Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  He went to the cemetery to see her. It took him over an hour to walk there from town. A priest, Father Julian, helped him find her grave and had stood with him, answering Adrian’s questions about God, promising him if he had any more he was free to return at any time. Adrian didn’t have much of an opinion about God. The Preacher—the man who ran the halfway house—tried to convince Adrian that God was somebody worth having on your side, but Adrian already knew God wasn’t on his side, otherwise he’d never have been put into that coma all those years before. Adrian returned to the grave a few months ago only to learn that God wasn’t on Father Julian’s side either, because, for all his worshipping and loyalty, Father Julian had been murdered. Adrian has never fully understood what irony is, but he thinks that may have been it. A new priest had taken his place, much in the same way a new mother had taken his original mother’s place.

  His second mother’s name was Pamela and he met her the first day he came here to live. He doesn’t know when she became more a mother figure to him than his nurse, and he guesses, just as he thinks Cooper would guess, that it happened because he was still very young. She insisted he call her Nurse Deans, and never Pamela, and the couple of times he accidentally called her mum he was locked downstairs in the basement, each time for one full day and night. She was never cruel to him over the years, just strict, and the times she had to hit him, or as they both grew older have one of the orderlies hit or restrain him, he knew were for his own good. He didn’t like it, but the abuse was the only way to fix whatever was wrong with him and make him a better person, and they sure spent a lot of time trying to make him better. She never saw him as a son and he never forgave her for not visiting him in the halfway house. After all their years together she made it seem as though she had never cared.

  He hated the halfway house and three years . . . three years were just too many. He wanted to come back here. The problem was he couldn’t. He would go to the hospital and wait for Pamela Deans, he would hide in the parking building across the road, other times shadowed by a tree in the park opposite, and he would watch her, always wanting to approach but always too nervous to do so.

  Then one day everything changed.

  Adrian learned how to drive.

  He was petrified the first time he got behind the wheel of a car, but soon that grew into mere nervousness, which itself became excitement. His teacher, Ritchie, was not an experienced driver himself, but he certainly knew more than Adrian. Ritchie was older than him by twenty years and lived out at the Grove for five of them before it was shut down. There was a lot Ritchie had done that Adrian never would—he’d been married, he had children, he’d had the same job for over fifteen years teaching people how to play the guitar. He tried teaching Adrian too, but the guitar had five strings too many for him to figure it out. But he had taught him to drive. In the end it was one of the most fun things he had ever done. They laughed a lot as he learned, and there were a few shrubs and letter-boxes that became victims, but at no other time has he ever felt so much at peace as he did with his best friend talking him through braking and steering, teaching him the art of changing gears, an art that needed to be so precise in the beginning because any mistake would stall the car. He even learned how to pour in petrol and fill the tires with air.

  Learning to drive brought about his freedom. With freedom he could do whatever he wanted, go wherever he chose. It opened up an entire new world of possibilities. It gave him access to Grover Hills, to the people who hurt him, it gave him access to a new life, and what he wanted the most from his new life was to be just like his old life—minus the Twins.

  So that was the plan. He would live at the Grove again, and Nurse Deans would look after him. He just had to make sure the Twins weren’t going to be there to hurt him.

  A few years before the Grove shut down, the Twins had left. It was pretty easy to find out where they lived. It was a beautiful moment showing up at their house last week, and it was the first time he ever killed anybody. Boy, he was nervous. So nervous that he almost dropped the hammer. He got through it. He clubbed them both to death, and then he took their car. They weren’t ever going to need it again.

  He wanted to live here, he wanted Grover Hills to be the way it used to be now that the Twins were dead, and he wanted Nurse Deans to live here with him.

  Only she didn’t want to.

  He moved what he owned out here but quickly became lonely. His best friend had met a woman and their friendship had taken a backseat to the new relationship. Adrian was jealous of them and happy for them at the same time, but not happy enough to ask them to join him out here. He wishes things had gone differently. Being back here he can clearly remember the good times, and there were many. He remembers some of the killers that came to stay, young men and women who weren’t fully aware of what they had done, or so they pretended, but sometimes at night they would tell him in detail and their stories would take on a life, he could see the details through their eyes, both sickening and exciting him. Some were so vivid he could almost lay claim to the memories and call them his own.

  After hearing them, he would go back to his room and work on his comics. He was getting better at them. No matter what the story was he had heard, he would draw that scenario. He would put himself into the killer’s shoes, he would imagine he was the one swinging the ax or holding the knife, and the victims he drew were always the eight boys who had hurt him all those years ago. As he drew them, he could feel himself killing them, and it was magnificent.

  But then the orderlies and nurses started to find his comic collection. Each time they would destroy it and he would be sent into the Scream Room. He wouldn’t be allowed pencils or paper anymore, but there was always a way to get some, and he’d start over again with the new stories until he lost those too.

