Collecting Cooper (34 page)

“Ask her your questions,” Ritchie says.

I turn back toward him. “She your alibi?”

“Why you asking me?” he asks. “She’s the one telling you we were here.”

I look back down at Melina, but Melina is still looking at the TV, completely ignoring me as she stares at it with glazed-over eyes made from plastic. Her entire body is made from rubber and plastic and must weigh around fifty or sixty kilograms. As far as companion dolls go, she certainly looks like a high-end model. I bet that makes her high maintenance.

“See?” Ritchie says.

“What?”

“See, I told you I was here all day yesterday,” he says, looking at me. He looks down at Melina. “I know,” he says. “I’m sorry, but it isn’t my fault. He just showed up. He has money.”

He turns back toward me. “I told you she doesn’t like strangers. You’ve got what you came for and, like the lady said, it’s time you leave.” He looks back down at her. “I know, honey, I know.”

He leads me to the door and I’m happy to be led. “Sorry about that,” he says, in a conspiratorial whisper.

“It’s hard to find the perfect woman,” I say. “You know, with a thousand bucks you could buy her a few nice dresses.”

“I guess I could.”

“But there are a few things you need to tell me.”

“Like what?”

“Tell me about the Scream Room.”

“Who told you about that?”

“Another patient. You ever have to spend time down there?”

“What, me? No, never. But I never . . . never, you know, hurt anybody. That room was for the bad people and I’m not a bad people. Money?”

“Not yet. What about the Twins?”

He looks down. “Why do you have to talk about them,” he whispers. “I’m a better person now. I don’t want nothing to do with them.” He sniffs loudly and starts to cry.

“I’m sorry, I really am,” I say, and it’s true. “Listen, are any of your friends from Grover Hills in the habit of killing cats and digging them back up?”

“I have to go,” he says, and starts to close the door. “You can keep the money.”

I push my hand against it. “Ritchie . . .”

“But Melina . . .”

“Melina can wait. Give me a name, Ritchie.”

“I can’t. He’s my friend. My best friend.”

“Who?”

“Nobody.”

“He killed my cat,” I say. “And he killed Nurse Deans.”

“She was a hard woman,” he says.

“What’s his name?”

“I can’t,” he says.

I hold the money back up. “You can spend this on Melina,” I say. “You going to choose friendship over love? Is that it? You’re going to choose to protect a killer instead of buying your girl something she deserves?”

He looks down and starts opening and closing his lips like a goldfish, no sound coming out.

“Ritchie . . .”

“His name is Adrian Loaner, but he doesn’t live here anymore. He used to, but then I taught him to drive and he left. He was young when he went to the Grove, real young, and he was there for twenty years maybe.”

“When did he leave here?”

“A week ago. That’s all I know,” he says, and when he looks back up there are tears running down his face.

“You’ve done the right thing,” I tell him.

“Melina . . . she isn’t, she isn’t . . . you know . . . and I know she isn’t, but . . . but it’s better than being alone.”

“It’s hard being alone,” I say.

“I’m sorry about your cat,” he says.

“So am I.”

“Please, please don’t kill him.”

I show him the sketch from the newspaper. “Is this Adrian?”

He looks at it, then tilts his head to change the angle first one way, then the other. “Kind of,” he says. “I mean, maybe.”

“Which bedroom was his?”

“Right opposite,” he says, pointing across the hall. “But it’s empty. He’s my best friend but I don’t know where he’s gone.”

I hand over the cash and enter the bedroom across the hall. The curtains are open and the sun falls across floorboards thick with dust. There’s a bed with the sheets and blankets and pillow missing.
The bedroom drawers are all open and each of them empty. There isn’t anything laying around the room light enough to be lifted in one hand. Adrian Loaner isn’t coming back. I do a customary check, looking under the bed, I search for loose floorboards, I check underneath and behind the drawers but nothing has been left behind.

Adrian moved out a week ago and started a new life out at Grover Hills. Only something spooked him into leaving today.

I head back into the hall. I can hear Ritchie talking to his girlfriend but the conversation is muffled. When I get downstairs the Preacher is waiting for me by the door.

