Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  The crowd ebbs and flows as people come and go. Adrian walks back to the car. There is a moment where he’s scared the car will have disappeared, and another moment when climbing into it he suddenly realizes it might be a trap and police are watching, but it comes to nothing and he pulls away.

  Adrian watches the news, but not obsessively, and only if it involves serial killers, which isn’t often, and he hasn’t seen it since leaving the halfway house he’s been forced to live in over the last three years since the institution closed. He thinks about the man on the front lawn as he drives, then has to pull over. He finds it hard sometimes to focus on two things at the same time, especially if one of them is driving. So he sits with his face in his hands and closes his eyes and thinks about the serial killers this city has had, he pictures them from the news and it only takes a few moments to put a name to the face he just saw. Theodore Tate. He remembers now. Theodore Tate used to be a cop and became a private investigator, and last year he was in the news because he caught and killed a serial killer. Adrian found the whole case fascinating. He remembers wishing he could figure out who the killer was before the police did, just so he could meet the guy.

  Does that mean Theodore Tate has also figured out Cooper Riley is a serial killer? With his face still buried in his hands, Adrian decides that it does. Theodore Tate is hunting Cooper Riley. He doesn’t know how Tate figured it out, all he knows is that it’s what Tate does.

  Not only is he trying to ruin Cooper Riley’s life, but Theodore Tate is going to try and take away Adrian’s collection. That’s not fair. When he pulls his hands away his eyes are assaulted by the sun and he has to close them again, opening them for a second at a time until he can bear the light. He drives to a service station. He fills up the two plastic containers that an hour ago were full of petrol but are now empty. He fills up the car too.

  He pays with cash. He asks the woman behind the counter if he can borrow a phone book and she says yes, which immediately makes him like her. Women normally do their best never to speak to him. He borrows a pen to write down Tate’s address. He spends five minutes with his map sprawled across the passenger seat trying to figure out the best way to Tate’s house, not recognizing any of the streets because he doesn’t know the area. He draws a line with his finger, humming as he decides on the best way to go.

  chapter nineteen

  In total, five fire engines, four patrol cars, and one ambulance show up. Only three of the fire engines are used, the other two park at the back, the excess firemen standing around watching the blaze, one of them talking to a young blond woman in the crowd and making her laugh. I sit in the back of the ambulance with my view of the burning house obstructed, but there are still some pretty clear views of lots and lots of smoke. We’re parked far enough away to no longer feel the heat, but close enough so we still have to talk loudly to be heard over the crackling wood. I’ve drunk about a liter of water since being dragged away from the flames, my lungs are sore, I’m no longer coughing but my hands are shaking. I could have gotten back in there. I know I could have. Wouldn’t have mattered if only one leg was going to support me, I could have made it back in there and found Emma and made it back out. Instead I let those two men drag me away and I could have done more.

  I try to focus on the positive. The positive in this case is that I didn’t see Emma, so that means she may not have been in there. The positive is that I’m still alive.

  It only takes one paramedic to look me over, and the second one stands outside with everybody else. My knee has swelled up to twice its size from the impact of my fall and has almost no movement. The paramedic is a guy in his midthirties and is completely bald, his scalp glistening with so much sunblock you can see the ambulance walls reflected in it. He gives me anti-inflammatories and painkillers and the pain disappears somewhat but the tightness remains. He jabs my hand with a needle and injects some local anesthetic and digs out a few pieces of glass before cleaning the wound.

  “You’re going to need stitches,” he says.

  “Can’t you do it?”

  He shakes his head. “You’re gonna have to come to the hospital for it.”

  Now I shake my head. “I don’t have time. Can’t you just patch it up?”

  “You cops are all the same,” he says, and he secures some gauze and padding around my hand, followed by some bandaging and tape. “It’s still going to need stitches, and unless you want more damage, you should get it done today.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  “Good. And as long as you’re trying things, try to keep it dry,” he tells me, “and try not to use it.”

  “Not even for swimming?”

  “Is that a joke?” he asks.

  “It was supposed to be,” I say, but with the fire still burning, no joke is going to come out sounding funny.

  “You won’t be laughing if it gets infected,” he says, “especially if we have to cut off your hand.”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll keep it clean and dry, I promise.”

  My feet are slightly burned and he smears ointment on them and covers them with gauze and a lighter layer of bandaging than on my hand. Schroder waits outside while I’m being looked at, the argument we were having until the ambulance arrived put on hold. My hands have some blisters on them from patting down the flames on the bottom of my pants. It’ll only take a couple of days for everything to heal except for the cut in my palm, which is going to take at least a week if I get around to having it stitched. When I’m all patched up they help me out of the ambulance and I lean against it, taking all the weight off my bad leg. I grab my shoes from the ambulance floor. The leather has charred and the tips of the laces and the soles have melted. They’re a tight fit with the new bandaging.

  Schroder comes in and puts his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says, “and, if it helps, we don’t know she was in there.”

  “I could have saved her,” I tell him.

