

“You want to be more specific?”

“Take a closer look at the photo.”

He does, but he still doesn’t get it. “What am I looking at here? You think Riley took her too?”

“I think so. Only things didn’t go the way they did with Emma Green. You don’t recognize her?”

“Should I?”

“Yes.”

“Well, stop playing around,” he says, “and just tell me what you want to tell me.”

So I tell him. What color had managed to return since first seeing the photographs of Emma drains out of his face. He takes a closer look at the picture and slowly starts nodding. I explain about the Professor Mono comment, about Riley being off work three years ago on sick leave the same time his wife left him, the same time Natalie Flowers went missing. I explain the chain of events that have led me to handing over the file.

“Jesus,” he says, and for the moment it’s all he can say. “You think Melissa X is involved in this somehow? You think she is the one who took Cooper?”

“I don’t think so. None of her victims were shot by a Taser, and she wasn’t the one who burned down his house.”

Schroder snaps on a pair of latex gloves. He opens up the drawers. He starts going through them. Then he starts pulling them all the way out and sitting them on top of the desk. He checks behind them and under them for anything taped out of sight. People always think they’re being clever when they hide things in those sorts of places, under drawers, under the carpet, behind books or above a suspended ceiling or in the tank above the toilet. They’re all places the police wouldn’t have checked because earlier Cooper Riley was only a man who had gone missing. He wasn’t a man who knew Melissa X, and he wasn’t a man who had tied Emma Green up and photographed her.

“So what about the car?” he asks. “The paint on the dumpster. The witness said it pulled out around into the street in a hurry, and the timeline proves he saw it just after Emma finished work.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Maybe it’s unrelated,” he says.

“Yeah, it’s possible, but like you say, it’s around the same time.”

I get up on the desk keeping the weight on my right leg. I push up at the ceiling tile.

“What the hell, Tate? Leave that to me,” Schroder says.

I reach into the ceiling cavity and pray I’m not about to be bitten by a rat. I search with my fingers but don’t find a thing. My knee jars a little as Schroder helps me down. He continues to check beneath the drawers. I twist the filing cabinet away from the wall. There’s a USB flash drive taped to the back of it. I thought Cooper would be different because I thought he’d have an insight into where he shouldn’t hide things, but he either thought he’d never be the victim of an office search, or he thought his hiding place was suitably sufficient. I hold it up and Schroder stops searching. I hand it over to him and we stand adjacent to each other staring at it. It’s as if whatever bad news is stored on there can be averted if we don’t open it, and we know it’s bad news—we’ve both been doing this for long enough to have a sense of what we’re about to see. The horror isn’t in seeing the images, the horror is in the quantity. How many others has Cooper killed?

Schroder plugs the flash drive into the computer and we go through the same process as I went through with the camera card. The first image loads up and he clicks the arrow to move to the second and then the third. There are thirty pictures in total. All of the same girl, which is an awful thing to be thankful for, but we are. Scared and clothed in the beginning, naked and dead in the end. The photos are a progression of the last week of her life according to the time stamps on the files. She’s laying on the same floor as Emma Green. The photos are in a sequence, and looking through them is like reading a story. The sequence shows the girl become paler as the days pass, she loses weight, blisters and a rash appear on her face, mean-looking welts appear on her skin. Seven days of hell. Seven days of knowing you were going to die but praying for the best. There is duct tape over her eyes in all of them except the last. Cooper liked the idea of not being seen but being able to converse. I bet the bastard loved hearing them cry or beg for their lives.

“She’s alive,” I tell him.

“What?” he asks, lost in his own thoughts.

“I said she’s alive. Emma Green. If he was going to do to her what he did to this girl then . . .”

“Jane Tyrone,” he says.

“What?”

“That’s who this girl is,” he says, tapping the monitor. “She went missing nearly five months ago. “She was a bank teller at that same bank that got held up just before Christmas. A woman was shot and killed.”

“You thought she was involved with the robbery?”

He shakes his head. “No. She went missing three months before the robbery. Her car was found abandoned in a parking building in town with her keys in the trunk along with traces of blood. Whatever happened to her, it started there.” He turns toward the window and looks at the same view I was staring at earlier. “He kept her for a week,” he says. “A whole week she was begging for us to find her and we never did.”

“Emma Green is begging for the same thing,” I tell him. “Come on, Carl, she has to still be alive. We’ve got two photos of her from his camera. He hadn’t copied them to the flash drive yet. He wasn’t done with her.”

“And Melissa X?”

