Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “Then fill me in.”

  He takes a long swallow of beer. “I s’pose I could,” he says, “but the way I see it, you’ve been paying everybody else for their side of things. Why should I be no different?”

  “Because you seem like a man with some pride,” I tell him, “and not somebody who’d hold back when what he tells me could save the life of a seventeen-year-old girl.”

  “That’s true,” he tells me, “but a man still needs to know where his next drink is coming from.”

  “I’ll fix you up when this is over,” I tell him.

  “Is that you believing what you’re saying, or you saying the way it’s going to be?” he asks.

  “That’s the way it’s going to be. I promise.”

  He takes another sip and then stares at me hard for a good few seconds, taking my measure as I’m sure he’d say. “Sounds good enough to me,” he says, finishes his beer, and opens another. “Can I get you one?” I shake my head. “It started out innocently enough, you know,” he says. “Way back fifteen years, give or take a year or two. Young fella came along. Real cocky little shit. Not much more than twenty. Could have been twenty-five, but no older. We all knew he wasn’t crazy, just mean, and mean and crazy are two different things, only the courts didn’t see it. He used to brag about how he fooled them. Used to tell us how clever he really was, and how he was going to be free in a couple of months. Courts placed him with us because he killed a girl. Just killed her because he felt like it, he told us. A young pretty little girl not much more than ten. He was with us a week when that girl’s dad came along. I can still remember seeing him outside in the parking lot. He looked nervous, like he was summoning up the courage to ask a pretty big question. You ever seen a man like that? The pain of what he wants to ask is written all over his face. I took one look at him and knew what he wanted. Then he just chose somebody. Saw somebody in a white uniform and went up to him, and that person saw the same thing I did. Never knew what he said, not exactly, but I knew what he wanted. We got TV in there. Some of us knew what was going on out in the world, and I knew who he was. The orderly he spoke to was one of the Twins. Back then the Scream Room was only a punishment. Bad things happened down there, but not real bad. The dad, he offered them money. Told them he’d like some time alone with the guy that hurt his daughter. The Twins, they sold him that time. The guy returned that night after most of the staff and nurses had gone. I saw him pull into the parking lot through my window and an hour later I saw him pull away. That boy, we never saw him again.”

  “How often did this happen?”

  He takes a long swallow of beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Just that time. There were rumors. You think rumors are bad out here? Son, rumors are nothing compared to what goes around in a mental institution. You listen to the patients in there and you’d be believing Elvis was living out there along with Jesus. But that was the start of it. After that, the Twins, they changed. They got off on it somehow. The Scream Room became not just a room for punishment, but a room for pain. They’d take us down there and hell, most of us, we deserved every second of it. It was as though two demons were unleashed, two mean demons who just loved to beat the shit out of everybody and humiliate the hell out of them. With the boy they killed, I accepted that. An eye for an eye and all that. Was biblical. But what they became . . . they deserve to rot in Hell for that.”

  “They’re already there,” I tell him. “They got themselves killed.” His eyebrows raise up. “They did now, did they? Well, I can’t say that’s a real shame, now. Who got them?”

  “Adrian Loaner.”

  “No. Adrian? Well I’ll be damned. Never knew that boy had it in him.”

  “You sound proud of him.”

  “Proud? I don’t know if that’s the right word. I do know if anybody deserved to hurt those fellas, it was Adrian.”

  “Who were they? The Twins?”

  “What do you mean, son?”

  “I mean who are they? You know their real names?”

  “Sure I do. Murray and Ellis Hunter.”

  “Hunter?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  The name is familiar. A few months ago when I was in jail, a man there named Jack Hunter was stabbed. Schroder came into the prison to see me and ask if I’d look into it, see if I could figure out who’d done it.

  “You know where they live?”

  “Now why’d I know a thing like that?”

  “Because I’m thinking Adrian is hiding out there.”

  He shrugs. “That’s a pretty big theory,” he says, “but it’s not impossible.”

