Текст книги "Collecting Cooper"
Автор книги: Paul Cleave
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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 26 страниц)
chapter two
The thumb is inside the jar, suspended in liquid murky with age. The lid is sealed tight and the jar safely cuddled by bubble wrap. The whole thing is packed inside a cardboard box the size of a football, the corners crushed in slightly, the contents surrounded by hundreds of pieces of jelly bean–shaped polystyrene packaging, each about the same size as the very thumb they’re protecting. The box is in the hands of a courier driver with an untucked shirt with the bottom two buttons open. He looks impatient. He looks frustrated by the heat. His eagerness to leave is evident in the way he thrusts his electronic signature pad into Cooper’s hands. The pad is the size of a paperback and Cooper awkwardly scrawls his name onto it. The driver gives him the box and tells him to have a good day, and a few seconds later he’s reversing from the driveway, the wheels spinning up small pieces of tar-coated shingle from the road that plink against the undercarriage. Cooper stands there watching him, holding on to the box that feels very light. He plays his fingernail along the side of the stamps—there are a dozen of them, slapped onto the side along with a declaration form that lies. The stickers and stamps give it an exotic look, as though it has traveled from faraway places, routed through distant lands, that the contents could be anything—just not that of the severed thumb. None of the seals have been broken. If they had, it would have been the police coming to his door, not a courier driver.
He locks his front door against the heat of the morning sun. Headlining the news all week has been the heat wave. It arrived in Christchurch six days ago and set up camp. It’s started a death toll that’s still in the single figures but expected to hit double digits by the weekend. It’s melting the tar seal in roads and burning tussock and trees and killing farm stock. Drownings and road rage are up and every day the sky somewhere in the city is clouded with smoke from a burning house or factory. He makes his way along the air-conditioned hallway to his air-conditioned study on the second floor, where diplomas line the walls, each of them perfectly level and equidistant to the next, the glass covering them clean, each of them small windows to his past achievements. He rests the package on his desk. He can only imagine what other people in his field would be saying right now.
He runs a knife blade along the tape. He’d like to know where the other thumb was posted, whether the recipient ripped into their box like a Christmas present. The cardboard edges spring upward on their folded creases. The jelly bean polystyrene whispers against his hands as he searches inside. His fingers close around the lumpy exterior of bubble wrap.
This is it.
The thumb looks fresh. The reality, however, is different. The thumb hasn’t been attached to its owner for over a year. In an ideal world he’d be looking at the whole set. Thumbs and fingers all attached to the hands, but they were all separated soon after death and the thumb was all he could afford. Other parts, bigger parts, all went to higher bidders. He licks his lips, his mouth so dry he can’t swallow. He drops the bubble wrap and moves to the first of his two bookcases. He sits the jar on the top shelf into the gap he made the day he won the auction. In a world of collectors, in a world of addicts, collecting the works of serial killers or saving the weapons they use, or the words they have written and the clothes they wore, or the paper their original confession was written on or the handcuffs they were arrested in is no different from collecting stamps or bobble-head action figures. Eighty percent of his own collection is made up of books. The rest is made up of a few knives, a few articles of clothing; he has some private police reports too which he shouldn’t have. Until now the most unique piece he owned was a pillowcase that was used by a bellboy in an Australian hotel to cover the faces of three different women he killed. He turns the jar, studying the thumb, aware of how creepy it is, and also how creepy it is that he bought it. He won it online through a private auction, one he was invited to bid on through contacts he’s nurtured through previous auctions. He’s still not entirely sure why he wanted it. He didn’t, not in the beginning. He saw it and thought it was crazy to own a body part, but the more he thought about it, the more he wanted it. He must have been crazy. What was he thinking? That he could put it on display and show people the next time he threw a dinner party? The shelves of his study are full of the other memorabilia he’s won over the years, both from killers and victims. It is for others to debate whether the collecting of these items creates a market for death. His focus is purely educational. If he is to learn, if he is to teach others about methods and a killer’s drive, then he must surround himself with these objects. It isn’t a hobby, it’s a job. And the thumb is more of an . . . he isn’t sure. Indulgence is the wrong word. Curiosity works better. Yet it’s more simple than that—it came down to him wanting it.
