Collecting Cooper (39 page)

Jane Tyrone is hanging where I last saw her. There’s rope wrapped around her chest and under her arms, and she’s been strung up, the rope thrown around the chimney on the roof and pulled back down to lift her weight, then tied off against the leg of the picnic bench. I can imagine Adrian heaving her into the air, the actions like climbing a rope. Nobody would have seen a thing over the fence. Ever so slowly, her body is rotating a hundred degrees or so, the rope spinning, she comes to a stop going one way then slowly starts to spin back the other. Her body is bloated and there isn’t much left in the way of skin, just a few patches, but mostly it’s just raw-looking flesh and even bigger areas of no flesh at all. There’s a large slice across
her chest that must have been made by the shovel that unearthed her. She’s naked, but covered in dirt. Parts of her are moving slowly, and I realize she has bugs squirming inside her. What face she has left is dark and sagging, the remaining skin is loose and her fingers and hands look like she’s wearing gloves that’re two sizes too big for her.

“Anybody see anything?” I ask.

“Lots of people heard the gunshot,” Schroder says, “and most of them looked out their windows. We got a bunch of matching descriptions that line up with Adrian Loaner, along with a description of the car.”

“That it?”

“That’s about as good as we can get. At least this time he didn’t take all your files.”

“Remind me to thank him,” I say. “So we don’t know anything more than we already knew, is that what you’re telling me?”

“Not true. We know he’s obsessed with you.”

“Can’t somebody cut her down?” I ask, nodding toward the dead girl.

“Not yet.”

“Jesus, Carl, she’s been up there long enough.”

“Not yet, Tate. You know how it goes.”

“Goddamn it,” I say, and I’m hit by another wave of nausea and have to crouch down before I lose balance.

“You okay?”

“No, I’m not okay,” I say, sounding pissed off and wanting to sound that way. “I was ringing you earlier because there was something I had to tell you. Goddamn it, it was important.”

“It’ll come to you.”

I close my eyes. I hate it when people say that, but I hate even more forgetting something I’m about to say before I can say it. This feels just like that. I squeeze my eyes shut even tighter in the hope it will help. I’m in the backyard, I’m on the phone to Schroder, I’m thinking about Emma Green, about Grover Hills, about places where Adrian can keep his collection. Grover Hills . . . for a while
Christchurch did what it could to hide the mental people away until one day they realized they were going to need a hundred institutions, so instead they closed down the three they had and let everybody go.

The three they had . . .

All within driving distance!

My eyes snap open. Every muscle in my body is humming with energy. “I know where she is,” I tell him, almost but not quite grabbing hold of Schroder and shaking him.

“What?”

“Emma Green. It’s what I wanted to tell you. I know where she is.”

“Where?”

“I’m going with you,” I say and head to Schroder’s car. In the last few minutes a couple of vans have shown up, TV network slogans stenciled across the sides. I feel nauseous again. “And we’re going to need to lose these vultures,” I say, nodding toward the vans.

“You’re staying here, Tate. Tell me, what’s your theory?”

I open up the passenger door and climb in. “Let’s go,” I say, ignoring him, “and get some backup. We’re going to need it.”

His mother used to tell him only girls cried, and when he went down to the basement and came back with tears on his face that’s what made him a girl. He never thought so. He always thought it was what those two orderlies did to him sometimes when they stripped him naked that made him a girl, or they thought of him as a girl, he isn’t sure exactly which. But right now he is crying. He’s pulled the car off the road well away from Tate’s neighborhood and he’s holding his hands tightly on his leg and there are tears streaming from his face. He cries not only from the pain but from the frustration. Nothing is working out. He always has to fight for everything in his stupid life and this is going to be no different. Why can’t things just come easily to him like they do to everybody else?

Why can’t people just like him?

