Collecting Cooper (15 page)

“How can I get hold of him?”

“You could ring him, I suppose,” she says, “or you could try. His phone has been switched off.”

She gives me his cell phone number and landline and I try calling the cell on the way back to my car and get a message saying the phone is off or out of range. The landline goes through to an answering machine and a promise of a returned call.

I give Schroder another call but his line is busy. I borrow a phonebook and match up the home number I was given with Riley’s name to get his address, wondering, wondering, was Cooper Riley the last person to see Emma Green alive?

It’s a brand-new day. His second mother used to tell him anything can happen on a brand new day, that a fresh start each morning gave you a chance to redeem yourself for the things that angered you the day before. That never helped much when he was locked in the Scream Room and didn’t have the chance to prove himself, but it certainly helps now.

He’s noticed Cooper using his name as often as he can. Part of him likes it, he likes the connection forming between them and hearing his name makes him genuinely hope that connection is real. His mother hardly ever used his name, only when he was in trouble, the kind of trouble that got him locked downstairs.

Ultimately he isn’t sure whether Cooper is trying to bond with him or fool him. Reading about all this kind of stuff, he learned if you’re ever attacked by a serial killer, you should use their name as much as you can if you know it. That’s why Cooper is using it. He doesn’t know this for sure—and he doesn’t like the confusion that comes with not knowing. It actually makes him angry. He tries to think of an adage his mother would use, but can only come up
with “
A frown is a foe that certainly must go.”
Cooper is hoping to humanize himself so Adrian won’t hurt him—but of course there is no chance of that. He hasn’t gone to all this effort to hurt the one thing he cherishes the most.

Today he will give Cooper his gift, and from there any bonding between them will be genuine. The gift will reset the mistakes from yesterday. The gift is his redemption. He learned years ago that you can feel better giving rather than receiving. It will be like that today. He is sure of it. He also learned years ago he felt good taking things. Like the lives of those cats.

The sun is pouring through the eastern windows as it makes its way around to the north. He fell asleep last night after listening to his conversation with Cooper, and then listening to classical music. The radio is still on, and the news is on, the announcer is talking about the temperature. People have been dying in the heat and Adrian doesn’t fully understand why. People should just stay inside if they’re getting too hot, or drink more water. He turns the radio off and a few minutes later he sits outside and drinks an orange juice. He likes the heat. He’s spent too many days locked in cold rooms to want to hang out in the shade. The trees forming a barrier between him and the neighboring paddock and the road are absolutely still, no breeze or birds to create any movement. There’s a forest about a kilometer away covering a shallow hill, the trees in there thick and old, the branches gnarled and twisted. The air is sticky. A persistent fly keeps landing on him and he keeps swatting it away until it falls into his orange juice. He starts to wonder what will happen if Cooper doesn’t like his gift, and that makes him sad. “
Depression is a sad man’s joy,”
his mother used to say. This is one she said to him many times, but he never really understood. He picks the fly out with his finger, studies it for a few seconds, then gently sits it on the porch. Its wings are stuck together. He moves it into the shade so it won’t burn.

He walks inside where the temperature drops a little. There are flies on the walls and ceiling and he’s never known how they do that without falling off. There isn’t much in the way of furniture to land
on. He rinses his glass in the kitchen and makes his way upstairs to the bedroom next to his own. The girl is awake. He enters the room and holds up the pitcher of water and helps her tilt her head forward and she sucks it in greedily through the straw. He gives her ten seconds and then pulls it away. She makes sounds inside her mouth; he thinks she’s trying to form some words but he has no idea what and doesn’t want to know. He holds the water back up and she takes another drink then slumps her head down. Her arms and legs are flushed the most, her face and stomach a close second, and he doesn’t know how attracted to her Cooper needs to be to do what it is he does best. He could try to put some makeup on her once he’s cleaned her up, but he doesn’t know how. It can’t be difficult.

When he goes down to the basement Cooper is standing at the cell door, looking out the small window as Adrian walks down the steps. The sun is still low outside, coming in through the windows and hitting the basement door, and for the next hour or so, as long as that door’s open, it’s almost as good as it used to be when this place had electricity.

