Collecting Cooper Read online

  “I’ve missed you,” I tell her, and I hope that she’s missed me when the reality is she doesn’t even know I’ve been gone and doesn’t even know I’m here now. My wife is a sponge that absorbs the words but can’t do anything with them. “And I’m sorry,” I add.

  I check the cell phone on the way back into town and it’s connected to the network. I punch in Schroder’s number and the line is clear.

  “What can you tell me about Emma Green?” I ask.

  “The girl from the accident? Why would you ask that, Tate?”

  “You didn’t tell me she’s missing.”

  “It’s not my case, and as it stands we don’t know that she’s missing.”

  “Yeah you do. She’s been gone almost two days and that makes her missing, only you’re hoping she’s taken off somewhere with a boyfriend, right?”

  “Like I said, Tate, it’s not my case. Why are you asking about her?”

  “Her father came to see me.”

  “Oh, Jesus, don’t tell me he tried to hire you to find her.”

  “No.”

  “No he didn’t try and you offered? Or no he didn’t hire you and you’re doing this for free? Which is it?”

  “A bit of both.”

  “Jesus, Tate, you’re not even a licensed investigator anymore.”

  “Like I said, he didn’t hire me. I’m not doing this in a professional capacity.”

  “You can’t do this in any capacity.”

  “That didn’t stop you from asking for my help this morning.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Yeah? You really think so?” I ask.

  “Look, Tate, we’re looking into her disappearance. We really are. We’ve got people at her work right now taking a look around. Nobody thinks she’s run away. We’re sure something bad happened to her. Nobody knows a damn thing. She just vanished. But people go missing every day in this city. We’ve got boxes and boxes of files of people we just can’t find, but we’re looking, we truly are.”

  “And no leads?”

  “If we had leads then her father wouldn’t have contacted you so fast.”

  “So what do you think? You think she’s dead?”

  “I hope not.”

  “That’s not much of an answer, Carl.”

  “Let it go, Tate.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why? Because you hurt her last year? You’ve paid your debt, Tate, you don’t owe her or her dad anything.”

  “Is that really what you think?”

  “It’s really what I think,” he says.

  “I don’t believe you. You’d be doing the same thing if you were in my shoes.”

  “Look, Tate, I get why you’re feeling this way, I do, I really do, but it’s a bad idea.”

  “It can’t hurt if I at least try.”

  “Come on, how can you say that?”

  “It’ll be different this time.”

  “Yeah? How’s that? You’re going to find the guy and let him live?”

  “That was an accident,” I say. He’s referring to the Burial Killer I caught last year. There was a fight in the cemetery where I caught him. He was digging up coffins, pulling out the occupants and replacing them with his victims. The original occupants he was dumping into the small lake nearby. During the fight we both ended up in an empty grave and the knife we were fighting with ended up inside of him. If you wanted to put a label on it, you could say it was a deliberate accident. “Come on, you know I’m going to do this anyway. Give me a copy of the file. Think of it this way-the more I know to begin with, the less people I’m going to upset along the way. That has to be good for everybody, right, including you.”

  “Goddamn it, Tate,” he says. “You have some strange logic in your world.”

  “But it works.”

  “Look, I gotta go,” he says.

  “The file?”

  “I’ll think about it,” he says, and breaks the connection.

  The first person I want to talk to is Emma Green’s boyfriend. They weren’t living together, not yet, but according to her dad it was only a matter of time. Donovan Green isn’t a fan of the boyfriend, but only in the same way I wasn’t going to be a fan of my daughter’s first boyfriend when she was old enough to start dating. The boyfriend’s name is Rodney and he’s the same age as Emma and still lives with his parents. Donovan Green gave me the boy’s address, and I drive to his house and he’s home because he’s taken today off because of Emma’s disappearance. The house is a single-story A-frame from the seventies, the roof steep enough to slide down and break the sound barrier along the way before breaking your neck. The front yard is brown grass with lots of bare patches and a large pine tree in the middle of it all, big roots breaking out of the ground and sucking the moisture from all the nearby plants. The bell on the front door rings loudly and there are some shuffling sounds on the other side of the wooden door before a woman with almost white hair swings it open. She’s wearing a pair of shorts and a cream blouse and looks about as tired as the big pine tree out front. She adjusts her glasses and smiles at me and I tell her hello, and when she answers it’s obvious the woman is deaf, and I’m sure we’re not far away from a time where deaf will be considered an insult, and we start going with hearing impaired. She says hello and talks exactly the way people talk when they don’t know how they sound. I speak slowly and ask to speak to Rodney and she holds her finger up and taps her watch, telling me she’ll either be one minute or one hour and then disappears. Rodney comes to the door thirty seconds later. He’s a skinny kid with beer-colored eyes and black hair and his cheeks are flushed from the heat. He’s wearing jeans and his T-shirt is salmon pink and he looks well fed and tidy and not on drugs or wearing any dark eyeliner, and therefore I have no reason to immediately hate him. Except for the T-shirt, which hurts my eyes.

