Collecting Cooper (6 page)

Days after that the Carver was caught and nobody has seen Melissa since. For the first few weeks after the Carver’s arrest, the consensus was Melissa X was dead, another of his victims. Then the bodies started showing up and Melissa X went from suspect to victim and back to suspect again.

Since the Carver’s arrest five months ago, multiple attempts have
been made to get him to offer up information on the woman, and each time he shoots them down. Melissa X is a monster with the blood of at least four people on her hands. I can’t blame Schroder for wanting all the fresh perspective he can get.

The report details each of the homicides, leading with Calhoun’s. All three of the other men worked in uniform—though no uniforms were found near the bodies, which were stripped down to their underwear. Two security guards and one police constable. The constable was found in a park, naked. He’d been tortured. One security guard was found in his home, the only thing reported missing was his uniform. The other guard was found on a golf course where he patrolled, his almost naked body pitching distance from the fourteenth green with the same signs of torture as the other men—a completely crushed testicle, the same injury Melissa gave the Christ-church Carver. No connection has been made between the men other than the way their throats had been opened up by a blade, and the fact they all had missing uniforms. There was nothing to link them to the Carver. There are two theories floating around as to why the uniforms were taken—either for practical use to impersonate one of these men or as a trophy. The reason for the torture is unknown—again two possibilities—one was to extract information, the other was for fun. I watch the DVD in the living room and my take on Melissa is she hurt these men for fun. Detective Inspector Calhoun is bound to a chair. The chair is in a bathroom and there is tape over his mouth. There are patches of blood on his shirt and the skin around the duct tape is dry and raw. His eyes are wide with fear and his face is soaked with sweat and he looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. The footage is taken two days before the Carver was arrested.

“I don’t understand what you’re playing at, Joe,”
Melissa says. There aren’t any background sounds. Her voice comes from somewhere to the side of the camera. The report says the angles in the footage and an examination of the apartment show the camera was hidden in the wardrobe pointing out. It means Melissa didn’t know she was being filmed. It’s possible Joe was going to try and blackmail her. The report doesn’t say.

“He’s my witness to what you really are.”
They are Joe the Carver’s words, and his voice is also off to the side. The footage still only shows Calhoun, his eyes wide in panic. Every ounce of his being is seeping fear. Calhoun didn’t need to be a detective to figure out what was going to happen to him. My stomach tightens and I tighten my grip on the remote control to try and stop my hands from shaking.

“Oh? And what do you have on him?”
Melissa asks.

“Enough.”

I wonder what “enough” means, and I’m sure I’m not the only one wondering. Calhoun’s fingerprints were found on a knife used to kill a prostitute only days before his death, but the scene was staged. Calhoun was innocent.

“You’re forgetting one thing, Joe.”

“And what’s that?”

“I don’t need him.”

Melissa steps into view, this tall woman brimming with sex appeal, but her eyes don’t fit with the package, her body and face transmit the kind of beauty you’d expect from a woman used to showing off the latest fashions on a runway, but her eyes tell a different story, her eyes reveal somebody you’d expect to spend her nights skinning kittens. She moves gracefully toward Calhoun and the veins stand out in her neck from the effort of plunging the knife into his chest. The camera doesn’t move. Joe doesn’t enter the frame. I want to put the TV on mute because I don’t want to hear the sounds Calhoun makes because somehow they’re worse than seeing him convulse beneath her. There’s a long gargling sound, like the last of the water draining from a bathtub. When it’s over, Melissa tucks her hair over her right ear and looks toward the camera, but not right at it. The Carver never comes into view.

“You stupid bitch. How could you do such a thing?”

She pulls the silver duct tape away from Calhoun’s mouth and blood spills out of it and down his front.
“I’m surprised that you thought I wouldn’t.”

I’m surprised too.

She carries on.
“I told you no tricks, Joe.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Well you should have assumed it. I still want my money.”

