Collecting Cooper (20 page)

“How can I help you?” she asks, smiling up at me.

“You know we searched Cooper Riley’s office earlier?” I ask, hoping she’s going to make the same mistake Professor Collins made, and she does.

“Yes, of course. Everybody knows.”

“There’s something else you may be able to help us with,” I tell her. “There was a time when Riley took a month or more off work. Possibly around three years ago. Can you look that up for me?”

She doesn’t answer me. Instead she puts on her glasses and adjusts the distance between the lenses and her eyes as she looks at a computer monitor, then her fingers fly across the keyboard.

“It’ll take a minute,” she says, and about ten seconds later she finds it. “Here we go. You’re right,” she says. “Almost three years ago. April through to May. Five weeks in total.”

“I need to get a look at names and faces of his students from that year.”

“Why?”

“Please, it’s important. We’re trying to save Cooper’s life,” I tell her.

“Is it true his house was burned down?”

“It’s true.”

“There are hundreds of students from three years ago,” she tells me.

I need to check them all for the arsonist, but that can wait till Schroder gets here. “Just the female ones.”

“I guess I can print them out,” she says. “It’ll take an hour, unless you can narrow down who you’re after.”

“What about students who dropped out during the year? Around the same time Professor Riley was off work?”

“Why? You think that means something?”

“Please,” I tell her, “we need to hurry.”

“Hmm . . . let me see,” she says. She taps at the keyboard again. “Four female students dropped out during that time.”

“Any of them named Melissa?”

“Melissa? No, none of them.”

“Can I see their photographs?”

She twists the computer monitor toward me and I have to lean over the desk to get a better view, entering her perfume zone in the process. She cycles through the photos. She gets to the third one when I stop her for a better look. The eyes look familiar.

“I remember this girl,” the receptionist says.

“You do?”

“Not so much her, but her parents. They came in here looking for information.”

“What kind of information?”

“Anything that would help them track her down. She went missing. Oh no,” she says, making the connection. “You think the same thing that happened to Emma Green happened to her?” she asks, tapping the monitor.

I don’t think so. I think these two girls ended up with very different fates. I think the girl on the screen might be the woman who attacked the Christchurch Carver and killed Detective Calhoun. This could be the woman that put Professor Riley in hospital three years ago. Her image has been in the papers and all over the news, an
image taken from the video I watched yesterday, but that image isn’t the same as the one I’m looking at now. Similar, but not the same, different haircut, different color hair, a little less weight around the face—but it’s the eyes. Those eyes are the same, I’m sure of it.

Cooper Riley would have known it too. He would have seen the news and he would have known who she really was, and he never came forward to the police.

Why would that be? Is he still afraid of her?

Or is there something he’s hiding?

Cooper’s head is much better today, but it’s still throbbing a little and he’s tempted to take the pills he found in his pocket yesterday. The wound on his chest is starting to itch and when he touches it with his fingers they come away damp with blood and something else too, something that’s not quite yellow. If he doesn’t eat something soon he thinks he’s going to go crazy.

He recognizes the girl. Shoulder-length red hair that is knotted and frayed. Her skin is pale and flushed. She can’t be any more than twenty. A student? Perhaps a former one. Even one from this year—there are always so many. Or it could be somebody from the supermarket, a checkout teller, some girl he’s made idle chitchat with while his groceries were scanned before he swiped his credit card. Maybe a hairdresser from the mall, a Jehovah’s Witness who banged on his door one morning, a receptionist at his doctor’s office. He’s seen her around but can’t place where. She’s in a dress that’s too big for her and covered in flowers that, under the lamplight, all look pale blue. It’s something his mother would wear in the summer.

