Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  He knows Cooper thinks their temporary home is Sunnyview, but Cooper doesn’t know everything. Adrian has driven here twice. The first time was when he was learning to drive and Ritchie thought it would be fun for them to learn on back roads without risk of being caught. They drove here and parked at the top of the driveway, both of them too nervous to go any further, both of them daring each other and laughing. The second time was Monday night when he followed Cooper out here when Cooper had the girl in the trunk of his car, and that time he stayed well back in case Cooper heard him.

  This time he pulls up the driveway, there is nobody to dare him, nobody to laugh with. Sunnyview is a much bigger building than Grover Hills and he doesn’t like it; it doesn’t have the homey feel that the Grove has. It’s more modern, it’s made from brick and it’s more boxy and in better condition and life may have been different if he’d been sent here instead. The lawns are overgrown with patches of thistle coming through, and around the back it’s knee length and tickles at his legs and he hates it. The skin on his back tingles as he carries the shovel and follows the path by the brick wall, using a flashlight now to light the way. At the end he turns left and takes a few footsteps before remembering he was supposed to go right. He should have taken notes. He knew it at the time, but he thought he would do okay. The sky is mostly dark now, purple way in the distance. There are big trees only a short distance away and thankfully Cooper didn’t bury the girl in there otherwise he’d never find her. He runs in line with the building and actually trips into the ditch. It’s about a meter lower than the normal level. He follows it looking carefully at the dirt. He finds the tree. It’s a silver birch and the branches are all brittle. He climbs over it and it snags at his shirt and tears a small hole in it. He reaches back and drops the shovel and his foot gets tangled and he falls into the ditch, tearing his shirt even more. He picks up the shovel and bangs it flat against the ground twice, then tosses it forward a few meters, bangs his fists into the ground, and starts to cry. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.

  It takes him a minute to get back up. His shirt is ruined. He finds the shovel and carries on. He has a headache. He counts out what he thinks are ten meters. The dirt looks different, it’s raised up a little at the ten-meter mark, and he stabs the shovel into the ground. His itches fade as he digs, but he doesn’t have to dig long before he finds her.

  For a girl who has been dead only a couple of days, she is a real mess. In fact she is so much of a mess that he wonders if this is the girl at all and not another of Cooper’s victims. After all, he did say he’d killed six people.

  He is frightened that if he picks her up she is going to fall apart. And anyway, he doesn’t want to touch her with his fingers. There are bugs and worms squirming around in her body. He looks around, sees nothing useful, then decides to use his shirt. After all, it’s already damaged. He takes it off, wraps it around the dead girl’s foot, and pulls.

  The foot remains attached to the body, and the body slides up and out of the grave, lots of dirt stuck to it, some ugly-looking bits of flesh being left behind. He scoops her up. He keeps her held away from his body. He thinks if he tried dragging her all the way back to the car, there wouldn’t be much of her left by the time he got there. He carries her around the silver birch tree instead of over it. He gets her back to the car and into the trunk. He leaves his shirt with her.

  He needs to clean up. He’s covered in dirt and what he thinks might be bits of the dead girl.