  “Not impossible at all,” I tell him. After all, if Murray and Ellis Hunter are dead in the ground at Grover Hills, then that means they have a home somewhere that they’re not looking after. That means an empty building, and Adrian has to be somewhere and the Hunter house is looking like a good bet. “How long they work at Grover Hills for?”

  He pulls a handkerchief out from his pocket. His clothes are immaculate, his shirt is still buttoned up, and his tie nice and tight, but the handkerchief is the dirtiest one I’ve ever seen. He wipes it around the back of his neck and it comes away wet. “They started a few years after I was there. And they left five or six years ago. Was a hell of a surprise to see them go. Never knew where they went. Adrian kill them back then, did he?”

  “No. He killed them at some point in the last week or two. Along with Nurse Deans.”

  He whistles, like he’s just inspected and appreciated a car that can travel much faster than he’d previously imagined. “She was a real piece of work, that one. Listen, son, I don’t know what happened between when they left and when they died. If I were to have at a guess, I’d say they did nothing good. Those boys were evil. The patients were bad but most of them were just wired up wrong is all. Nobody liked it, but you couldn’t blame them for it. Those boys, I’d bet my bottom dollar they carried on hurting people well after they left the Grove.”

  “And you? What’s your story?”

  “My story is my story,” he says, and he tries to offer a kind smile that doesn’t quite fit right on his face. “Don’t forget we made a deal,” he tells me.

  “I’ll be back,” I promise him.

  I try to use the police computer to look up the Hunters but at some point in the last hour I’ve been locked out, it asks for a password that I don’t know. So I drive deeper into town. Cell phone technology has made phone booths pretty much redundant in most parts of the world, but not here in Christchurch where many people are still living in the stone age. I find a phone booth a block away from the police station next to the Avon River, where four teenagers in their boxer shorts are currently going for a drunken swim. Back in the nineties, to combat underage drinking, the government lowered the legal drinking age, so suddenly thousands and thousands of youths across each city were no longer breaking the law, hence making it no longer an issue. Only the government couldn’t see what a bad idea that was. They opened the floodgates, and now, years later, the country has one of the biggest underage drinking problems in the world.

  I flick through the phone book. Half of it is missing but thankfully it’s the half starting from M. There’s almost a hundred Hunters in there. Two of them belong to the brothers. I check the initials and find an M and E Hunter on the same line. Maybe they lived together. They did everything else together, so why not? I figure it’s worth a shot. I figure since Buttons didn’t know their address, then Adrian wouldn’t have known it either. Yet Adrian found them, which means it can’t be hard to do. He probably looked them up in the phone book. Probably saw the same initials and started with that one. I decide on the same thing.

  I pick up the phone. It’s sticky. I miss my cell phone. I drop some coins into the slot. I have to press the receiver tight against my ear to block out the loud music being pumped from every open doorway of every open bar and every passing car. I dial the number and nobody answers immediately, which I figure to be a go
od sign, then an even better sign comes along: an answering machine picks up.

  “You’ve reached Ellis and Murray and we’re out and you know the deal, so go ahead and leave a message if you want.”

  I don’t bother leaving a message.