  “I’m Rodney,” he says. “You’re here about Emma?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What are you? A reporter? I’m sick of reporters. I swear to God if you’re a reporter I’m going to kick your ass.”

  I suddenly like him even more. “Her dad hired me. I’m a private investigator.”

  “He hired you to talk to me? Why? He thinks I had something to do with her going missing?” he asks, his voice starting to raise. His right hand grips the door frame as if he has to stop himself from lunging at me.

  “So you’re confident that’s what she is? Missing? That she hasn’t gone away for a few days?”

  “Emma’s not like that. I recognize you, you know,” he says, “but I can’t tell where from.”

  “I have one of those faces,” I answer. “And her dad doesn’t think you’ve done anything to hurt her. I’m here to help, to try and get her back.”

  He relaxes his grip on the doorframe. “Is she dead?” he asks, and his question is so genuine that it really seems he has no idea one way or the other, but I’ve been fooled by grieving boyfriends before.

  “Can I come in?”

  “You didn’t answer the question.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you think so.”

  “I hope not,” I say, giving Schroder’s answer from before.

  “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Theo.”

  “Theodore Tate?”

  “Yeah,” I say, and for a second I look down.

  “The man who. .”

  “That’s why I’m here,” I say. “It’s why her dad came to me. He knows I’m going to do what it takes to find her. That gives you two options. You can stand there and be pissed at me like you deserve to be before closing the door, or you can answer my questions and help me find Emma before it’s too late. What’s it going to be?”

  He leads me inside to a living room that nobody could come to an agreement on how to decorate. I sit down in a chair that tries to swallow me. Rodney’s mother carries out a tray with a teapot on it and three cups. She sits on the couch next to Rodney and pours me a cup, then points to
the milk. I can’t stand tea and nod at the milk figuring it will help dilute the problem. There’s a light on the wall above the door that I figure must flash when somebody rings the doorbell. The mother signs something to Rodney, and he signs something back, and I feel like an outsider.

  “Mum recognizes you too,” he says.

  He doesn’t say it in an accusing tone and his mother doesn’t sign it in any aggressive way. I don’t apologize because it’s not why I’m here. His mum nods, not hearing us but knowing what’s being said. I look at her. “I’m here to find her,” I say, and she nods and smiles.

  I turn back to Rodney. “How long have you been dating Emma?”

  “About four months.”

  “How’d you meet?”

  “School. I’ve known her for years. She was off from school last year for some time because of-well, you know why, and when she came back we just kind of started talking. I was in an accident when I was a kid and Mum got pretty hurt and Dad didn’t make it, and we spoke about her accident and my accident and we found out how we were both going to university this year, and then we found out we were both taking psychology. We’re in the same psych class. It’s weird. I mean, I’ve always seen her around at school, just never, you know, just never thought she was my type.”

  “Your type?”

  “Yeah. Any girl who talks to me is my type, which pretty much narrowed it down to Emma and nobody else in the world.”

  “You share many classes with her now?”

  “Just psychology.”

  “Anybody at university giving her a hard time? Anybody creeping her out?”

  “Not that she mentioned, and I think she would have. We haven’t been there long yet-I mean, this is only our second week of the term. Plus a bunch of classes have been canceled because some of the students have been passing out from the heat.”

  “You sure nobody was making her uncomfortable?” I ask.

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Did you see her on the day she disappeared?”

  He shakes his head. His mother has made him a cup of tea and placed it on the coffee table ahead of him and he stares at it untouched, as if he’s too scared to drink in case Emma’s fortune is at the bottom and the news is bad. “Sunday night I went around to her flat and we hung out for a few hours.”

  “Hung out?”

  “Yeah,” he says, and he finally picks up the cup of tea. He holds it in front of his mouth but still doesn’t drink from it, but it shields his lips so his mum can’t see what he’s saying. “Hung out,” he says. “In her bedroom.” He takes a sip and puts the cup down. His mum looks over at me, smiles, and rolls her eyes. I smile back. “I got home about eleven,” he says, “then went to class the following morning only to find class was canceled because of the heat. We swapped a few texts during the day and she had to go to work, then that was it. We weren’t planning on meeting up Monday night at all. Yesterday she wasn’t answering my calls so I spoke to her flatmate who thought Emma was with me. Her boss was calling, looking for her too. I knew it was weird and I was worried, but not worried enough to call the police because bad things like that only happen to other people, right?”

  “If only that were true,” I say.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know that then. So I called her parents. Then they rang everybody they knew and then the police and the police don’t even think anything bad has happened.”

  I don’t tell him that’s not the case.

  “Was she enjoying her job?” I ask.

  “Who enjoys their job?”

  “What about any old boyfriends?”

  “I’m her first boyfriend,” he says.

  I take a sip of the tea trying to be polite. It tastes exactly how I knew it would. The mother smiles at me and nobody says or signs anything for about ten seconds and in that time I try to get a read on Rodney, knowing full well my reads in the past have been way off the mark. Could this kid have killed Emma and dumped her somewhere?

