Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“You think this is what got her started?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “She could have gotten a taste for doing bad things and just kept on doing them, and I think there aren’t any pictures of her because she was the first and it was an impulsive act. After her Cooper was too afraid to try again. Could be it took him three years to get up the nerve.”

“So what in the hell happened to him? Who abducted Cooper and burned down his house?”

“Maybe it’s somebody Cooper has hurt in the past. One more thing that doesn’t make sense is why wait a day between kidnapping Cooper and burning down his house? And why use Emma Green’s car?”

“You don’t think Cooper torched his own place to try and hide evidence, faked his own abduction, then ran?”

“No reason to,” I say. “Nobody was on to him. Only reason he became a suspect was because he didn’t show up for work. And why torch his house and leave these,” I say, nodding toward the photographs, “in his office?”

“They weren’t exactly on display.”

“Still, he wouldn’t try cleaning up one scene by torching it without getting rid of the USB key from another.”

“He would if he killed the girl at his house,” he suggests.

“He wouldn’t have left his camera in the driveway, and we have a witness who saw him taken. And those were definitely ID tags from a Taser I was looking at.”

“Okay, so what about Donovan Green? He could have done it.”

“Possible,” I answer, “but why come to me about it?”

“Because he wanted an alibi. He wanted to make out he had no idea what happened to his daughter. You think he’s the kind of guy who could do it?”

“I don’t know,” I say, thinking back to last year when he wanted to kill me. Absolutely Donovan could have done it. But Donovan Green was waiting for me to give him a name. It’s possible, I guess, that he had that name first, that he killed Cooper Riley, panicked, and then came to me to start building a story to make him look innocent. I think about the look on his face, the grim determination to get his hands on the person who hurt Emma. No, he didn’t know who took his daughter. I’m sure of it. “Donovan Green wouldn’t kill the only person who knew where she was.”

“Maybe he’s torturing it out of him.”

“Wasn’t him who lit the fire.”

“He could have hired somebody.”

“Then why drive around in Emma’s car?”

He doesn’t have an answer.

“You looked into a connection with the fires?” I ask.

“There could be a link there between Cooper Riley and Pamela Deans, but it’s a very tentative one if it is.”

“Want to share?”

“Look, Tate, I have to call this in. You should go. If you’re here when the other detectives arrive, you’ll get me fired.”

“You’ll call me later today?”

He nods. “I’ll keep you in the loop and update you later. Tate, you’ve done a good job with this Melissa X thing,” he says. “If what you’ve learned leads to an arrest, don’t worry-you’re still looking at the reward money.”

I look down at the photographs. “I’m not doing this for the money,” I tell him.

“I know. But you need it.”

I head back into the hall and close the door behind me. I think of the girls wandering these halls and how close any one of them came to being Cooper’s next victim.

Donovan Green calls again before I reach the parking lot. It’s no longer blue skies in every direction. There are white fluffy clouds to the north and it’s completely overcast out to the east, the cloud cover over the ocean stretching the length of the horizon. The temperature must have dropped a few points too. I answer the phone and give Green an update. I don’t tell him about the photographs of his daughter tied up and naked. I don’t share with him my theory that she may still be alive. Last thing I want to do is feed him false hope only to have to confront him with the worst news of his life a day later. I tell him that I have made some progress, that I have some leads, and am hoping for some more news soon.

I head for home. Peak-time traffic makes it a long trip. I make some strong coffee once I walk through the door and fire up the computer. I go online. Rain starts to splash on the windows, just a couple of drops every few seconds. I get up and close them, the breeze coming through is warm and feels charged. The trees outside the study window are being thrown about by the wind. The pre-autumn leaves that have already fallen are scuttling across the lawn. There is no more blue sky, no more white clouds, just darkness in every direction. I step out into the rain as it starts to come down heavy, and I’m not the only one. Neighbors are standing in the street with their faces turned up to the sky, their arms stretched wide and smiles on their faces. For days on end this city has felt like it was going to burn, and for the moment everything is okay. Children are laughing. People are dancing in circles. It’s absolute pure happiness, and it’s infectious. I start laughing too. I let it soak my clothes, my first touch of rain in four months, and like the sunset last night, I’ve never seen rain looking so good. When the lightning comes, I head back inside, then thunder rolls over the city, loud enough to rattle the pictures on the wall. The house lights up like a camera flash as more lightning splits the evening apart. I dry off and put fresh bandages on my feet and hand, then I sit in front of the computer.

I look up articles about Natalie Flowers. She was reported missing almost three years ago, but the police didn’t look into it. According to the articles, Natalie cleaned out her bank accounts and packed up all her clothes and moved out of her apartment, telling her flatmate she had somewhere else to be. There were no suspicious circumstances. Her parents reported her missing, they pleaded in the media for their daughter to come home.

Eight years before that Melissa Flowers, Natalie’s sister, was raped and killed by a police officer. Melissa Flowers was thirteen years old, an unlucky number for some, especially unlucky for her. I can still remember the case. It wasn’t an officer I knew, but I knew all about him after the fact. There was no investigation because he confessed to the crime within an hour of doing it, confessed with a note and by putting a bullet in his head, his body found next to the young naked girl. The note had an apology, it told what he did but didn’t say why. It stunned the whole country. I think whatever happened that night with Cooper Riley, Natalie Flowers died and Melissa X was created. She walked away from her old life and started a new one. Either something inside of her snapped, or something inside of her lit up with the excitement of what she had done and needed more. Three years later she would murder Detective Calhoun while the Christchurch Carver filmed her, and she would go on to kill others. Maybe when Cooper attacked Natalie, whatever had started to break when her sister had been killed finally snapped. She was no longer Natalie. She became Melissa, and Melissa wanted revenge for what that officer had done. Is there a connection to the men Natalie has killed, other than the uniforms? Did these men remind her of the man who murdered her sister?

I read the rest of the articles on them both and there are no answers. So I start to look for the connection between Cooper Riley and Nurse Deans, and before I can find anything there’s a knock at the door. It’s the sketch artist. We sit at the kitchen table, and he goes to work and I keep thinking about Cooper Riley and Pamela Deans, I keep trying to figure out a way they can connect, and keep coming up with nothing.

Cooper Riley hasn’t killed six people like he told Adrian, but six sounded much better than the truth-which was one, but this isn’t about the truth, this is about escaping from a man who’s purely delusional. Technically, having killed only one person doesn’t make him a serial killer even though he has a second one all tied up waiting for him, so in that sense he wasn’t lying when he first told Adrian he wasn’t a serial killer. He guesses that now he is, because now he’s up to two.