Collecting Cooper (5 page)

There aren’t many people on the streets as he drives through them. All the faces look the same. The houses seem to fall into two categories—nice ones that he’d like to live in, and bad ones he wouldn’t. His last house was in that second category, but he’s moved out now and living in the house where his mother, God bless her soul, raised him. It’s not a nice place, but it’s home, and there’s a certain something to be said for that. He just doesn’t know what that
something
is.

The driveway leading to that certain-something house has never been paved. It’s made up from loose tooth-sized pieces of shingle that over the years have compacted into the dirt. Some of that dirt blankets the air behind the car as he drives over it, and when he comes to a stop it settles over the warm metal. He sits in the car and waits for the air to clear, humming to himself, not wanting the dust to stick to his damp body and make the itching worse. Soon the tranquillity returns. He loves it out here—the isolation, the peaceful-ness—out here there are no such things as home invasions and loud cars and people being rude.

The thumb he took from Cooper’s house is sitting on the passenger seat in a glass jar filled with fluid that, if he holds it up to the light, is full of small gray flecks. He shakes it and the flecks float aimlessly like a snow globe but nowhere near as pretty. The thumb doesn’t move much. The nail is longer than he grows his own, and he remembers hearing somewhere that people’s nails still grow after they died, but he isn’t sure that’s true. It makes sense the nail stays the same and the fingers and toes shrink as the body dries out. Cooper would know. Cooper is a professor and a smart person, and this would be just one of a hundred things that he knows. He can’t tell if Cooper cut the thumb from a man or a woman. The nail doesn’t have any polish on it, but that doesn’t mean anything. The cut that removed it from the hand is clean and the bone doesn’t look splintered,
but would be under a microscope. Something pretty sharp must have been used. He knows serial killers like to collect moments and . . . and no, not
moments,
and not
moment-o
either—he knows the word, has read it a hundred times, but for the moment it just won’t come to him. Whatever it is, he knows that serial killers collect them and that it’s normally a piece of jewelry or clothing they save somewhere private. It’s dangerous for Cooper to have taken an entire thumb, and even more so to have put it on display. Adrian climbs out of the car and rests the jar on the roof where it forms a ring in the dust. The air is full of grasshopper sounds and birdsong. He moves to the back of the car and pops the trunk.

Cooper Riley’s face is grazed from the fall he took when the Taser hit him, and he looks beaten up from banging around in the trunk of the car. His face is puffy and his wrists have swollen and turned purple from being tied behind him. Next time, Adrian thinks, he’ll pad the trunk with blankets first. If nothing else, he’s learning. Cooper would be proud of him.

There’s a line of drool running from the corner of Cooper’s lips. Tiny pieces of dirt have gotten caught in it. He brushes them away knowing Cooper would appreciate it, and wipes his hand across Cooper’s shirt, hoping Cooper wouldn’t mind. He knows this entire ordeal is going to be one giant learning curve, and it gets proven again when he discovers pulling a man out of a trunk is much harder than putting him in. He drags Cooper over the rim, the limp body catches in places, first his belt, then his arms, then his chin, and then there is a loud
thunk
as his head hits the bumper on the way down. Cooper lies on the ground as lifeless as he looked when he was in the car. Adrian leaves the rope around Cooper’s wrists and ankles, heads inside, and returns with a red dolly that once, a lifetime ago, when he was supposed to be in his bedroom but wasn’t, he saw a dead boy strapped to it. Age and use has chipped away over half of the paint, but the wheels still turn pretty good. The tires are half flat, and look even flatter once he has Cooper strapped in.

Negotiating the steps leading inside is the most awkward bit, and he manages them by turning around and dragging the dolly backward.
Getting Cooper down into the basement is equally as hard, but he does the same thing, only in reverse, keeping the dolly low and carefully taking one step at a time, knowing if he lets go Cooper will crash down and break his nose and teeth. Cooper doesn’t make any noise, other than his head bouncing against the frame of the dolly with every step.