The arrival of the package has left him running late. His criminal psychology students will soon be staring at a whiteboard and no lecturer. The thumb has pushed him enough off schedule that he’s going to have to skip breakfast and head straight into getting caught in traffic. He swallows a couple of vitamin pills and heads through to the garage and backs out the car.
The sun is climbing steadily into the sky, shortening the shadows from the trees and making the floating strands of spiderweb glint in the light. The radio is on and he’s listening to a talk-back station, the current debate one that’s been raging in the news lately—whether or not New Zealand should bring back the death penalty. It started as a flippant remark, the prime minister making a bad joke when asked what they were going to do to try and curb the country’s growing crime rate and growing prison population, but it snowballed into other people backing the statement and asking why the government can’t really consider it. After all, if death was good enough for the victims, why not give that same courtesy to their killers?
Cooper isn’t sure where he stands on the issue. He isn’t sure a first-world country should be practicing third-world punishments.
He puts the gear stick in park and climbs out to close the garage door because the damn automatic opener broke about two months ago and the service agent is still waiting on parts that were supposed to arrive back then. He can feel the warmth from the ground through the soles of his shoes. He breaks into a sweat a few paces from the door. The breeze is light and feels hot enough to ignite. All week people have been walking around with short sleeves and shortened nerves. He can smell marijuana from the goddamn surfer across the road who likes to spend his mornings and evenings and the hours in between using his lotto money to get as high as a kite. His shirt dampens with each stride. He’s so distracted by the thumb and the heat that he suddenly realizes he’s picked his briefcase back up and is carrying it with him.
“Weird,” he says, and when he turns back to the car it gets even weirder. A man he’s never seen before is standing next to it.
“Excuse me,” the man says, and even though he’s in his midthirties there’s something about him that makes Cooper think of him as a kid, it could be the floppy hair hanging across his forehead, or it could be the corduroy pants twenty years out of date. “Have you got the time?”
“Sure,” Cooper says, and he looks down at his watch, and when he does a sharp cramp explodes in his chest. He jerks the briefcase into his body with enough force to pop it open. The contents spill onto the driveway and a moment later he collapses next to them, every muscle and limb well beyond his control. The pain extends to his stomach and legs and groin, but mostly it’s his chest that hurts. The man lowers the gun and crouches down next to him, brushing his hair out of his eyes.
“It’s going to be okay,” the kid says, at least that’s what Cooper thinks he says, he can’t really tell, because at the same time a chemical smell wafts over him and something is pushed into his face and he can’t do a thing to fight it. It’s at that moment the darkness rushes in and takes him from his collection.
chapter three
The sign says Lost puppys for sail—$5 each. It leans against the side of a brick wall held together by mortar and graffiti. The wall is two hundred meters closer to home than the police station. Leaning against that same brick wall in the shade it offers is a guy in a tattered blue shirt and tattered blue shorts and a hat made out of cardboard that came from a cereal packet. It doesn’t fit quite right but he doesn’t seem to mind. He hasn’t shaved in a while by the look of it and hasn’t eaten real food in about as long. I walk past him and he smiles and asks for loose change, only one side of his mouth moving when he talks, revealing teeth pointed and gray. All I have is the money Schroder gave me, and I give ten of it to him, hoping he’ll spend it on spelling lessons rather than beer. His smile widens and clean white lines appear around the corners of his eyes between all the grime, and I figure his last four months have been worse than mine.
“That gets you two lost puppies,” he says, arithmetic his strong point. “Take your pick.”
I don’t want a puppy, but I look anyway, turning left and right and not seeing any.
“They’re lost,” he reminds me, and tucks the money into his pocket.
