Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“Can I help you?” he asks.

“Professor Collins?”

“Just like the door says,” he says, smiling and leaning back in his chair. “You’re not a student,” he says, “so you’re either a reporter or a cop. I’m going to go with cop. Am I right? You’re here to ask questions about Cooper Riley? I’ve heard his house burned down this afternoon, and you guys were searching his office an hour ago.”

“Well done, sir,” I say, stepping inside.

“Please, take a seat,” he says, and I sit opposite him, stretching my leg out in front of me. “So, any word on Cooper?”

“None yet. How long have you worked here?”

“Going on fifteen years,” he says.

“You know Cooper well?”

“What do you think happened to him? Do you think he’s going to be okay?”

“We’re looking into it,” I tell him. “Please, anything you can tell me might help.”

“Sure, I knew him well. We have offices next to each other. We’ve both been working here the same amount of time. We both went to each other’s wedding and sometimes we’ll still have dinner together.”

“How long has he been divorced?” I ask, aware these are things that Schroder already knows.

“Hmm, let me think. Three years ago, give or take. His wife moved on, you know. Met somebody else. I heard they met online. Happens all the time these days. It’s an interesting psychological phenomena, really, how people form online relationships to find a connection in the offline world. I’m actually thinking of writing a paper on it.”

“She still around?”

He shakes his head. “Australia, last time I heard, but Cooper never talks about her. Just one day she was in his life, the next day she wasn’t. It’s a shame. They’re both good people, but it didn’t work. It happens that way sometimes,” he says, but he doesn’t follow it up by saying he’s thinking of writing a paper on it. “Cooper took it pretty hard.”

“Can you tell me when he had his accident?”

He looks confused. “Accident? What, a car accident?”

“Not quite.”

“Then what kind of quite?”

“Can you recall a time when he was off work, maybe for a month or so? Quite suddenly? Would have been around three years ago, around the time of his divorce.”

His eyes flick to the left as he tries to recall, then slowly he shakes his head and his mouth turns into an upside-down smile. “Not that I can remember.”

“He wasn’t sick all of a sudden and couldn’t show up?”

“I’m sure he was. It happens to us all at some point. Life does get in the way of work, detective. Why, does his being sick in the past relate to his disappearance now?”

“I’m not sure,” I tell him.

“Try the administration office,” he tells me. “They’ll have all those kind of records there.”

I follow Collins’s directions to a building more modern than the rest, large tinted glass frontages overlooking a concrete fountain that’s currently home and toilet to a dozen pigeons. There’s a foyer that is like a doctor’s waiting room, with students sitting in chairs reading textbooks or magazines while waiting to talk to somebody. The woman behind the desk is in her late forties and has hair pulled tightly back into a bun and glasses that hang around her neck on a thin chain. Her perfume is sharp and I can feel the hint of a hay fever attack lurking. She’s wearing a blouse that has cat fur caught around the buttons.

“How can I help you?” she asks, smiling up at me.

“You know we searched Cooper Riley’s office earlier?” I ask, hoping she’s going to make the same mistake Professor Collins made, and she does.

“Yes, of course. Everybody knows.”

“There’s something else you may be able to help us with,” I tell her. “There was a time when Riley took a month or more off work. Possibly around three years ago. Can you look that up for me?”

She doesn’t answer me. Instead she puts on her glasses and adjusts the distance between the lenses and her eyes as she looks at a computer monitor, then her fingers fly across the keyboard.

“It’ll take a minute,” she says, and about ten seconds later she finds it. “Here we go. You’re right,” she says. “Almost three years ago. April through to May. Five weeks in total.”

“I need to get a look at names and faces of his students from that year.”

“Why?”

“Please, it’s important. We’re trying to save Cooper’s life,” I tell her.

“Is it true his house was burned down?”

“It’s true.”

“There are hundreds of students from three years ago,” she tells me.

I need to check them all for the arsonist, but that can wait till Schroder gets here. “Just the female ones.”

“I guess I can print them out,” she says. “It’ll take an hour, unless you can narrow down who you’re after.”

“What about students who dropped out during the year? Around the same time Professor Riley was off work?”

“Why? You think that means something?”

“Please,” I tell her, “we need to hurry.”

“Hmm. . let me see,” she says. She taps at the keyboard again. “Four female students dropped out during that time.”

“Any of them named Melissa?”

“Melissa? No, none of them.”

“Can I see their photographs?”

She twists the computer monitor toward me and I have to lean over the desk to get a better view, entering her perfume zone in the process. She cycles through the photos. She gets to the third one when I stop her for a better look. The eyes look familiar.

“I remember this girl,” the receptionist says.

“You do?”

“Not so much her, but her parents. They came in here looking for information.”

“What kind of information?”

“Anything that would help them track her down. She went missing. Oh no,” she says, making the connection. “You think the same thing that happened to Emma Green happened to her?” she asks, tapping the monitor.

I don’t think so. I think these two girls ended up with very different fates. I think the girl on the screen might be the woman who attacked the Christchurch Carver and killed Detective Calhoun. This could be the woman that put Professor Riley in hospital three years ago. Her image has been in the papers and all over the news, an image taken from the video I watched yesterday, but that image isn’t the same as the one I’m looking at now. Similar, but not the same, different haircut, different color hair, a little less weight around the face-but it’s the eyes. Those eyes are the same, I’m sure of it.

Cooper Riley would have known it too. He would have seen the news and he would have known who she really was, and he never came forward to the police.

Why would that be? Is he still afraid of her?

Or is there something he’s hiding?

Cooper’s head is much better today, but it’s still throbbing a little and he’s tempted to take the pills he found in his pocket yesterday. The wound on his chest is starting to itch and when he touches it with his fingers they come away damp with blood and something else too, something that’s not quite yellow. If he doesn’t eat something soon he thinks he’s going to go crazy.

He recognizes the girl. Shoulder-length red hair that is knotted and frayed. Her skin is pale and flushed. She can’t be any more than twenty. A student? Perhaps a former one. Even one from this year-there are always so many. Or it could be somebody from the supermarket, a checkout teller, some girl he’s made idle chitchat with while his groceries were scanned before he swiped his credit card. Maybe a hairdresser from the mall, a Jehovah’s Witness who banged on his door one morning, a receptionist at his doctor’s office. He’s seen her around but can’t place where. She’s in a dress that’s too big for her and covered in flowers that, under the lamplight, all look pale blue. It’s something his mother would wear in the summer.