Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, rolling off her. His head was buzzing from the alcohol and he felt sick.

  She said nothing. She stared at the ceiling and, God, she could go a long time without blinking. Tears had formed a small stream down the side of her face.

  “I . . . I don’t know what happened,” he said. “Please, please, I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

  He touched her shoulder. She didn’t flinch away. She didn’t move.

  “Are you . . . are you okay?”

  She wouldn’t answer. Wouldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t move.

  He started to panic. She would tell the police what had happened. He would lose his job. He would go to jail. Nobody would publish his book then. He sure as hell wouldn’t win his wife back. And when he came out, what would he do? Nobody would ever respect him. Nobody would hire him. His future self would be lost.

  The easiest solution was to kill her. Could he cross that line? He had already crossed one, he could cross another. He thought about bundling her up in the car and dumping her somewhere. That part he could do. The strangling or stabbing part, no, that part he couldn’t do.

  “I have money,” he said to her and it wasn’t true. He owned the house with his wife and the mortgage was small, but now that she was gone he was going to have to buy her out for her half. When she wouldn’t move, he sat up on the edge of the bed and pulled his pants back on. “It’s yours. All of it,” he said, and he meant it. He would sell the house and if there was anything left he would give it to her. His chest felt heavy and his breathing was forced, and he bent over and vomited on the floor. Immediately he felt better. Even the buzzing died down by half.

  “I’ll drive you home,” he said, wiping his mouth on the bottom of his shirt, but of course he was in no condition to drive. “Let me help you with your clothes,” he said, and he helped her and she did none of the work, just kept laying there, letting him move her, and the clothes didn’t fit that well because they were torn and damaged. “Tomorrow we can go to the bank,” he said. “How much? Oh, God, please, just tell me how much you want?”

  She stayed unresponsive and he needed another drink, a drink would help him think, so he went back out to the living room, passing clumps of her hair in the hallway, strands that had been pulled out when he fought her into the bedroom. He leaned against the dining table and knocked back a shot of whiskey, then slowly sipped at another. His hands were shaking and there were spots of blood on his palms. The shot glass kept clicking against his teeth.

  To this day he still doesn’t know what she used to hit him. One moment he was leaning, the next the living room floor was rushing up to reach him. His face slapped into it, and when he came to he was tied up. He was spread-eagled, his legs tied to couch legs. His arms were over his head, tied to the TV cabinet. Something was in his mouth. His vision was foggy.

  “You want to know how that felt?” she asked. “You want to know what I just went through?”

  Her questions were calm. None of the words were stressed. It was like she was asking him if she could get him a drink.

  He couldn’t answer. She lifted a pair of pliers in her hand. They were his pliers. She must have taken them from the garage, and he’s never seen them since. She didn’t say anything. She put the pliers onto his testicle and squeezed. She didn’t even hesitate. He heard something pop. Felt every nerve in his body catch fire. He screamed into the rag until he passed out, and when he came to he was alone, untied and bleeding on his carpet. He made his way to the hospital. He kept waiting for the police to arrive, but they never came.

  A month passed. The student was reported missing. Nobody knew where she was. He knew he was the reason she had vanished. He thought she had killed herself somewhere. Part of him felt guilty, part of him felt relief, and the part of him that had lost his testicle was angry he hadn’t been given the chance to kill her himself. That first year he thought about her every waking moment. Then he started to think of her less. Two years after the attack and he still hated her, but the anger had dulled, he didn’t think about her constantly. Three years after the attack she was hardly in his thoughts anymore, and then she showed up in the papers last year. Her name was Melissa. She was on the front page, and he was sure it was her. There were differences, of course there were, a person can change a lot physically in three years if they want to, but it was her, and she was doing bad things. He couldn’t understand the psychology. There must have been more to it than his attack on her. He wanted to know. He needed to understand. He wanted to kill her. What she was doing to other people, that was his fault. He knew that. He had made her into a monster. He wanted to feel bad about it too, but he didn’t.

  It had all been an accident. It was his wife’s fault. If she hadn’t cheated on him, none of it would have happened.

  He wanted to track the girl down but there was no way to do it. He wasn’t an investigator. Seeing her in the papers brought the anger back. He became obsessed again. He hadn’t had a drink in three years, but this made him return to it. He wanted revenge. He wanted that night with her back so he could do it differently. It would start the same but end with his hands around her throat.

  He couldn’t take that night back. He would sit in his living room staring at the wall while the bottle of whiskey disappeared in front of him. He would dream about what he would do to her if he found her. He would go to work the following day disguising his hangover, and nobody ever knew what was really going on inside his head.

  Then he met Jane Tyrone.

  She reminded him in some ways of Natalie Flowers. Same hair, young and pretty, same smile. She worked at his bank. He had gone in to deposit a check. She gave him a big smile that was part of service. He wanted the service to include seeing her naked. He wanted it enough that he followed her after work into a parking building in town. It was an impulsive thing to do, but also very simple. Just a matter of timing, really, as long as nobody else was around, and there wasn’t. He walked up to her while she was unlocking her car. He smiled at her and she smiled back and she didn’t recognize him. Then he reached behind her and banged her head down into the roof, once, twice, and a third time for luck. She was out cold. He put her into the trunk of her car and left her there for fifteen minutes until he returned with his own. He had to park a few spaces down, and he killed five minutes reading the newspaper until again there was nobody around, and then he made the switch.

