Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

Schroder tells me they’ve gotten a warrant for the Grover Hills patient and staff files and will have them within the hour. He tells me interviewing of the staff will start by lunchtime, and that everybody who ever worked there now has a lawyer. I tell him that’s good, and then I give him the address where I think Emma Green is being held. He asks how I came to that conclusion and I tell him there isn’t time to explain it all, that he needs to meet me there, that I’m right on this one. I have probably a twenty-minute head start on him. Anything can happen in twenty minutes. He tells me to wait and I tell him that I’ll check it out and call him if I see anything suspicious.

“From where? Adrian smashed your cell phone.”

“I’m not just going to stand around and wait. Twenty minutes is a long time.”

“Tate. .”

“I gotta go,” I say, and I hang up.

I start to walk away from the phone, and go two paces before changing my mind. I call Donovan Green.

“You got a pen?” I ask.

“Sure.”

“Then write this down,” I tell him, and give him the address. “I’m pretty sure this is where Emma is.”

“Is she okay?”

“I don’t know. If you want your five minutes with Cooper Riley, you’re going to need to hurry.”

I hang up, confident there’s no way Green can get out there before the police do. If Emma is alive, it’s going to be a fantastic reunion. If she’s dead, then I’ve just given Donovan her location and he’s going to see his daughter’s body and he’s going to fall apart. But it’s what he wants, it’s what I’d want in his situation, and it’s what I owe him.

Edward Hunter has given pretty good directions, but it’s been years since he was last out here, which gives him plenty of room to be a little vague. For the most part he was confident, and for the most part that made me confident too. I compare his map against the map in the car, vowing that when this is over I’m going to purchase the most expensive GPS unit on the market. More paddocks and wire fences and if a case ever brings me into this part of the country again I’m turning it down.

The farmhouse comes into view. It’s a big building with a large A-frame roof, the sides of the building painted red, the roof is black, lots of white trim around the windowsills and door. It looks like the grandparents saw a nice farmhouse in a movie or jigsaw puzzle and wanted the same one. What’s missing is a steaming pie on the windowsill, but what is here at the top of the dirt road leading up to the farmhouse is Emma Green’s car. I keep driving. Problem is I have to drive another five hundred meters before I can find anything to park behind that will hide my car. I check the trunk and find a crowbar for wrenching off wheels that get stuck when you’re changing a flat. I jump the fence. Nothing has been farmed here in a long time, there are areas of hard dirt, areas of tall grass and even taller weed, some of it up around my knees. I move diagonally across the section staying low, approaching the house from only one side to decrease the number of windows I can be seen from, waiting, waiting for a gunshot from the gun Donovan Green gave me to ring out and drop me like a rock.

By the time I get to the building my legs are itchy and blotchy from the grass. I pause against the wall. The wood is warm and the heat soaks into my skin. There is no sign of anybody. No sounds. I look through one of the windows, struggling a little to see beyond the netting. There’s a large living room suite with flower-patterned upholstery, an oak coffee table with sculptured legs, a boxy TV that must weigh a ton. It all looks very neat, as if Grandpa and Grandma Hunter are still living here. I move past the window and look into the next one. It’s a master bedroom with a queen-sized bed and the blankets all thrown back. The next window is completely black and I can’t see anything beyond it. It’s covered on the inside with something much thicker than curtains.

I head around to the back of the house. The deck leading up to the back door groans as my body weight shifts onto it. I come to a complete stop. I give it a few seconds and there’s no indication anybody is coming to check out the sound. I walk as close as I can to the wall and the groaning stops. I turn the handle on the back door and it opens freely. I step into the kitchen. It’s tidy. There are lots of white tiles behind the sink and a table off center for the family to sit around. There’s a calendar hanging on the wall dating back nearly sixty years showing a painting of an orchard. It’s faded and the edges are creased and one of the dates has a fading circle around it. Inside the circle in a script that looks old-fashioned and has also faded are the words Our wedding. The sun is still reasonably low and shining in under the veranda and through the windows, casually hitting every surface and filling the kitchen with light. I close the door behind me and stop and listen. It’s me and a crowbar up against an ex-mental patient with a gun and a Taser.

The kitchen is open plan into a dining room, from where there are two doors, one leading into a living room, another into a hallway. I can see into the living room and there’s nobody in there. I enter the hallway. It branches off in two directions, one is up a flight of stairs, the other goes straight ahead where it turns right. I stay on the ground floor and follow the hall around the corner, passing some pretty old furniture and some paintings on the wall. There’s a door wide open. The hinges have been reversed so the door opens outward rather than in and it blocks the rest of the hall. The front of the door is facing me. I step up carefully to it and look around it. There are two bodies in the hall further down. I close the door slightly so I can look into the room. It’s empty inside. The entire thing is padded, ceiling and floor. There are stains on the floor-this is the Scream Room the Hunter twins built. This is where at least nine men lost their lives. Despite the heat a cold shiver runs the length of my body. Could be they kept their victims in here for only a day, or it could be they kept them for months.

I swing the door completely closed and approach the bodies. One man and one woman. The woman looks to be in her late seventies. The man is who I saw setting fire to Cooper Riley’s house and tried to collect me from my own. There’re a pair of bullet holes in his chest. His eyes are wide open and one of them is ruined, there’s a hole in it and the area has swollen and there’s been some seepage. I crouch down and check the woman for a pulse. Nothing. I don’t even bother with Adrian. No point. There’s no immediate sign of the gun. Cooper Riley probably has it. He probably has Emma Green too. He can’t know how much the police know about him, and has to be thinking the best way he can get out of here and resume any kind of life is by making up his own version of events, and to do that he can’t let anybody live.

So why isn’t Emma Green laying on the floor here too?

There’s a sound like a small gunshot and then a muffled scream from further down the hall. I move in that direction. There’s another gunshot sound that isn’t loud enough to be a gunshot. I want to rush the rest of the way, but I just keep taking one step at a time, slowly, carefully, past a bathroom and an empty bedroom and toward another one that has a queen-sized bed with Emma Green on top of it. She’s naked. As I watch, Cooper Riley, standing in front of her, swings his belt down against the bedside drawers, on top of which is resting the gun and a Taser. Emma jumps at the sound. It’s the noise I heard earlier. Her hands are bound behind her and she tries to push herself further into the mattress. I move forward. Either he senses me or he notices Emma change as she senses me, because he turns quickly, the large bedroom window behind him, and I think about running hard at him and trying to push him right through it, only he could take me with him and I could end up landing on a rake and he could end up landing in a pile of hay. He snatches up the gun and brings it up toward me and I throw the crowbar forward. It hits his arm and he shouts out as he lets go of the gun, both items go hurtling in the same direction, the pry bar hitting and cracking the window, the gun flying out the smaller open window to the world outside. Cooper comes forward and I meet him, he throws a fast right punch that catches me in the jaw at the same time I swing one, mine catching him in the cheek. He comes at me again and I block him, grab him, and then we’re tipping over into a chest of drawers. Solid objects start littering down on us, a hairbrush, a mirror, some figurines, a couple of novels, a crossword book with a pen hooked onto it, a thick glass jar with something floating inside. Emma Green is off the bed and she’s gone for the door. I push up and hit Cooper in the side of the face again, and before I can follow it up he grabs the glass jar and swings it down.