  When he left the Grove and went to the halfway house, the people who inspired him were no longer with him. It affected his work. He found he couldn’t get the shapes right, or the shading, and the details in the faces disappeared. The characters just didn’t want to be there. After six months of trying, he gave up. The memories had faded, just as the people who told them have faded from his life.

  He has his books, but books aren’t the same. Those people who came and went over the years, he would tell them his story too, and those people are what made the Grove a home. You can’t tell your story to a book.

  He remembers everything about Cooper Riley from when Cooper used to come out here with his questions. Part of him felt jealous in the beginning, because Cooper was stealing the stories that were meant for him, but of course that was stupid, and he came to realize that in the end. Cooper would come out here once a week over the final year the Grove remained open, and he would interview a handful of patients, all of them committed for taking lives. Adrian found the process fascinating, and he couldn’t wait to read the book when it came out, and he hoped it would have pictures too. When the Grove shut down, Adrian looked for but was never able to find a copy. Nobody at the book stores had ever heard of it. That meant Cooper wasn’t done writing it.

  Last week he looked Cooper Riley up. He was a professor at the University of Canterbury who taught psychology to some students and criminology to others. Adrian began to follow him. He began to think—if he couldn’t be friends anymore with the men who had told him those stories, men who had moved on, he could have the man who had recorded them, the man who was the keeper of those stories as well as a storyteller.

  Only Cooper was so much more.

  Because a few nights ago he learned Cooper was part of the story. Following him, Adrian watched as Cooper hurt the woman behind the café. Cooper dropped her into the trunk of his car and drove away.

  Adrian followed.

  When it was all over, Adrian drove back to the parking lot. He wanted the woman’s car. He didn’t know why, but he wanted to own it. He wanted to collect it. Even more, he wanted to collect Cooper. He had been using a car that belonged to one of the Twins. He left it severa
l blocks away and walked back to the café. He was lucky—the keys to the woman’s car were laying on the ground. What started as an idea was now a must have. He would bring Cooper back to Grover Hills. He would store him in the Scream Room, and over time Cooper would grow to trust him, to befriend him, and tell him story after story.

  He knew keeping Cooper would be a lot of work. He had his savings, and he was still receiving a sickness benefit. The government was giving him money and he didn’t have to work for it, all he had to do was tell the doctor he had to go and visit every six months that he was taking his pills even if he wasn’t. He knew once in the Scream Room the professor would get bored, and the way to combat that was to bring home a victim. So from the café he had driven his new car into town and parked near the corner where the woman had rejected him months earlier, back when Christmas lights had decorated the city. It had been the week before Christmas and he had known for months what he wanted, and what he wanted to do was spend some money and be with the woman from the street corner who reminded him of the girl who changed his life. He had seen her many times over the previous year, each time she looked more like Katie than the last, until finally he was convinced that it was her. He should have known it wasn’t—after all, Katie would have been his age, and this girl on the corner was no more than twenty. The memory of it still makes him feel bad, almost embarrassed to tell the truth. He had approached her and asked how much it cost to be with her, and she had given him a varying range of prices for things he didn’t understand.

  They had walked to an alley less than twenty seconds away. She had looked him over and then asked for the money first and he had paid it. Then she had undone the front of his pants. He had never been with a woman before and didn’t know what to do, but she seemed to know plenty.

  “Don’t be shy,” she had said, but he was shy and his heart had been banging like a drum, so nervous he was that by the time he felt sick it was too late to warn her, his mouth had opened and a stream of vomit hit her in the middle of the chest.

  “Ah, shit, you goddamn freak,” she screamed, jumping away from him.

  “I’m sorry, Katie.”

  She looked up from where she was wiping the vomit off with her hand and flicking it into the ground. “What did you just say?”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  “You called me Katie.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “How much money do you have on you?”

  “None.”

  She stepped forward and poked him in the chest. He was afraid of her. “How much?”

  “I . . . I don’t know,” he said. He had already given her sixty dollars. He pulled out his wallet and she snatched it from him. She took out all the cash that was in it and threw the wallet back.

  “This is to cover the dry cleaning,” she said, “and don’t let me ever see you again.”

  But he had seen her again, sometimes a few nights in a row, but he had never approached her.

  Not until this week. She didn’t recognize him. She seemed softer for lack of a better word, and he suspected she was high. Plus he had a car—and last time he didn’t. She climbed into the car willingly and he Tasered her when they drove into an alley half a block away. He probably could have just held the rag over her face, but this way there was no struggle. It was the same Taser he would use on Cooper and she collapsed into the same kind of heap, only she was supported by the passenger seat.

  The Taser came from the Twins, and so did the extra cartridges, a dozen of them in total, meaning he can shoot twelve people, or less people more than once. He also found the chemical they used to use on him sometimes. They would soak it into a rag and hold it over his face and he’d fall asleep. He would have collected the Twins and listened to their stories if he hadn’t hated them so much. He considered putting the woman in one of the padded rooms and decided to rope her to one of the beds instead. The bedrooms got more air and he figured were more comfortable. He used rope and glue and she stayed asleep the entire time.