I walk into the heart of the city, past office blocks with large glass doors and shops with large glass windows; banks and cafés scattered among them, even the occasional place of worship. Many of the buildings in the city are almost a hundred years old, some even older, the old English architecture looks fantastic when you’re in the mood for it, and it’s hard to be in any kind of mood other than a pissed-off one when the temperature is above a hundred. Most of the buildings are stained with exhaust fumes and soot from over the years, but the beauty of Christchurch isn’t in the architecture, but in the gardens. Christchurch isn’t known as the Garden City for nothing—there are trees almost on every street, the Botanical Gardens are only a few blocks away, and it breaks up the old look of the city more than the occasional modern hotel or office block being built. A couple of the shops still have Christmas decorations in the windows from a few months back, or they’re getting them up earlier this year. It’s creeping up to ten o’clock in the morning and the streets have never looked so empty. It’s as if in the time I was away the Ebola Circus came to town, but of course it’s nothing as scary as that; the heat is keeping people indoors. Those unlucky enough to be out and about are walking slowly to maintain energy, shirts and blouses damp with sweat, people carrying bottled water they’ve bought from the supermarket even though Christchurch has the best water in the world coming straight out of the tap. I cross the bridge going over the Avon River. The water level is lower than normal, and the trees lining the banks are drooping and look like they’re trying to dive in. There are a couple of ducks hidden in the shade of some flax bushes, and another duck floating along the water on his back, his head twisted backward, dark bloated flies swarming its body. I pass a four-wheel drive double-parked at a set of lights, forcing cars to swing out into the opposite lane to get past. The vehicle is coated in dirt, and somebody has written I wish my daughter was this dirty across the back window with their finger. I walk to the central bus terminal and get blasted by the air-conditioning. The terminal smells of cigarette smoke and the electronic board displaying the departure times has had a brick or something equivalent thrown through it. I wait with ten other people for the next ride, a few of them helping to give a pair of lost tourists directions. For the first time in about twenty years I catch a bus in my own city. At the back of the bus a couple of school kids are rolling cigarettes and talking about how wasted they got last weekend, how wasted they’re going to get this weekend, their drunken antics a badge of honor for them. They use fuck as a noun, a verb, an adjective, their conversation littered with the word.
The bus driver barely fits in behind the wheel and there is no obvious sign where his forearms end and his wrists start, and his head seems to come straight out of his shoulders, his neck engulfed by the fat of doughnuts past. We drive past a large group of teenagers with shaved heads all wearing black hoodies and jeans and looking like they’ve all just come from court and getting ready to do something that will send them back. I watch the city and see nothing dramatic has changed; a couple of new buildings and altered intersections, but for the most part it’s identical to how it was before; those who don’t look defeated by it are those doing the defeating. On the outset of my prison stay, four months seemed like a long time for me, and it seemed like time on the inside would come to a standstill while on the outside it would fly by. Now it looks like I haven’t missed a thing.
Clouds of smoke erupt from behind the bus and add to the smog stain that’s building on the back window. The bus pulls over every few minutes and the numbers on board shrink and grow. By the time we hit the suburbs there are only two other people onboard besides the driver. One of them is a nun, and the other is an Elvis impersonator decked out in full Elvis-Vegas-style sequins, and I feel like I’m in the middle of a setup to a joke. The folder Schroder gave me stays on my lap—unopened—the entire time. It has a green cover that is held closed by two rubber bands that I flick with my fingers every now and then. It takes a little under thirty minutes to reach the bus stop closest to home, and it’s a five-minute walk from there that takes me eight in this heat.
Normally this time of year you can’t go fifty meters without passing somebody mowing lawns or planting flowers, but the weather has pushed those activities to the end of the day when the heat has died down, so I walk the distance to my house in relative silence. Ninety-nine percent of my neighborhood is identical to how it was before. The remaining percent is made up of recently subdivided properties with brand-new homes. The sun bakes all of it, me included, and Schroder’s money has almost turned to soup by the time my house comes into view.
I’ve never been more pleased to see it. Part of me was sure I’d never see it again, that the only way I’d be leaving prison was in a body bag after being shanked. It’s a three-bedroom house with a black, concrete tile roof and gardens that are tidier than I’ve ever had them. My parents have been looking after the place. I find the key they hid along the side of the house for me. I head inside and it certainly feels like coming home. It’s a lonely house but it’s nice to be in a room that doesn’t have concrete walls. The fridge is stocked with fresh food and there’s a vase of flowers on the table with a Welcome Home card leaning against it. I call for my cat. He doesn’t show up, but there’s a half-empty food tray on the floor, so my parents have fed him this morning. I sit the flowers outside before my hay fever kicks in. While I was in jail my house was broken into but nothing stolen, the window they smashed has been replaced. I leave the file on the table and take a long shower, but the feeling of prison remains on my skin no matter how hard I scrub it.
