Collecting Cooper (44 page)

So where? Where in the hell is their torture chamber? And if it’s in a house, why not live there? Why bring the souvenirs back here?

Because this is their home. Maybe this is closer to where they work. And they needed the souvenirs here for when they’re not visiting their other place.

I go back through everything. I go through their address book. I stop on a name I recognize. Edward Hunter. It was his father who was stabbed in jail. Edward was in jail too, but not till a few days after that. Edward was sentenced for killing two men. His father Jack was sentenced twenty years ago for killing eleven prostitutes. Are they related to Ellis and Murray? Is there a family trait that makes these men want to hurt people?

I go through the rest of the address book. I head out to the car in the garage and check for a GPS unit in case there’s a location plotted on it, but there’s only a map and the map doesn’t have any circles or crosses scrawled across it. I go through files and boxes of bills. I find tax statements but only for this address. If they own property somewhere else there’s no record of it here. If they’re paying for power for another house, the bills are getting sent to that address.

There’s a Scream Room somewhere, it could be a cabin in the woods, it could be a house with a soundproof basement, but nothing in this house tells me where.

It has to be somewhere. It’s who they are. A Scream Room is what makes them tick.

And I’m wondering if Edward Hunter might have an idea where that is.

I’m suddenly hit by a wall of exhaustion. It’s almost six-thirty and it’s daylight by the time I leave the Hunter house. It’s a slow drive home, not because of traffic—the roads are empty—but because fatigue is trying to convince me that nothing would feel better right now than driving into a lamppost and falling asleep.

There are patrol cars and crime scene tape outside of my house and I completely forgot that I wasn’t supposed to return. I switch cars, getting back into the rental, then drive to the nearest motel I can find, a place that looks okay in the dim early-morning light, and I figure since only two of the neon letters in the word
vacancy
are busted it can’t be that bad a place. The clerk behind the desk is asleep when I step through the doors but he snaps to attention pretty quick. He swipes my credit card and five minutes later I’m in a room that smells of furniture polish. I phone home and check my messages, of which there are four. One from my parents, the other three from Donovan Green. He tells me he’s been trying to get hold of me all night but the cell phone he gave me is switched off. I figure Schroder is asleep, so rather than waking him on his cell phone, I call the police station and leave a message for him. I give him the Hunter address and a brief rundown of what he’ll find. I also tell him to send somebody to check on Jesse Cartman. I don’t call Donovan Green.

I set my alarm for eight o’clock, which is a little over an hour away. I don’t bother getting undressed. I just take off my shoes and lie down and stare at the ceiling and think about what Emma Green is doing right now.

The sunrise is something he’d like to see again. Hopefully next time it won’t be when he’s in so much pain. He napped a little during it, and a lot before it, the previous hours disappearing into a haze of dreams in which he saw his mother and his other mother, in which he even saw his father before his father disappeared from his life when Adrian was still in primary school, walking out on the family the way some men do when they’re offered simpler lives with their secretary.

He saw the good part of the sunrise. The sky lightened and for a while the sun seemed to refuse to appear, something holding it back, some entity wanting this day born into darkness. Then the tip of it broke the horizon, coming up out of the fields that trailed out as far as he could see, pouring golden light into the morning, an instant warmth, the world waking up around it. It slipped quickly into view then, the thing holding it earlier now shoving it forward, then it was angling upward, creating long shadows through the trees. He napped again a little afterward but never really fell asleep, his itching leg keeping him from drifting off completely.

The sun is up over the trees and the shadows are shorter but
not by much when he goes back inside, his leg still sore to walk on but better since he rubbed the cream into it. The piece of medical padding he held over it has stuck to the wound and when he tugs at it there’s a tearing sound and a lot of pain to go along with it, so he stops tugging. Somehow he’s going to have to remove it and re-dress it and somehow it needs to heal. He can’t lose his leg. He rummages back around in the medicine cabinet hoping he’ll find something in the daylight that hid from him in the dark, but there’s nothing. He doesn’t understand what half of it is for, and there’s a pair of false teeth on one of the shelves that looks very creepy with dots of mold and fuzz around the gums. He guesses he’ll have to drive into town at some point today and pick up some supplies. There’s some food in the fridge, some from his mother, some from the Twins, but not enough to get them all through the next few days, but it’s fantastic having a fridge with power. There’s a reality slowly kicking in, and that reality tells him he can’t afford to keep too many parts of the collection at the same time. He’ll have to take care of Cooper’s mum and the girl today too. And it’s not such a bad thing he wasn’t able to get Theodore Tate.

