Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  I hobble outside to the car. I’m able to keep my left leg straight while using my right to switch between the accelerator and brake. My face is feeling a little sunburned from yesterday and when I scratch at an itch on my nose it feels like I’m clawing my nail an inch deep. Traffic is blocked near town where an RV has turned the wrong way into a one-way street. It hasn’t hit anything, but none of the drivers coming toward it felt like pulling out of the way to give it room to turn back around, and there’s a chorus of swearing and advice being thrown from dozens of directions as more traffic backs up. I switch on the radio and there’re a couple of DJs talking about the death penalty. They talk about Emma Green and how her disappearance is proof that New Zealand needs to bring back capital punishment. They’re saying what the rest of are thinking—that whoever took Emma has hurt other girls in the past, and harder sentences would save future victims. It’s all commonsense stuff. Kill the really bad people and they can’t hurt good people, and who could argue with that? Only really bad people. The DJs are saying they should start with the Christchurch Carver. They’re coming up with ways in which they would execute him, starting out with the clichés like hanging or lethal injection before delving, or devolving, into more imaginative ways that make me seriously wonder about the two men giving the commentary. Then they throw open the lines to the public, to Steve from Sumner who thinks they should start setting these guys on fire, to James from Redwood who thinks we should go old school and stone these bastards in front of rugby-sized crowds in rugby-sized stadiums, then to Brock from Shirley who says nothing beats a good, slow cutting in half right down the middle where they dangle the guy upside down to keep the blood in his brain so he doesn’t pass out as fast. I turn off the radio and pray to God I never piss off Steve, James, or Brock.

  Once I get past the blocked RV, traffic thins out. I miss two more calls from Donovan Green. I pull into the university parking lot and stop in a handicapped spot. There’s a student sitting in a shopping cart with another student pushing him along a sidewalk, both of them laughing.

  I limp to the psychology department wishing I had crutches. I struggle with the stairs, leaning on the handrail along the way. A couple of people pass me and stare at me while pretending not to stare at me, I can see part of them wants to offer to help, but the bigger part doesn’t want to suggest that I need the help. It’s like opening a door for a person in a wheelchair and not knowing whether they’re going to say thank you or fuck off. I reach the second floor where all the offices are lined up. There’s a montage of photographs on the wall of faculty members, the kind of thing you’d see where dead people were being remembered, small hand-sized portrait shots forming a grid. I search through them for the man who lit the fire and decide it could have been about half of them. Cooper Riley is among them, his hair not so gray and more of it in the photo. I head down the corridor. Everything up here looks old enough to predate the very subject of psychology. All the office doors are blue and they’re all labeled by name and Cooper’s office is no different in that aspect, but very different in the fact there is crime scene tape crisscrossed over the door. There’s a large poster pinned to the wall between two of the offices labeled Personality Study with flow diagrams and long complicated words that give me a headache. Nobody is around. I try the door. It’s locked. I take out the keys I found in the front door to Cooper’s house. One of them fits. I pull down the tape and toss it onto the floor. The blame will go to the students.

  The air in the office is thick and stale. The desk is pine and there are dents and scratches covering the surface, and nothing on top of it shares any of the same angles. The desk drawers are open and the filing cabinet is open and the computer is running and there’s fingerprint powder on plenty of flat surfaces. The police came here looking for any clue as to what happened to Cooper Riley. I can imagine Cooper being the kind of guy to keep everything in straight lines and if he were to come into his office right now he’d be pretty upset. My cell phone rings and it’s Schroder.

  “Where are you?” he asks. “The sketch artist just showed up at your place.”

  “Shit. I completely forgot. Tell him I’m on my way.”

  “Listen, there’s no record of Cooper Riley reporting any crime,” he says. “Why did you want to know?”

  “So you’re on the case now?”

  “Two fires in two days. It could be connected, so yeah, I’m on the case. The fire department will know for sure hopefully later on today.”

  I tell him about what the neighbor said.

  “And you think our Melissa X did that to him?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why wouldn’t Riley report that?”

  “That’s the question. Why wouldn’t a victim report being a victim?”

  “Happens every day, Tate,” he says. “You know that. Only about one in seven rapes are reported. Could easily be the same psychology behind that as what happened to Riley, assuming what the neighbor said is true,” he says.

  “Can you access his medical records?”

  “I’ll try to get a warrant.”

  “How’d the search of Riley’s office go?”

  “It hasn’t turned up anything. We’re hoping forensics will find something at the house or Cooper’s car once we can go through the ruins, but it’s not looking hopeful.”

  “I’m thinking of taking a run out to his office,” I say, leaning against the edge of the desk. “See if I can spot something you missed.”

  “Are you trying to offend me?” he asks.

  “No. It’s like you say, I have an eye for this kind of thing. So, are you cool with that?”

  “That depends, Tate. Are you already there?”

  “What if I was?”

  “Then you’d be entering a crime scene, which can go a long way to damaging whatever case we’re building up here.”

