Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “Define all the time,” I tell him.

  He shrugs again and water drips off the hose. “Every few months or so.”

  I do the math. Every few months. Six people a year. Ten years would be sixty people. No way sixty people are going to pay their money and head downstairs and beat the hell out of somebody with a baseball bat or hammer. I don’t see it.

  What I can believe is it happening once or twice. There could be some truth in what he’s saying. If it did, it must have felt good for the person getting revenge. I wonder how good it felt when their hour was up. How many went home and threw up, how many wanted to come back for more. “And you told nobody.”

  “Who’d believe me? Even you don’t.”

  “I’ve seen the room,” I tell him, but it’s still not enough. I believe people suffered down there with the bed and dirty blanket and dirty pillow, but not for money, and not by family members out looking for revenge.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t tell anybody. None of us did. Rumors don’t amount to much when they’re being told by crazy people, and half the people who came out of that place are dead now and the other half still fucking crazy. After that first guy got killed down there, the Twins would start taking others down there. Sometimes we’d be beaten. Sometimes just humiliated. And made to scream. And our screams couldn’t be heard.”

  “What about . . .”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “Jesse . . .”

  “I mean it,” he says, looking right at me and holding up his hand, and his eyes flare with the darkness I saw in them years ago. “I hate that I remember it all. You want me to stop taking the drugs so I can forget?”

  “Okay, Jesse,” I say, still holding the hose. “No more questions about the room.”

  “I want you to leave now.”

  “I have to find Emma Green.”

  “She was pretty,” he says. “She reminded me of . . .” he trails off and looks down at the puddle forming around his feet.

  “Of your sister?”

  “I said I want you to leave,” he says quickly. “You ever see Pamela Deans once you were released?”

  “Never.”

  “What happened to you? Where’d you go?”

  He drops the hose. “What do you want from me?”

  “Your help,” I say. “If Emma reminds you of your sister, then you owe it to her to help her. This is your chance at some redemption, Jesse. Don’t let it pass you by.”

  He looks up at the ceiling and keeps his gaze up there as he comes to a decision. When he looks back at me, his face is tight with anger. “A bunch of us were sent to a halfway house,” he says. “I was allowed to move out about six months ago. I have my own place now and I always show up to work and I never miss my doctor’s appointments and always take my meds. I’m fine now. I’m no longer a danger to society,” he says, and he says it as though he’s rehearsed the lines over and over, as if he were forced to memorize them on the day Grover Hills was shut down and he was sent forth into the world to fend for himself.

  “The guy from the picture, it also looks like another guy who might have been there too.”

  “Where? The halfway house?”

  “Both. The Grove,” he says, “that’s what we called it. He was there and at the halfway house. I really can’t remember his name.”

  “Did he have a habit of killing and digging up pets?”

  He pulls back a little in disgust. “What? No, no, not that I know of. Jesus, that’s wrong,” he says, and I picture the day we found him after he’d had his hands deep inside his sister. I wonder what would have gotten the same wrong reaction from the predrug Jesse Cartman.

  “The Twins have names?”

  He bends down and picks the hose back up. “Just the Twins. Twin One and Twin Two.”

  “Where is this halfway house?” I ask him.

  “Town. Worcester Street,” he says, and gives me the address.

  I thank him for his time, not real sure how I feel about Jesse Cart-man. Back when I first saw what he had done, all I wanted to do was put a bullet between his eyes. Now he’s a different person. It’s as though the man who killed his sister has disappeared, and this new version of him has to live with that guilt. For the first time it really sinks in that he was a victim back then too, a victim of a sickness he couldn’t control, a victim who slipped through the cracks along with others who, with the right medication in the first place, never needed to have hurt anybody.

  If he were a criminal, he’d have been locked away. He’d have been released from jail within the last couple of years, and he’d have come out a far more violent man. At least this way there’s a chance he can function in society.

  “I truly am better now,” he says, as if reading my thoughts. “I truly hope you are,” I tell him, aware the only thing stopping him from trying to eat somebody else are a few small pills that he pops every morning along with his cornflakes when he wakes up to carry on with his normal life.

  chapter thirty-five

  The walls are blurry and sway a little when Cooper starts coming around. There’s a metallic taste in his mouth and he probes it with his finger. He’s bitten down on the side of his tongue, the flesh torn and swollen.

  There is no light coming into the room. He can tell by feel that he’s in a padded cell. He’s either in Sunnyview or Eastlake. Most likely it’s Sunnyview. Adrian must have followed him out here the other night since he knows about Emma Green, and he certainly would want to hide somewhere he was somewhat familiar with. Cooper doesn’t remember any of the trip here. In the end he had to accept Adrian was going to shoot him with the Taser, but it was the only way if he wanted to change location. The police are probably already at Grover Hills and he couldn’t afford to be found there covered in a dead girl’s blood. They’d arrest Adrian and he’d tell them everything he knew about Cooper, including what he knew about Emma Green, which was turning out to be quite a lot. Adrian would have led the police straight here. The police would be saving Cooper only to crucify him.