The basement is segmented into two separate rooms, a dividing wall running across the middle is made of concrete block with a door near the middle acting as barrier to the second, internal room. The outer part used to be used as storage, though not these days. The inner room, the Scream Room as they used to call it, years ago contained a furnace that was stripped out and sold for scrap, not long after Adrian came to live here. He can still remember the workman coming and taking it away. He was young then, curious as to what was going to happen with the empty room. It was only a matter of days before he found out. In that room now is nothing but bolts sticking out of the walls and floor that were never important enough to spend the time or resources on removing. There’s an old bed with a worn mattress and flat pillow that has absorbed thousands of tears, not all of them his own. There are extra blankets and a bucket in the corner with a lid and another bucket full of fresh water, a cup, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a towel. He’s filled a large plastic container full of water for Cooper to drink, there must be five liters in there. The door to this cell is made from iron except for a square patch of reinforced glass at head height. There is a sliding arm across the front that can’t be accessed from the inside. At the bottom of the door is a panel that can be hinged open like a cat-flap so items can be passed back and forth, big enough for the bucket or for somebody very small. It opens outward and has the hinges on this side of it and the bolts are on the outside and can’t be opened from within. From no point within the basement can the outside world be seen. There used to be a single lightbulb that hung down from the ceiling, but a long time ago that was removed after one of the boys pulled enough of the wire through to make a noose. His name was George, and George’s tongue bloated to the
same size as his mouth and his skin turned gray and George never came back. After that all the rooms in the house had the cables shortened. So now the only light comes through the open basement door, which isn’t much, but enough to see by.

He wheels Cooper into the inner room and unties him, then helps him onto the mattress. The mattress is slightly damp and cool, which Adrian thinks Cooper will appreciate, especially this week with the temperature almost topping one hundred and ten every day. The bedsprings sag and it’s the first time they’ve had weight on them in three years. He lifts Cooper’s head and secures a pillow beneath it then steps out of the cell, taking the dolly and ropes with him. He locks the door behind him and leans with his forehead on the glass and watches Cooper, who, for the moment, is still. He knows when Cooper awakes he won’t be happy, and Adrian is fully prepared for it.

Back outside the day has continued to grow hotter. The glass jar with the thumb has trapped some of that heat and nearly burns his fingers. He collects it, along with a few other things he’s taken from Cooper’s home, and heads back inside. Over the years Adrian has met other killers. He has lived with people who have killed families, people who have killed strangers, people who have killed for no real-life reason, who have taken lives because of a voice telling them to, or an instinct, or a hidden message in a newspaper from God. He’s shared rooms with people who have sliced others apart, only a few without emotion, most of them dumbfounded and upset at what they did, all hoping pills and talking about feelings would cure them. There haven’t been many—he’s met less killers than he can count on both hands, but he believes they are the reason he now has a fascination with them. He would have been just like them if he hadn’t been sent here and locked away when he was a teenager.

There was one, he remembers, that was impossible to warm to, a man who had killed his parents and brother and sister the day before he turned sixteen. Not really a man, but more of a boy, certainly a boy younger than Adrian when they met. His name was Hutchinson, and Adrian always thought it was a strange name, and
he also thought that Hutch was a boy before he took the knife to his family but a man immediately after. Whenever Hutch had to spend time in the Scream Room he never complained. There were many trips down there for him, and never did he speak a word about what happened. Adrian has always wondered what it would be to be a man like that.

Hutch stayed here for a few years and then moved on and Adrian has no idea what became of the man, whether he’s alive, whether he’s still a killer, or whether he’s in a grave mourned by no one. It was these years that shaped his obsession . . . no, his mother has told him it’s wrong to be obsessed with anything . . . it was these years that shaped his
interest
in killers. Last year with the papers continually feeding him information about the Christchurch Carver and the Burial Killer, his interest in serial killers became extreme. He suspects the thing inside him creating that interest isn’t normal. It made him want to move back here. It made him want to learn to drive so he could do something with that interest. He stacks Cooper’s belongings on the shelves in the basement where Cooper can see them through the small window that, yesterday, Adrian cleaned especially.