After that the footage gets even worse. There is a coldness with this woman that I’ve never seen before, a cold beauty that remains even when she withdraws the knife and drags it across the dead detective’s throat. Not long after she walks away the footage ends. Melissa said no tricks, but filming her was a trick. I wonder what the money is she’s talking about. According to the file the question has been posed to Joe, but he hasn’t given an answer.

I switch off the TV and walk slowly down the hallway to the study with a stronger determination to help Schroder. This is why he included the DVD. The connection between Melissa and the Carver is hard to understand. She tortured him, they became lovers, and he won’t give up any information on her. It doesn’t make sense. If the Carver hadn’t been arrested, would they have stayed together until one of them killed the other?

By the end of the first hour there aren’t any spare surfaces on the desk and I’ve had to lock down the fan to keep it from blowing the papers away. By the end of the second hour parts of the floor are covered and some of the images are taped to a whiteboard I have in my study and the fan is back in the wardrobe. All the windows in the house are open. I can hear a stereo thumping from one of the neighboring houses and somebody singing along to it. I wanted to think in silence, but I turn my own stereo on preferring to listen to my own music rather than somebody else’s. I listen to a Beatles album and think things were easier back then before figuring things are never easy. In the two hours I’ve created piles of chaos with no real clear insight to who this woman is.

The security guard on the golf course was the last body found, and that was three weeks ago. I wonder what Melissa wants their uniforms for. All that wondering, though, tires me out, and by the end of the third hour I start moving through the house, putting some distance between me and the collection of evidence. I pause in the kitchen and make a sandwich. I’d planned on arriving home
and somehow making my way out to see my wife, but somehow three hours have gone by and I haven’t even thought of her. I feel like getting a drink. Start with a beer and see what follows, but there’s no alcohol in the house. I end up sitting at the dining table with my lunch and a glass of milk the same way I did when I was a kid.

There is a world waiting for me back in the study, a world that I thought I had escaped. I finish my lunch and I’m halfway down the hall back toward that world when somebody knocks on my front door. My parents said they’d call first, so it isn’t them. Anyway, through the blurred glass I can see only one figure. I feel like not answering it. I just want to tell whoever is there to go away, but the knocking continues so I head toward it. I open up the door. It’s my lawyer. A year ago my lawyer wanted to kill me. He tied me up and dragged me into the woods. He threw me into the dirt and made me stare down the barrel of a gun while he considered pulling the trigger. My only thought now is that he’s come to finish off what he couldn’t finish then.

Cooper can taste carpet and dust and something metallic, along with something he can’t place, something that makes him think of decaying coffins being opened in ancient black-and-white movies, where the inside lids have claw marks and the dead men have torn and broken fingernails. His eyes are too heavy and sore to open. The darkness is connected optically to a mind that feels raw. His head is pounding and he wonders what sort of hangover this is, and quickly decides it must be the worst kind, the kind where you wake up and wish you were dead instead of drunk. There is a ringing in his ears and his chest is burning.

The first memory to return is the heat wave. A city under siege by the sun. That could be why he started drinking. Hell, it’s a good reason for anybody to start. Drink what you can then pass out someplace cool, because wherever he is at the moment, it is certainly that. He bets his wife is equally as drunk somewhere before remembering he doesn’t have a wife anymore, that they separated three years ago though he can’t quite remember why, not off the top of his head, and since his wife there haven’t been any other women,
not serious ones, and there’s nobody at the moment, so probably he started drinking alone. Only he’s given up drinking, or so he’d thought. In the past the drink has gotten him into trouble. He rolls onto his side, the bed squeaking and grinding beneath him, not his bed, though, because he doesn’t recognize any of the sounds. Then he thinks
hospital.
He’s been in an accident, that whatever has happened has nothing to do with an indulgence of too much scotch. He listens for but can’t hear the chatter of patients, the scuffle of feet, the
bing bong
of the intercom shouting code blue or code red in room one-oh-something. Last time he stepped into a hospital was two years ago when his uncle was sick, his uncle being eaten alive from the inside out by cancer. He remembers another old man in the same room having to shit into a plastic container suspended beneath the seat of a chair next to the bed, the stench of it wafting through the room enough to make him leave. None of that is with him here, none of the sounds or the smells. This isn’t a hospital.

