Collecting Cooper (49 page)

So I tell him as we watch Emma and her family continue to hug each other, and as the Christchurch sun continues to try and set fire to fields around us.

The café owner kept Emma’s job for her. She didn’t want to go back, but she needed the money, and anyway, she has time to kill before she heads away to the police academy. She had never thought before that she would want to be a cop, but it’s all she can think about. She has quit university, has filed her application with the police force, and now she just has to wait. It could take six months. It could take three years. Hopefully she’s accepted. Hopefully she has the strength to get through the months of training, and then hopefully she is posted in Christchurch so she can be near her family where she can make a difference. Despite everything that has happened to her, she loves this city. She wants to protect this city. She wants to make sure other girls like her don’t have to go through what men like Cooper Riley put her through. She doesn’t know whether in a few months’ time she might have changed her mind, that the reality of what happened to her two weeks ago will seem different and instead of wanting to become a cop she’ll be wanting to curl up in her bedroom for the rest of her life. Her parents don’t support her decision. They want her to carry on with her studies.
They tell her it’s too dangerous being a policewoman. She pointed out that it’s equally as dangerous being a student or working at a café.

The old man who she thought was dead the night she was abducted is sitting at the table closest to the counter. He’s working his way through a muffin and a coffee and also the crossword puzzle. He doesn’t recognize her from that night. God, how she wanted to scream at him when he walked in! She wanted to spit in his coffee too, but she just smiled and took his money and brought out his order when it was ready.

Part of her, and she can’t deny it, wants to follow him out to the parking lot when he’s done and, in the morning, people will find him sitting dead behind the driver’s wheel of his car. It’s what Melissa X would do.

He senses she is looking at him, and he looks up, a big smile on his face.

“Best coffee in the city,” he tells her.

She smiles back. “I appreciate hearing that,” she says.

He goes back to his crossword. She thinks about Adrian Loaner, and how it felt putting that safety pin into his eye. A month ago if asked, she’d have said that sort of thing would never have been possible for her, not under any circumstances. She also never would have thought about following a customer into the parking lot and strangling him either.

People change. Some for the better, some for the worse. After helping kill two men, she doesn’t know which of those sums her up.

She thinks about Cooper Riley, flat on the floor with his throat blocked from the Taser. She wanted him to die. She was desperate for him to die, and even though that’s what happened, she’s glad he didn’t die from her hand. There is some relief there. He killed himself, and that took any guilt away from her—even though she isn’t sure she ever would have felt any. If he had lived, he could have hurt other people. Not today, not next week, but definitely in fifteen years when he was freed from jail.

Theodore Tate made sure that wouldn’t happen.

At least she thinks that’s what happened.

Theodore Tate. She still hates him for what he did to her last year. But that’s changing. She’s heard he’s wanting to be a cop again. She hopes she gets to work with him one day. She knows there are things about the world he can teach her that the police force can’t, things that can make her a better cop. Things she can do to help more people.

Like pulling plastic tubes out of evil men’s throats.

Okay—she isn’t sure if she could do that, just as she isn’t sure what really happened in that bedroom after she walked out.

The following day nine bodies were found at the farmhouse. All of them men who had gone missing over the previous few years, all of them killed by a pair of brothers who were themselves killed by the man she stabbed with the safety pin.

Yes, she absolutely wants to become a cop. She wants to rid this world of men like that.

The old man finishes off his crossword and waves at her on his way out the door. She goes over to his table and picks up the newspaper he left behind. She folds it over to the front page. There’s a sketch of Melissa X, the same one they’ve been running since last year, only now she has a name and a photograph of when she was a student. Natalie Flowers.

Natalie Flowers was Cooper Riley’s first victim.

It’s an awful thought, but she wishes Cooper had killed Natalie Flowers.

Last night another body was found. An ambulance driver. He was found naked in a park with his hands tied around a tree. His uniform wasn’t at the scene. She wonders if she’ll make it onto the force before Natalie Flowers is caught, then wonders if Flowers will ever be caught. She carries the coffee cup and plate out to the kitchen, folds the newspaper in half, and tosses it into the bin.

I would like to say a big thank-you to the team at Atria, and especially the fantastic Sarah Branham, who did an amazing job with the manuscript and I’m very lucky to have her as my editor.

I’m also lucky to have the best agent in the business—Jane Gregory, who has shown a lot of faith in me and given a lot of support—I’d be lost without her. Stephanie Glencross, Jane’s in-house editor at Gregory and Company, has a great eye for detail and a great bedside manner in pointing out my mistakes.

I also want to say thanks to all the people who have bought the books and to those who have emailed me—without those kind words I’d have stopped writing by now. 2010 was a pretty bumpy year, and I’d like to thank all my friends for making sure I got through it in one piece!

And of course my parents—the two coolest people in the world—everything I am is because of them.

Paul Cleave is the author of four internationally bestselling thrillers—
The Cleaner, The Killing Hour, Cemetery Lake,
and
Blood Men.
He lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. Find out more at
www.paulcleave.com
.