His hands are covered in blood. There isn’t anything in the car he can wrap around the wound, and if he takes his pants off to use he would be almost naked. His leg is itchy and too tender to scratch. He lowers his head and stares at the hole, tears dripping into his blood, and he imagines he’s back in his room at the Grove and
he’s pacing the room, counting the footsteps, preferring the even footsteps over the odds, starting with his left and finishing with his right. Then he thinks about the cats, the boys who pissed on him and beat him, then he imagines putting them in the ground and digging them back up, ending their lives the same way they ruined his.

His tears start to slow, and the pressure in his chest from sobbing begins to ease. Strings of snot dangle from his nose and he wipes them with his hands, forgetting about the blood for a second until it streaks across his face. He begins to cry again. Life isn’t fair. It never has been. It never will be.

His leg hurts but it’s not bleeding as much now. His pants are completely soaked in blood. He can’t stay on the side of the road all night. He wipes his hands dry on the passenger seat, starts the engine and drives slowly, but not too slow, not wanting to attract the kind of attention that will get him pulled over. Blood has pooled into his shoe and makes a sucking sound when he presses on the accelerator. The wound is bad, but he knows if it were
that bad
he’d have passed out or died from loss of blood. He has no idea how to treat the wound or take care of it. In the past, cuts that were bad were bandaged for him by one of the nurses or his mother, and since leaving the Grove he’s never needed a doctor or a nurse to take a look at anything. What he needs is his mother, either one of them, but one’s dead and so is the other and he has never felt their loss as much as he feels it now. He truly is alone with nobody to care for him, he’s out of mothers, out of old people, his best friend left him for a girl that isn’t even real, and those at the halfway house never warmed to him the same way ninety-nine percent of everybody else never warms to him.

Including Cooper.

Friendship is such a simple thing for others, but not for him. And he’s being naïve if he thinks Cooper really wants to be his friend. Although Cooper was right about the police.

He begins driving, heading back home, unsure if Cooper will help him, trying desperately to think of another option. Each turn
is painful as he switches from accelerator to brake. There aren’t many people on the streets, not in the suburbs. People don’t go out much at night. He learned not to. At night the last place he ever wanted to be was outside the walls of the halfway house.

He could go to the hospital. He couldn’t go in, but he could get one of the nurses coming out to help him. She wouldn’t want to at first, but he would make her do it. He could hold a gun to her head and she wouldn’t say no. The problem is somebody might see him. The hospital is a public place.

What then?

“Why couldn’t you have helped me?” he says, talking to his second mother. If she had helped him in the beginning, none of this would have happened.

He pulls over and stops the car, thinking, thinking, the only person who would help him is somebody who doesn’t know him already, somebody who hasn’t formed an opinion.

We split into two teams. Schroder lets me come along this time. We head to Eastlake House full of enthusiasm and determination, and the other team heads to Sunnyview Shelter. We know that Adrian Loaner has a gun and therefore armed-offenders units are coming along for the ride. The drive takes us out of town and back past the prison and the fields full of crops and animals but none of it is visible in the dark. There aren’t any streetlights on the motorway, just faded white lines down the center of the road keeping traffic on one side from smacking head-on into traffic on the other. Red and blue swirling lights belt out from the top of the cars, a string of vehicles consistent in their urgency, the lights warning anybody ahead of us to get the hell out of the way.

Schroder is armed and so is everybody else and I’m the only one who isn’t. I’ve never seen him drive so fast and it doesn’t mix well with the headache and nausea I still have. We hit another section of unpaved roads and Schroder barely slows down, not until the roads become a maze. The dirt streets all look the same and the GPS unit on Schroder’s dashboard doesn’t seem to have any better
idea where Eastlake is than we do. In the end all the patrol cars slow down and a bunch of us get out and stand on the side of the road, the flashing lights coloring our skin first red and then blue and then merging to purple. The urgency and frustration is evident in the way everybody starts swearing about how hard it is to find anything out here. One call to the media and we could have followed them. The air is warm and sticky but fresher out here than in town. An entire community of moths, maybe a thousand or more of them, are hanging around in the headlights, the occasional one straying into our faces. We get out maps and bounce out some ideas and finally decide on a direction. Schroder takes the lead again and we sit in silence as he drives, a few minutes later bringing us to a stop a hundred meters from a driveway lined with oak trees. He kills the lights and the other cars line up in single file behind us and do the same. The night goes dark. There is no light pollution out here from the city, and the stars are as clear as you’ll ever get without flying up to greet them. Pale light is thrown out over the fields from a moon that in a few days will be full, there are shapes out in those fields, fence posts and trees and black objects the size of cars that could be just about anything.

