Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“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.

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 the crime-after that you’re looking for a corpse. He doesn’t know if it’s the same for him.