Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“We need to search the office again,” I say, still looking out the window. There’s a couple of students beneath a tree making out in the shade for everybody to see. They notice others are watching and start to get into it more, putting on a show. I want to throw a bucket of cold water over them.

“We’ve already searched it,” Schroder says.

“Yeah, but you were looking to see what happened to Cooper. You were looking at him as a victim.”

“And not a suspect,” he says. “Where the hell did you get these?” he asks.

“They were on a memory card. I found it at Cooper’s house.”

“Jesus Christ, Tate. You didn’t think of mentioning this earlier?”

“Actually, Carl, no, I didn’t. I forgot I had the damn thing,” I say, snapping. “Why the hell do you always have to assume the worst?”

He doesn’t answer.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, and then I tell him how I found the card. “And if I hadn’t been there on time, it would have gotten destroyed like everything else and you wouldn’t have those,” I say, nodding toward the computer where there are images of Emma Green lying on a floor with her hands tied behind her. In one photo she’s wearing the clothes she went missing in, in the next she isn’t wearing anything. She has duct tape over her eyes and none over her mouth. “You wouldn’t even know there was a connection.”

“We don’t know that she’s still alive,” he says.

“And we have no reason to suspect otherwise. What if Cooper was interrupted? What if he was planning on going back?”

“Back? You don’t think these were taken at his house?”

I shake my head. “I doubt it. She’s not gagged. These were taken where nobody could hear her scream.”

“We’ll know soon enough if there were any bodies in the fire.”

“Listen, Carl, there’s another connection too.”

“With who?” he asks. I hand him over the file. “Natalie Flowers,” he says, looking at the picture. “Who is she, another of Riley’s students?”

“She was.”

“Was? What happened, she go missing too?”

“In a sense.”

“You want to be more specific?”

“Take a closer look at the photo.”

He does, but he still doesn’t get it. “What am I looking at here? You think Riley took her too?”

“I think so. Only things didn’t go the way they did with Emma Green. You don’t recognize her?”

“Should I?”

“Yes.”

“Well, stop playing around,” he says, “and just tell me what you want to tell me.”

So I tell him. What color had managed to return since first seeing the photographs of Emma drains out of his face. He takes a closer look at the picture and slowly starts nodding. I explain about the Professor Mono comment, about Riley being off work three years ago on sick leave the same time his wife left him, the same time Natalie Flowers went missing. I explain the chain of events that have led me to handing over the file.

“Jesus,” he says, and for the moment it’s all he can say. “You think Melissa X is involved in this somehow? You think she is the one who took Cooper?”

“I don’t think so. None of her victims were shot by a Taser, and she wasn’t the one who burned down his house.”

Schroder snaps on a pair of latex gloves. He opens up the drawers. He starts going through them. Then he starts pulling them all the way out and sitting them on top of the desk. He checks behind them and under them for anything taped out of sight. People always think they’re being clever when they hide things in those sorts of places, under drawers, under the carpet, behind books or above a suspended ceiling or in the tank above the toilet. They’re all places the police wouldn’t have checked because earlier Cooper Riley was only a man who had gone missing. He wasn’t a man who knew Melissa X, and he wasn’t a man who had tied Emma Green up and photographed her.

“So what about the car?” he asks. “The paint on the dumpster. The witness said it pulled out around into the street in a hurry, and the timeline proves he saw it just after Emma finished work.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Maybe it’s unrelated,” he says.

“Yeah, it’s possible, but like you say, it’s around the same time.”

I get up on the desk keeping the weight on my right leg. I push up at the ceiling tile.

“What the hell, Tate? Leave that to me,” Schroder says.

I reach into the ceiling cavity and pray I’m not about to be bitten by a rat. I search with my fingers but don’t find a thing. My knee jars a little as Schroder helps me down. He continues to check beneath the drawers. I twist the filing cabinet away from the wall. There’s a USB flash drive taped to the back of it. I thought Cooper would be different because I thought he’d have an insight into where he shouldn’t hide things, but he either thought he’d never be the victim of an office search, or he thought his hiding place was suitably sufficient. I hold it up and Schroder stops searching. I hand it over to him and we stand adjacent to each other staring at it. It’s as if whatever bad news is stored on there can be averted if we don’t open it, and we know it’s bad news-we’ve both been doing this for long enough to have a sense of what we’re about to see. The horror isn’t in seeing the images, the horror is in the quantity. How many others has Cooper killed?

Schroder plugs the flash drive into the computer and we go through the same process as I went through with the camera card. The first image loads up and he clicks the arrow to move to the second and then the third. There are thirty pictures in total. All of the same girl, which is an awful thing to be thankful for, but we are. Scared and clothed in the beginning, naked and dead in the end. The photos are a progression of the last week of her life according to the time stamps on the files. She’s laying on the same floor as Emma Green. The photos are in a sequence, and looking through them is like reading a story. The sequence shows the girl become paler as the days pass, she loses weight, blisters and a rash appear on her face, mean-looking welts appear on her skin. Seven days of hell. Seven days of knowing you were going to die but praying for the best. There is duct tape over her eyes in all of them except the last. Cooper liked the idea of not being seen but being able to converse. I bet the bastard loved hearing them cry or beg for their lives.

“She’s alive,” I tell him.

“What?” he asks, lost in his own thoughts.

“I said she’s alive. Emma Green. If he was going to do to her what he did to this girl then. .”

“Jane Tyrone,” he says.

“What?”

“That’s who this girl is,” he says, tapping the monitor. “She went missing nearly five months ago. “She was a bank teller at that same bank that got held up just before Christmas. A woman was shot and killed.”

“You thought she was involved with the robbery?”

He shakes his head. “No. She went missing three months before the robbery. Her car was found abandoned in a parking building in town with her keys in the trunk along with traces of blood. Whatever happened to her, it started there.” He turns toward the window and looks at the same view I was staring at earlier. “He kept her for a week,” he says. “A whole week she was begging for us to find her and we never did.”

“Emma Green is begging for the same thing,” I tell him. “Come on, Carl, she has to still be alive. We’ve got two photos of her from his camera. He hadn’t copied them to the flash drive yet. He wasn’t done with her.”

“And Melissa X?”

“I’m thinking three years ago she was Riley’s first, but something went wrong and she ended up attacking him. He kept quiet, because what was he going to say, that a woman he was trying to rape and kill assaulted him?”