Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

He copies the file, which takes about two seconds and hands me the flash drive. I’m halfway out the door when I turn back toward him. “One more thing,” I ask. “Can you tell me when he last accessed the file?”

“I can only tell you when he last backed up this particular one. He may have been working on it at home, or have a different version saved somewhere. But this one was last saved three years ago.”

Three years ago. The same time Natalie went missing. The same time Cooper got divorced.

The dashboard of the rental tells me it’s almost eleven o’clock and one hundred and six degrees. Traffic starts to back up from the north where there’s another house fire. Hardly anybody is walking the streets. A few stray dogs are sniffing the gutters for food, the gutters having dried out now and full of fresh litter. I get past the fire only to get boxed in by traffic a few intersections later where two taxis have collided, the drivers both unhurt but yelling at each other in different foreign languages neither of them can understand. It takes ten minutes to get past them, glass pooled out over the road like diamonds.

When I get home I leave the front door open and crack open the windows in the study and try to get some airflow going. I get the fan up and running and plug the flash drive into my computer. It takes a few minutes for my computer to boot up, it takes longer than last time and will take longer next time, the eighteen-month-old components inside making it an antique. I sit in front of it and massage my knee, which is feeling better and bending more than it did this morning. Three hundred pages is a lot to read through, but I’m only going to be scanning it for a connection between Pamela Deans and Cooper Riley and Grover Hills. I set it printing and pick up the first few pages as they come out. Before the pages have even cooled off I can see the connection. It’s in the introduction Cooper Riley has written. Riley was visiting Grover Hills. He was interviewing some of the criminals out there for his work. Nurse Deans was helping him. He was building up a study and writing this book and I imagine at some point was going to approach some publishers, or maybe he did and was rejected. He was heading out there on a weekly basis, Nurse Deans the liaison between him and the patients. More warm pages are ejected from the printer. I pick them up. It looks like Riley interviewed at least a dozen or so patients. A couple of things come to mind. First off, how far down the path was Cooper Riley toward abducting Natalie Flowers, killing Jane Tyrone, and abducting Emma Green when he conducted these interviews? Second, was the thought of torturing and killing a young woman something he never thought he’d do back then, or something he was dying to do? Impossible to know whether these interviews brought his desire forward or repressed it.

Almost a hundred pages are finished printing. I tap them against the desk to level them then carry them out to the living room. The house is stuffy at this end and the smell of toner has followed me down the hall, making the house feel even stuffier. I open the French doors to head out to the deck.

I drop the pages. Daxter is hanging from the gutter, his eyes half open, and while yesterday he looked like he was sleeping, today he looks exactly the way dead cats look when a noose has been fashioned from a piece of wire and hooked up to the roof.

The payoff is in the expression. It’s been more than twenty years since he last saw that look. It brings a flood of memories that makes his insides warm and gives him a sense of longing for those days. There will be more cats, he tells himself, because there are more people who have hurt him. Through the gap in the fence he watches Tate drop the pages. They hit the deck and slide apart like a deck of cards, the top few peeling away and drifting onto the brown lawn. Tate reaches up to the cat and Adrian doesn’t stay to see what happens next, instead he runs down the street to where his car is parked, mission almost accomplished, drives to the end of the street, turns left, then turns left again and comes up the parallel street into the cul-de-sac and stops outside Tate’s house.

The front door to the house is open, which makes this easier. He was going to knock on the door and shoot Tate when he answered it, which is always risky, but now he steps inside. He can’t hear anything except a mechanical sound being repeated over and over from the first room on the left, a whirr-clunk, whirr-clunk. He takes the Taser out of his pocket. His hands are sweating and he almost loses his grip on the handle. He keeps it pointed ahead of him, but close to his body where he can protect it. The rag is in his back pocket, along with the small plastic bottle of the fluid that makes people sleep.

Ideally he’d like to shoot Tate in the back. The whole thing would go that much easier, but it’s not necessary. Either way, once Tate is down and unconscious, Adrian can back the car into the driveway and pick him up. He’s not the best at reversing a car but he’s done it enough times that he’s confident he can do it again. He’ll park next to Tate’s car because the driveway is wide enough. Then he’ll pop the trunk and load Tate in and drive back to the Grove. He’ll put him in one of the rooms with the padded walls. Not as comfortable as a bed, but much safer when dealing with somebody like Tate.

Theodore Tate-both killer and hunter of killers-the perfect collector’s piece. He will have stories too-good ones.

The room making the sound is a study. There are pages coming out of a printer, being ejected through a slot like an envelope being mailed. The pages fall into a tray. There’s a bunch of them already, and there are lots of other papers and photographs scattered across the floor and desk. He takes hold of the next page rolling out of the printer. He scans it then picks up other pages from the tray and scans those too.

Oh my God, is this the book Cooper was working on? He recognizes some of the names. It is! It really is! He can’t believe it, and he’s so excited that his hands start shaking even more. More pages come out of the printer. He snatches them up. How did Tate get hold of a copy? And why? He glances around the room as if the answer is going to be there for him, but it isn’t, but what is here are lots of other papers and photographs to do with another case, one that he’s been reading about lately. Tate is not only looking for Cooper, but also for the woman who’s been killing men in uniform.

He can’t believe his luck in coming here.

He doesn’t think the smile will leave his face for hours!

He steps into the hallway. He can hear Tate talking to somebody and his heart slams harder in his chest and his smile disappears. There are two people here! He steps back into the study and scoops up the manuscript and all the papers scattered around the room, and the papers he jams into an empty file. He doesn’t get them all and he can’t wait for the rest to come out of the printer. Cooper will love getting his hands on this Melissa X information. What a way to make him happy! He feels like he’s raiding a treasure chest. He feels like, at any second, Tate and his friend are going to burst into the study and capture him. It makes him both excited and anxious.

He gets back outside and runs down to the car. His racing heart slows down, but he’s still dripping with sweat. He starts the car and is about to pull away when he realizes that Tate may not have had somebody with him, but may have been on the phone. He feels stupid. He bets that’s what it was, that Tate was calling somebody. Probably the police. He still has time to go back inside and try to collect him.

Only he’s too nervous, way too nervous now, and he’s ridden his luck for the morning, getting in and out of the house without being seen, getting all that information, and digging up the cat. He can come back any time. He can come back tonight, or tomorrow, or next week. So he puts the car into gear and drives out of the street. His nerves turn to excitement. In fact he’s so excited on the way home he pulls over for five minutes to look through the book. Seeing the names of people he used to know, it’s like pulling the scab off an old memory, a happy scab because the memories make him smile. He drives to a convenience store and buys a newspaper, and when he finally gets home he bursts through the front door and puts Cooper’s book on the floor by the basement door, then heads straight down into the basement.