  He’s done with the baby steps. Now he has to go full throttle. It’s a three-part plan. Escape. Kill Adrian. And make up a story to put him in the clear. It’s all going to work out. In fact, there’s no reason he can’t come out of all this looking like a hero and write his book. And, if he can get hold of the file Adrian was holding up earlier, he might be able to track down Natalie Flowers.

  God, that would make all of this worth it.

  Unless the cops have found the photographs.

  That’s what he needs to determine once he gets out of here. He’ll have to return to his office and see if the pictures are still there. If they are then the three-part plan will work out. If they’re gone, then the three-part plan has to change. Escape. Kill Adrian. And get the hell out of New Zealand. He doesn’t know exactly how somebody goes about doing something like that, but if people dumber than him can flee the country, then there shouldn’t be any reason he can’t too.

  He walks the room. It’s completely padded. Not just the walls, but the floor too. He jumps up but can’t reach the ceiling. It might be padded too. There might also be a light up there. He walks a grid formation and finds nothing else in the room with him. One of these walls has a door in it, and he finds the join in the padded wall and can pull it back barely enough to reveal the door frame. Light comes in around it. He tugs at the wall hoping to tear it away, but it’s no use. He finds a mail-sized slot in the door at head height. He can’t open it from this side. It’s hot in here and stuffy. There will be no power to the building, and even if there was there’d be no air-conditioning in this room. These were never designed to be comfortable—only designed to stop the crazy from banging themselves into oblivion.

  The room is slightly bigger than the last cell he was in, cleaner, and much hotter. He’ll have to speak to Adrian, see what he can do about the heat. And he’s got no bucket to piss into this time and no water to drink.

  When he brought the girl
s here he only spent time with them at night and the only heat in the room was coming from the flashlights he brought. He made Emma Green drink a bottle of water before leaving her, but that was . . . what? He’s lost track of time. Three days? Four? And he left two more bottles with her. He kept her tied up, but the bottles were open and she could roll onto her side and sip them. He was going to bring her more when he returned, along with some food. He needed her to stay healthy long enough to enjoy her. The first night he was happy with keeping her tied while he cut away her clothes and took photos. The duct tape over her eyes kept her from seeing him. He liked exercising control. The following night he was going to do more. A lot more. But the duct tape would remain over the eyes. He didn’t want her seeing him. Didn’t like the disgust that would have been in her eyes.

  He puts his hands against the wall. The texture is canvas, the padding beneath it thick, made up from cushions of foam. Emma Green could be in the room next to him. He tries tugging again at the material, but it’s secured too tight and all he does is hurt the tips of his fingers. He begins to pace, then gives up when he starts sweating. He tries banging on the walls but can’t make much of a sound. All he can do is wait. He sits in the corner and doesn’t have to wait long before the slide opens. The light coming through almost blinds him and he has to look away, but then it disappears when Adrian looks through the slot.

  “How are you feeling?” Adrian asks.

  “It’s hot in here, Adrian. Really hot.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. But like you said, it’s only temporary. Only . . . I kind of like it here. I didn’t, at first, but it’s . . . growing on me.”

  “I’d like it too if it wasn’t so hot,” Cooper says.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Where are we? Is this Sunnyview?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Are we at Eastlake?”

  “No,” Adrian answers, shaking his head.

  “So it’s Sunnyview then.”

  “Maybe,” Adrian repeats.

  “Okay, Adrian, why don’t you let me out? I need to be in a room that’s cooler. It’s hot in here.”

  “There’s nowhere else for you,” Adrian says.

  “Well, then how about leaving that slot open. And I’m going to need water. Plenty of it.”

  “I can do that, I guess. Also, umm, I wanted to, you know, to thank you for telling me the police would find us. That was really nice of you and, and . . . and what I want to know is, is it true what they say about serial killers wanting to kill their mothers?”

  Like you killed Pamela Deans? Is it possible after all his years in Grover Hills Adrian formed a connection that made him look at Nurse Deans as a mother figure? It takes him only a second to decide that yes, it’s entirely possible.

  “In most cases,” he answers. “Why?”

  “If you kill your mother will that make you a serial killer?” Adrian asks.

  “You think you’re a serial killer?”

  “No,” Adrian says, looking away. “I’m just, you know, curious.”

  “I don’t know,” Cooper says. “It depends on whether you kill other people too.”

  “What about your mother?” Adrian asks.

  “What?”

  “I’ve read heaps and heaps of books and they all say that serial killers grow up hating their mothers. They say that the one person a serial killer wants to kill more than anybody is their abusive mother, and instead they kill other women as surr . . . surr-goats,” Adrian says.

  “Surrogates.”

  “Sir-gates. Is that why you killed all those other people?”

