Collecting Cooper (10 page)

“Your type?”

“Yeah. Any girl who talks to me is my type, which pretty much narrowed it down to Emma and nobody else in the world.”

“You share many classes with her now?”

“Just psychology.”

“Anybody at university giving her a hard time? Anybody creeping her out?”

“Not that she mentioned, and I think she would have. We haven’t been there long yet—I mean, this is only our second week of the term. Plus a bunch of classes have been canceled because some of the students have been passing out from the heat.”

“You sure nobody was making her uncomfortable?” I ask.

“Pretty sure.”

“Did you see her on the day she disappeared?”

He shakes his head. His mother has made him a cup of tea and placed it on the coffee table ahead of him and he stares at it untouched, as if he’s too scared to drink in case Emma’s fortune is at the bottom and the news is bad. “Sunday night I went around to her flat and we hung out for a few hours.”

“Hung out?”

“Yeah,” he says, and he finally picks up the cup of tea. He holds
it in front of his mouth but still doesn’t drink from it, but it shields his lips so his mum can’t see what he’s saying. “Hung out,” he says. “In her bedroom.” He takes a sip and puts the cup down. His mum looks over at me, smiles, and rolls her eyes. I smile back. “I got home about eleven,” he says, “then went to class the following morning only to find class was canceled because of the heat. We swapped a few texts during the day and she had to go to work, then that was it. We weren’t planning on meeting up Monday night at all. Yesterday she wasn’t answering my calls so I spoke to her flatmate who thought Emma was with me. Her boss was calling, looking for her too. I knew it was weird and I was worried, but not worried enough to call the police because bad things like that only happen to other people, right?”

“If only that were true,” I say.

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that then. So I called her parents. Then they rang everybody they knew and then the police and the police don’t even think anything bad has happened.”

I don’t tell him that’s not the case.

“Was she enjoying her job?” I ask.

“Who enjoys their job?”

“What about any old boyfriends?”

“I’m her first boyfriend,” he says.

I take a sip of the tea trying to be polite. It tastes exactly how I knew it would. The mother smiles at me and nobody says or signs anything for about ten seconds and in that time I try to get a read on Rodney, knowing full well my reads in the past have been way off the mark. Could this kid have killed Emma and dumped her somewhere?

“She could still be okay, right?” he asks. “I mean, if something bad happened and somebody hurt her, she could still be okay. She could still be alive.”

“Absolutely,” I say, unable to tell him what both Schroder and I suspect—that Emma Green is dead somewhere, and the devastation Rodney is already feeling is only going to get worse.

The cell has been plunged into complete darkness. The shoe in his hand has gotten warm from the last few minutes of continuous banging against the door. Adrian isn’t coming back. Yelling at the man was a mistake, he knew it when it was happening but he couldn’t stop himself, it was a rush of blood to the head, some animal instinct that told him to lash out and ignore the voice inside telling him to shut up, stay calm, and be smart. Or maybe that voice couldn’t be heard over the still pounding headache. If he wants any chance of getting out of here alive, he has to keep his emotion in check. He has to listen to that voice.

In the dark, the cell feels colder, and his breathing is louder, ragged breaths that make his head spin. He leans against the door and slips his shoe back on before following the wall back to the bed, the concrete feeling damp, his feet dragging over the floor. He sits down and waits for his eyes to adjust, but they don’t. The only light coming downstairs is what sneaks through the edges of the door upstairs, and it doesn’t sneak far, enough to see part of the top step but nothing more. The bed squeaks and he puts the pillow between
his back and the wall and leans against it, hooks his legs up in front of him, and rests with his wrists hanging over his knees and thinks about Adrian.

Come on, every time somebody gets murdered in this city you create a profile of the killer and compare it to the newspapers once he’s caught. It’s like a game, and Christchurch has given you plenty of practice. This is the same—if you want to get out of here you have to start by building up a profile.

He has to play the game.

