Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  He wheels Cooper into the inner room and unties him, then helps him onto the mattress. The mattress is slightly damp and cool, which Adrian thinks Cooper will appreciate, especially this week with the temperature almost topping one hundred and ten every day. The bedsprings sag and it’s the first time they’ve had weight on them in three years. He lifts Cooper’s head and secures a pillow beneath it then steps out of the cell, taking the dolly and ropes with him. He locks the door behind him and leans with his forehead on the glass and watches Cooper, who, for the moment, is still. He knows when Cooper awakes he won’t be happy, and Adrian is fully prepared for it.

  Back outside the day has continued to grow hotter. The glass jar with the thumb has trapped some of that heat and nearly burns his fingers. He collects it, along with a few other things he’s taken from Cooper’s home, and heads back inside. Over the years Adrian has met other killers. He has lived with people who have killed families, people who have killed strangers, people who have killed for no real-life reason, who have taken lives because of a voice telling them to, or an instinct, or a hidden message in a newspaper from God. He’s shared rooms with people who have sliced others apart, only a few without emotion, most of them dumbfounded and upset at what they did, all hoping pills and talking about feelings would cure them. There haven’t been many—he’s met less killers than he can count on both hands, but he believes they are the reason he now has a fascination with them. He would have been just like them if he hadn’t been sent here and locked away when he was a teenager.

  There was one, he remembers, that was impossible to warm to, a man who had killed his parents and brother and sister the day before he turned sixteen. Not really a man, but more of a boy, certainly a boy younger than Adrian when they met. His name was Hutchinson, and Adrian always thought it was a strange name, and he also thought that Hutch was a boy before he took the knife to his family but a man immediately after. Whenever Hutch had to spend time in the Scream Room he never complained. There were many trips down there for him, and never did he speak a word about what happened. Adrian has always wondered what it would be to be a man like that.

  Hutch stayed here for a few years and then moved on and Adrian has no idea what became of the man, whether he’s alive, whether he’s still a killer, or whether he’s in a grave mourned by no one. It was these years that shaped his obsession . . . no, his mother has told him it’s wrong to be obsessed with anything . . . it was these years that shaped his interest in killers. Last year with the papers continually feeding him information about the Christchurch Carver and the Burial Killer, his interest in serial killers became extreme. He suspects the thing inside him creating that interest isn’t normal. It made him want to move back here. It made him want to learn to drive so he could do something with that interest. He stacks Cooper’s belongings on the shelves in the basement where Cooper can see them through the small window that, yesterday, Adrian cleaned especially.

  “Cooper?”

  Cooper does not answer. He does not move.

  “Cooper?” This time a little louder. He knows you have to speak up to be heard through the door, but not much, only a little really.

  Satisfied Cooper is still asleep, he tidies the basement. He doesn’t need Cooper to wake into this mess and form an instant bad impression. He straightens the memorabilia on the shelves, tidies the bookcase that has dozens of autobiographies of serial killers. There is a couch down here and a scarred coffee table but not much more. Anyway, today is only day one, and as he learns he will begin to improve.

  “Cooper?”

  Nothing.

  He heads upstairs and turns on the radio. It’s small, and has a belt clip so he can hang it from his pants, and it can play tapes and even record things too. He’s sure Cooper will enjoy the same kind of classical music, and he carries the radio back to the basement, but when he starts to climb down the stairs the reception fades. He plays with the dial but can’t get any of the stations to work, not until he climbs back up the stairs into the corridor. He replaces the batteries, but the same thing happens and he doesn’t understand why. Can the music not get past the concrete walls from the radio station? He could play a tape, but playing tapes uses up the battery faster, and he doesn’t want to use it up that way. He’s disappointed. Hopefully this will be the only setback.

  Suspecting Cooper will be hungry as well as confused when he wakes up, Adrian, not wanting to be a rude host, heads to the kitchen where the radio works again, and he clips it onto his pants and listens to one of the modern rock bands he’s come to like, and starts preparing lunch for his new housemate.

  chapter five

  They’re calling her Melissa X. It’s not a Roman numeral—she isn’t the tenth Melissa in the city to have killed a cop, or the tenth Melissa to become a serial killer still on the loose, or the tenth Melissa to fill what I imagine to be boxes and boxes of evidence stored in an evidence warehouse. It’s an X because it’s an unknown. The media, normally quick to come up with catchy names for crimes and killers, have dubbed her The Uniform Killer. She became famous when a videotape found in the Christchurch Carver’s possession—a serial killer named Joe Middleton who was caught last year—showed her stabbing a knife into the chest of a currently missing detective. The Christchurch Carver was arrested the same day I killed the serial killer I was hunting last year, a man dubbed the Burial Killer. In the month between the accident I caused, the sentencing, and then being put in jail, I saw on the news that Melissa was still on the run and was now the suspect in other homicides. She was big news back then, and I guess she’s even bigger news now because the police still have no idea where she is or who she really is. Another day, another serial killer—each one trying to outdo the other. For the last few years the city was under siege by the Christchurch Carver, now it’s dealing with his girlfriend.

