Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“I can find something to remove the glue,” he says, keeping his voice low and calm, no traces of panic, no hint that he desperately wants her to hurry the fuck up. “It won’t be hard, I promise.”

She nods again, and then she looks down at the door. She continues to cradle her injured wrist under her opposite armpit as she works at something with her free hand. There is squeaking as metal is hinged up and down, a dead bolt he assumes. It’s tight, and she has to work it a few times and then bang as it slides open and hits into place. The door opens a crack. He puts his hand on it and pushes, thinking this is too easy, then thinking it ought to be easy when the person holding you captive has the mind of a child.

Ten minutes left.

The door swings open. He steps into the basement. The air is just as cool on this side of the door. She flinches when he wraps his arms around her and holds her tight. “Thank God,” he whispers, and he has the urge to sob into the side of her neck. He pulls back. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, holding her shoulders, but she doesn’t seem to believe him.

“We need to find something to use as a weapon,” he says, and he moves over to the bookcase. He couldn’t get a good look from his cell window, but there is plenty of history on these shelves, including a couple of knives that have come from his house. He picks up the largest one, it’s a dull blade that forty years ago belonged to a man who stabbed his parents, a dull blade that he bought in an auction for just under two hundred dollars. Right now the blade feels priceless. It makes him feel as powerful as the previous owner must have felt. His briefcase is on the floor. He kneels down and pops the catch that does work and opens the lid. Everything inside is messed around. He rakes his fingers through the contents.

The camera is missing.

If it fell out when the briefcase got damaged, if Adrian doesn’t have it. .

This changes everything.

He closes up the case. He picks up the lamp and heads to the steps. Even though he was banging on the door a few minutes ago, he’s desperate to stay as quiet as he can now. In a world well away from this, his house has turned to ash, his life ruined, but nothing could be worse than being stuck down here forever. The basement door will probably be locked, but compared to the cell, even the basement feels like freedom. If it’s locked he’ll just wait on this side of the door until Adrian comes back. He can’t see things playing out any other way than him being forced to kill his captor. He has to. If he doesn’t, he risks too much. He’ll kill Adrian and the police will give him a hard time. The one thing he knows for sure is how eager the police are to get a conviction, no matter what the circumstances are. He’s seen it before. He’s seen them lock away men they’ve known are innocent, and there have been proven instances where they’ve planted evidence to get a conviction.

He’s going to kill Adrian and save this woman’s life and end up going to jail.

He comes to a stop halfway up the staircase.

The police are going to be a problem.

The missing camera an even bigger problem.

He carries on up the stairs. He crouches down and puts his head against the door but can’t hear anything beyond. There are so many possibilities waiting out there.

The girl is two steps behind him. She looks unsure of what’s about to happen.

Ultimately it’s the missing camera that makes his mind up for him. If it’d been in his briefcase, then things could have turned out differently. It’s a shame, because he truly was grateful for the girl’s help.

He still has eight minutes left. That’s plenty of time.

“There’s something I should tell you before I open this door,” he says, “because so far I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

I stand outside Cooper’s office, reading through Melissa’s file while waiting for Schroder. Only it isn’t Melissa X anymore. It’s Natalie Flowers. She was nineteen years old when she became a student at Canterbury University. She was studying here for two years before wanting to get a degree in psychology. She took it for three years before taking criminal psychology, where she entered Cooper Riley’s class. One and a half months after joining his class, she dropped out. At the same time Cooper Riley took five weeks off work. I do the arithmetic. Melissa X in the video I saw would have been around twenty-six years old. She looked a little older, but maybe she has an old soul.

I get tired of waiting in the hall, and my leg is hurting from all the walking, and in the end I decide there’s no harm in waiting in Cooper’s office. I sit down behind the desk. I go through the basics, opening the drawers, going through anything I can find. I keep looking outside, I have a perfect view of the path that leads to the psychology department. I’ll have time to get out when Schroder shows up. I move the mouse and the computer monitor becomes active. There’s a desktop showing an island surrounded by clear water Cooper might have dreamed of visiting. I navigate my way through the files, finding nothing of interest. There isn’t anything personal on it, only work related. I glance over a few of the topics that Cooper is teaching and it’s very dark stuff, the kind of stuff that gives good people bad dreams and bad people good dreams. I look for any mention of Natalie Flowers and there’s none.

I look at the photograph of Natalie taken on the day she enrolled here, I try to imagine what kind of thoughts she had back then, I wonder if she knew the person she would become, or if the Natalie back then was a completely different person. I imagine her sitting in front of the camera just as Emma Green would years later, each of them with smiles on their faces, a click of the shutter, a flash going off, a say cheese and then a next please as the photographer ushered them through, their image stored onto a. .

Memory card!

Jesus, I’d completely forgotten!

I reach into my pocket, and there it is, the card I took from the camera in Cooper’s driveway. I slot it into the computer and it grumbles for a few seconds trying to read it. If we’re lucky, he has a photo of the man who took him. Or there’ll be a location, or at least something we can use to track him down. A new icon appears and I click on it to open the files, and it goes about the process slowly. I click on the first one and it takes about ten seconds to open, the computer drawing the image from the top, the rest of it coming into view an inch at a time. The second image opens much quicker as the computer gets into the swing of things. There are just the two images, and I flick back and forth between them until the door opens and Schroder steps inside.

“Jesus, Tate, how the hell did you get in here?”

“Emma Green,” I say, pushing my chair back from the computer. Despite the heat of the office, my skin has gone clammy and my spine feels chilled. “Jesus, Carl,” I say, my mouth dry. “I think Emma Green is still alive.”

“Look, Tate, you can’t. .”

“For once, Carl, just shut up,” I say, and he does. “Take a look,” I say, and I nod toward the computer. He comes around the desk and I watch him as he looks at the photographs, the only sound in the office is the computer fan whirring and the occasional click of a mouse button. There is laughter and yelling from outside, students at work. Schroder’s sleeves are rolled up and he’s leaning forward with his hands on the desk and I can see goose bumps littering his forearms. He’s slowly shaking his head and I’m slowly doing the same thing. I stand up and Schroder takes the chair. I move to the window and stare out at the students in the sun below, all of them hovering a year or two either side of twenty years old with so much to learn, but there are things in the real world I pray they never have to see. The saying goes that a picture tells a thousand words. Looking at them, it couldn’t be more true. What they don’t tell us is an ending.