“One more thing,” he says. There’s a fresh cigarette in his hand and also beer. “How was prison, Detective?” he asks, and the smile he gives me has no warmth.

Back at the car, all four tires have been slashed. I call the rental agency and keep my hand on my gun as I wait for a tow truck to arrive.

Adrian stalls the car twice as he backs down the driveway from their new, temporary home. He’s excited with the new accommodations and frustrated that he had to leave the Grove, making him happy one moment and sad the next, and that makes driving a whole lot harder to focus on. At least the day is starting to cool down somewhat, and he’s finding he’s having more energy because of it. His head snaps forward the third time he stalls the car so he comes to a stop, gets out, and leans against it for a minute while rubbing his neck. He needs to concentrate.

He drives into the city, the traffic around him thick with people coming home from work. He doesn’t like driving at this time and tries to avoid it, but sometimes he can’t. People drive differently at this time of the day. They’re more aggressive. They honk their horns more and the cars are closer together, the front of them almost touching the back of the car in front. He hates it. Sometimes he’s thankful he’s not part of the crowd. Families and funerals, taxes and TV shows, planning holidays and painting houses—the thought of that scares him.

He has the phone book in the front seat, the phone book he took from the halfway house, it’s covered in pen marks and the covers are torn and the Preacher would be disappointed in him for taking it. He hated living there. If it wasn’t for Ritchie he’d have tried to move out three years ago, though he doesn’t know where he would have gone without the ability to drive. The problem with Ritchie was once he met Melina, he started to change. He wasn’t the same guy that taught him how to drive. He didn’t have much time for Adrian anymore. It’s sad, because if Ritchie were here then all of this would be going easier. It would also be a lot more fun.

He looks up Cooper’s mother in the phone book. He doesn’t have any intention of adding her to his collection, and he isn’t sure why he lied to Cooper about it. More so Cooper wouldn’t be able to predict what he would do next. Adding the mother would be another mouth to feed, another unhappy person to have around, just more negativity, and like his mother used to say,
“A sad man is a bad man,”
and that would go the same for a woman too, he guesses. The idea of collecting the mum certainly does excite him, though, there is no denying that, but the reality is just too complicated. Still, he wants to see her house, just to satisfy his curiosity. He looked her address up before, only he forgot to write it down. He knows the direction, and he rechecks the address against the map and confirms he’s going the right way.

When he drives past her house he slows enough to look at the cars parked outside. He doesn’t think any of them belong to the police because they’re too nice. Most likely she has friends over to comfort her because she can’t find Cooper. In the future those cars won’t be there.

Now his stomach is rumbling. He hasn’t eaten since breakfast. He hates missing meals. He could drive back out to the new home and fix something to eat, but he doesn’t know where things are in the kitchen or how to use them and he needs time if he’s going to do that.

He pulls away from the curb. He’ll go to a drive-through and get some fast food. He’s never used a drive-through before and the
thought makes him anxious, but then again, a few years ago he’d never used an ATM card and now he knows how. Experiences like this are good for him. They are character building. He can pull over somewhere and eat the food while it’s still warm. Then he’ll drive out to the Grove and watch to see if any police come looking around.

It will feel nice watching the Grove.

In a way it will be like being back home but not really being there.

It takes an hour for the tow truck to arrive. It’s a nervous wait in case the guys with the dog come back, forcing me to shoot them and their dog and then spending twenty years in jail before getting back onto the case. It’s also a frustrating hour because I want to push forward. The tow-truck driver arrives and steps out of the truck and walks around the rental. He has his arms out of his overalls so the top half of his outfit is hanging down past his legs. His white T-shirt is drenched with sweat and has become see-through. His hands are stained with oil and grease.

“You must have really pissed somebody off,” he says, looking down at the wheels.

“Sometimes I’m misunderstood,” I tell him.

