Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  Schroder plugs the flash drive into the computer and we go through the same process as I went through with the camera card. The first image loads up and he clicks the arrow to move to the second and then the third. There are thirty pictures in total. All of the same girl, which is an awful thing to be thankful for, but we are. Scared and clothed in the beginning, naked and dead in the end. The photos are a progression of the last week of her life according to the time stamps on the files. She’s laying on the same floor as Emma Green. The photos are in a sequence, and looking through them is like reading a story. The sequence shows the girl become paler as the days pass, she loses weight, blisters and a rash appear on her face, mean-looking welts appear on her skin. Seven days of hell. Seven days of knowing you were going to die but praying for the best. There is duct tape over her eyes in all of them except the last. Cooper liked the idea of not being seen but being able to converse. I bet the bastard loved hearing them cry or beg for their lives.

  “She’s alive,” I tell him.

  “What?” he asks, lost in his own thoughts.

  “I said she’s alive. Emma Green. If he was going to do to her what he did to this girl then . . .”

  “Jane Tyrone,” he says.

  “What?”

  “That’s who this girl is,” he says, tapping the monitor. “She went missing nearly five months ago. “She was a bank teller at that same bank that got held up just before Christmas. A woman was shot and killed.”

  “You thought she was involved with the robbery?”

  He shakes his head. “No. She went missing three months before the robbery. Her car was found abandoned in a parking building in town with her keys in the trunk along with traces of blood. Whatever happened to her, it started there.” He turns toward the window and looks at the same view I was staring at earlier. “He kept her for a week,” he says. “A whole week she was begging for us to find her and we never did.”

  “Emma Green is begging for the same thing,” I tell him. “Come on, Carl, she has to still be alive. We’ve got two photos of her from his camera. He hadn’t copied them to the flash drive yet. He wasn’t done with her.”

  “And Melissa X?”

  “I’m thinking three years ago she was Riley’s first, but something went wrong and she ended up attacking him. He kept quiet, because what was he going to say, that a woman he was trying to rape and kill assaulted him?”

  “You think this is what got her started?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “She could have gotten a taste for doing bad things and just kept on doing them, and I think there aren’t any pictures of her because she was the first and it was an impulsive act. After her Cooper was too afraid to try again. Could be it took him three years to get up the nerve.”

  “So what in the hell happened to him? Who abducted Cooper and burned down his house?”

  “Maybe it’s somebody Cooper has hurt in the past. One more thing that doesn’t make sense is why wait a day between kidnapping Cooper and burning down his house? And why use Emma Green’s car?”

  “You don’t think Cooper torched his own place to try and hide evidence, faked his own abduction, then ran?”

  “No reason to,” I say. “Nobody was on to him. Only reason he became a suspect was because he didn’t show up for work. And why torch his house and leave these,” I say, nodding toward the photographs, “in his office?”

  “They weren’t exactly on display.”

  “Still, he wouldn’t try cleaning up one scene by torching it without getting rid of the USB key from another.”

  “He would if he killed the girl at his house,” he suggests.

  “He wouldn’t have left his camera in the driveway, and we have a witness who saw him taken. And those were definitely ID tags from a Taser I was looking at.”

  “Okay, so what about Donovan Green? He could have done it.”

  “Possible,” I answer, “but why come to me about it?”

  “Because he wanted an alibi. He wanted to make out he had no idea what happened to his daughter. You think he’s the kind of guy who could do it?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, thinking back to last year when he wanted to kill me. Absolutely Donovan could have done it. But Donovan Green was waiting for me to give him a name. It’s possible, I guess, that he had that name first, that he killed Cooper Riley, panicked, and then came to me to start building a story to make him look innocent. I think about the look on his face, the grim determination to get his hands on the person who hurt Emma. No, he didn’t know who took his daughter. I’m sure of it. “Donovan Green wouldn’t kill the only person who knew where she was.”

  “Maybe he’s torturing it out of him.”

  “Wasn’t him who lit the fire.”

  “He could have hired somebody.”

  “Then why drive around in Emma’s car?”

  He doesn’t have an answer.

  “You looked into a connection with the fires?” I ask.

  “There could be a link there between Cooper Riley and Pamela Deans, but it’s a very tentative one if it is.”

  “Want to share?”

  “Look, Tate, I have to call this in. You should go. If you’re here when the other detectives arrive, you’ll get me fired.”

  “You’ll call me later today?”

  He nods. “I’ll keep you in the loop and update you later. Tate, you’ve done a good job with this Melissa X thing,” he says. “If what you’ve learned leads to an arrest, don’t worry—you’re still looking at the reward money.”

  I look down at the photographs. “I’m not doing this for the money,” I tell him.

  “I know. But you need it.”

  I head back into the hall and close the door behind me. I think of the girls wandering these halls and how close any one of them came to being Cooper’s next victim.