“I’m thinking three years ago she was Riley’s first, but something went wrong and she ended up attacking him. He kept quiet, because what was he going to say, that a woman he was trying to rape and kill assaulted him?”

“You think this is what got her started?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “She could have gotten a taste for doing bad things and just kept on doing them, and I think there aren’t any pictures of her because she was the first and it was an impulsive act. After her Cooper was too afraid to try again. Could be it took him three years to get up the nerve.”

“So what in the hell happened to him? Who abducted Cooper and burned down his house?”

“Maybe it’s somebody Cooper has hurt in the past. One more thing that doesn’t make sense is why wait a day between kidnapping Cooper and burning down his house? And why use Emma Green’s car?”

“You don’t think Cooper torched his own place to try and hide evidence, faked his own abduction, then ran?”

“No reason to,” I say. “Nobody was on to him. Only reason he became a suspect was because he didn’t show up for work. And why torch his house and leave these,” I say, nodding toward the photographs, “in his office?”

“They weren’t exactly on display.”

“Still, he wouldn’t try cleaning up one scene by torching it without getting rid of the USB key from another.”

“He would if he killed the girl at his house,” he suggests.

“He wouldn’t have left his camera in the driveway, and we have a witness who saw him taken. And those were definitely ID tags from a Taser I was looking at.”

“Okay, so what about Donovan Green? He could have done it.”

“Possible,” I answer, “but why come to me about it?”

“Because he wanted an alibi. He wanted to make out he had no idea what happened to his daughter. You think he’s the kind of guy who could do it?”

“I don’t know,” I say, thinking back to last year when he wanted to kill me. Absolutely Donovan could have done it. But Donovan Green was waiting for me to give him a name. It’s possible, I guess, that he had that name first, that he killed Cooper Riley, panicked, and then came to me to start building a story to make him look innocent. I think about the look on his face, the grim determination to get his hands on the person who hurt Emma. No, he didn’t know who took his daughter. I’m sure of it. “Donovan Green wouldn’t kill the only person who knew where she was.”

“Maybe he’s torturing it out of him.”

“Wasn’t him who lit the fire.”

“He could have hired somebody.”

“Then why drive around in Emma’s car?”

He doesn’t have an answer.

“You looked into a connection with the fires?” I ask.

“There could be a link there between Cooper Riley and Pamela Deans, but it’s a very tentative one if it is.”

“Want to share?”

“Look, Tate, I have to call this in. You should go. If you’re here when the other detectives arrive, you’ll get me fired.”

“You’ll call me later today?”

He nods. “I’ll keep you in the loop and update you later. Tate, you’ve done a good job with this Melissa X thing,” he says. “If what you’ve learned leads to an arrest, don’t worry—you’re still looking at the reward money.”

I look down at the photographs. “I’m not doing this for the money,” I tell him.

“I know. But you need it.”

I head back into the hall and close the door behind me. I think of the girls wandering these halls and how close any one of them came to being Cooper’s next victim.

Donovan Green calls again before I reach the parking lot. It’s no longer blue skies in every direction. There are white fluffy clouds to the north and it’s completely overcast out to the east, the cloud cover over the ocean stretching the length of the horizon. The temperature must have dropped a few points too. I answer the phone and give Green an update. I don’t tell him about the photographs of his daughter tied up and naked. I don’t share with him my theory that she may still be alive. Last thing I want to do is feed him false hope only to have to confront him with the worst news of his life a day later. I tell him that I have made some progress, that I have some leads, and am hoping for some more news soon.

I head for home. Peak-time traffic makes it a long trip. I make some strong coffee once I walk through the door and fire up the computer. I go online. Rain starts to splash on the windows, just a couple of drops every few seconds. I get up and close them, the breeze coming through is warm and feels charged. The trees outside the study window are being thrown about by the wind. The pre-autumn leaves that have already fallen are scuttling across the lawn. There is no more blue sky, no more white clouds, just darkness in every direction. I step out into the rain as it starts to come down heavy, and I’m not the only one. Neighbors are standing in the street with their faces turned up to the sky, their arms stretched wide and smiles on their faces. For days on end this city has felt like it was going to burn, and for the moment everything is okay. Children are laughing. People are dancing in circles. It’s absolute pure happiness, and it’s infectious. I start laughing too. I let it soak my clothes, my first touch of rain in four months, and like the sunset last night, I’ve never seen rain looking so good. When the lightning comes, I head back inside, then thunder rolls over the city, loud enough to rattle the pictures on the wall. The house lights up like a camera flash as more lightning splits the evening apart. I dry off and put fresh bandages on my feet and hand, then I sit in front of the computer.