  The adrenaline is starting to pump. It’s closing in on two-thirty and the drag racers have either moved on or all broken down on another stretch of the four avenues because I don’t get caught up in traffic again. I race through the streets doing about 20 kph over the limit, passing a couple of speed cameras, which flash at me, but I’m in a detective’s car so the tickets will be waived. The Hunters live in a part of the city where there aren’t any junked-up cars resting on front lawns. In fact it’s a nice neighborhood where most houses look no more than ten years old and you can drive for five straight minutes without passing any crime scene tape. I find the address and there aren’t any cars parked out front. I pull over a block away and grab a flashlight and make my way back. My heart is racing. Adrian has my gun and a Taser and who the hell knows what else. First thing I check is the garage window. There’s one car in there that doesn’t belong to Emma Green, and a space for another car. There aren’t any lights on inside the house. I shine my flashlight on the back door and crouch in front of the handle. I use a lock-pick gun. It only takes a few pulls of the trigger and some good placement and thirty seconds to make my way inside. Not as quick as kicking down the door, but the door here looks far more sturdy than Jesse Cartman’s house, and back there I wasn’t trying to be quiet. I step into the hallway. I can hear the beep beep of an answering machine. It sounds frantic. It sounds like it’s desperate to unload its secrets. I use the flashlight to light my way, stepping carefully. In the living room there are photos of Murray and Ellis Hunter and there’s no doubt they’re the two men I saw in the ground. There’s a large patch of blood in the center of the living room with hair and what could be bone fragments stuck in it. There is more blood leading from the front door and drag marks in the carpet.

  I go from room to room. Nothing. And nothing to suggest Cooper Riley or Emma Green were ever here.

  “Damn it,” I say, kicking at one of the walls and putting my shoe through the plasterboard. White dust settles onto the carpet from the hole. It looks like cocaine, and reminds me of a case I worked with Schroder five years ago, where we busted into a house and a guy dropped his drugs onto the carpet by accident, then dropped onto his knees and began snorting them, trying to hide the evidence, and he snorted so much in that few seconds that it almost killed him.

  Where the hell can Emma and Cooper be? There aren’t any more abandoned mental institutions. Best I can think of is Adrian is holed up in the house of another victim. I close the back door in case Adrian is planning on coming back. Hope that he’s going to return is all I have. After everything I’m still back at square one with no idea in the world where Emma Green is being held.

  I think about what Buttons said, about the twin boys being evil. There was no doubt in his mind the Twins carried on hurting people, probably even killing some. I start looking around the house not exactly sure what I’m looking for, but I go through everything. Maybe there’ll be a scrapbook or something. I switch on the computer. I read through emails. I check the attic access in the ceiling to see if anything is hidden up there, I check beneath the carpet in the bedrooms in the corners, and an hour into the search I check the closets for loose floorboards and my search pays off. Beneath the house is a cardboard box. I open it up. I lay the contents on the floor side by side. Nine wallets in total, each of them with credit cards and driver’s licenses and photos of children or wives, none of them with any cash. Three of the names I recognize from my last few years on the job—names of people who dropped off the face of the earth. Another one I think I recognize but can’t be sure.

  The computer is still switched on. I spend twenty minutes running the rest of the names through the news database online, along with the ones I remember. Nine names and each of them comes back with a story. Nine men all gone missing dating back to the time Buttons said the Twins left Grover Hills. Nine men who were never found. A different range of men, family men, single men, a lawyer, a plumber, a couple of unemployed men, the youngest nineteen years old, the oldest forty-five. Each of them sharing in common a very bad fate according to the cardboard box hidden beneath the floorboards in the closet.

  Buttons said the Twins got their first taste of what they could do when that man approached them wanting revenge. Since then they spent years at Grover Hills using the Scream Room as an outlet. Then one day they just up and left. They built a Scream Room of their own. Had to have. But where? Certainly not here. Not in this part of the city. None of the rooms here would stop a scream from traveling outside, and in a neighborhood like this somebody would have called the police.

  So where? Where in the hell is their torture chamber? And if it’s in a house, why not live there? Why bring the souvenirs back here?

  Because this is their home. Maybe this is closer to where they work. And they needed the souvenirs here for when they’re not visiting their other place.

  I go back through everything. I go through their address book. I stop on a name I recognize. Edward Hunter. It was his father who was stabbed in jail. Edward was in jail too, but not till a few days after that. Edward was sentenced for killing two men. His father Jack was sentenced twenty years ago for killing eleven prostitutes. Are they related to Ellis and Murray? Is there a family trait that makes these men want to hurt people?