  He takes a flashlight up to the main entrance of the building and tries the door. There is a chain going across the handles with a padlock that looks much newer than the one he smashed from the Grover Hills doors. He steps away and returns with the shovel. He rests the flashlight on the ground so it’s pointing at the chain, gets a secure grip on the handle of the shovel, and swings. The first swing he misses the lock completely, and the edge of the shovel slides down the door and into the concrete step, vibrating through his hands, a few small chips of cement flicking up and getting him in the lip. When he swings again, it’s out of anger. He hits the door three times before connecting with the chain, and when he does connect nothing happens, not until a few swings later when he hits down on the chain with enough force that the door handle it’s attached to splinters away. He’s curious—curious as to what it’s like inside, curious as to what his life may have been like if he had been sent here instead. The hallways and rooms are as black as a cave, and the flashlight struggles to penetrate the dark. He leaves the shovel behind and moves through the building slowly, comparing the rooms to those of the Grove, the flashlight always keeping ninety percent of his surroundings in the dark. He finds a bathroom and rinses himself down. The water is ice cold. He carries on. He finds a strange-looking room unlike anything he has back home. It has a padded table bolted into the middle of the floor, arm and leg restraints connected to it. There are lots of power sockets around the walls and spaces on the floor and on benches where big pieces of equipment used to be, and a piece of wood with bite-marks in it with a strap connected to each end. He thinks this is one of those rooms where people used to get electrocuted when people thought that kind of thing helped. They’d put wires on you and turn up the voltage and it was supposed to fix up your brain. Geez, back then they’d even slice out part of your brain because the doctors thought it would help. He hopes they don’t do that kind of thing anymore, and he’s thankful that’s one thing he never had to go through at the Grove. The basement was bad, and some of the things the orderlies did to him down there were worse, but he thinks he would still choose that over having bits of his brain cut off.

  The naked girl in the next room comes as a complete surprise. His heart jumps in his chest when he sees her and he almost drops the flashlight. It’s the girl Cooper brought out here the other night, the girl Adrian was sure that Cooper would have raped, killed, and disposed of by now, and yet here she is, so the girl he dug up is definitely a different girl. She doesn’t look dead, and as if to confirm it, one of her arms moves slightly toward him, a spasm, like a cat chasing mice in a dream. There is duct tape across her eyes and two empty water bottles on the floor next to her. Her arms are tied behind her.

  When he followed Cooper here on Monday night, he had hidden his car off the side of the road and approached on foot. At the driveway where he and Ritchie had stopped that day, he argued with himself what to do next, wanting to creep forward to get a better look but afraid he’d get spotted. He was brave enough to go as close as the Sunnyview entrance, but no further. He couldn’t hear what was going on inside, but he didn’t have to hear or see to know. He ran back down the driveway and down the road to his car. From Sunnyview he drove into town and left his car on the side of the road and took the car that had belonged to the girl Cooper took. This whole time he just assumed she was dead, and finding her alive is a blessing.

  Already he is thinking what he can use her for.

  Ultimately she’ll be another gift to Cooper, but he doesn’t want her being part of a test like the last one turned out to be. He wants something greater for her, and the universe wants something greater for her too—that’s why he found her here.

  But first she needs his help.

  “I’m here to help you,” he says.

  She doesn’t answer. He needs to get her some water, but he’s afraid if he gives her some now she’ll regain enough strength to try and run away. He carries her outside. She groans a little but doesn’t speak. Her skin is hot to touch. It’s hard to fit her in the trunk of the car because of the dead girl already in there, but with some perseverance he gets them snuggled up tight. He leaves the duct tape over her eyes so she doesn’t have to see the view, but he knows she must be able to smell it.

  Before he closes the lid, he gets the rag out of the front seat and pours the chemical that puts people to sleep, then holds it over the girl’s face. She doesn’t fight it, and a moment later she’s asleep. He closes the lid carefully, not wanting to snap some fingers or a
limb. Then it’s back on the roads again, following them through the darkness and back toward their new home, the itching almost gone now, just one more thing to do before returning to the new home to see Cooper.

  chapter forty-one

  I wonder if Jane Tyrone and Emma Green knew each other. I wonder if they had more in common other than being young and blond and the type of girl Cooper Riley wanted to rape and murder. I try not to think about the hell Karen Ford went through here with one mentally unstable man and one madman. Whatever the relationship is between Cooper Riley and Adrian Loaner, there’s no doubt that Karen Ford suffered. Her body is a mess. There is glue residue and torn skin around her lips with a drinking straw hanging from her bottom lip. I try not to think about her last few minutes but it’s all I can think about—what a fucking cruel place to die.