“Good morning, Adrian,” Cooper says. “Did you have a good sleep?”

“Not really,” Adrian says, suspicious at how friendly Cooper sounds. Suspicious . . . and happy.

“That’s a real shame. So what are we going to do today?”

“Today you get your surprise. In fact I have two of them. One will have to wait until tonight. It’s a nighttime kind of surprise.”

“And the other one?”

“You haven’t made the news yet,” Adrian says. “When the police go looking for you, they’re going to find out you’ve done bad things.”

“True,” Cooper says. “That’s good thinking, Adrian. Excellent thinking. And we need to do something about that, because they’ll come looking for me and eventually they’ll come here.”

Adrian frowns. “Why would they come here?”

“Because they’re the police. They’ll look for me. They’ll figure out who took me, and they’ll figure out where you have me.”

“No they won’t,” Adrian says, and he’s confident of that. “And that’s one of the surprises. See, I don’t want them to figure out you’re a serial killer because then they’ll look even harder for you. That’s why I’m going to burn it down.”

“Burn
what
down?”

“With your house gone the police won’t be able to learn as much about you.”

“Wait, wait, hang on a second, Adrian,” Cooper says, putting his hand on the glass. “Listen to me. There’s no need to do that. I’ve been careful. There’s nothing there for them to find.”

“But it’s for the best! You don’t need it anymore, and it’s safer this way. I’m doing this for you! It’s about being careful,” he says. “I’ll be back in an hour or two and I’ll bring you some lunch,” he adds, and he makes his way back upstairs, shaking his head as Cooper continues to call to him, thinking,
who knew being a collector was so much work?

Cooper Riley lives in Northwood, one of the newer subdivisions in the north of Christchurch that came into existence around the same time the twentieth century ended. Out here half a million dollars can buy you a badly built house that looks nice, but is nowhere as strong as a home built across town fifty years ago where land and life is cheaper. People come to Northwood for the safety of a community that isn’t addicted to drugs or murder, but like all things, the violence is already catching up. Today it doesn’t matter where you live in Christchurch, everywhere is being blasted by the heat wave equally. Paint has peeled from letterboxes and iron fences, and the only grass that hasn’t been burned off is in thick shade. All of the houses have manicured gardens, and there aren’t any weeds in sight. Each house falls in line with a similar design. It’s the kind of community where everybody’s uniqueness conforms with the collective agreement. If somebody built a front fence or painted their house something that wasn’t a shade of fawn, they’d be lynched. There are garage-sized sculptures every few blocks that are supposed to look like pergolas but instead look like incomplete garages. Cooper
lives on Winsington Drive, surrounded by other pretentious-sounding street names that could have come out of some 1940s golf clothing catalog,
the Winsington Jacket is a collaboration of style and elegance, a must for when one is taking lunch on the 19th hole
. Cooper’s street is part of a subdivision less than five years old, the tar seal road has bubbled from the heat and there are potholes where it’s melted and stuck to the tread of passing cars. I drive slowly because it’s impossible to know what direction other drivers are wanting to take because the residents of Northwood are allergic to indicating.

