Collecting Cooper

chapter seventeen

Cooper Riley lives in Northwood, one of the newer subdivisions in the north of Christchurch that came into existence around the same time the twentieth century ended. Out here half a million dollars can buy you a badly built house that looks nice, but is nowhere as strong as a home built across town fifty years ago where land and life is cheaper. People come to Northwood for the safety of a community that isn’t addicted to drugs or murder, but like all things, the violence is already catching up. Today it doesn’t matter where you live in Christchurch, everywhere is being blasted by the heat wave equally. Paint has peeled from letterboxes and iron fences, and the only grass that hasn’t been burned off is in thick shade. All of the houses have manicured gardens, and there aren’t any weeds in sight. Each house falls in line with a similar design. It’s the kind of community where everybody’s uniqueness conforms with the collective agreement. If somebody built a front fence or painted their house something that wasn’t a shade of fawn, they’d be lynched. There are garage-sized sculptures every few blocks that are supposed to look like pergolas but instead look like incomplete garages. Cooper lives on Winsington Drive, surrounded by other pretentious-sounding street names that could have come out of some 1940s golf clothing catalog, the Winsington Jacket is a collaboration of style and elegance, a must for when one is taking lunch on the 19th hole. Cooper’s street is part of a subdivision less than five years old, the tar seal road has bubbled from the heat and there are potholes where it’s melted and stuck to the tread of passing cars. I drive slowly because it’s impossible to know what direction other drivers are wanting to take because the residents of Northwood are allergic to indicating.

The price tags increase as the houses get bigger, two-story places with columns leading up from the front door to the top floor, columns that in another time and country would have been made from marble. Here, however, ninety percent of the homes are made from plaster that’s been slapped over polystyrene sheets, a great idea until some kid punches a hole in a wall with his soccer ball and then the moisture is sucked into the wooden framework of the house where the rot spreads. It’s an expensive problem and a common one across the country. People here are paying for the area and for the look and for the illusion of quality. There’s a big jet boat parked up on a trailer out on the street next to Cooper’s house, taking up most of the lane. It looks expensive, and I guess the nice house wasn’t enough by itself for the owner to prove to the neighbors he has wealth. I get past it and there are two cars on the other side and they certainly don’t look like they belong to a detective. The smaller car parked out front is yellow and looks out of place in this neighborhood because it’s not European. If it were here for more than twenty-four hours it would get picked up by the sanitation department. The second car, the BMW, is in the driveway. I pull in ahead of the cheaper car. I’ve seen it before. Emma Green’s file is next to me on the passenger seat. I open it and there’s a photo of her car with her standing next to it, taken about four months ago. I look at the registration plate in the file and then the one in real life and they’re identical. Since Tuesday night there has been a report out to look for that car, but the problem is there are more cars than cops in this city, and the report to look for it doesn’t mean anything unless it enters the orbit of a patrol car. This is the car the insurance company gave her after I ruined her other one. In the photo she has a big grin on her face. In the photo she thinks the worst is behind her. She has no idea she’s about slap-bang between two tragedies, one that almost took her life and one that may have. I close the file and step into the sun, her smile staying with me and pushing me forward, making me desperate to find the man who took that smile from her.

I walk carefully up to the house, the lenses in my sunglasses ready to drip from the frames. Schroder must have made a call by now and somebody will be on their way to talk to Cooper Riley. That means soon a police car is going to arrive and a detective along with it. But something here isn’t right. The front door to the house is ajar. The keys are hanging from the lock. The driver’s door to the BMW is closed, but hasn’t latched. The interior light isn’t going so either the bulb has blown or it’s switched off or the door has been open all night and the battery has died. The BMW is dark blue and about ten years old and can’t have been the car that hit the dumpster behind the café.

I take a deep breath and pop the trunk and breath out slowly when I see Emma Green isn’t in there. If she ever was folded up into it at any point there’s no sign. If Cooper did take her he could have wrapped her in something. When I walk around the car there’s something plastic on the ground sticking out from beside the tire. I bend down. It’s a camera. There’s a crack running across the back of the display screen and the lid to the battery compartment has busted off. I open up the small compartment covering the memory card and pop it out. I sit the camera back on the ground and look under the car. There’re a couple of papers, a teaching schedule, a sandwich wrapped in clear wrap, and an apple that’s wrinkled and soft. Wedged beneath the edge of the tire are some tiny pieces of paper, disk-shaped with a serial number across them. There are others further beneath the car, and when I stand back up I can see some against the edge of the lawn. They are from a Taser gun. I slip the memory card into my pocket and walk around to the trunk and take out the tire iron.

I don’t knock on the door. Instead I take the keys and pocket them before swinging the door all the way open with my foot. The stench of petrol wafts out. My eyes water as I move forward. There are two empty petrol cans just inside the doorway. I wipe at my eyes while holding my breath. The tiled foyer floor is wet and slippery. To the left are a set of open French doors leading through to a carpeted living room with large dark patches where petrol has been splashed around. Ahead are more French doors, another living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. To the right a staircase twists up to the second-floor landing, a ninety-degree bend halfway up, all of it edged with iron wrought bars connected by a white wooden handrail.

I step back outside. I suck in a breath of clean air. Somebody was shot by a Taser, and somebody is about to set fire to the house. All that petrol-it’s going to burn quick, and it’s going to happen any second now. If Emma Green is inside she’s going to burn quick along with it.