  “And on that note,” he says, pulling his hand away, “now I have to lay down the law. You fucked up, Tate,” Schroder says. “It was only a matter of time before somebody tried to set you on fire.”

  “People are always warming up to me,” I say.

  “Jesus, Tate, this could have been much, much worse.”

  “Well, I’m grateful for your concern.”

  “Don’t be. I mean people could have gotten hurt here, Tate. People could have gone rushing in to save you when you weren’t supposed to be there in the first place.”

  “I’ve told you why I went in. You got a picture of Riley yet?” He holds one up and it matches up with the Cooper I saw in a couple of the shots inside, Cooper with friends, with family, Cooper on holiday, Cooper not being burned alive or attacked in his driveway. This one looks like it could be an ID photo from the university. Cooper has a short gray beard, he’s bald on top with hair running around the sides.

  I shake my head. “That’s not the guy I saw. This guy was younger by ten or fifteen years.”

  “Then who?”

  “Like I said earlier, I didn’t get a good look at him, only from above, but it certainly wasn’t that guy,” I say, nodding toward the photograph.

  “Okay. Work with a sketch artist. See if you can put something together.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I tell him. I look toward the smoldering remains of the house. “Even if Emma isn’t in there, I think you’re going to be scraping your second dead body out of a fire in two days.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too.”

  “He live alone?”

  “Yeah. He divorced three years ago. No current partner, according to anyone we’ve questioned.”

  “You think they’re related?” I ask. “Two fires in two days.”

  “Could be. Both were obviously arson,” he says, “though it’s anybody’s guess what the connection between Pamela Deans and Cooper Riley could be.”

  “She was a nurse, right?”<
br />
  “Goddamn it, Tate, isn’t there an off switch in there somewhere?” he asks, tapping me on the forehead. “Let it go. I know I said earlier I was happy to let you look for Emma Green, but this has advanced beyond that now. You see that, right? You see how you can fuck things up for us by getting in the way?”

  “I’ll back off,” I say, not really sure if I mean it.

  “Sound like you mean it,” he says.

  “I mean it,” I say, still unsure.

  “No you don’t.”

  I shrug. “I’m sorry,” I say, but I’m not sorry, and I don’t know what else to add.

  “No you’re not. You’ve been out of jail for twenty-four hours and you’re running around like a damn cowboy. I should have known it’d be this way. If you had just used that goddamn phone of yours to call me the moment you saw Emma Green’s car, things would be different. You’d have seen the arsonist come out. You could have followed him. We’d have somebody in custody, Tate, if only you had waited.”

  “Come on, Carl, I had no choice but to go in once I smelled that petrol. I knew from the moment I stepped inside that place might burn down around me, but I couldn’t take the chance Emma was alive in there getting ready to be cooked. How’d it have looked if I just waited out here while she died? You’d have done the same damn thing, so stop acting so pissed at me.”

  He looks mad, and then he sighs and slowly shakes his head. “Okay, Tate, point taken,” he says. “Are you sure you didn’t recognize the arsonist? I wouldn’t put it past you to recognize him and not tell me because you wanted to find him yourself.”

  “Screw you, Carl.”

  “Hey, I’m just putting it out there,” he says, holding his hands up. “And don’t pretend to take offense. It’s exactly the kind of stupid thing you’d do.”

  “Not this time.”

  “You sure on that?”

  “Positive.”

  We both look toward the fire. The car has been put out, and the house is now just a smoldering wreck. “If we’re lucky,” Schroder says, “one of those Taser ID disks survived the flames.”

  We both look at the driveway and at the car, it doesn’t look like we’re going to be lucky.

  “It’s not the car that sped out from behind the café,” Schroder says.

  “I know. You got any leads on that at all?”

  “Not yet. The café doesn’t have any surveillance, and the owner says it’s pretty much a cash business. We’re still waiting on testing to see if the paint can be matched to any specific car, but that’ll take a few more days.”

  “Emma doesn’t have a few more days. Nor does Cooper,” I say. “If he wasn’t in there,” I say, staring at the house, “then he’s been taken somewhere. Why Taser him if you’re planning on killing him right away?”

  “Maybe it was the only weapon somebody had.”

  “Then he’d have Tasered him and stabbed him and left him in the hallway. I don’t think he’s in there. No reason to drag him that far into the house if you’re planning on killing him.”

  “There’s always a reason,” Schroder says.

  It’s a good point; however, I’m thinking Cooper isn’t in there. I’m hoping that means Emma isn’t in there either.

  “Okay, Tate. Look, go home. I’ll send somebody around in half an hour to draw up a description. We’ll get it into the papers. Maybe somebody will recognize him. Get some rest and take care of that leg of yours.”

  I take that leg of mine along with the rest of me back toward my car. It isn’t parked far enough away from the house to not be affected by the heat, and the paint on the hood and passenger side has bubbled. I have to walk swinging my leg out to the side because I can’t bend it. I get the door open and am easing myself inside when a guy steps out of the crowd and comes toward me.