  Donovan Green calls again before I reach the parking lot. It’s no longer blue skies in every direction. There are white fluffy clouds to the north and it’s completely overcast out to the east, the cloud cover over the ocean stretching the length of the horizon. The temperature must have dropped a few points too. I answer the phone and give Green an update. I don’t tell him about the photographs of his daughter tied up and naked. I don’t share with him my theory that she may still be alive. Last thing I want to do is feed him false hope only to have to confront him with the worst news of his life a day later. I tell him that I have made some progress, that I have some leads, and am hoping for some more news soon.

  I head for home. Peak-time traffic makes it a long trip. I make some strong coffee once I walk through the door and fire up the computer. I go online. Rain starts to splash on the windows, just a couple of drops every few seconds. I get up and close them, the breeze coming through is warm and feels charged. The trees outside the study window are being thrown about by the wind. The pre-autumn leaves that have already fallen are scuttling across the lawn. There is no more blue sky, no more white clouds, just darkness in every direction. I step out into the rain as it starts to come down heavy, and I’m not the only one. Neighbors are standing in the street with their faces turned up to the sky, their arms stretched wide and smiles on their faces. For days on end this city has felt like it was going to burn, and for the moment everything is okay. Children are laughing. People are dancing in circles. It’s absolute pure happiness, and it’s infectious. I start laughing too. I let it soak my clothes, my first touch of rain in four months, and like the sunset last night, I’ve never seen rain looking so good. When the lightning comes, I head back inside, then thunder rolls over the city, loud enough to rattle the pictures on the wall. The house lights up like a camera flash as more lightning splits the evening apart. I dry off and put fresh bandages on my feet and hand, then I sit in front of the computer.

  I look up articles about Natalie Flowers. She was reported missing almost three years ago, but the police didn’t look into it. According to the articles, Natalie cleaned out her bank accounts and packed up all her clothe
s and moved out of her apartment, telling her flatmate she had somewhere else to be. There were no suspicious circumstances. Her parents reported her missing, they pleaded in the media for their daughter to come home.

  Eight years before that Melissa Flowers, Natalie’s sister, was raped and killed by a police officer. Melissa Flowers was thirteen years old, an unlucky number for some, especially unlucky for her. I can still remember the case. It wasn’t an officer I knew, but I knew all about him after the fact. There was no investigation because he confessed to the crime within an hour of doing it, confessed with a note and by putting a bullet in his head, his body found next to the young naked girl. The note had an apology, it told what he did but didn’t say why. It stunned the whole country. I think whatever happened that night with Cooper Riley, Natalie Flowers died and Melissa X was created. She walked away from her old life and started a new one. Either something inside of her snapped, or something inside of her lit up with the excitement of what she had done and needed more. Three years later she would murder Detective Calhoun while the Christchurch Carver filmed her, and she would go on to kill others. Maybe when Cooper attacked Natalie, whatever had started to break when her sister had been killed finally snapped. She was no longer Natalie. She became Melissa, and Melissa wanted revenge for what that officer had done. Is there a connection to the men Natalie has killed, other than the uniforms? Did these men remind her of the man who murdered her sister?

  I read the rest of the articles on them both and there are no answers. So I start to look for the connection between Cooper Riley and Nurse Deans, and before I can find anything there’s a knock at the door. It’s the sketch artist. We sit at the kitchen table, and he goes to work and I keep thinking about Cooper Riley and Pamela Deans, I keep trying to figure out a way they can connect, and keep coming up with nothing.

  chapter twenty-four

  Cooper Riley hasn’t killed six people like he told Adrian, but six sounded much better than the truth—which was one, but this isn’t about the truth, this is about escaping from a man who’s purely delusional. Technically, having killed only one person doesn’t make him a serial killer even though he has a second one all tied up waiting for him, so in that sense he wasn’t lying when he first told Adrian he wasn’t a serial killer. He guesses that now he is, because now he’s up to two.

  He really did want to help the girl who saved him, but the missing camera may be in the hands of the police, they may have seen photos of him with Emma Green, they may have searched his office and found pictures of him with Jane Tyrone. He needs to find that out before going to the police, and if he walked out of here with the girl, what could he say to her to keep her quiet until he knew for sure the police didn’t know he was a killer? The moment they escaped she would be calling for help. It was unfortunate, but he couldn’t take her with him. It was too risky.

  The blade is deep inside the girl’s stomach. Her eyes are wide and he can see all sorts of thoughts running behind them, the foremost one her regret at unbolting the door. She’s no longer struggling. Blood rolls along the edges of the blade and warms his hand, and in the thrust he gave the knife to enter her he has managed to cut himself, his hand jarring forward and dragging the web of this thumb along the sharp edge. He lets go and repositions his grip on the handle. It’s getting slippery.

  Seven minutes left.

  He presses his body weight against her, holding her against the wall. There are tears in her eyes and her face is red. She is losing a battle she no longer even has the strength to fight. With his free hand he pinches shut her nose, and at the same time crumples the end of the straw into his palm. Her eyes grow wider, her face redder, veins stand out in her neck and her forehead. Her eyeballs, he really believes, are in jeopardy of popping right on out. It’s something he’d be curious to see happen, but at the same time he thinks it would gross him out. Something inside her nose clicks loudly. Then her mouth opens, the lips tearing, glued skin hanging from them like tiny leaves, the straw dangling from her bottom lip like a cigarette as blood splatters across her chin. She inhales loudly but her lungs don’t even fill before he twists the knife, any air sucked in immediately rushing out.