When I get out I examine myself in the mirror. I haven’t seen myself in four months. I’ve lost weight. I jump on the scale and find I’m almost ten kilograms lighter. My face is thinner, and for the first time ever my stubble is coming through gray in places, matching the gray coming through around my temples. Great—I’m on my way to looking like my father. My eyes are slightly bloodshot too. This is how I used to look last year when I was drinking.
I put on some summer clothes and feel more relaxed. I want to go and see my wife more than anything. Bridget has been in a care home for the last three years. She sits in a chair and stares out at the world and doesn’t speak and hardly moves and nobody really knows for sure how much of her is still alive. There has been progress—or at least a hope of progress. The accident that nearly killed her left her with broken bones and torn flesh and in a coma for eight weeks, it punctured her left lung and shattered vertebrae and people tell me she was lucky to live. My daughter wasn’t so lucky. Nobody ever tells me my daughter was unlucky enough to have died. People hardly mention her anymore.
Schroder’s money will only get me about halfway there. Instead I have to wait for my parents. I don’t have a car—it was damaged in the accident last year that led to my conviction. My parents wanted to pick me up today but couldn’t. They visited me twice a week every week while I was locked away, but the day I’m due out they’re busy, Dad with an appointment with a specialist at the hospital to fix the kind of prostate problems men get when they get to Dad’s age, problems I’m hoping they’ll cure with a pill by the time I get to sixty.
It’s too hot to head back outside, and ironically, after four months of wanting nothing more than to come home, I’m hit with an incredible sense of boredom. I stand at the kitchen sink and stare out the window. Though tidy, the backyard looks tired, the heat having drained much of the life from every living thing planted out there. My cat, Daxter, comes in and gives me a sad look, then comes back in a minute later with a bird in his mouth. Daxter is an overweight ginger cat who, for a piece of food, will be your best friend. He puts the bird on the floor next to my feet and steps back and meows at me. I don’t know whether to tell him off or cuddle him. I do the latter, then toss the bird into the garden recycling bin outside.
Like I knew I would, and like Schroder knew I would, I turn my thoughts to the folder with the green cover and rubber bands—a folder full of death. It couldn’t hurt to look. Schroder’s hoping there is something I can see that nobody else can. It’s unlikely, but possibly I can offer a different perspective. Plus I have a mortgage to pay and nothing in the way of job prospects. I pick the file up from the dining table and carry it to the study.
chapter four
The heat is bad—not as bad as earlier this morning when Adrian set fire to his mother, but still hotter than he’d like. People complain about the heat. His mum did. She complained and screamed until the pretty-colored flames melted her tongue to the roof of her mouth and then she couldn’t scream anymore. People like to walk around complaining that it’s too hot and six months ago those same people walked around complaining it was too cold, and people, he knows, just can’t be pleased. Adrian doesn’t like the heat, but he isn’t making a fuss about it. He knows you just have to be careful enough to stay in the shade and drink enough water. If you don’t you can get skin cancer or your skin gets old quickly and gets blotchy and he doesn’t like the idea of that. When he gets too hot he sweats, which makes his clothes stick to him and makes him itch, and he hates itching, because his are the kind of itches that he can never quite get to, they travel as he scratches at them, forcing him to chase them with chewed-up fingernails, which roughs his skin and makes him bleed.
He doesn’t know how to work the radio in the car so he can’t hear the temperature on the news. He wishes he could. He loves to listen to music, any kind of music as long as it’s not that heavy metal stuff you rip your throat up trying to sing along to, or worse, hip-hop. For twenty years he never heard a single song, a life without music, only sad, lonely humming from some of the others he lived with. When music came back into his life, he just didn’t get it. It was like all the rules had changed. Even records and cassette tapes had been replaced with songs you listened to on a computer, and he barely even knew what a computer was let alone how to use one. He listened and adapted to the new styles and now he hates to be without it. His favorite is classical. As a kid he never liked classical music. He used to have a paper route, and he’d save his money, and he was always spending it on cassette tapes. He used to collect them. He liked bands and he liked solo artists, but he didn’t like women singers that much. Every week he would spend his pay on another tape, building his library of music. All those bands and artists are in the past and didn’t date well, but classical music stays the same forever, and now he can’t fall asleep without listening to his tape player.