“Wait here,” Schroder says.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I mean it. You step out of that car and I’ll shoot you myself.”

“Don’t make me beg. Damn it, Carl, you’re only here because of me.”

“Maybe you’re right. You should put yourself in the line of fire. It’d be worth the paperwork just to get rid of you.”

I watch through the windshield as the armed-offenders unit slowly moves forward, six people dressed in armor as dark as the night, and they fade out of view about ten meters ahead of me. Schroder goes around to the trunk of the car and puts on a bulletproof vest. I get out of the car and he hands one to me. I put my arms through the holes and strap it on tight. Out of the car I can feel the tension in the air, and I’m certainly contributing to what’s feeling like a trigger-happy mood. If there are any scarecrows out in the fields they’re in
danger of being shot. Emma Green is in this building somewhere, she has to be, and if not then she’s in Sunnyview.

I follow the team with Schroder who has his hands tightly on a pistol, but I fall back with each step because of my knee. By the time they reach the driveway, I’m already twenty meters behind and frustrated. The road is hard-packed dirt and the heat of it is coming up through my shoes. The unit ahead splits up, two go left, two go right, and the other two go straight ahead. Schroder waits for me, then we follow the two straight forward at my pace, and come to a stop twenty-five meters back from the door. The building looms up out of the ground, the front of it lit up by the moon, it looks pale white and run-down, the ivy climbing the front of it so black that it looks like strings of holes in the walls. It looks like the sort of place we should have come armed with crucifixes and holy water. There are no cars out front. One of the teams makes it around the back and I can hear a voice coming through Schroder’s earpiece but can’t make it out. He puts his finger against it and listens carefully, cocking his head slightly to the side.

“No cars around the back,” he tells me.

“Doesn’t mean they’re not here,” I say. “Might just mean that Adrian is out and not back yet.”

“Well, if he’s on his way back we’ll get him. We’ve got two units hidden a few blocks back. No way anybody is getting past without getting pulled over.”

The team in the middle reaches the door. One of them stands off to the side, half crouching while pointing his gun ahead as the other person swings a metal battering ram that opens the door quicker than a key and echoes across the fields. Flashlights are switched on and the team disappears. There are loud footsteps as they make their way quickly through the building. I want to join them but Schroder puts his hand on my shoulder.

“Give them time,” he says.

We give them five minutes. The moon reflects off some of the windows but the light seems to be absorbed by others. There are constant updates coming through Schroder’s earpiece. None of the
shapes out in the field move. Flashlights appear in all the windows. We can hear the officers moving around inside. There’s the occasional stuck door being shouldered open, the odd floorboard creaking. Then the scene is clear and we move into the building.

The building seems much bigger than it ought to be up close, and even bigger inside. We step in through the main door. The framework has been splintered from where the team knocked it in. The air is dry and has the texture of dust. We start on the ground floor and make our way upstairs. We take a good look around, there are padded cells that are empty and no basements with thick iron doors and scream rooms. There is leftover furniture abandoned, a few broken windows, but no vandalism, just like Grover Hills. The living arrangements are crowded, small rooms that would take two people and I can’t imagine there was much hope for anybody living out here, and I think about my wife, about her care home, about the room she has all to herself even though she’s not aware of it, and I can’t help but think the people sent here could have done better if they had rooms and care like that. How hard was it for the nurses and doctors to care about people who’d done really bad things? Surely many came here with good hopes but ended up being burned too many times until they just treated everybody like shit.