  I open the windows in the study and let the outside air force its way in; it’s warm air but at least it’s fresh. It’s circulated slightly by an oscillating fan that I drag out of a wardrobe and plug in, thick dust blowing off the blades and clouding the air for the first ten seconds and sending me into a sixty-second sneezing fit. The contents of the folder are two inches thick and I stack them on the desk into different piles. The fan lifts the corners of the pages every twenty seconds as it passes by. There are reports, statements, copies of forensic evidence. There are photographs of bruises, cuts, blood; there’s a DVD with a recording of Melissa X murdering Detective Inspector Calhoun. Four dead bodies and a lot of paperwork, and Melissa is on the loose. They have DNA and fingerprints and even footage of the woman, and with all of that she’s a ghost. Her face has been plastered in the papers, headlining the news. Three episodes of New Zealand’s Most Wanted have been dedicated to finding information about her. Even the psychics have come out of the woodwork. Nobody knows where she is, and even stranger, nobody has come forward to identify her. Family, friends, colleagues, schoolmates, doctors, teachers—if these people are in her past or present, they don’t recognize her. Melissa may be her name but it also may not be. At one point during the Carver investigation she showed up at the police station to help identify a suspect—giving false information to help the Carver evade capture. She gave her name as Melissa Graves, and nobody at the time had any reason to doubt her. The name, of course, isn’t real. Since then it’s been narrowed down to Melissa X, and it’s unlikely Melissa is her real name either.

  Days after that the Carver was caught and nobody has seen Melissa since. For the first few weeks after the Carver’s arrest, the consensus was Melissa X was dead, another of his victims. Then the bodies started showing up and Melissa X went from suspect to victim and back to suspect again.

  Since the Carver’s arrest five months ago, multiple attempts have been made to get him to offer up information on the woman, and each time he shoots them down. Melissa X is a monster with the blood of at least four people on her hands. I can’t blame Schroder for wanting all the fresh perspective he can get.

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sp; The report details each of the homicides, leading with Calhoun’s. All three of the other men worked in uniform—though no uniforms were found near the bodies, which were stripped down to their underwear. Two security guards and one police constable. The constable was found in a park, naked. He’d been tortured. One security guard was found in his home, the only thing reported missing was his uniform. The other guard was found on a golf course where he patrolled, his almost naked body pitching distance from the fourteenth green with the same signs of torture as the other men—a completely crushed testicle, the same injury Melissa gave the Christ-church Carver. No connection has been made between the men other than the way their throats had been opened up by a blade, and the fact they all had missing uniforms. There was nothing to link them to the Carver. There are two theories floating around as to why the uniforms were taken—either for practical use to impersonate one of these men or as a trophy. The reason for the torture is unknown—again two possibilities—one was to extract information, the other was for fun. I watch the DVD in the living room and my take on Melissa is she hurt these men for fun. Detective Inspector Calhoun is bound to a chair. The chair is in a bathroom and there is tape over his mouth. There are patches of blood on his shirt and the skin around the duct tape is dry and raw. His eyes are wide with fear and his face is soaked with sweat and he looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. The footage is taken two days before the Carver was arrested.

  “I don’t understand what you’re playing at, Joe,” Melissa says. There aren’t any background sounds. Her voice comes from somewhere to the side of the camera. The report says the angles in the footage and an examination of the apartment show the camera was hidden in the wardrobe pointing out. It means Melissa didn’t know she was being filmed. It’s possible Joe was going to try and blackmail her. The report doesn’t say.

  “He’s my witness to what you really are.” They are Joe the Carver’s words, and his voice is also off to the side. The footage still only shows Calhoun, his eyes wide in panic. Every ounce of his being is seeping fear. Calhoun didn’t need to be a detective to figure out what was going to happen to him. My stomach tightens and I tighten my grip on the remote control to try and stop my hands from shaking.

  “Oh? And what do you have on him?” Melissa asks.

  “Enough.”

  I wonder what “enough” means, and I’m sure I’m not the only one wondering. Calhoun’s fingerprints were found on a knife used to kill a prostitute only days before his death, but the scene was staged. Calhoun was innocent.

  “You’re forgetting one thing, Joe.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I don’t need him.”

  Melissa steps into view, this tall woman brimming with sex appeal, but her eyes don’t fit with the package, her body and face transmit the kind of beauty you’d expect from a woman used to showing off the latest fashions on a runway, but her eyes tell a different story, her eyes reveal somebody you’d expect to spend her nights skinning kittens. She moves gracefully toward Calhoun and the veins stand out in her neck from the effort of plunging the knife into his chest. The camera doesn’t move. Joe doesn’t enter the frame. I want to put the TV on mute because I don’t want to hear the sounds Calhoun makes because somehow they’re worse than seeing him convulse beneath her. There’s a long gargling sound, like the last of the water draining from a bathtub. When it’s over, Melissa tucks her hair over her right ear and looks toward the camera, but not right at it. The Carver never comes into view.

