Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

The Friday-night crowd is spilling into town, guys in tight T-shirts with big biceps and girls in jeans so tight they look painted on. Shiny cars with bright paint race the streets, tires spinning at every intersection with smoke hanging in the dry air. Other cars are parked in groups, teenagers in black hoodies leaning against them as they laugh and smoke and drink beer and give the finger to anybody driving by, all of them in jeans way too low, showing way too much, making me want to way too much run all of them over. It’s such a different world from the one I just left, and these kids have no idea just how lucky they are.

I park the rental in my driveway. Nobody from the media shows up. Plenty of them yelled questions at me as I drove through them earlier, most of them recognizing me and asking if I was back on the payroll. In my study I open up the four new files and spread the contents across the desk and set the Melissa X one to the side for later. As much as I want to find Natalie Flowers, she isn’t the one who kidnapped Emma Green, she isn’t the one who abducted Cooper Riley. There is a connection to her, but not a relevant one that will help us find Emma. Even if we found Natalie within the hour it wouldn’t do Emma Green any good.

I pop open a Coke and start reading. Adrian’s file is only one page. It has his name and age and when he was committed but it doesn’t have the reason why. Medical privilege and all that. Which means we’ll never know what made him crazy. It lists the halfway house as his current address.

The file on Cooper Riley is the thickest one. It traces back his history from when he was a child, his education, university, becoming a criminologist and then a professor. Karen Ford’s file is thin because she was only reported missing earlier today. She was a known prostitute, but since prostitution isn’t illegal in New Zealand, she doesn’t have a record. Jane Tyrone’s file is thick. It has all the information from the investigation into her disappearance last year. There’s a photograph of her, a smiling happy-looking girl in the prime of her life. I look though Emma Green’s file, but there isn’t much that I already didn’t know. We know who took her, and we know who took Cooper Riley.

If I pressed Ritchie Munroe, if I threatened to take Melina away from him, would he know anything more about his best friend? I wonder how easily Adrian was able to make his way to and from Grover Hills. I wonder if Cooper struggled with the drive the first few times. Jonas Jones wouldn’t-he’d have used his psychic abilities. But for the rest of us, driving out there is a challenge. I figure Cooper would drive out there then drive to one of the others to conduct more interviews to save on petrol.

“Damn it,” I say, slapping the desk. How could I have missed it?

I missed it the same way we all missed it, but it’s no excuse. I grab my cell phone. There are two more buildings almost identical in nature to Grover Hills. Both are abandoned. And Cooper Riley knows that better than anybody. Barlow said Adrian would want to return somewhere familiar to him, and though Adrian never grew up in either of the other two places, the similarity may be enough. In fact, that similarity may be all he has. And for Cooper Riley, what better place to take Emma Green? There could be other rooms like the Scream Room, and there are certainly going to be some padded cells.

I dial Schroder’s number. I walk through the living room to the French doors. Schroder answers and I open the door to step out onto the deck, wanting to escape the hot air inside.

“Oh fuck,” I say.

“Tate?”

“She’s here,” I say, and the words are thick and catch at the back of my throat.

“What?” he asks.

“Barlow. .” I have to hold a hand up to my mouth. “Barlow was right.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Only it wasn’t the pets we had to worry about.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Jane. . Jane Tyrone,” I say, and her name is covered in the taste of vomit.

“What about her?”

The corpse has the same hair but beyond that it’s a mess, any of the features blurred by five months of rot and decay. “She’s hanging from my roof,” I say, and I crouch down and throw up off the side of the deck and onto the lawn.

Adrian feels better. The itching has gone, his skin feels cool, he feels relaxed and at peace. Digging up the dead girl was a new experience, and he has to admit, an even more rewarding one than he was used to. He could have done without the mess and the smell of her, but ultimately digging up cats is child’s play compared to digging up and hanging the dead girl.

Like using an ATM at a drive-through, it’s character building. One brought about by a need he never thought he would have. Seeing those people at Grover Hills triggered something inside of him, something Cooper would label as rage, and he knew digging up the girl and hanging her from Tate’s roof would make the rage disappear.

All those times he was locked in the Scream Room with blood running down his thighs and the skin on his face scuffed from the cinder blocks, he would drift away from the cold room and take himself back to the boys who hurt him, and in his thoughts he would kill them, he would kill them the way his friends at the institution had killed others. When he was a boy, digging up the animals was a waste of time. He knows that now, he’s experienced it now. All those years ago he should have been killing the boys who had hurt him and stringing them up for their parents to find.

He’s back in Tate’s neighborhood, and he’s nervous being back. During the drive here he looked at every car as a potential police car. He was beginning to regret taking her car. He should have kept the car he started with-the police wouldn’t be looking for it. In this weather it wasn’t that odd walking the streets without a shirt on, but it was odd carrying a dead girl, so he parked outside the house and carried the dead girl through the side gate into the backyard. The other girl, the alive one, was still asleep.

Then he went and moved his car to the end of the block and around the corner and came back. Since stringing up the girl he’s been waiting behind Tate’s garage, waiting for the reaction. From his vantage point he isn’t able to see it, but he certainly hears it. He can hear him talking on his phone, then silence, then gagging as the ex-policeman starts throwing up on his lawn. The sound of it makes Adrian feel sick too, and for a frightening moment he thinks he’s also going to throw up. He sucks in a deep breath and holds it and the feeling disappears.

He moves around the garage and down the back of the house, staying against it. Light is coming out of the dining room and kitchen windows and hitting the lawn to the side of him. He can see the grave where the cat was buried, dug up, and it looks like buried again. He reaches the end of the house. Tate is crouched off the side of the deck, the phone is still in his hand. He can hear the person on the other end of it, a tinny voice asking Tate over and over “What’s wrong?”

He’s positive he hasn’t made a sound, yet he senses that Tate knows he’s there. There’s a pause, no longer than a second, but it feels like a minute in which both of them hold their breath. Tate has vomit on his chin and his face is covered in sweat, the living room light reflecting off it, the phone is hanging down in one hand and in the other. .

“No,” Adrian says, barely getting the word out before the gun comes up toward him. Adrian has never seen one in real life. He thought Cooper would have owned one, or the Twins, but the closest he’s ever come to seeing one is on a TV screen. Adrian pulls the trigger on his own gun, which isn’t a gun at all but only shaped like one, and the twin darts are propelled from the Taser and hit Tate in the chest and his body contracts and the gun goes off, an explosion of sound followed quickly by the impact of a bullet splintering into the wooden fence behind him.