  After that he went back out. Driving was amazing. Having a car was changing his life. He drove to the hospital. He waited outside. He followed his second mother home. He needed her help to look after all the people he was collecting. She called him a freak just like the street girl had, only this time she didn’t have any orderlies to back her up. He lashed out at her. She told him she would call the police and he would go to jail and that jail was far worse than anything she had ever done to him. So he lashed out again and, when he was finished with the lashing, he tied her to the bed, went out, and bought a container of petrol.

  He slept in her house most of the night on the couch, waking up at five o’clock in the morning to load his car with all the food he could find. He took some of her dresses for the girls he would bring home for Cooper, said goodbye to his mother, and set her on fire.

  It meant he was going to have to do everything by himself. He could handle that. After all, the last three years in the halfway house proved he was capable, and look at what he’s learned in that time—he’s learned how to drive, how to cook, how to clean up after himself, how to go into town and buy groceries and clothes. He’s been back at the Grove for a week now, and each morning he has sat on the wooden deck out front in the sun, sometimes for only a few minutes, other times for the entire day. This morning was a little different because of the rain, but it’s cleared up now pretty good. He drinks his orange juice and he thinks about Cooper and how, last night, the two men bonded over the killing of the woman. Violence is . . . is sit-u-ation-al, that’s what all the books say. That’s what makes criminals model prisoners in jail—there are no women to rape and murder in there. He knew when the situation changed, so would Cooper’s attitude. He’s read that somewhere.

  Adrian also feels betrayed. He knew the woman would let Cooper out of his cell, and what Cooper did next was going to impact their relationship. If he tried to escape, it meant he didn’t really like Adrian at all, and that everything he had said was a lie. The killing brought them closer, but the betrayal has driven them apart. He guesses that means he’s exactly where he was in the beginning.

  He finishes breakfast but doesn’t go downstairs. He cleaned up the mess last night. He wrapped the body in an old blanket and took her around the back to bury her with the others. He doesn’t want to face Cooper right now. He’s still too annoyed at him. And anyway, he’s got other plans for this morning—he has some digging to do, and maybe some collecting too.

  chapter twenty-seven

  Donovan Green doesn’t look like he’s had any sleep since the last time I saw him. He hasn’t changed either. His hair is a mess and his eyes are red and keep flicking left and right as if he’s being followed. He looks like he’s just walked out of a bar where he’s been holed up for the last twelve hours drinking hard.

  “Here’s the money,” he says, handing me an envelope. When it comes to finding your daughter, there’s no limit to what you’ll spend. “What’s the lead?”

  “Cooper Riley wrote a book,” I tell him. “It may have something in it we can use.”

  “It’s five thousand dollars for a book?”

  “It is for this one. I’ll call you later on today.”

  He seems about to argue the point, that he wants to hang around and watch me work, but in the end he just nods slowly. He’s a broken man holding out the kind of hope that may kill him if things don’t work out the way he needs them to.

  “The sketch in the news,” I say, “you recognize him?”

  “Looks like the prime minister.”

  “You know if the police have shown it to Emma’s flatmates and friends?”

  “One of them thought it was their cousin Larry. I told you she was still alive, and the photos prove it,” he says. “I know you think things might have changed since they were taken, but they haven’t. She’s alive and I can feel it,” he says, and I really hope that he can. “She’s strong,” he tells me. “You know that for a fact. She survived what you did
to her, and she’ll survive what’s being done to her now. She can talk her way out of anything.”

  I hope she can. I hope she has the ability to talk.

  “My wife, Hillary,” he says, “she was always the strong one. Last year, when you hurt Emma, my wife was a rock. I was the one falling apart. This time, Jesus, she’s a mess. All she does is sit in Emma’s old room holding on to some of the clothes Emma left behind when she moved out. Hillary is the strongest woman I know, but this . . . if we don’t get Emma back alive,” he says, “she’s . . . she’s . . . I don’t know. I just don’t know,” he says, shaking his head. “Just . . . just find her, okay? Find her alive. Please, I’m begging you, find my daughter alive.”

  I want to tell him that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I want to tell him he can tell his wife everything is going to be okay, because by the end of the day, tomorrow at the latest, they’ll have their daughter back. I can see in his tired face and tired features that he wants me to tell him this, that hearing it would make him feel a whole lot better.

  And I almost tell him.

  I nod, and he takes meaning in that nod because he nods back, turns around, and I watch him walk away, maybe he’s going to head back home, maybe to the hospital, maybe to go and see Jonas Jones Psychic or a priest because he’s desperate to try anything.

  I head back into the corridor. The idea of money isn’t as powerful as money itself, which is why I hold up two thousand dollars in the window of the door to the computer server room and knock on it. I could try holding up fifty dollars and hope for the same result, but the risk of having him call the police fades more with every hundred I hold up. The door is locked and the guy comes over and stares at the money then at me and then back at the money.