Jesus, his mother . . . she’ll be a mess. His mother will be eighty years old in July, and already the family is planning a huge party for her. His sister is going to fly back from the UK—and he suspects she might be flying back now because of what’s happened, assuming people even know he’s disappeared, which they must do if it’s true what Adrian said about burning down his house. He hopes his mother is holding up okay. She’s a strong woman. Has been ever since his dad walked out on them when Cooper was twelve years old. He hasn’t seen him since. Has no idea whether the man is even alive and doesn’t care. But his mother . . . he owes her everything. With a weaker mother, his life would have taken a different path. When he was fourteen years old, he stole a car. He and his friend got drunk, and they crashed it. Neither of them were hurt, but his mother came and picked him up from the police station and didn’t say a word on the way home, didn’t say a word until the following morning when she made him breakfast.

He had apologized, and she had told him she wasn’t the one he should be apologizing to, that he should be apologizing to his future self, that it was his future self he was damaging. He didn’t care. Back then he didn’t care about much except that his dad had left, and how good beer tasted when he snuck out at night to meet his buddy. She made him write himself a letter for the future, in which he told himself how sorry and how stupid he was. She made him write down how much he had hurt his mother. He did that too. Then she went into her room and cried. When she came back out she sat down with him and ate breakfast and told him she felt sorry for the man she was going to give that letter to in ten years’ time. She never gave him that letter. Instead things changed. Every day she would tell him whether his future self would be happy or disappointed with his actions. He started to care about that future self. He didn’t want to grow up to be like his dad. He started to study harder. His grades were good.

When he was twenty years old, he had an affair with the next-door neighbor. She was fifteen years older than him. He thought he loved her. One day her husband came home with a shotgun
and put a hole in her before putting one in himself. Nobody saw it coming. Cooper was never sure whether the husband knew his wife had been cheating, and he suspected that if he had known and who with, there would have been a shotgun shell reserved for him too. The husband was the cliché, the quiet man who didn’t speak much to people, and Cooper couldn’t figure out how he hadn’t seen it coming. It fascinated him. People were different, they ticked differently, and he wanted to understand them. He felt the loss of losing his lover, but he felt no guilt, and that interested him too.

Right now, he needs to understand Adrian and, if he can get this woman to wake up, get her to understand what’s going on.

“Hey,” he says, loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be heard by her. He bangs against the door and gets the same result. Adrian said he’d be half an hour. The clock is ticking. He’ll aim for twenty minutes to be on the safe side. Cooper bangs against the window. He needs the girl to wake up, and to wake up now.

And she does.

Slowly.

Her eyes stay closed and her hands creep up to her face and start probing. She looks like she’s coming out of a very deep sleep, probably a nightmare. Her skin is red and patchy and her face is flushed, except for the dark gray smudges beneath her eyes. Her hands explore the straw sticking out from her mouth. She pulls on it gently but it doesn’t budge. For the first time he realizes her lips are glued shut. He calls to her again but she doesn’t respond. In fact she looks like she’s passed back out. Her fingers have stopped moving and her hands have collapsed onto the floor. It takes what feels like an hour but is only two minutes before there’s any further movement. She rubs at her eyes slowly and then they open. He can see her looking around but she can’t focus on anything. He taps on the glass and she looks in his direction but doesn’t register his presence.

He has eighteen minutes left.

“Miss, hey, miss, wake up, wake up. Please, you have to wake up.”

He watches her jaw move as she tries to speak. Then he sees it all coming back to her, her memories flooding with emotions. Her
face tightens and her eyes grow wider and her hands probe faster at her face, especially at her lips, and she starts to cry. She sits up and looks around the room before holding the edges of the dress up to stare at it for a few seconds. Finally she locks her gaze on him. Her jaw moves again and he thinks she’s trying to scream. She turns away from him and her head pauses in the direction of the bookcase, the lamp casting her shadow over the books and trophies, and he’s sure if she could another scream would be coming.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he says, holding up his hands even though she can’t see them. “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to help you.”

She puts her palms on the ground and pushes herself further away from him. Looking through the cell window, and with her lips glued shut, it’s like watching a show on mute.

“Please, please, I’m not here to hurt you,” he says. “I’m a friend. I’m in the same situation as you.”