He connects a hook and chain under the car then stands next to the back of the truck as he holds a button, a pulley winding the car forward and up onto the deck. He makes sure it’s secure and we climb up into the cab. The cab is full of so many hamburger wrappers that my cholesterol level spikes when I inhale. We make the kind of small talk that small talk was invented for—the weather, traffic,
sports news. He drives me to the tire shop the rental agency told me to take the car to. The people there have been advised about the problem but tell me it’s going to take another hour before they even take a look at it because they’re busy. I sit on a bench outside in the fading heat, spending five minutes staring at a tree, five at the side of the wall, bunches of other five-minute intervals staring at whatever else is around. The air smells of rubber. I call Donovan Green and update him on the case. I tell him I have a few names that I’m following up tonight and that he should keep his cell phone nearby in case I need more money. He tells me money isn’t an issue. He asks me if I’m still carrying the photograph of Emma he gave me, and I tell him that it’s in my wallet. He asks me to take it out and take a look at it, and I do. He tells me that her life is in my hands, that she’s alive somewhere, that money isn’t an issue, and reminds me that I’m doing this for Emma and for him, not for the police. He reminds me that when I find Cooper Riley that I’m to go to him first, that I’m to give him a few hours alone with Cooper Riley.

“Okay,” I tell him.

“Promise me,” he tells me. “Promise me Riley will pay for what he’s done.”

“I promise.”

I hang up and call Schroder. “Any hits on the fingerprints from my house?” I ask him.

“Nothing. There were some good ones too. So it wasn’t Melissa and it wasn’t somebody with a record . . .” he says, then trails off. “Hang on a second,” he says, and he takes the phone away. I can hear muffled voices but not what they’re saying. He comes back a moment later. “Listen, I have to go.”

“Wait a second. Maybe this guy we’re looking for was young and didn’t get a criminal record, but got a medical one instead.”

“What are you getting at, Tate?”

“I got something for you,” I tell him. “This is important. I know who took Cooper Riley.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“An ex-patient from Grover Hills. His name is Adrian Loaner.
If he was just a kid when he went there, there’d be no criminal record.”

“Uh huh. Good job, Tate. We’ll look into it.”

“Hang on,” I say, his lack of enthusiasm telling me what I need to know. “You already knew?”

“Of course we knew. What, you think we can’t function without you?”

“How long have you known?”

“Listen, Tate, I have to go.”

“Can you meet me?”

“What?”

“With some corpse dogs.”

“Oh man, are you shitting me?”

“Grover Hills.”

“Look, Tate, we know what we’re doing.”

“Grover Hills . . .”

“We’re already out there.”

“You find anything?”

“We sure as hell found a lot more than you did.”

“You found Cooper Riley?”

“Not yet.”

“But you found somebody.”

“A couple of bodies.”

I break out in a cold sweat. “Emma Green?”

“No,” he says, and I breathe a sigh of relief. “Listen, Tate, don’t even think of coming out here.”

“I’ll be there soon,” I tell him, and I hang up.

It’s closing in on seven o’clock by the time my car is hoisted up on a hydraulic lift. It’s an anxious wait, and I end up pacing the footpath outside, looking at the other cars parked around the shop wondering how hard it’d be to steal one. Each of the wheels are taken off. It takes ten minutes per tire to replace, then the car is lowered and I’m back on the road.

I still get somewhat lost on the drive back to Grover Hills even though I was there earlier today. The sun is in my eyes for most of it,
creeping under the angle of the sun visor, so when I do turn corners and head in different directions I have bright lights dancing in my vision. I pull in behind one of the patrol cars at Grover Hills. One side of the building is lit up with the sun reflecting in all the windows, the other sides are dim in the shade. I have to shield my eyes as I look for Schroder. The building hasn’t been cordoned off because there’s nobody out here to protect it from. There are around thirty people working the scene and about half of them watch me get out of the car, but nobody comes over. They seem to know who I am, and Schroder must have told them to let me though. He’s standing next to a man with a beard and a comb-over. He breaks off the conversation and comes over. His shirtsleeves are rolled up and dust and dirt has settled into the folds.

“Jesus, Tate,” he says, shaking his head.

“Why don’t you just give up on the indignation, Carl, and accept I’m part of this. Let me help you. That’s what you wanted from me when you picked me up from jail, remember? My help? Stop bullshitting me by pretending you want me out of here when you need all the help you can get.”