  I go through the rest of the address book. I head out to the car in the garage and check for a GPS unit in case there’s a location plotted on it, but there’s only a map and the map doesn’t have any circles or crosses scrawled across it. I go through files and boxes of bills. I find tax statements but only for this address. If they own property somewhere else there’s no record of it here. If they’re paying for power for another house, the bills are getting sent to that address.

  There’s a Scream Room somewhere, it could be a cabin in the woods, it could be a house with a soundproof basement, but nothing in this house tells me where.

  It has to be somewhere. It’s who they are. A Scream Room is what makes them tick.

  And I’m wondering if Edward Hunter might have an idea where that is.

  I’m suddenly hit by a wall of exhaustion. It’s almost six-thirty and it’s daylight by the time I leave the Hunter house. It’s a slow drive home, not because of traffic—the roads are empty—but because fatigue is trying to convince me that nothing would feel better right now than driving into a lamppost and falling asleep.

  There are patrol cars and crime scene tape outside of my house and I completely forgot that I wasn’t supposed to return. I switch cars, getting back into the rental, then drive to the nearest motel I can find, a place that looks okay in the dim early-morning light, and I figure since only two of the neon letters in the word vacancy are busted it can’t be that bad a place. The clerk behind the desk is asleep when I step through the doors but he snaps to attention pretty quick. He swipes my credit card and five minutes later I’m in a room that smells of furniture polish. I phone home and check my messages, of which there are four. One from my parents, the other three from Donovan Green. He tells me he’s been trying to get hold of me all night but the cell phone he gave me is switched off. I figure Schroder is asleep, so rather than waking him on his cell phone, I call the police station and leave a message for him. I give him the Hunter address and a brief rundown of what he’ll find. I also tell him to send somebody to check on Jesse Cartman. I don’t call Donovan Green.

  I set my alarm for eight o’clock, which is a little over an hour away. I don’t bother getting undressed. I just take off my shoes and lie down and stare at the ceiling and think about what Emma Green is doing right now.

  chapter fifty-two

  The sunrise is something he’d like to see again. Hopefully next time it won’t be when he’s in so much pain. He napped a little during it, a
nd a lot before it, the previous hours disappearing into a haze of dreams in which he saw his mother and his other mother, in which he even saw his father before his father disappeared from his life when Adrian was still in primary school, walking out on the family the way some men do when they’re offered simpler lives with their secretary.

  He saw the good part of the sunrise. The sky lightened and for a while the sun seemed to refuse to appear, something holding it back, some entity wanting this day born into darkness. Then the tip of it broke the horizon, coming up out of the fields that trailed out as far as he could see, pouring golden light into the morning, an instant warmth, the world waking up around it. It slipped quickly into view then, the thing holding it earlier now shoving it forward, then it was angling upward, creating long shadows through the trees. He napped again a little afterward but never really fell asleep, his itching leg keeping him from drifting off completely.

  The sun is up over the trees and the shadows are shorter but not by much when he goes back inside, his leg still sore to walk on but better since he rubbed the cream into it. The piece of medical padding he held over it has stuck to the wound and when he tugs at it there’s a tearing sound and a lot of pain to go along with it, so he stops tugging. Somehow he’s going to have to remove it and re-dress it and somehow it needs to heal. He can’t lose his leg. He rummages back around in the medicine cabinet hoping he’ll find something in the daylight that hid from him in the dark, but there’s nothing. He doesn’t understand what half of it is for, and there’s a pair of false teeth on one of the shelves that looks very creepy with dots of mold and fuzz around the gums. He guesses he’ll have to drive into town at some point today and pick up some supplies. There’s some food in the fridge, some from his mother, some from the Twins, but not enough to get them all through the next few days, but it’s fantastic having a fridge with power. There’s a reality slowly kicking in, and that reality tells him he can’t afford to keep too many parts of the collection at the same time. He’ll have to take care of Cooper’s mum and the girl today too. And it’s not such a bad thing he wasn’t able to get Theodore Tate.