  He doesn’t want this to take much longer, and it doesn’t. Her eyes are asking the question she cannot.

  “Because it’s who I am,” he tells her, then, when that isn’t enough, he carries on. He feels as though he needs to. “I’m sorry,” he adds, and he thinks he means it.

  Her eyes roll up and then she sinks to the floor. This is different from the other girl who died. This way is more enjoyable, and it’s the way he always wanted to do it. There is nothing sexual here, and he misses that, but that hasn’t made the experience any less rewarding. The last girl died while he was gone. She just gave up. He can’t help but wish he knew what his peers would say, not only other killers, but those who study them too. What would they say about a man whose need is so strong he kills the very woman who set him free and could possibly help? That makes him a step above any other killer. It makes him brilliant. If he could tell them, he’d say it wasn’t just a need, it was also about semantics. He couldn’t take her with him. He has to kill Adrian. Camera aside, his personal life has to stay personal—any talk of him being a serial killer could end up having the police dig deeper than need be, and then it’s all over for him, then he may as well have stayed down here because at least it would have been safer than real jail.

  He looks down at the woman. There are tattoos on the insides of her arms and needle marks on the insides of her elbows. There’s something about her that makes him think she’s a prostitute, that her body has been polluted with the needs and anger of hundreds of men. Her blood has flecked onto his face. He wipes at it with the back of his arm. His shirt is covered in dark red patches. Annoyed, he plucks the wet material away from his body, and when he lets it go it clings back to his stomach. The blood is already cooling down. He looks at the cut on his hand. Jesus, all that blood mixing with his wound—fuck, he’s going to need to take a shower. The way things are going, he’s going to get out of here, get his life back, only to find out he’s just become HIV positive or has hepatitis, or maybe he’s struck the jackpot and has AIDS.

  He makes his way to the top of the stairs. He puts the webbing between his thumb and finger into his mouth and pinches down softly with his teeth, tasting the blood. He sucks it into his mouth then spits it onto the floor. He holds his ear against the door. He can make out classical music. There is some natural light showing around the edges of the door but not much. He puts his hand on the handle. It’s unlocked. He has four minutes left. Maybe longer. He slowly opens the door and the music gets louder.

  The corridor looks the same as the last time he was here three years ago, back when he had ideas of writing a book that people were going to care about. Movement. Out from the shadow of one of the other doors. He knows what’s about to happen, just as he knows he has been played, that he has been fooled by a man who is nothing but a fool, and before he can move the pain hits him, a blinding pain that makes his entire body shut down and he drops like a rock, his mind trying to move his arms and legs but all the wiring in between has been switched off. He watches Adrian come over and can do nothing as he crouches down and holds the rag over his face. The sweet chemical smell, the taste, and then there is nothing.

  chapter twenty-five

  Friday morning and the rain is still hanging about. There’s some fresh bacon and eggs in the fridge, courtesy of my mother, I manage to burn the bacon but not the eggs. I’m feeling tired, last night after the sketch artist left I spent three hours online looking into the pasts of Pamela Deans and Cooper Riley and eventually finding a connection thin enough to tear, a connection involving an abandoned mental institution. I turn my cell phone on and check my messages. There are three, two from Donovan Green, and one from Schroder. Schroder tells me there were no bodies found in the fire and that the fire department is of the belief both fires were set in the same manner. Schroder go
es on to say he has been unable to get a warrant for Cooper Riley’s medical records from three years ago on account of medical records being one of the hardest things to be given.

  From the clouds outside you’d never know we’d just come through a heat wave. Rain is pouring from the gutters of my house into the garden, and the roads are overflowing, water rushing toward drains mostly blocked with leaves. I want to start my day by driving out to see my wife, I want to hold her hand and escape the world for an hour, but it’s not going to happen and, strangely, I’m okay with it. I don’t feel guilty at not seeing my wife, but I feel guilty at not feeling bad about it.

  I switch on the TV and eat my breakfast in the living room, watching the morning news. Emma Green’s disappearance has finally become newsworthy. The story about her lasts ten minutes, and then it mentions Jane Tyrone, the girl on the memory card who disappeared five months ago, around the same time the Christ-church Carver was being arrested. I looked her up online last night and read the articles about her when she disappeared. She made the news for two weeks and hasn’t been mentioned since until now.

  The description I gave the sketch artist is shown. The problem is it’s very generic, not all of the details have come from me, but from other witnesses; the dope smoker and a woman at a nearby service station where Adrian filled up two cans of petrol. The shading and the frown of the arsonist makes him look like a killer, but the killer looks like my next-door neighbor and everybody else’s next-door neighbor. After they show the sketch, they show some footage from the service station of a man stepping out of Emma Green’s car and paying for petrol. The problem with service station footage is that it’s the same quality of film used to shoot Bigfoot, but what it does do is give a more accurate description of height and weight of the man who took Cooper Riley.