  “Hey bro, you were lucky to get out,” he says. He has long blond hair twisted into dreadlocks that are a meter long and smell like wet dog. He’s wearing army green cargo pants and a T-shirt that says You’re not in Guatemala anymore Dr. Huxtable. His face is deeply tanned and his lips chapped by the sun; he has one hand stuffed into the pocket of his pants and an unlit cigarette in the other. “You’re a cop, right?”

  “You see who lit the fire?” I ask, standing back up, my knee complaining. Along with the smell of his dreadlocks is the smell of weed. His eyes are bloodshot.

  “Nah, sorry bro. Is the professor okay?”

  “You’re one of his students?” I ask.

  “Nah, man, one of his neighbors.”

  “You think something happened to him?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I think so. First I gotta tell you, man, you can’t arrest me. I got no weed on me.”

  “Oh man,” I say.

  “Deal?”

  “Sure. I promise I won’t arrest you.”

  “I saw something yesterday morning. I was sitting outside, you know, just sitting, right, relaxing with a smoke, you know what I mean? And I saw this dude approach that professor dude and the professor dude fell down or something so the other dude helped him and I thought I was hallucinating or something. You know, from the smoke.”

  “Which house is yours?”

  “That one, bro,” he says, pointing to the one opposite Cooper’s place. It’s a single-story home, tightly packed into a compact lot like all the others on this street, painted the same kind of color, the only real difference between his and the neighbors being that it hasn’t seen a lawn mower since winter.

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “Because I was . . . you know, wasn’t real sure what I’d seen and you’d have just ended up arresting me. I kind of forgot about it all until his house like, totally caught on fire, right, oh man that’s a hell of a sight, a real sight. Anyway I thought I should tell you.”

  I have the urge to see if the bandaging on my hand will pad my knuckles like a boxing glove. “You should have reported it yesterday!”

  “I didn’t want to get in trouble. I had to, you know, man, finish what I had. Jesus, I’m hungry,” he adds.

  “Shit.”

  “Geez, dude, Gandhi yourself down a notch,” he says, holding up his hands. “You think Professor Mono’s going to be okay?”

  “What?”

  “You think he’s going to be okay?”

  “What did you call him?”

  “Professor Riley.”

  “No. You called him something different.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he says, and he starts to grin. “Don’t tell him, but some of us in the neighborhood like to call him Professor Mono, you know, on account of his accident.”

  “What accident?”

  He starts to laugh. “Oh man, I shouldn’t laugh, but it’s the one he had . . . let me think, must have been three or four years ago. Yeah, four years I think, nah, maybe it was three. I’ve been here five. Like it here too, man. Guess how I bought the place? Go on, guess.”

  “What accident are you talking about?”

  “I won lotto, bro. How sweet is that?”

  Now I feel like kicking him too. “The accident?” I say, reminding him.

  “Oh, yeah. Well, I don’t really know how it happened, but I have a friend, right, and his girlfriend’s a nurse at the hospital, right, and she told him that she recognized Cooper because she used to be one of his students way back whenever,” he says, “and . . . and where was I? Oh, yeah, anyway the professor rushed himself in there after he got one of his nuts ripped off.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, she said it was crushed like a grape. They had to remove it.”

  “He was attacked?”

  “He said he got it caught in a door, but how the hell does a man get his nuts caught in a door?” He spreads his legs and pushes his waist forward and tries to twist his body. “You’d have to, you know, have one leg out like this,” he says, “and maybe if the door slammed and you were . . .”

  “This nurse, how can I get hold of her?”

  “Oh man, that’s a bummer
.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t, ay. She was stealing medical supplies and prescription drugs and sold them to a patient who ended up dying. She got caught and she killed herself because she didn’t want to go to jail. It was really sad, bro, real sad. She had a real great rack,” he says, holding his hands up to his chest and looking sad.

  “So which was it—when he had the accident? Three years ago, or four?”

  “What’s it matter?”

  It matters because Schroder said Cooper got divorced three years ago and there could be a connection. “See that guy over there?” I say, and point toward Schroder.

  “Another cop?”

  “Go and tell him the same thing you just told me. It’s useful.”

  “Okay, man. Sure,” he says, then walks in the opposite direction, heading away from Schroder.

  I’m able to bend my leg enough to get behind the steering wheel. Thankfully I’m driving an automatic. I pull away from the curb, smoke still drifting up from the house into the sky. I think about the nurse stealing pills and getting caught and taking her own life and wonder if any of what I was just told is true. My leg is throbbing but it’s too early to pop any more of the painkillers the paramedic gave me. Last year my addiction was booze; I haven’t been out of jail long enough to start a new one. Traffic is thick in and around the blocks surrounding the fire, and there are plenty of parked cars, but once I get through it all it’s a pretty easy drive. I drive past a service station and the attendant out front is up on a ladder changing the prices on the sign, putting petrol up another five cents a liter. I call Schroder on the cell phone.

  “You checked Riley for any criminal record, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You check if he reported any crimes?”

  “What?”

  “Was he the victim of a crime?”

  “What kind of crime?”