  “Technically it’s not a crime scene,” I tell him. “Come on, Carl, what can it hurt if I take a look around?”

  “I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes,” he says. “Last thing I want is you messing things up.”

  He hangs up. I start flicking through the files on Cooper’s desk the same way somebody else would have earlier today. They’ve gone through all the student and staff files because so far that’s the only link between Cooper Riley and Emma Green. Maybe an ex-psychiatry student who was pissed off about a failing grade wanted to get even. Maybe he blamed Emma Green somehow too.

  I check the filing cabinet and the files have been jammed in one direction and obviously thumbed through, they cover this year’s students and last year’s students but don’t go back any further. I think about Melissa and whether she’s the reason Cooper Riley has become Professor Mono to his neighbors. If she was, she could have been a student here. He had to interact with her somehow.

  I step out into the corridor and move down to the next office. A plaque on the door says it belongs to Professor Collins. The door is slightly ajar and I knock on it and open it the rest of the way. A man sitting behind a desk looks up at me. He has wiry gray hair and eyes that are too big for his face and his ears stick out almost ninety degrees. The office has the same layout and same view as Cooper’s, only nowhere near as messy.

  “Can I help you?” he asks.

  “Professor Collins?”

  “Just like the door says,” he says, smiling and leaning back in his chair. “You’re not a student,” he says, “so you’re either a reporter or a cop. I’m going to go with cop. Am I right? You’re here to ask questions about Cooper Riley? I’ve heard his house burned down this afternoon, and you guys were searching his office an hour ago.”

  “Well done, sir,” I say, stepping inside.

  “Please, take a seat,” he says, and I sit opposite him, stretching my leg out in front of me. “So, any word on Cooper?”

  “None yet. How long have you worked here?”

  “Going on fifteen years,” he says.

  “You know Cooper well?”

  “What
do you think happened to him? Do you think he’s going to be okay?”

  “We’re looking into it,” I tell him. “Please, anything you can tell me might help.”

  “Sure, I knew him well. We have offices next to each other. We’ve both been working here the same amount of time. We both went to each other’s wedding and sometimes we’ll still have dinner together.”

  “How long has he been divorced?” I ask, aware these are things that Schroder already knows.

  “Hmm, let me think. Three years ago, give or take. His wife moved on, you know. Met somebody else. I heard they met online. Happens all the time these days. It’s an interesting psychological phenomena, really, how people form online relationships to find a connection in the offline world. I’m actually thinking of writing a paper on it.”

  “She still around?”

  He shakes his head. “Australia, last time I heard, but Cooper never talks about her. Just one day she was in his life, the next day she wasn’t. It’s a shame. They’re both good people, but it didn’t work. It happens that way sometimes,” he says, but he doesn’t follow it up by saying he’s thinking of writing a paper on it. “Cooper took it pretty hard.”

  “Can you tell me when he had his accident?”

  He looks confused. “Accident? What, a car accident?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Then what kind of quite?”

  “Can you recall a time when he was off work, maybe for a month or so? Quite suddenly? Would have been around three years ago, around the time of his divorce.”

  His eyes flick to the left as he tries to recall, then slowly he shakes his head and his mouth turns into an upside-down smile. “Not that I can remember.”

  “He wasn’t sick all of a sudden and couldn’t show up?”

  “I’m sure he was. It happens to us all at some point. Life does get in the way of work, detective. Why, does his being sick in the past relate to his disappearance now?”

  “I’m not sure,” I tell him.

  “Try the administration office,” he tells me. “They’ll have all those kind of records there.”

  I follow Collins’s directions to a building more modern than the rest, large tinted glass frontages overlooking a concrete fountain that’s currently home and toilet to a dozen pigeons. There’s a foyer that is like a doctor’s waiting room, with students sitting in chairs reading textbooks or magazines while waiting to talk to somebody. The woman behind the desk is in her late forties and has hair pulled tightly back into a bun and glasses that hang around her neck on a thin chain. Her perfume is sharp and I can feel the hint of a hay fever attack lurking. She’s wearing a blouse that has cat fur caught around the buttons.

  “How can I help you?” she asks, smiling up at me.

  “You know we searched Cooper Riley’s office earlier?” I ask, hoping she’s going to make the same mistake Professor Collins made, and she does.

  “Yes, of course. Everybody knows.”

  “There’s something else you may be able to help us with,” I tell her. “There was a time when Riley took a month or more off work. Possibly around three years ago. Can you look that up for me?”

  She doesn’t answer me. Instead she puts on her glasses and adjusts the distance between the lenses and her eyes as she looks at a computer monitor, then her fingers fly across the keyboard.

  “It’ll take a minute,” she says, and about ten seconds later she finds it. “Here we go. You’re right,” she says. “Almost three years ago. April through to May. Five weeks in total.”

  “I need to get a look at names and faces of his students from that year.”

  “Why?”

  “Please, it’s important. We’re trying to save Cooper’s life,” I tell her.

  “Is it true his house was burned down?”