Sixteen minutes. Maybe more.

She gets to her knees. Both of them are scuffed and become even more scuffed as she tries to get to her feet. She loses balance and falls forward and he can hear something in her wrist crack. He winces at the sound. She starts to cry again. Another minute is lost. “Please, can you open the door?” he asks. “Is there a latch there? Or a lock?”

She doesn’t look at him. She cradles her arm and curls up into a fetal position. She’s wasting time and he can feel himself becoming increasingly frustrated. Even angry. He wants to get out of the cell and shake her. She’s going to blow their chance and she’s going to die and he’s going to die and if she just focused, if she could just get hold of herself . . . Christ, if only he could slap her!

“We’re going to die down here if you don’t start helping me,” he says, only she isn’t listening. Out of a desperate need to do something, out of instinct, he turns and looks around his cell for something to help, but of course there’s nothing, only a ratty old mattress and a spring bed and a bucket a quarter full of his own piss and vomit that smells worse today than yesterday. He looks back at the window. She hasn’t moved.

Stay calm. Baby steps.

He takes a deep breath. “My name is Cooper,” he says, clenching his fists down low where she can’t see them. He tries to smile at her but ends up grimacing. He has to return to the basics, he has to return to psychology 101. “I bet your family is worried about you,” he says. “My family is worried about me. Help me help you see them again. Can you open the door? Please, please, take a look at the door.”

She looks up at him. She seems to figure out if she’s a prisoner here and he’s a prisoner here then they’re on the same side. She tightens her jaw and her eyes clear and for the first time since waking up she seems fully aware of herself.

Twelve minutes left.

“We need to be quick,” he says, “before the man who took us comes back. You have to help me, then I can help you. I promise we’re going to get out of here,” he says. She looks around the room, and it seems to Cooper that she’s seeing it for the first time. She turns in a circle and stops when she’s looking directly at him.

“The door,” he says. “Can you unlock it?”

She nods, but doesn’t move.

“We have to hurry,” he says, “and we have to stay quiet.”

She takes a step toward him, and then another, and finally she’s directly on the other side of the glass. He keeps waiting for her to back away and curl into a ball again but she doesn’t. She looks through the window at him and tries to see beyond, and he steps aside slightly so she can get a better look, only the lamplight doesn’t hit much of it. Up close, her face is sunken in and she looks tired and underfed and there are small blisters growing around the edges of her mouth. At least he thinks they’re blisters.

“I can find something to remove the glue,” he says, keeping his voice low and calm, no traces of panic, no hint that he desperately wants her to hurry the fuck up. “It won’t be hard, I promise.”

She nods again, and then she looks down at the door. She continues to cradle her injured wrist under her opposite armpit as she works at something with her free hand. There is squeaking as metal
is hinged up and down, a dead bolt he assumes. It’s tight, and she has to work it a few times and then
bang
as it slides open and hits into place. The door opens a crack. He puts his hand on it and pushes, thinking this is too easy, then thinking it ought to be easy when the person holding you captive has the mind of a child.

Ten minutes left.

The door swings open. He steps into the basement. The air is just as cool on this side of the door. She flinches when he wraps his arms around her and holds her tight. “Thank God,” he whispers, and he has the urge to sob into the side of her neck. He pulls back. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, holding her shoulders, but she doesn’t seem to believe him.

“We need to find something to use as a weapon,” he says, and he moves over to the bookcase. He couldn’t get a good look from his cell window, but there is plenty of history on these shelves, including a couple of knives that have come from his house. He picks up the largest one, it’s a dull blade that forty years ago belonged to a man who stabbed his parents, a dull blade that he bought in an auction for just under two hundred dollars. Right now the blade feels priceless. It makes him feel as powerful as the previous owner must have felt. His briefcase is on the floor. He kneels down and pops the catch that does work and opens the lid. Everything inside is messed around. He rakes his fingers through the contents.