  He kept her alive for a week. That hadn’t been the plan. There had been no plan, really. He had woken up that morning with no intent of harming anybody, and had ended it at the institution with her locked in a padded cell. He thought he would use her and dispose of her the way he should have disposed of that bitch three years earlier.

  Things had changed. He found he began to like her, and part of him, there’s no kidding himself here, part of him wanted to be liked by her too. Sometimes, within the moments after using her, he would tell her he was sorry, and tell her everything was going to be okay. In the beginning he thought he meant it. In the end he knew he didn’t.

  He kept her alive, he used her over and over, and each time he found himself not caring as much about her as the time before. He wasn’t sure how long he wanted to keep her, but after seven days she just went and died on him. It was okay, because after seven days there was nothing left to be attracted to, nothing he hadn’t done a dozen times to her already that he felt the urge to do again. It had been time to move on anyway. For both of them. It was bound to happen. People drift apart.

  It’s common knowledge that killers like to keep souvenirs, and it was no different for him. He had a digital camera in his briefcase. He used it every day with her. He took one photo, then another, and it turned out he enjoyed taking photos. It’s a good thing too, because he liked to spend time looking at those pictures. It was a week’s worth of fun compressed onto a microchip smaller than a fingernail. The irony is he actually thought of bringing her to Grover Hills. He needed an abandoned building, and this one suited his needs
perfectly. However there were two others that were the same, two other mental institutions he used to visit to talk to the patients to write his book, both closed down within months of this one. In the end he settled on one of the locations to take the girls, a place called Sunnyview Shelter.

  If he gets out of here alive, how much of his life can he return to? The camera has been destroyed, but what of the photographs on the flash drive behind his filing cabinet? There was another one too, hidden in his office at home, surely as melted and ruined as everything else in his house. He knew it was a bad idea hiding them at work, but he needed to be able to look at them any time he pleased.

  The day he took Emma Green had been a lousy one. There had been another article in the previous Saturday’s paper about Melissa X, or rather, Natalie Flowers. It was a feature piece that covered three pages and had pictures of her taken from a video recording the police had. The entire weekend he read that article over and over, each time a little more fueled by alcohol. Monday he went to work. The hangover was a bitch and a struggle to hide at work, but thankfully some of his classes were canceled because of the heat wave. There was a girl in his class who reminded him a little of Natalie. She worked at a café he went to sometimes. He went there to see her and nothing more, just to take a look at her and fantasize what it would be like to hurt her, and then that old man assaulted her in the parking lot. He first went toward her to help her, he’s sure of that, because he was never going to harm another of his students because then the police might have questions for him. So he went to her aid and changed his mind. Just like that. His thought process went from helping her to hurting her in under a second and it was a mistake. He knew it then but couldn’t help himself.

  He was going to keep her for seven days like Jane Tyrone. He liked the symmetry. Other’s would call that a signature. Taking the pictures was stupid. He knew it was stupid but took them anyway. It went against everything he had learned. There were rules you had to follow if you didn’t want to get caught. He had broken them. Killers always ended up becoming smug enough and arrogant enough to think they won’t get caught and they take bigger risks, and he knew, he absolutely knew that he was better than that. Better than all those smug bastards. It’s unlikely the police have found the photos. They would have no reason to even look. At this point he’s a victim, nothing more. Emma Green being a student of his doesn’t look good for him, but at least the bank teller was a random stranger.

  His fingertips are completely black with ink as he continues to stroke the newspaper. He turns it over and looks at the second page. A picture of Nurse Pamela Deans stares out at him from a black-and-white square about the size of his palm. There was no warmth to her, and every time he spoke to her he was sure it took all her energy to remain cordial. However she was extremely useful in his studies and exceptionally efficient. He always imagined her living alone in a house full of straight edges and starched bedsheets, perhaps a few cats, a small TV and a radio tuned only to classical music. Now she is dead, burned in the same way his house was burned.

  Burned, no doubt, by Adrian.

  This is bad. Really bad. If the police make the connection between the two fires, is it possible they’ll connect everything to Grover Hills? Yesterday he’d have loved it if the police showed up to rescue him. But if they come today they’ll find the girl who helped him, and who he killed in return for that help.

  Again, that was stupid. For a man who knows a lot about killers, for a man who knows what their common mistakes are, why can he not stop himself before acting?

  There is still blood on him. His clothes are stained, and there’s a murder weapon with his prints on the other side of the door. He begins pacing the cell. The police will make the connection. At some point somebody will drive out here to take a look around. They’re going to find the dead woman and there are going to be some tough questions. He has to get out of here. He has to kill Adrian. He has to make it look like Adrian killed the dead woman. He needs to destroy his clothes. If he escapes he can change and he can set the stage any way he wants to. As long as the camera or the photographs in his office haven’t been found, there’s no reason for the police to suspect him of anything.