  The team of police searching the area has expanded over the last hour. So far only the one extra body has been found, this one has also been in the ground for several years according to the medical examiner, as many as twenty. Dozens of high-wattage halogen bulbs have been strung up around the scene. Moths are attracted to the lamps, they fly in at full speed, some of them impacting against the lamps and burning, others basking in the light as they dance in the air. From a distance it all looks like some archaeological dig, or a group of scientists unearthing an extraterrestrial find. So far no sign of Emma Green. Fingerprints taken from her flat, from her hairbrush and the books she was reading, have been run up against fingerprints found at Grover Hills and so far no match. Grover Hills is Adrian Loaner’s hiding place, but it wasn’t Cooper Riley’s.

  Schroder has made some calls to some of the staff who worked at Grover Hills. The first call he made seemed to be going well until he mentioned the Twins. Then he was shut down. The woman he was talking to said she wanted a lawyer. Every phone call since has followed a similar pattern.

  “They’re lawyering up,” Schroder tells me. “Getting anything out of them is like getting blood out of a stone, and this is why. They knew shit was going on there. We’re going to have to start getting warrants and bringing them in for questioning, and this is going to take a fuckload longer than it should.”

  Over the last thirty minutes media vans have started showing up. Men and women in expensive-looking outfits have been pouring out of vehicles and hitting the dirt roads, unable to pass the cordon that was erected only minutes before the first van arrived. Others are circling the perimeter, heading toward the trees on the hill in the near distance, all of them hoping for a better shot, wanting so desperately to be the first to share the tragedy with the rest of the country, to have their smiling faces on the ten-thirty news tonight to speak of horrors unburied, all of them aware the more bodies we find the bigger the story, the longer the story can survive, the better the ratings. At this point they have no idea what story they’re covering, only that for this amount of police attention they know it’s a big one. Emma Green and Cooper Riley are names that will pass across the airwaves as TV anchors bounce theories back and forth with the journalists live at the scene. As I watch them, a BMW that can only be a year old at the most pulls up and Jonas Jones steps out, the psychic here to predict that there are bodies in the graves. I allow myself a brief smile as I imagine what it would be like if a small earthquake opened the ground beneath the media and the city was suddenly short a couple of dozen journalists, but the smile disappears when I realize only more would come to replace them, only now with more to report on, bigger smiles and bigger news and bigger ratings.

  “We’re running out of time,” I say, and Schroder nods. I turn toward Benson Barlow. “Who killed Karen Ford? Adrian Loaner or Cooper Riley or both of them together? And who abducted her? Did Riley abduct her and they were both taken by Adrian, or did Adrian take her by himself, and if so, why?”

  “It’s possible Riley and Loaner may start working together,” Barlow says. “There are many cases of relationships between killers where one personality dominates over the other. I say it’s possible, but I imagine highly unlikely. Riley won’t have any time for Loaner. I think you’ll find if an opportunity comes to kill Adrian Loaner, Cooper Riley will take it. If he’s still alive, Cooper will be doing what he can to manipulate his way to freedom. I would imagine Adrian is trying to please Cooper, and the girl was a gift to him.”

  “Jesus,” I say. “So you think Cooper Riley is still alive then.

  “Until the novelty wears off, yes.”

  “And Emma Green?”

  “If she’s still alive, it won’t be for long. That’s one thing I can be certain of.”

  “We don’t know anything for certain,” Schroder says. “For all we know Adrian might try eating Cooper.” He puts his hand on my shoulder to steer me away from the graves. “Look, I know you’re not going to give me any peace, and like you said, there are things you can do that we can’t.”

  “What are you asking, Carl?”

  “I don’t really know,” he says, but I think he does know, he just doesn’t want to voice it. He looks back to see if Barlow is following, but he isn’t. He opens up his car door and leans inside. He pulls out four folders. One each for Adrian Loaner, Cooper Riley, Karen Ford, and Jane Tyrone. He holds them against his chest. “Look, Theo, you have a way of finding people and finding out about them, and if Emma Green really is still alive . . . just, I don’t know, I want to say just do what it takes. I guess that’s what I am saying. Do what it takes, and in your case dial it back a little.”