Over the years, his profiles have helped identify a suspect, have narrowed down the kind of person doing the killing. In this case it’s to identify what the suspect wants, how to make him think he’s going to get it, and how to escape this bloody cell. If he had his notepad here, he’d write
Completely loony
at the top of the page and draw a ring around it so many times the pen would chew through the pages. In fact, thinking about it, Adrian is so completely loony that if he had his notepad, Cooper would also write and underline the words
Mental Patient / ex mental patient?

Mental issues aren’t such a bad thing. In fact, given the choice, he’d rather be captive to somebody like Adrian over a cold-blooded, calculated killer. Being deranged makes Adrian unpredictable and dangerous, but there’s a flip side to that, it gives Cooper more room to try and play him, to gain his trust and talk his way out of this cell. If it were simply a case of being smarter than Adrian, then he’d already have gotten out of here. That means he has to rely on luck too, and unfortunately Cooper’s never really been one for having much luck. Today is a perfect example of that. He’s dealt with some seriously deranged people over the years, and no matter how smart they are or he is, you have to take common sense out of the equation and replace it with luck, and without that, he’s going to die down here—or worse, he’ll manage to live down here for twenty years. He imagines Adrian being excited about bringing food and water down every day, then imagines Adrian becoming tired of that, of bringing down supplies less and less because the novelty of having a
serial killer
has worn off. Well, the novelty of starving to
death will sure as hell wear off fast. The stomach pains, the dehydration—there’s no point in thinking about it.

Instead he focuses on Adrian—that’s what is going to get him out of here—which leads him in a circle, because immediately he imagines Adrian going out one day and getting arrested for something, or being hit by a truck, or having a heart attack or getting shot shopping for milk, then nobody ever knowing where Cooper is, starving down here in the cold and dark and suffocating in his own stench. Kidnapping cases normally have a twenty-four-hour window in which to solve the crime—after that you’re looking for a corpse. He doesn’t know if it’s the same for him.

“Jesus,” he whispers. “A collection,” he says, “I’m part of a goddamn collection.”

If he did have his notepad, he’d tear it up right now. Everything he’s read, everything he’s learned and taught over the years, it all turns into a blur, the texts and references hit by a tornado in his brain, scattering all the relevant data too fast to hang on to, and even if he could hang on to it, he doubts there’d be anything there to help. He stands and moves over to the door. He lifts his fists back and is ready to start banging on the door, punching at it, wanting to vent the frustration, but somehow, somehow, he keeps it in check. He thinks he can smell the sandwich in the next room, but he knows it’s unlikely. He picked the worst day to skip breakfast. Even if the food wasn’t all over the floor, even if he could reach it, he isn’t that sure he would touch it. He figures he can go twenty-four hours without food. People do that all the time. People in other countries last days without anything. Homeless people seem to make do.

His stomach starts to rumble. He has to get a grip on his surroundings and, more important, get a grip on the man who has him locked down here. In the basement. Of a house. As an exhibit. In wonderland.

Questions start coming out of the tornado. He begins plucking them out of the air. Is Adrian the only person who will see this collection? Or is he more a zookeeper, and others will come to look?
Are the police looking for him, does anybody know yet he’s missing? Who is Adrian, what has he done in the past, have others died in this room? What of those others, did they admit to being serial killers in the hope of gaining Adrian’s trust, or deny it?

He can feel the onset of panic. He pushes at the door and the walls and kicks at the cinder blocks but it’s all pointless. He takes one of the coins out of his pocket and drags it back and forth against the mortar between two of the cinder blocks and can feel a sprinkle of cement come away, blunting the edge of the coin. He figures if he had a thousand dollars in change he could cut his way through if he stuck at it for about two years.

He hangs his head against the window and asks himself the big question—what should he do next? The way he sees it, he has two options. He can play the professor and try to puncture Adrian’s version of reality, or he can go along with it. He can’t imagine Adrian taking too kindly to his attempts at proving him wrong. Best option is to play along to gain his trust. Tell this loony what he wants to hear. Go down that path for a bit, test it out, see how it feels.

