Collecting Cooper

chapter fifteen

It’s my first day waking up as a free man. I put my phone on charge and refuel on a bowl of cereal before heading out into the heat to find Emma Green alive and well. That’s the goal. That’s the frame of mind I’m going to keep. Yesterday was hot and today is even hotter. There are no clouds in the sky and if there were they’d probably catch fire. Mother Nature is holding her breath because there isn’t the slightest hint of any breeze. Smoke hangs to the south over the Port Hills, blazing scrub fires turning the sky out there gray. Last night I left the rental in the driveway and I suffer for that now, the steering wheel hot to touch and my sunglasses, which I left on the dashboard, burn the bridge of my nose. I leave the doors open and let things cool before hitting the road. It’s nearly ten o’clock and the traffic is much thinner than it would have been an hour ago. Everybody looks tired. Everybody looks like they want to take the day off from whatever it is they’re doing and spend it inside sleeping. It’s no different when I reach Canterbury University. The parking lot is a quarter full and the silver birches lining it are less tree than they are kindling. The people climbing out of their cars are all in a daze.

Canterbury University is a mismatch of old and modern buildings-many how you’d imagine a Soviet university to look at the peak of the cold war, the rest how you’d imagine a university to look if it were built on the moon. There are older, Gothic-style buildings of the same era as Jack the Ripper, gray stone covered in soot and bird shit and dirt picked up and dumped on them from the nor’west winds. Mixed among them are modern buildings with big steel beams and long glass frontages covered in fingerprints and streaks from whoever cleaned them last. None of the buildings have much in the way of curves, any extra shape outside of a square being a cost the university wasn’t prepared to spend. Most of the students are in T-shirts and shorts, but there are still those in black trench coats from thrift shops with black or white shirts and black jeans, badges on their jackets, both men and women with eyeliner, defying the hot weather to show off their angst. At least half of the students are walking along with their faces down, their eyes locked on their cell phones as their thumbs dance across the keys sending out texts, just the occasional glance upward so as not to walk into a wall or another cell phone user. Even more of them have white wires leading from their ears to a pocket somewhere. I ask for directions and to these people it’s like helping the elderly.

I reach the lecture hall where Emma Green’s next class is. Outside is a sculpture painted bright colors and made from wooden beams that looks more like bad carpentry than good art. I’m not sure what it’s meant to represent, or whether Superman just came along and meshed together all the bus stop benches he could find. There’s a group of students hanging about outside in the shade, sitting on the lawn. They tell me their lecturer hasn’t shown up yet. I ask them about Emma and most of them remember seeing her in the class but never really knew her. Some have been questioned by the police, and those who did know a little something about Emma are eager to go over what they told them. I spend a productive hour waiting with them; their psychology professor never shows up. It turns out their professor also teaches criminology but only to students who have taken psychology for three years. The fact it’s a psychology class means everybody offers an insight into Emma’s disappearance, some of them likely hoping an accurate assessment of the situation will get them an A. I figure that’s the norm. I figure about two weeks into studying psychology you start self-diagnosing yourself, and then everybody else. As helpful as they all are, I’m saddened by them too, there’s an excited atmosphere surrounding them, brought on by the knowledge that one of their own is about to hit the headlines in the worst way possible, and some relief too that it isn’t any of them.

“This lecturer that didn’t show up today,” I say, speaking to a girl with a dozen earrings in her left ear and hair not much longer than her nails. She’s wearing a skin-tight T-shirt with the words Underage Sperm Bank across it. “I’d like to talk to him as well. What’s his name?”

“He’s actually a professor,” she says, “and he doesn’t really like it if you make that mistake,” she says, summing him up in one sentence. “You got a cigarette I can have?”

“I don’t smoke. The professor’s name?” I ask because she appears to have forgotten I asked.

“Oh yeah, Cooper Riley,” she answers, “but I can’t tell you where you can find him. This is the second day he hasn’t shown up. It’s like, totally random, you know? Looking at him you’d kind of think he had never been late for anything in his life. Maybe the heat got him.”

“Maybe,” I answer, thinking about the timeline, about Emma being missing for two and a half days and Cooper Riley not showing up for two. Riley wasn’t mentioned in the file-no reason he would have been questioned because it was only yesterday Emma was officially considered missing. I get directions to the faculty lounge and thank the students for their time. I phone Schroder on the way.

“The name Cooper Riley mean anything to you?” I ask.

“Nothing. I don’t even know who he is.”

“He was one of Emma’s professors.”

“Come on, Tate, I’ve told you already, it’s not my case.”

“And he didn’t show up for work yesterday or today.”

“Shit. So now you’re jumping to conclusions, right?”

“I think he knows something.”

“Tate, he may be sick, or was called away because somebody else is sick.”

“Either way I still want to talk to him.”

“Doesn’t matter what you want. We’ll be the ones to talk to him.”

“Damn it, Carl, I’m coming to you with this, just like you asked, remember? I’m not holding back. Don’t cut me out of the loop.”

“I’ll call you back,” he says and hangs up.

The psychology department has its own faculty lounge. In fact the psychology department is actually one of the largest departments in the entire university, and I think that sums up Christchurch pretty well. All the corridors are like hospital wings, linoleum floors and pastel colors. I learn the same thing from another professor that I did from the students-that Cooper Riley hasn’t shown up for work in two days. I ask if I can see Riley’s office and the woman I’m talking to tells me I’d have to ask Cooper.

“How can I get hold of him?”

“You could ring him, I suppose,” she says, “or you could try. His phone has been switched off.”

She gives me his cell phone number and landline and I try calling the cell on the way back to my car and get a message saying the phone is off or out of range. The landline goes through to an answering machine and a promise of a returned call.

I give Schroder another call but his line is busy. I borrow a phonebook and match up the home number I was given with Riley’s name to get his address, wondering, wondering, was Cooper Riley the last person to see Emma Green alive?