The car stereo isn’t the only thing not working. For air-conditioning he has to make do with having the window down. He doesn’t have a driver’s license and isn’t sure he’d pass the test if he tried. The thought of it makes him nervous. He could have every piece of information memorized, he’d know in the little diagrams presented if the blue or red car had to give way, he’d know how much tread your tires needed, how much alcohol you could drive with in your blood, but if he sat in front of an officer who watched him trying to complete that test, it would be like a magician came along and made his answers disappear. It would be worse trying to pass the physical part, the part where he had to drive through town with somebody next to him, judging every move he made. He knows he’d only manage a few hundred meters before throwing up all over himself. No, he doesn’t need a license as long as nobody ever pulls him over, and there’s no reason anybody should. He’s a careful driver, and the body in the trunk isn’t making any noise. He just wishes he could get the air-conditioning to work. He isn’t sure whether it’s his fault or the car’s. The car is at least ten years old—surely not everything can be working right on it. The same goes for the radio.
There aren’t many people on the streets as he drives through them. All the faces look the same. The houses seem to fall into two categories—nice ones that he’d like to live in, and bad ones he wouldn’t. His last house was in that second category, but he’s moved out now and living in the house where his mother, God bless her soul, raised him. It’s not a nice place, but it’s home, and there’s a certain something to be said for that. He just doesn’t know what that something is.
The driveway leading to that certain-something house has never been paved. It’s made up from loose tooth-sized pieces of shingle that over the years have compacted into the dirt. Some of that dirt blankets the air behind the car as he drives over it, and when he comes to a stop it settles over the warm metal. He sits in the car and waits for the air to clear, humming to himself, not wanting the dust to stick to his damp body and make the itching worse. Soon the tranquillity returns. He loves it out here—the isolation, the peaceful-ness—out here there are no such things as home invasions and loud cars and people being rude.
The thumb he took from Cooper’s house is sitting on the passenger seat in a glass jar filled with fluid that, if he holds it up to the light, is full of small gray flecks. He shakes it and the flecks float aimlessly like a snow globe but nowhere near as pretty. The thumb doesn’t move much. The nail is longer than he grows his own, and he remembers hearing somewhere that people’s nails still grow after they died, but he isn’t sure that’s true. It makes sense the nail stays the same and the fingers and toes shrink as the body dries out. Cooper would know. Cooper is a professor and a smart person, and this would be just one of a hundred things that he knows. He can’t tell if Cooper cut the thumb from a man or a woman. The nail doesn’t have any polish on it, but that doesn’t mean anything. The cut that removed it from the hand is clean and the bone doesn’t look splintered, but would be under a microscope. Something pretty sharp must have been used. He knows serial killers like to collect moments and . . . and no, not moments, and not moment-o either—he knows the word, has read it a hundred times, but for the moment it just won’t come to him. Whatever it is, he knows that serial killers collect them and that it’s normally a piece of jewelry or clothing they save somewhere private. It’s dangerous for Cooper to have taken an entire thumb, and even more so to have put it on display. Adrian climbs out of the car and rests the jar on the roof where it forms a ring in the dust. The air is full of grasshopper sounds and birdsong. He moves to the back of the car and pops the trunk.
Cooper Riley’s face is grazed from the fall he took when the Taser hit him, and he looks beaten up from banging around in the trunk of the car. His face is puffy and his wrists have swollen and turned purple from being tied behind him. Next time, Adrian thinks, he’ll pad the trunk with blankets first. If nothing else, he’s learning. Cooper would be proud of him.