  “She could still be okay, right?” he asks. “I mean, if something bad happened and somebody hurt her, she could still be okay. She could still be alive.”

  “Absolutely,” I say, unable to tell him what both Schroder and I suspect-that Emma Green is dead somewhere, and the devastation Rodney is already feeling is only going to get worse.

  chapter ten

  The cell has been plunged into complete darkness. The shoe in his hand has gotten warm from the last few minutes of continuous banging against the door. Adrian isn’t coming back. Yelling at the man was a mistake, he knew it when it was happening but he couldn’t stop himself, it was a rush of blood to the head, some animal instinct that told him to lash out and ignore the voice inside telling him to shut up, stay calm, and be smart. Or maybe that voice couldn’t be heard over the still pounding headache. If he wants any chance of getting out of here alive, he has to keep his emotion in check. He has to listen to that voice.

  In the dark, the cell feels colder, and his breathing is louder, ragged breaths that make his head spin. He leans against the door and slips his shoe back on before following the wall back to the bed, the concrete feeling damp, his feet dragging over the floor. He sits down and waits for his eyes to adjust, but they don’t. The only light coming downstairs is what sneaks through the edges of the door upstairs, and it doesn’t sneak far, enough to see part of the top step but nothing more. The bed squeaks and he puts the pillow between his back and the wall and leans against it, hooks his legs up in front of him, and rests with his wrists hanging over his knees and thinks about Adrian.

  Come on, every time somebody gets murdered in this city you create a profile of the killer and compare it to the newspapers once he’s caught. It’s like a game, and Christchurch has given you plenty of practice. This is the same-if you want to get out of here you have to start by building up a profile.

  He has to play the game.

  Over the years, his profiles have helped identify a suspect, have narrowed down the kind of person doing the killing. In this case it’s to identify what the suspect wants, how to make him think he’s going to get it, and how to escape this bloody cell. If he had his notepad here, he’d write Completely loony at the top of the page and draw a ring around it so many times the pen would chew through the pages. In fact, thinking about it, Adrian is so completely loony that if he had his notepad, Cooper would also write and underline the words Mental Patient / ex mental patient?

  Mental issues aren’t such a bad thing. In fact, given the choice, he’d rather be captive to somebody like Adrian over a cold-blooded, calculated killer. Being deranged makes Adrian unpredictable and dangerous, but there’s a flip side to that, it gives Cooper more room to try and play him, to gain his trust and talk his way out of this cell. If it were simply a case of being smarter than Adrian, then he’d already have gotten out of here. That means he has to rely on luck too, and unfortunately Cooper’s never really been one for having much luck. Today is a perfect example of that. He’s dealt with some seriously deranged people over the years, and no matter how smart they are or he is, you have to take common sense out of the equation and replace it with luck, and without that, he’s going to die down here-or worse, he’ll manage to live down here for twenty years. He imagines Adrian being excited about bringing food and water down every day, then imagines Adrian becoming tired of that, of bringing down supplies less and less because the novelty of having a serial killer has worn off. Well, the novelty of starving to death will sure as hell wear off fast. The stomach pains, the dehydration-there’s no point in thinking about it.

  Instead he focuses on Adrian-that’s what is going to get him out of here-which leads him in a circle, because immediately he imagines Adrian going out one day and getting arrested for something, or being hit by a truck, or having a heart attack or getting shot shopping for milk, then nobody ever knowing where Cooper is, starving down here in the cold and dark and suffocating in his own stench. Kidnapping cases normally have a twenty-four-hour window in which to solve t
he crime-after that you’re looking for a corpse. He doesn’t know if it’s the same for him.

  “Jesus,” he whispers. “A collection,” he says, “I’m part of a goddamn collection.”

  If he did have his notepad, he’d tear it up right now. Everything he’s read, everything he’s learned and taught over the years, it all turns into a blur, the texts and references hit by a tornado in his brain, scattering all the relevant data too fast to hang on to, and even if he could hang on to it, he doubts there’d be anything there to help. He stands and moves over to the door. He lifts his fists back and is ready to start banging on the door, punching at it, wanting to vent the frustration, but somehow, somehow, he keeps it in check. He thinks he can smell the sandwich in the next room, but he knows it’s unlikely. He picked the worst day to skip breakfast. Even if the food wasn’t all over the floor, even if he could reach it, he isn’t that sure he would touch it. He figures he can go twenty-four hours without food. People do that all the time. People in other countries last days without anything. Homeless people seem to make do.

  His stomach starts to rumble. He has to get a grip on his surroundings and, more important, get a grip on the man who has him locked down here. In the basement. Of a house. As an exhibit. In wonderland.

  Questions start coming out of the tornado. He begins plucking them out of the air. Is Adrian the only person who will see this collection? Or is he more a zookeeper, and others will come to look? Are the police looking for him, does anybody know yet he’s missing? Who is Adrian, what has he done in the past, have others died in this room? What of those others, did they admit to being serial killers in the hope of gaining Adrian’s trust, or deny it?