  I nod and he hands me the folders. The one with Adrian’s name on it is by far the thinnest of them all. I open it up and there’s a photograph of him from the institution. I don’t know when it was taken, but it doesn’t look much like the sketch I tore from the newspaper.

  He leans back into his car. “Don’t lose this one again,” he says, and hands me the Melissa X file, only now it’s thicker and the front of it says Natalie Flowers / AKA Melissa X.

  I get lost on the way back home. There is no point in hanging around at Grover Hills, and there aren’t any names jumping out at me as to who to speak to next. It’s dark and there’s no other source of lighting on these roads other than what’s coming from my car and the sliver of pale moon. Nothing is recognizable, and certainly nothing looks the same as it did this afternoon. I have no idea how the media made it out here, and can only assume that in the deal they made to sell their souls, the Devil threw in GPS as a bonus. I drive up and down a wrong set of dirt roads until lucking my way back into what I’d deem civilization. The highway gets me back onto the road to town where traffic is thick but so far flowing quickly, and for the first time in my life I make it through town hitting less than half a dozen red lights.

  The Friday-night crowd is spilling into town, guys in tight T-shirts with big biceps and girls in jeans so tight they look painted on. Shiny cars with bright paint race the streets, tires spinning at every intersection with smoke hanging in the dry air. Other cars are parked in groups, teenagers in black hoodies leaning against them as they laugh and smoke and drink beer and give the finger to anybody driving by, all of them in jeans way too low, showing way too much, making me want to way too much run all of them over. It’s such a different world from the one I just left, and these kids have no idea just how lucky they are.

  I park the rental in my driveway. Nobody from the media shows up. Plenty of them yelled questions at me as I drove through them earlier, most of them recognizing me and asking if I was back on the payroll. In my study I open up the four new files and spread the contents across the desk and set the Melissa X one to the side for later. As much as I want to find Natalie Flowers, she isn’t the one who kidnapped Emma Green, she isn’t the one who abducted Cooper Riley. There is a connection to her, but not a relevant one that will help us find Emma. Even if we found Natalie within the hour it wouldn’t do Emma Green any good.

  I pop open a Coke and start reading. Adrian’s file is only one page. It has his name and age and when he was committed but it doesn’t have t
he reason why. Medical privilege and all that. Which means we’ll never know what made him crazy. It lists the halfway house as his current address.

  The file on Cooper Riley is the thickest one. It traces back his history from when he was a child, his education, university, becoming a criminologist and then a professor. Karen Ford’s file is thin because she was only reported missing earlier today. She was a known prostitute, but since prostitution isn’t illegal in New Zealand, she doesn’t have a record. Jane Tyrone’s file is thick. It has all the information from the investigation into her disappearance last year. There’s a photograph of her, a smiling happy-looking girl in the prime of her life. I look though Emma Green’s file, but there isn’t much that I already didn’t know. We know who took her, and we know who took Cooper Riley.

  If I pressed Ritchie Munroe, if I threatened to take Melina away from him, would he know anything more about his best friend? I wonder how easily Adrian was able to make his way to and from Grover Hills. I wonder if Cooper struggled with the drive the first few times. Jonas Jones wouldn’t—he’d have used his psychic abilities. But for the rest of us, driving out there is a challenge. I figure Cooper would drive out there then drive to one of the others to conduct more interviews to save on petrol.

  “Damn it,” I say, slapping the desk. How could I have missed it?

  I missed it the same way we all missed it, but it’s no excuse. I grab my cell phone. There are two more buildings almost identical in nature to Grover Hills. Both are abandoned. And Cooper Riley knows that better than anybody. Barlow said Adrian would want to return somewhere familiar to him, and though Adrian never grew up in either of the other two places, the similarity may be enough. In fact, that similarity may be all he has. And for Cooper Riley, what better place to take Emma Green? There could be other rooms like the Scream Room, and there are certainly going to be some padded cells.