  “It’s true.”

  “There are hundreds of students from three years ago,” she tells me.

  I need to check them all for the arsonist, but that can wait till Schroder gets here. “Just the female ones.”

  “I guess I can print them out,” she says. “It’ll take an hour, unless you can narrow down who you’re after.”

  “What about students who dropped out during the year? Around the same time Professor Riley was off work?”

  “Why? You think that means something?”

  “Please,” I tell her, “we need to hurry.”

  “Hmm . . . let me see,” she says. She taps at the keyboard again. “Four female students dropped out during that time.”

  “Any of them named Melissa?”

  “Melissa? No, none of them.”

  “Can I see their photographs?”

  She twists the computer monitor toward me and I have to lean over the desk to get a better view, entering her perfume zone in the process. She cycles through the photos. She gets to the third one when I stop her for a better look. The eyes look familiar.

  “I remember this girl,” the receptionist says.

  “You do?”

  “Not so much her, but her parents. They came in here looking for information.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Anything that would help them track her down. She went missing. Oh no,” she says, making the connection. “You think the same thing that happened to Emma Green happened to her?” she asks, tapping the monitor.

  I don’t think so. I think these two girls ended up with very different fates. I think the girl on the screen might be the woman who attacked the Christchurch Carver and killed Detective Calhoun. This could be the woman that put Professor Riley in hospital three years ago. Her image has been in the papers and all over the news, an image taken from the video I watched yesterday, but that image isn’t the same as the one I’m looking at now. Similar, but not the same, different haircut, different color hair, a little less weight around the face—but it’s the eyes. Those eyes are the same, I’m sure of it.

  Cooper Riley would have known it too. He would have seen the news and he would have known who she really was, and he never came forward to the police.

  Why would that be? Is he still afraid of her?

  Or is there something he’s hiding?

  chapter twenty-two

  Cooper’s head is much better today, but it’s still throbbing a little and he’s tempted to take the pills he found in his pocket yesterday. The wound on his chest is starting to itch and when he touches it with his fingers they come away damp with blood and something else too, something that’s not quite yellow. If he doesn’t eat something soon he thinks he’s going to go crazy.

  He recognizes the girl. Shoulder-length red hair that is knotted and frayed. Her skin is pale and flushed. She can’t be any more than twenty. A student? Perhaps a former one. Even one from this year—there are always so many. Or it could be somebody from the supermarket, a checkout teller, some girl he’s made idle chitchat with while his groceries were scanned before he swiped his credit card. Maybe a hairdresser from the mall, a Jehovah’s Witness who banged on his door one morning, a receptionist at his doctor’s office. He’s seen her around but can’t place where. She’s in a dress that’s too big for her and covered in flowers that, under the lamplight, all look pale blue. It’s something his mother would wear in the summer.

  Jesus, his mother . . . she’ll be a mess. His mother will be eighty years old in July, and already the family is planning a huge party for her. His sister is going to fly back from the UK—and he suspects she might be flying back now because of what’s happened, assuming people even know he’s disappeared, which they must do if it’s true what Adrian said about burning down his house. He hopes his mother is holding up okay. She’s a strong woman. Has been ever since his dad walked out on them when Cooper was twelve years old. He hasn’t seen him since. Has no idea whether the man is even alive and doesn’t care. But his mother . . . he owes her everything. With a weaker mother, his life would have taken a different path. When he was fourteen years old, he stole a car. He and his friend got drunk, and they cra
shed it. Neither of them were hurt, but his mother came and picked him up from the police station and didn’t say a word on the way home, didn’t say a word until the following morning when she made him breakfast.

  He had apologized, and she had told him she wasn’t the one he should be apologizing to, that he should be apologizing to his future self, that it was his future self he was damaging. He didn’t care. Back then he didn’t care about much except that his dad had left, and how good beer tasted when he snuck out at night to meet his buddy. She made him write himself a letter for the future, in which he told himself how sorry and how stupid he was. She made him write down how much he had hurt his mother. He did that too. Then she went into her room and cried. When she came back out she sat down with him and ate breakfast and told him she felt sorry for the man she was going to give that letter to in ten years’ time. She never gave him that letter. Instead things changed. Every day she would tell him whether his future self would be happy or disappointed with his actions. He started to care about that future self. He didn’t want to grow up to be like his dad. He started to study harder. His grades were good.

  When he was twenty years old, he had an affair with the next-door neighbor. She was fifteen years older than him. He thought he loved her. One day her husband came home with a shotgun and put a hole in her before putting one in himself. Nobody saw it coming. Cooper was never sure whether the husband knew his wife had been cheating, and he suspected that if he had known and who with, there would have been a shotgun shell reserved for him too. The husband was the cliché, the quiet man who didn’t speak much to people, and Cooper couldn’t figure out how he hadn’t seen it coming. It fascinated him. People were different, they ticked differently, and he wanted to understand them. He felt the loss of losing his lover, but he felt no guilt, and that interested him too.