He massages his closed eyes with his fingertips and winces when he finds a bump on his forehead sticking out like a golf ball. He gets his eyes open and everything is blurry and gray-looking. He blinks heavily until things start to clear a little, but it doesn’t help. Wherever he is, there isn’t much light. His face is grazed and stings to the touch. He remembers walking to his car after closing the garage door. He was carrying his briefcase and he can’t remember why, there’d be no purpose for that, and then there was . . . was . . . what?

“Oh Jesus,” he says, and he tries to stand up, but his body won’t work, he manages to get up onto his elbows before collapsing back down, his arm banging off the edge of the bed, his knuckles hitting the concrete floor and scraping away the skin. He sticks them in his mouth and the blood tastes sweet. He needs to get up. Needs to get away from wherever this is. The man. The man asked him for the time and then . . . and then he lost control over his body. He lay on the ground with the sun in his eyes until the man shadowed it. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t even speak. There was confetti on the ground next to his face and he couldn’t figure out why it was there.
The man crouched down and held a cloth over his face and there was nothing he could do to fight it. Then . . . then this.

He pushes his hands into the bed. Forces himself upward, slower this time, trying to maintain control, desperate to get onto his feet, pausing to sit on the edge of the bed while the world spins. His eyes begin to adjust. The room comes into focus, but there’s not much to see. It’s some kind of bomb shelter. The only light coming into the room is through a small glass window in a door. Everything is concrete and steel. With small cramps and electrical-like charges, feeling begins to arrive to the rest of his body. First pins and needles through his feet and hands, then it spreads up his limbs into his core. He stands up. There’s a heavy ache behind his eyes. He’s tired and scared and has no idea how long he’s been unconscious.

He realizes he was shot by a Taser. That’s what the confetti was. Tasers spit out twenty or thirty bits of paper with serial numbers on them every time they’re fired. It identifies the user. Then he was drugged. He remembers the rag on his face, the smell, the darkness.

He supports his weight against the wall and makes his way to the door. It’s a short walk. The room is twice the size of a prison cell, with a view out to what looks like another prison cell, this one not as dark, with light coming through an open door that he can just see the bottom of on an upper landing. The window in the door is clean, but has some scratches on this side of it and, if broken, wouldn’t leave a hole big enough to climb through. The window fogs up from his breath, he wipes his hand over it, his thumb following some of the scratches. He doesn’t want to think about the people trapped on this side of the door who made them, not yet anyway. There’s a bookcase out there but he can’t make out any of the titles. There’s a couch with holes big enough for him to see, through which springs are sticking out. He looks back at the bookcase. He keeps staring at it, the shapes becoming clearer . . . if only there was a little more light. On the top shelf he thinks he can see the thumb he bought in the auction, and suddenly it all makes sense to him—the auction was a trap. Whoever sold him the thumb
never intended to part with it—in fact, all along the seller wanted more thumbs to add to his collection. Next to the bookcase, the leather scuffed up and one of the catches twisted, is his briefcase.

The nausea hits him like a punch to the stomach. He turns around and everything is dark until he moves from the window. There’s no sink or toilet, only two buckets. There’s a cup for drinking and a toothbrush, which indicates the seller’s intent isn’t murder, at least not immediately. He picks up the empty bucket and sits on the edge of the bed and throws up into it, wiping the bottom of his shirt across his mouth when he’s done. His head is pounding, and having to squint to see a goddamn thing isn’t helping. He rubs his hand over his chest and finds the two small holes where he was shot by the Taser, the barbs pulled out by his attacker.