  He turns the newspaper over and goes to the front page where he saw the sketch earlier when Adrian was holding it. Up close it looks like his brother-in-law, except it’s supposed to be Adrian, only it doesn’t look much like Adrian.

  Jesus.

  He has to escape.

  He has to convince Adrian to let him out of here.

  It’s time to try a different tactic.

  chapter thirty-two

  The study is tidier than I last left it. All the files have been swept up and taken. I move into the hallway and look outside the front door. No sign of anybody. Back in the study it’s only a matter of time before what pages are left in the printer start curling in the heat. The flash drive is still hanging out of the front of the computer. I snatch it out and stuff it into my pocket. I go through the house room by room before heading outside and going around the property. I do a full sweep of the section then head back inside.

  I’m still thinking it could have been somebody from Grover Hills who killed Daxter, but now that the Melissa X file has gone, I’m also thinking that it could have been Melissa. I’m not sure which one of those two possibilities scares me the most. What I am sure about is that I’m the world’s biggest idiot for leaving the front door open, but front doors are open all across the city, people desperate for the breeze. I lock the front door now. I plug the flash drive into the computer and print out the rest of the document.

  I give Schroder a call and update him.

  “Jesus, Tate, how can you have been so careless? That file is confidential! Did they take the DVD too?”

  “No, the DVD is still here,” I tell him, and it is—it’s still in the player.

  “Well, at least that’s something. If that footage was ever made public . . . God, what a nightmare that would be. Still, it’s bad enough you lost the file.”

  “You should never have given it to me.”

  “Ah, I see, so it’s my fault then.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” I tell him.

  “Yes you did,” he says, and he’s right.

  “I need another copy of the file.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he says. “So now what, now you’re thinking maybe Natalie Flowers is the one who broke in and stole it and killed your cat?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “Listen, there’s been an update. We’ve found the car that hit the dumpster behind the café.”

  “When?”

  “A few hours ago.”

  “And you’re only letting me know now?”

  “I’m sorry, boss, you’re right—you should have been the first person I told. Jesus, Tate.”

  “Okay, point taken,” I say.

  “Yeah, I’m sure you’ll remember it. Anyway, we sent out the details to all the panel beaters in the city yesterday. We figured it was a long shot. I mean, it’s not like somebody is going to abduct a girl and have his car looked at two days later, but we did it because it’s procedure, and because it might not have come from the car that took Emma. One of them called us this morning saying he had a match to the color, and metal transfer from what could have been the dumpster, and the damage matched the height of the paint on the dumpster. So we checked it out, and sure enough, it was our car.”

  “And?”

  “And a couple of detectives go around and speak to the owner. He’s seventy-six-year-old Arnold Sweetman and they can tell right off the bat that he’s got nothing to do with Emma’s disappearance. He goes into the café at least once a week. He says he was sitting in his car getting ready to leave when a girl tried to steal his wallet. They show him a picture of Emma Green, and he tells them that’s the girl.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what he said. He said he was sitting there when she opened up the door, le
aned in, and tried to take his wallet from his pocket.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I know. It doesn’t make sense. So the detectives take him down to the station and keep on questioning him. His answer doesn’t change. He really thinks Emma Green was trying to mug him. So we check the side of his car for prints, and sure enough, we find a couple on the handle that belong to her.”

  “There must have been a reason she was opening it,” I say. “I mean, she just isn’t going to walk up to a car with somebody sitting in it, open the door, and try to mug them, especially right behind her work where people could recognize her.”

  “There is a reason,” Schroder says. “After an hour, Sweetman asks for a lawyer, so the detectives have to leave him alone. His lawyer shows up, and when they go into the interview room Sweetman has fallen asleep, only he looks like he could be dead. So the lawyer puts his hand on Sweetman’s shoulder and slowly tries to shake him awake, and when he comes to he starts screaming at his lawyer accusing him of trying to molest him. It only lasts five seconds, but it’s possible the same thing happened the other night. The café owner remembers Sweetman being in there, and remembers him leaving at least an hour before Emma left. He probably went and sat in his car and fell asleep, and Emma came along and saw him and was concerned. She probably opened the door and he reacted the same way he did with his lawyer.”

  “And then Sweetman sped away,” I say, finishing the story, “and Emma was either abducted from the parking lot, or somewhere between there and her home by Cooper Riley.”

  “That’s how it’s looking. But none of it gets us any closer to finding where she is now,” he says, and hangs up.

  I’m thirty pages into Cooper’s manuscript when a patrol car and a station wagon pull up outside. I return the gun to its hiding place beneath the mattress. Three men come to the door and none of them is Schroder. Two of them are officers and the other the crime scene technician. I lead them through to Daxter. One of the officers looks away and the other one groans. The crime scene technician stares at my cat as though he were a puzzle. The wire that was around his neck is still there. It’s an unwound coat hanger. One end is wrapped around Dax’s neck, the other hooked over the edge of the gutter on the roof. I show them the grave.