If he were a betting man, he’d give himself three-to-one odds of getting out of here. Adrian’s IQ is half of his own. Cooper knows what he’s talking about and Adrian doesn’t. He has to gain Adrian’s trust. Compliment him. Take baby steps. Use his name as often as he can and try to form a connection. Tell him stories about how good it feels to kill. Become friends. Then start asking for privileges. Start small, like asking for certain food. A change of clothes. Build up the requests until he can convince Adrian to let him outside to see the sun.

Can he do all of that within twenty-four hours? He doesn’t think so. Maybe forty-eight.

He lays on the bed and waits for his headache to pass and for Adrian to come back. The only thing he can do now is be patient. Baby steps. He’ll try to take them as quickly as possible. And now that he has a plan, he already feels calmer. He’s no longer feeling like his odds of getting out of here are three-to-one, more like two-to-one. Good odds. A betting man’s odds.

If the reaction at the boyfriend’s house could be considered cool once they realized who I was, then at the café I’m in need of a winter jacket and scarf despite the summer heat. I knew it was only a matter of time. People know Emma’s missing and they know the police are looking into it, and they don’t want to talk to a man who put the missing girl into hospital last year. At least at the boyfriend’s house things thawed out. After only a couple of words to the café owner, the only thing thawing out are half a dozen chicken breasts in the kitchen. The café is a small mom-and-pop affair with swirling patterns of broken glass in flower-petal shapes glued to the oak veneer walls, serving up croissants and sandwiches with meat and egg and salads in them, chicken or mince pies, rich-looking palm-sized cakes and custard treats that all look pretty damn good after four months in the slammer. The coffee looks good too, but I get the feeling if I ordered a cup I’d have to sink some antibiotics to the bottom to balance out whatever the barista would add with his back turned. The café is located in Merivale, a block away from the Main North Road—one of the central roads heading out of the
city. Merivale is one of those suburbs that defines its own housing market, where you pay far more for far less, where if you don’t own a four-wheel drive and expensive clothes the neighbors would ask you to leave. Everybody has the collars on their shirts and jackets turned up, many of them walking around as though they were living in a country club. There’s a parking lot behind the café and no sign of Emma’s car. I walked around it when I arrived, passing a
Help Wanted
sign in the window that I hope isn’t advertising the spot Emma isn’t filling. Not even two days missing and the world is moving on.

The café owner’s name is Zane Reeves. He has a toupee that at the most cost what he’d make off about eight cups of coffee, and he’s one of those guys who always has to lean against something when he talks, propping himself up against the counter and putting his fist on his hip, his stomach extending out. He smiles for the first five seconds until I introduce myself and he realizes I’m not there to buy something. The café smells of warm food and coffee and is full of people hovering a year or two either side of twenty, all of them drinking hot coffee from small cups on an incredibly hot day, the café full with the low murmur of conversation and some kind of classical music folk guitar blend being pumped through the speakers that is already making me drowsy. Reeves’s smile turns into a grimace and he takes me through a door into the kitchen to talk.

“I’ve already spoken to the cops,” he says.

“Then it will still be fresh in your memory.”

“Speak to them. If they want you to know then they can share.”

“Did she mention any weird customers? Anybody watching her, or giving her weird vibes?”

“We all want Emma back, and mate, you have a bad track record when it comes to people you get involved with. Emma is better off without you trying to help.”

“That’s not what her father thinks.”

“People make bad decisions when they’re grieving.”

“Grieving? Why, you think she’s dead?”

“Don’t you? Mate, last thing I want is anything to have happened
to her, she’s a great kid, a good worker, but I watch the news as much as anybody. I’m not an idiot.”

“That why you already have a new help wanted sign in the window?”

“Fuck you, man,” he says, pointing a finger at me. “I have a business to run. I can’t just keep her position open. See those people out there? They don’t care who serves them as long as they get served. It sucks, but that’s the way it is. There’s nothing here for you, mate. You’ve already hurt her, and I’m not going to help you hurt her family.”