He puts on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and pads barefoot into the kitchen. There is orange juice in the fridge that he brought from the Twins’ house, along with some fresh eggs and bread from his mother’s house that isn’t as fresh now. There were already a few food items out here, but mostly junk food, like bags of chips and a fizzy drink of the kind he was never allowed to drink growing up and doesn’t want to drink now. He pours himself some orange juice and puts some bread in the toaster and puts on a pair of shorts while waiting for his toast to pop. He sits at the kitchen table and reads the newspaper he gave to Cooper yesterday. He learns the name of the girl he found last night. Emma Green. He reads an article about capital punishment, about the rights and wrongs of it, agreeing with both sides. The Twins deserved to die for what they did to people, but Adrian doesn’t deserve to die for what he did to the Twins. And if he did, then wouldn’t the people who carried out those executions on prisoners, wouldn’t they be killers too, and
then wouldn’t they get arrested and go to jail and be next in line for the electric chair? Did New Zealand even have an electric chair? He isn’t sure when they got rid of the death penalty in New Zealand, or if they even had it, and, if they did, how did they use to do it? Probably a firing squad. Not all killers are monsters. Some have their reasons.

He pours a second glass of juice and tucks the Taser into his pocket and grabs hold of the gun and opens up the bedroom door where Emma Green is tied to a bed similar to the one he slept in. He thinks this one was perhaps the master bedroom for whoever the Twins killed out here before taking it over. The furniture is old-fashioned with lots of curves and engravings, and the bedspread has lots of flower patterns over it. The window is open and the air is warm and the girl is fast asleep and he stands motionless staring at her. He wants to smell her hair and use his finger to stroke it from her face. After a few minutes she starts to stir as if sensing him. Her eyes flutter open and fix on him. She pulls back in horror.

“I’m the one who found you,” he says, “and helped you. See, I have something for you to drink.”

“What . . . what do you—” she says, then starts to cough. Her body tightens as she tries to cover her mouth with her hand but her hands are tied up around the headboard. “Do you, you, want?” she asks.

She’s naked, but last night when he tied her to the bed he draped a sheet over her. He realizes now that she thinks he’s the one who took her. Didn’t she see Cooper?

“Please, I’m not the one who abducted you,” he says. “I’m trying to help you.” He steps toward the bed and she has no more room to pull back from him. He holds the glass out toward her. “I want you to drink this,” he says. “I want you to feel better.”

Before she can answer, he tips the drink toward her mouth. She gulps it down eagerly.

“Don’t you remember me?” he asks, while she’s still drinking. “I helped you. I put you into the bath and helped cool you down and gave you water and took the duct tape off your eyes.”

He pulls the glass away. She slowly nods. Her lips are wet with juice and there are drops on her chin. He’ll have to pick up some more glue when he’s getting supplies today.

“I remember,” she says. “You put me in the trunk of a car against something that smelled dead,” she says, “but if you didn’t take me, why do you have me tied up?”

“It’s complicated,” he says, and it always is. “I’m the man trying to help you,” he says, which isn’t exactly a lie. He wants to help her get better so he can give her to Cooper.

“But you kidnapped me,” she says.

“No, I found you,” he says.

“Then why tie me up?”

“It’s complicated,” he says again, and he likes this answer. He’ll use it on Cooper too when Cooper starts asking him things he doesn’t want to talk about.

“If you didn’t kidnap me,” she says, “then can you untie me? And I need food too—I haven’t eaten in days.”