  The answer is no. And there aren’t all those other people. There are only two. “My mother is a good person,” Cooper says, and it’s true. He loves his mother. Right now she’ll be sitting in her living room, photos of Cooper and his sister staring down from the walls. His sister probably in the middle of some long-haul flight back to New Zealand to be with their mum. Friends and other family members trying to keep her comforted, a damp handkerchief in her lap, an absolute blank stare on her face, hoping her son is alive but believing otherwise. When people go missing in this country they don’t show back up. At least not alive.

  “Your mother made you who you are,” Adrian says. “She’s the reason you became a killer.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “But the books say . . .”

  “The books aren’t always accurate, Adrian. They’re a generalization.”

  “A what?”

  “It means the books say what works for most people, but not for all. There are always going to be exceptions.”

  “The books didn’t say anything about exceptions.”

  “But there are. You didn’t become fascinated with killers because of your mother, right?”

  “That was different. That didn’t happen to you, which means you must hate your mother.”

  “I don’t hate her. I love her.”

  “Do you think she’s collectable?”

  For a split second the words don’t make sense, at least he doesn’t think they do, but he knows, he knows what Adrian means. “What?”

  “If you really love her, then bringing her here is the best thing I can do for you. If you hate her and want her dead, then bringing her here is also a good thing for you.”

  “Don’t bring her here,” he says, his words low.

  “What?”

  “I said don’t bring her here,” he repeats, louder this time.

  “But she’ll be perfect for the collection!” Adrian says, sounding out of breath. “Both serial killer and the woman who made him that way.”

  “She didn’t make me this way.”

  “We can talk about it when I come back with her.”

  “Wait, wait,” Cooper says, moving toward the slot, but Adrian closes it and he returns to the darkness. “Wait!” he shouts, but it’s no use. He bangs on the padded door and can’t make much of a sound. “Adrian! Adrian!”

  But Adrian is already gone.

  chapter thirty-six

  I take a time-out to have a slice of life moment. I’ve hardly eaten all day and my body is starting to crash. I hit a drive-through and pick up a hamburger and fries and some kind of Coke substitute that consists of syrup and about four carbonated bubbles. It tastes exactly how I remember it tasting, which is a real shame. I stay in my car, parked under the shade of some large elm trees as burger juice runs down my fingers onto my wrist. There are kids playing cricket, which means that school is over for the day, which means it’s much later than I thought it was. I think about my daughter as I eat my burger. I think about her friends from school and wonder how many of them still remember her. Then I think about the blood on the steps leading down to the basement at Grover Hills and how, at the moment, the place is most likely now a crime scene. The ice in the Coke melts and makes the drink a little more bearable. I think about Jesse Cart-man and the Scream Room. If there were any truth to what Cart-man said and the room was still active and I was still a cop with my daughter in the ground, would I blow the whistle on that room and all the bad things that happened there? I finish off the hamburger. I’d want revenge the same way many others would, but seeing Jesse Cartman, seeing he was never really responsible for his past, does that change things? I don’t know. I think it should. I like to think it would have changed things enough for me not to have lost my mind, pay off a couple of orderlies, and go into a basement with a baseball bat looking for revenge.

  I bundle up the mess and drop it into a trash bin.

  If what Jesse Cartman said is true, then the Twins did this city a service by taking care of some of the trash—the trash being those who faked their illness. But they did the city a disservice by beating on those who were ill, hurting those who couldn’t defend themselves. There’s no excuse for that. After I find Emma Green, I’m going to find those twins.

  It’s less than a ten-minute drive to the halfway house. The friendly construction of old places being knocked
down and replaced by the new in this part of town hasn’t reached this block of homes, tall miserable-looking state homes with unkempt yards and junked-out cars parked up on front lawns, warped clapboards and twisted fences and dog shit every few feet. The halfway house is a two-story place that hasn’t been quite as neglected as the neighboring properties, the difference being only one third of the fence is missing compared to the others, which are shooting around half. I park opposite it, thankful there’s still five hours of sunlight left; this is one neighborhood I wouldn’t want to be caught in after dark. The house is painted a poor choice of green, the roof a poor choice of red, the front door a poor choice of black. The whole thing would look good in orange; nice large engulfing orange flames. I separate the remaining cash Donovan Green gave me into two one-thousand-dollar piles and fold them into separate pockets. I cross the road and knock on the front door and hope I haven’t just contracted syphilis.

  A guy in his midsixties opens it. He’s wearing a white buttoned-up short-sleeve shirt with a black tie and pants and a fedora. He looks like he’s about to head to the track in 1960. There are cigarette burns all up the insides of his arms that look as old as his outfit. His blue eyes burn out from his deeply tanned face and I realize forty years ago this guy would have done well with the ladies. “You lost, son?” he asks, his voice is low and gravely.

  “No. I’m . . .”

  “You the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “Somebody done something?”

  “Yes.”

  “What exactly?”

  “I need to talk to somebody in charge.”

  “I’m in charge.”

  “Are you really?”

  “We’re all in charge, son. We all have to be in charge of our own lives to take responsibility for ourselves.”