  “You stupid bitch. How could you do such a thing?”

  She pulls the silver duct tape away from Calhoun’s mouth and blood spills out of it and down his front. “I’m surprised that you thought I wouldn’t.”

  I’m surprised too.

  She carries on. “I told you no tricks, Joe.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Well you should have assumed it. I still want my money.”

  After that the footage gets even worse. There is a coldness with this woman that I’ve never seen before, a cold beauty that remains even when she withdraws the knife and drags it across the dead detective’s throat. Not long after she walks away the footage ends. Melissa said no tricks, but filming her was a trick. I wonder what the money is she’s talking about. According to the file the question has been posed to Joe, but he hasn’t given an answer.

  I switch off the TV and walk slowly down the hallway to the study with a stronger determination to help Schroder. This is why he included the DVD. The connection between Melissa and the Carver is hard to understand. She tortured him, they became lovers, and he won’t give up any information on her. It doesn’t make sense. If the Carver hadn’t been arrested, would they have stayed together until one of them killed the other?

  By the end of the first hour there aren’t any spare surfaces on the desk and I’ve had to lock down the fan to keep it from blowing the papers away. By the end of the second hour parts of the floor are covered and some of the images are taped to a whiteboard I have in my study and the fan is back in the wardrobe. All the windows in the house are open. I can hear a stereo thumping from one of the neighboring houses and somebody singing along to it. I wanted to think in silence, but I turn my own stereo on preferring to listen to my own music rather than somebody else’s. I listen to a Beatles album and think things were easier back then before figuring things are never easy. In the two hours I’ve created piles of chaos with no real clear insight to who this woman is.

  The security guard on the golf course was the last body found, and that was three weeks ago. I wonder what Melissa wants their uniforms for. All that wondering, though, tires me out, and by the end of the third hour I start moving through the house, putting some distance between me and the collection of evidence. I pause in the kitchen and make a sandwich. I’d planned on arriving home and somehow making my way out to see my wife, but somehow three hours have gone by and I haven’t even thought of her. I feel like getting a drink. Start with a beer and see what follows, but there’s no alcohol in the house. I end up sitting at the dining table with my lunch and a glass of milk the same way I did when I was a kid.

  There is a world waiting for me back in the study, a world that I thought I had escaped. I finish my lunch and I’m halfway down the hall back toward that world when somebody knocks on my front door. My parents said they’d call first, so it isn’t them. Anyway, through the blurred glass I can see only one figure. I feel like not answering it. I just want to tell whoever is there to go away, but the knocking continues so I head toward it. I open up the door. It’s my lawyer. A year ago my lawyer wanted to kill me. He tied me up and dragged me into the woods. He threw me into the dirt and made me stare down the barrel of a gun while he considered pulling the trigger. My only thought now is that he’s come to finish off what he couldn’t finish then.

  chapter six

  Cooper can taste carpet and dust and something metallic, along with something he can’t place, something that makes him think of decaying coffins being opened in ancient black-and-white movies, where the inside lids have claw marks and the dead men have torn and broken fingernails. His eyes are too heavy and sore to open. The darkness is connected optically to a mind that feels raw. His head is pounding and he wonders what sort of hangover this is, and quickly decides it must be the worst kind, the kind where you wake up and wish you were dead instead of drunk. There is a ringing in his ears and his chest is burning.

  The first memory to return is the heat wave. A city under siege by the sun. That could be why he started drinking. Hell, it’s a good reason for anybody to start. Drink what you can then pass out someplace cool, because wherever he is at the moment, it is certainly that. He bets his wife is equally as drunk somewhere before remembering he doesn’t have a wife anymore, that they separated three years ago though he can’t quite remember why, not off the top of his head, and since his wife there haven’t been any other women, not serious ones, and there’s nobody at the moment, so probably he started drinking
alone. Only he’s given up drinking, or so he’d thought. In the past the drink has gotten him into trouble. He rolls onto his side, the bed squeaking and grinding beneath him, not his bed, though, because he doesn’t recognize any of the sounds. Then he thinks hospital. He’s been in an accident, that whatever has happened has nothing to do with an indulgence of too much scotch. He listens for but can’t hear the chatter of patients, the scuffle of feet, the bing bong of the intercom shouting code blue or code red in room one-oh-something. Last time he stepped into a hospital was two years ago when his uncle was sick, his uncle being eaten alive from the inside out by cancer. He remembers another old man in the same room having to shit into a plastic container suspended beneath the seat of a chair next to the bed, the stench of it wafting through the room enough to make him leave. None of that is with him here, none of the sounds or the smells. This isn’t a hospital.