“I’m going to untie you,” he says, “and give you some food, but first you need to understand that there’s no way you can understand what’s going on here. If you help me I can help you, and then you can eat and I can take you home,” he says, and the first part is true but the second part isn’t, and he can feel himself blush. He hates lying to somebody so . . . so pretty.

“Help you?” she asks. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

“I’m hurt,” he says, and he looks down at his leg. With the gun still in his hand, he tries to roll up the leg of his shorts but the Taser in his pocket stops him. He takes it out and rests it on the chest of drawers behind him where it is well out of Emma Green’s reach. Then he rolls his shorts up to reveal the medical padding. “I was shot last night and there’s an infection and I need you to clean it and bandage it.”

“I’m not a nurse,” she says.

“But you’re a woman,” he says, and in his experience all women seem to know what to do. “Please, help me with my wound and I’ll let you go.”

“How do I know you’re not lying?”

“I don’t lie,” he says, lying and feeling bad about it.

“So what exactly do you want me to do?”

“Clean the wound and bandage it. I want you to make me feel better.”

“And for that you’ll let me go.”

“Of course.”

“You promise?”

“On my mother’s life.”

“Then you’ll need to untie me.”

“I have a gun,” he says, waving it back and forth slightly even though surely she’s seen it by now. “If you try to escape I’ll shoot you. Please, don’t make me do that, it really is the last thing I want to do,” he says, and this time the entire statement is true.

“Where’s the first-aid kit?”

“There are some things in the bathroom,” he says, “but I don’t know what everything is and most of it is old anyway.”

“Then untie me and bring everything you have back in here.”

“No. I’ll get everything first and then untie you.”

He heads back into the bathroom. He stares at the mirror. The rash is still there with the same intensity, but he’s no longer flushed—if anything he looks very pale. Like a ghost. He scoops everything into a plastic bag and carries it back into the room. He returns to the bathroom and fills a bucket with warm water and finds some cotton balls and a couple of clean cloths.

“It will be easier if you take your shorts off,” the girl says.

“Ah . . . I don’t know. I think it’ll be okay,” he answers, remembering the time he vomited on the prostitute.

“They’re going to keep getting in the way.”

“It’s just that . . . that . . .” he doesn’t know how to finish. He’s never taken his pants off around a woman before, except for last night when Cooper’s mother helped him, but she was more like a mother and less like a woman and that’s a big difference. “The shorts stay on.”

“Okay. It’s your decision. You need to untie me.”

“I know.”

“And I’d like another drink.”

“When we’re done.”

“You promise you’re going to let me go?”

“You sound like you don’t believe me.”

“I do believe you,” she says. “After all, you saved me from whoever took me, and for that I’m thankful.”

Adrian smiles. He likes her.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Adrian,” he tells her. He had never planned on telling her his name, and can’t believe how quickly he’s told her now.

“I really like your name, Adrian.”

“You do?”

“Of course,” she says, smiling at him, and wow, what a smile! He can feel his heart beating. “It reminds me of classic romance novels.”

“It does?”

“Sure it does,” she says. “Adrian . . .”

“Yes?”

“Oh, nothing. I was just saying your name. I like it.”

He’s pleased that she likes it. It makes him feel . . . warm inside.

“My name is Emma,” she tells him. “Emma Green. I’m glad you’re going to take me home, Adrian, because my family will be worried about me. My mum especially. I can imagine she will be crying a lot, and so will my dad, and I have a brother too. My mum has cancer,” she tells him, “and is dying.”

“Does she really have cancer?” he asks.

“Of course she does. I wouldn’t make up something like that.”

“Do you read books about serial killers?” he asks, then adds “or books about psychology?”

“What? No, no, never. Why?”

“No reason,” he tells her, and he’s suspicious that she’s trying to relate to him. She’s using his name a lot, and the story about the mum with cancer is supposed to make him feel sympathetic . . . that’s what he read in the books about serial killers, but if she
doesn’t read those books, then she wouldn’t know to say these things. She’s not trying to trick him—she’s a nice person. Hanging around with people who aren’t nice is making him look for things that aren’t nice in nice people.