Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

There have been no unusual visitors to the flat, no maintenance men or gardeners or a creepy landlord, no strange phone calls, nobody hanging around outside. The flatmate lets me look through Emma’s room about twelve hours after the police already have, and everything is out of place from this morning’s search and anything they found relevant taken away. I spend an hour at the flat with my questions and leave feeling more frustrated than when I arrived.

I get home just before nine o’clock. It’s been a long day, and one that started with me waking up in jail. There are kids out in the street racing on skateboards, some throwing a football, others playing a game of tag. The sun is moments away from sliding off the edge of the horizon, but at the moment it’s reflecting brightly off the windows, a blistering orange ball of fire trying to melt the glass. It’s the first time in four months I’ve seen the sun sink from view, and the sight has never looked so fantastic. For four months day and night were brought in with the flick of a switch. It’s hard to imagine that tomorrow I’ll be waking up in my own bed. Hard to imagine Emma Green can see the sunset. It’s the perfect evening for a beer but I’ve made a promise never to touch another beer again.

I stay outside until the sun is completely gone and I can no longer hear the kids in the street. The temperature drops down to a more livable seventy degrees. I watch the late-night news and there’s no mention of Emma Green, no mention of Melissa, but the news is no different from the news I was watching before being shut away for four months-bad people doing bad things to good people all across the city, across the country, all across the world. The news becomes blurry as my eyelids become heavier. There’s a brief mention of the fire Schroder attended today. The victim peeled from the floor was a nurse by the name of Pamela Deans. It shows a picture of Pamela in a nurse’s uniform. It makes me think about Melissa for a moment, but all her victims have been men and the fire doesn’t fit. The picture has to be at least a few years old and in it she looks around fifty, hair streaked black and gray pulled tightly in a bun, perhaps her downcast smile is a result of her extra chin weighing down on her lips.

I make some coffee and go back through the file Schroder gave me. I call Schroder for an update but his phone goes through to voice mail. I leave a message. Some of the facts in Emma’s folder are things I learned about her last year when I ran into her life. Her birthday was the day after I ran into her with my car. She’ll be eighteen this year and has an older brother, Jason, living in Australia. She has blond hair and hazel eyes and a look that would have men watching her anywhere she went. It could be that look that got her abducted.

My cell phone rings and I’m hoping it’s Schroder, but it’s Donovan Green. He’s wanting an update. I tell him I’ve spoken to the boyfriend and her boss and her flatmate and I’m going to speak to some of her classmates in the morning. I tell him there will be many who won’t want to speak to me, and he tells me to remind them why I’m there-to help find Emma. He reminds me in an almost pleading way why he’s come to me. I don’t tell him about the blood and hair. I hang up and a minute later Schroder calls.

“We’re working on something,” he says. “We got a report of a car speeding away from the café just after Emma finished work. Another driver had to slam on his brakes to avoid a collision.”

“He get a plate?”

“He got the first two letters. Said if he’d gotten the rest, he’d have reported the guy for reckless driving yesterday. He said he forgot about it, then Emma’s case made the news tonight, and he thought it might be relevant. He said it was a red four-door sedan, maybe five years old. Couldn’t pin him down on any other details. You saw the dumpster?”

“Yeah. Red paint. But if he sped away from the scene, where’s Emma’s car?”

“That’s the key question. You take another look at the Melissa file?”

“Not yet. I’m going to talk to some of Emma’s classmates,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I figured you would. You still think you can do a better job.”

“It’s not that. .”

“I know, I know,” he says. “I didn’t mean it like that. Hell, maybe you can do a better job. There could be something to what you said earlier.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Or I’m just frustrated and tired, that’s all. The fact is you do have a good insight and one that can save lives,” he says before hanging up, and I hope he’s right, I hope that we can balance the scales of this city a little by finding Emma Green alive.

Cooper has to be careful with Adrian’s questions: What made you interested in serial killers? What made you want to become one? His instinct is to say he isn’t a serial killer, but instead he has to play the game. He didn’t set the rules, but he can follow them. Already he has made wrong assumptions. He thought Adrian had been the one to sell him the thumb, but that’s clearly not the case. The thumb is a coincidence in a day full of random shit. The basement is getting cooler. It’s too dark to see if there’s damp or mold, but he can sense it there, growing in and around the concrete blocks, leeching the warmth from his body. He’d rather freeze to death than wrap the sheet laying on top of the mattress around himself. He takes a deep breath and plunges into the delusion, answering the question with one of his own. “Do you know how many women I’ve killed?”

Adrian, smiling now because he is being drawn into the conversation, smiling because he’s getting everything he wants, raises up two fingers, and then says “Two,” confirming it. “Plus the man who owns the thumb. That’s three in total that I know of. Are there more?”

Be careful. And be believable. Just what is a good number to start with?

Christ, it’s like bidding in one of the auctions. Ten is way too many, but he likes the idea of going higher than three because it will give Adrian the feeling of being drawn into a secret. He settles on five.

“Six,” he says, changing his mind at the last moment. “Four women and two men,” he says.

Just hope he doesn’t ask you to name them.

Making up the names won’t be the problem, no, the problem will be remembering them. He struggles enough as it is to remember somebody’s name when he’s introduced to them. What he’ll do is go with some of his students. Surely Adrian wouldn’t recognize the names. He pushes forward, hoping to get past that. “I enjoyed the women,” he says, “but the men were necessities.”

“Why?”

“One of them was a boyfriend of one of the women who was in the way,” Cooper says, then pauses. It sounds unbelievable to himself and surely to Adrian too, and he waits to be called a liar, and when it doesn’t happen, he carries on. “And the other one owed me money.”

“And the thumb belongs to one of them?”

“Yes. The one who owed me money,” he answers, wishing he’d gone with four people. Or just the two Adrian said in the beginning. Wait-three-because of the thumb in the jar. This is going to be harder than he thought. He can feel those two-to-one odds tugging in the wrong direction.

“What did you use to cut off the thumb?” Adrian asks, stepping closer to the window. “Who was he? Why did he owe you money?”

Shit. Cooper can see this quickly getting away from him. “He was a friend of mine,” he says, “and I lent him some money a few years ago, but then he refused to pay it back,” he says, and he has lent money to friends before and every one of them has always paid him back and there was no need to remove any thumbs. “So I strangled him, and I used a knife to cut off his thumb, and I buried his body.”