There’s a line of drool running from the corner of Cooper’s lips. Tiny pieces of dirt have gotten caught in it. He brushes them away knowing Cooper would appreciate it, and wipes his hand across Cooper’s shirt, hoping Cooper wouldn’t mind. He knows this entire ordeal is going to be one giant learning curve, and it gets proven again when he discovers pulling a man out of a trunk is much harder than putting him in. He drags Cooper over the rim, the limp body catches in places, first his belt, then his arms, then his chin, and then there is a loud thunk as his head hits the bumper on the way down. Cooper lies on the ground as lifeless as he looked when he was in the car. Adrian leaves the rope around Cooper’s wrists and ankles, heads inside, and returns with a red dolly that once, a lifetime ago, when he was supposed to be in his bedroom but wasn’t, he saw a dead boy strapped to it. Age and use has chipped away over half of the paint, but the wheels still turn pretty good. The tires are half flat, and look even flatter once he has Cooper strapped in.
Negotiating the steps leading inside is the most awkward bit, and he manages them by turning around and dragging the dolly backward. Getting Cooper down into the basement is equally as hard, but he does the same thing, only in reverse, keeping the dolly low and carefully taking one step at a time, knowing if he lets go Cooper will crash down and break his nose and teeth. Cooper doesn’t make any noise, other than his head bouncing against the frame of the dolly with every step.
The basement is segmented into two separate rooms, a dividing wall running across the middle is made of concrete block with a door near the middle acting as barrier to the second, internal room. The outer part used to be used as storage, though not these days. The inner room, the Scream Room as they used to call it, years ago contained a furnace that was stripped out and sold for scrap, not long after Adrian came to live here. He can still remember the workman coming and taking it away. He was young then, curious as to what was going to happen with the empty room. It was only a matter of days before he found out. In that room now is nothing but bolts sticking out of the walls and floor that were never important enough to spend the time or resources on removing. There’s an old bed with a worn mattress and flat pillow that has absorbed thousands of tears, not all of them his own. There are extra blankets and a bucket in the corner with a lid and another bucket full of fresh water, a cup, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a towel. He’s filled a large plastic container full of water for Cooper to drink, there must be five liters in there. The door to this cell is made from iron except for a square patch of reinforced glass at head height. There is a sliding arm across the front that can’t be accessed from the inside. At the bottom of the door is a panel that can be hinged open like a cat-flap so items can be passed back and forth, big enough for the bucket or for somebody very small. It opens outward and has the hinges on this side of it and the bolts are on the outside and can’t be opened from within. From no point within the basement can the outside world be seen. There used to be a single lightbulb that hung down from the ceiling, but a long time ago that was removed after one of the boys pulled enough of the wire through to make a noose. His name was George, and George’s tongue bloated to the same size as his mouth and his skin turned gray and George never came back. After that all the rooms in the house had the cables shortened. So now the only light comes through the open basement door, which isn’t much, but enough to see by.
He wheels Cooper into the inner room and unties him, then helps him onto the mattress. The mattress is slightly damp and cool, which Adrian thinks Cooper will appreciate, especially this week with the temperature almost topping one hundred and ten every day. The bedsprings sag and it’s the first time they’ve had weight on them in three years. He lifts Cooper’s head and secures a pillow beneath it then steps out of the cell, taking the dolly and ropes with him. He locks the door behind him and leans with his forehead on the glass and watches Cooper, who, for the moment, is still. He knows when Cooper awakes he won’t be happy, and Adrian is fully prepared for it.
Back outside the day has continued to grow hotter. The glass jar with the thumb has trapped some of that heat and nearly burns his fingers. He collects it, along with a few other things he’s taken from Cooper’s home, and heads back inside. Over the years Adrian has met other killers. He has lived with people who have killed families, people who have killed strangers, people who have killed for no real-life reason, who have taken lives because of a voice telling them to, or an instinct, or a hidden message in a newspaper from God. He’s shared rooms with people who have sliced others apart, only a few without emotion, most of them dumbfounded and upset at what they did, all hoping pills and talking about feelings would cure them. There haven’t been many—he’s met less killers than he can count on both hands, but he believes they are the reason he now has a fascination with them. He would have been just like them if he hadn’t been sent here and locked away when he was a teenager.