“Cooper?”

Cooper does not answer. He does not move.

“Cooper?” This time a little louder. He knows you have to speak up to be heard through the door, but not much, only a little really.

Satisfied Cooper is still asleep, he tidies the basement. He doesn’t need Cooper to wake into this mess and form an instant bad impression. He straightens the memorabilia on the shelves, tidies the bookcase that has dozens of autobiographies of serial killers. There is a couch down here and a scarred coffee table but not much more. Anyway, today is only day one, and as he learns he will begin to improve.

“Cooper?”

Nothing.

He heads upstairs and turns on the radio. It’s small, and has a belt clip so he can hang it from his pants, and it can play tapes and
even record things too. He’s sure Cooper will enjoy the same kind of classical music, and he carries the radio back to the basement, but when he starts to climb down the stairs the reception fades. He plays with the dial but can’t get any of the stations to work, not until he climbs back up the stairs into the corridor. He replaces the batteries, but the same thing happens and he doesn’t understand why. Can the music not get past the concrete walls from the radio station? He could play a tape, but playing tapes uses up the battery faster, and he doesn’t want to use it up that way. He’s disappointed. Hopefully this will be the only setback.

Suspecting Cooper will be hungry as well as confused when he wakes up, Adrian, not wanting to be a rude host, heads to the kitchen where the radio works again, and he clips it onto his pants and listens to one of the modern rock bands he’s come to like, and starts preparing lunch for his new housemate.

They’re calling her Melissa X. It’s not a Roman numeral—she isn’t the tenth Melissa in the city to have killed a cop, or the tenth Melissa to become a serial killer still on the loose, or the tenth Melissa to fill what I imagine to be boxes and boxes of evidence stored in an evidence warehouse. It’s an X because it’s an unknown. The media, normally quick to come up with catchy names for crimes and killers, have dubbed her The Uniform Killer. She became famous when a videotape found in the Christchurch Carver’s possession—a serial killer named Joe Middleton who was caught last year—showed her stabbing a knife into the chest of a currently missing detective. The Christchurch Carver was arrested the same day I killed the serial killer I was hunting last year, a man dubbed the Burial Killer. In the month between the accident I caused, the sentencing, and then being put in jail, I saw on the news that Melissa was still on the run and was now the suspect in other homicides. She was big news back then, and I guess she’s even bigger news now because the police still have no idea where she is or who she really is. Another day, another serial killer—each one trying to outdo the other. For the last few
years the city was under siege by the Christchurch Carver, now it’s dealing with his girlfriend.

I open the windows in the study and let the outside air force its way in; it’s warm air but at least it’s fresh. It’s circulated slightly by an oscillating fan that I drag out of a wardrobe and plug in, thick dust blowing off the blades and clouding the air for the first ten seconds and sending me into a sixty-second sneezing fit. The contents of the folder are two inches thick and I stack them on the desk into different piles. The fan lifts the corners of the pages every twenty seconds as it passes by. There are reports, statements, copies of forensic evidence. There are photographs of bruises, cuts, blood; there’s a DVD with a recording of Melissa X murdering Detective Inspector Calhoun. Four dead bodies and a lot of paperwork, and Melissa is on the loose. They have DNA and fingerprints and even footage of the woman, and with all of that she’s a ghost. Her face has been plastered in the papers, headlining the news. Three episodes of
New Zealand’s Most Wanted
have been dedicated to finding information about her. Even the psychics have come out of the woodwork. Nobody knows where she is, and even stranger, nobody has come forward to identify her. Family, friends, colleagues, schoolmates, doctors, teachers—if these people are in her past or present, they don’t recognize her. Melissa may be her name but it also may not be. At one point during the Carver investigation she showed up at the police station to help identify a suspect—giving false information to help the Carver evade capture. She gave her name as Melissa Graves, and nobody at the time had any reason to doubt her. The name, of course, isn’t real. Since then it’s been narrowed down to Melissa X, and it’s unlikely Melissa is her real name either.