The price tags increase as the houses get bigger, two-story places with columns leading up from the front door to the top floor, columns that in another time and country would have been made from marble. Here, however, ninety percent of the homes are made from plaster that’s been slapped over polystyrene sheets, a great idea until some kid punches a hole in a wall with his soccer ball and then the moisture is sucked into the wooden framework of the house where the rot spreads. It’s an expensive problem and a common one across the country. People here are paying for the area and for the look and for the illusion of quality. There’s a big jet boat parked up on a trailer out on the street next to Cooper’s house, taking up most of the lane. It looks expensive, and I guess the nice house wasn’t enough by itself for the owner to prove to the neighbors he has wealth. I get past it and there are two cars on the other side and they certainly don’t look like they belong to a detective. The smaller car parked out front is yellow and looks out of place in this neighborhood because it’s not European. If it were here for more than twenty-four hours it would get picked up by the sanitation department. The second car, the BMW, is in the driveway. I pull in ahead of the cheaper car. I’ve seen it before. Emma Green’s file is next to me on the passenger seat. I open it and there’s a photo of her car with her standing next to it, taken about four months ago. I look at the registration plate in the file and then the one in real life and they’re identical. Since Tuesday night there has been a report out to look for that car, but the problem is there are more cars than cops in this city, and the report to
look for it doesn’t mean anything unless it enters the orbit of a patrol car. This is the car the insurance company gave her after I ruined her other one. In the photo she has a big grin on her face. In the photo she thinks the worst is behind her. She has no idea she’s about slap-bang between two tragedies, one that almost took her life and one that may have. I close the file and step into the sun, her smile staying with me and pushing me forward, making me desperate to find the man who took that smile from her.

I walk carefully up to the house, the lenses in my sunglasses ready to drip from the frames. Schroder must have made a call by now and somebody will be on their way to talk to Cooper Riley. That means soon a police car is going to arrive and a detective along with it. But something here isn’t right. The front door to the house is ajar. The keys are hanging from the lock. The driver’s door to the BMW is closed, but hasn’t latched. The interior light isn’t going so either the bulb has blown or it’s switched off or the door has been open all night and the battery has died. The BMW is dark blue and about ten years old and can’t have been the car that hit the dumpster behind the café.

I take a deep breath and pop the trunk and breath out slowly when I see Emma Green isn’t in there. If she ever was folded up into it at any point there’s no sign. If Cooper did take her he could have wrapped her in something. When I walk around the car there’s something plastic on the ground sticking out from beside the tire. I bend down. It’s a camera. There’s a crack running across the back of the display screen and the lid to the battery compartment has busted off. I open up the small compartment covering the memory card and pop it out. I sit the camera back on the ground and look under the car. There’re a couple of papers, a teaching schedule, a sandwich wrapped in clear wrap, and an apple that’s wrinkled and soft. Wedged beneath the edge of the tire are some tiny pieces of paper, disk-shaped with a serial number across them. There are others further beneath the car, and when I stand back up I can see some against the edge of the lawn. They are from a Taser gun. I slip the memory card into my pocket and walk around to the trunk and take out the tire iron.

I don’t knock on the door. Instead I take the keys and pocket them before swinging the door all the way open with my foot. The stench of petrol wafts out. My eyes water as I move forward. There are two empty petrol cans just inside the doorway. I wipe at my eyes while holding my breath. The tiled foyer floor is wet and slippery. To the left are a set of open French doors leading through to a carpeted living room with large dark patches where petrol has been splashed around. Ahead are more French doors, another living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. To the right a staircase twists up to the second-floor landing, a ninety-degree bend halfway up, all of it edged with iron wrought bars connected by a white wooden handrail.

I step back outside. I suck in a breath of clean air. Somebody was shot by a Taser, and somebody is about to set fire to the house. All that petrol—it’s going to burn quick, and it’s going to happen any second now. If Emma Green is inside she’s going to burn quick along with it.

I have no choice. I head back in. I take the stairs, moving quickly past prints and photographs, my feet squelching into the carpet as petrol comes up out of it. If I’m quick I can get in and out of here before this place goes up in flames, or maybe I can stop it from happening. I check the rooms upstairs. A study to the far left, a guest bedroom, two bathrooms, and two more bedrooms. My chest is sore from breathing hard, my legs are aching, the lack of exercise over the months clearly evident. The fumes are much thicker up here. It doesn’t add up—torching your own house doesn’t seem the way a criminology and psychiatry professor would deal with hiding a body. A guy like Cooper wouldn’t have brought a victim here, then become desperate enough to burn down his own house to hide the evidence. He also wouldn’t be foolish enough to leave her car parked outside. Cooper Riley is quickly sliding down the scale from suspect to victim. Something bad has happened to him, or about to if this place burns, and I’m thinking it’s the same bad thing that might happen to Emma Green.