I have no choice. I head back in. I take the stairs, moving quickly past prints and photographs, my feet squelching into the carpet as petrol comes up out of it. If I’m quick I can get in and out of here before this place goes up in flames, or maybe I can stop it from happening. I check the rooms upstairs. A study to the far left, a guest bedroom, two bathrooms, and two more bedrooms. My chest is sore from breathing hard, my legs are aching, the lack of exercise over the months clearly evident. The fumes are much thicker up here. It doesn’t add up-torching your own house doesn’t seem the way a criminology and psychiatry professor would deal with hiding a body. A guy like Cooper wouldn’t have brought a victim here, then become desperate enough to burn down his own house to hide the evidence. He also wouldn’t be foolish enough to leave her car parked outside. Cooper Riley is quickly sliding down the scale from suspect to victim. Something bad has happened to him, or about to if this place burns, and I’m thinking it’s the same bad thing that might happen to Emma Green.

I get through all the rooms. No blood. No Emma Green. No Cooper Riley. No sign of any struggle except for the broken camera outside and signs somebody used a Taser. Every second I expect to hear the rush of flames erupting from below. I head back toward the stairs. Maybe I’ll have more luck on the ground floor.

From downstairs a toilet flushes and the urgency is replaced with caution. I reach the staircase, my grip still tight on the tire iron, looking down into the foyer, when a man I don’t recognize steps into the hall. He has a box of matches in his hand and one of them is already lit. He drops it into the petrol on his way out the door without even seeing me, picking up the empty containers on the way. Before I can move or even yell out, there’s a whoomp as fire erupts over the tiles, through the French doors and onto the carpet and up the curtains. The arsonist disappears behind a haze of heat and smoke. The flames reach the staircase where it forks, heading along the ground floor and at the same time climbing the steps toward me, the flames blue at the bottom, yellow at the tips, the heart of it dark orange, the furniture in the foyer and living room already burning, the air blanketed with smoke and toxic fumes, all of it taking only seconds.

There is no path to the front door. The entire foyer is engulfed in fire. I take a few more steps down toward it. Somehow I have to get through those flames and find Emma Green.

Only I can’t. Those flames are suicide. There is no path through them. The only direction is up.

Smoke rolls like water beneath the ceiling. Petrol splashes from the carpet onto my legs. I start coughing as raw dark air is pulled into my lungs. I run the length of the upstairs hallway to the bedroom at the end where there isn’t any petrol on the floor. I slam the door closed hoping it will form a barrier to give me more time. The flames downstairs sound like a freight train. I can feel the floor heating up but I’m not sure if it’s real or just my imagination. I try the windows. They open but not far enough to climb through. Emma Green’s car is doing a U-turn. Badly. It bounces up over the opposite curb and hits a letterbox then shudders as it stalls. It stays that way for a few seconds before lurching forward again, the engine hiccupping, the letterbox crushed flat beneath the front wheels. The skeleton of the house groans as it weakens, the ground floor readying to have the top floor fold into it. The polystyrene walls are melting as the timber framing crackles and burns. It’s only a matter of seconds until the bedroom is the next victim in the inferno.

I use the tire iron on the window, smashing it, taking out some of my frustration on the glass, angry that on the ground floor Emma may be burning to death. The quicker I get outside, the sooner I can make my way back in downstairs and look for her. Most of the shards of glass rain down outside, but some are pulled back in as the tire iron hooks toward me. A couple of pieces slide into my hand and cut deep. I drop the iron and drag the mattress from the bed and twist it out over the windowsill, shark tooth-shaped fragments of glass biting at it, making it difficult. I get it far enough to let it fall and allow gravity to take over. It disappears through the smoke and I can barely see the shape of it hitting the ground. Landing on the mattress is such a cartoonish thing to attempt, but it’s all I have. The window in the bedroom below shatters and flames erupt outside and heat rushes over my face. I will have to pass through the flames, no choice there. People are appearing on the other side of the road. They’re standing there staring at me with no idea what to do, some of them with their hands over their mouths, others pointing at me, some making calls on their cell phones, others pointing their phones at me and taking pictures or shooting film, some of them probably even annoyed I’m devaluing the neighborhood by being burned alive. None of them come any closer or offer any encouraging words of survival. I drape a blanket over the edge of the window to cover the remaining glass. The bedroom door is on fire. Smoke is being sucked in under it and toward the broken window. I wrap another blanket over my body, covering as much of myself as I can, holding it over my face by putting it between my teeth. I lower myself outside as far as I can to lessen the impact. The flames hit my feet. I let go, pushing back slightly, unable to see the mattress but remembering where it landed. I watch the house race past me. I pull the blanket down further to cover my face as I pass through the flames. I tuck my knees up slightly and I hit the mattress with my feet and butt at the same time, something in my left knee popping. I roll onto my back and away from the fire, leaving the blanket behind. The cuffs of my pants are smoldering. I slap at the flames with my hands and kill them, having to stretch forward because of my already swelling knee. I crawl further from the house, and at the same time two men appear. They grab me under the arms and drag me away, asking if there is anybody else inside.

I look at the house. Fire is coming through all the windows, it’s overlapping every surface. I tell them I don’t know, but I think there might be-I think Cooper Riley might be somewhere among those flames, Emma Green too, but I can’t send these men in there.

“Let me go,” I tell them, and try to shrug them off.

“You can’t go back in there, buddy,” one of them tells me.

“I have to. There’s a girl in there.”

“Not anymore there ain’t,” the other one says, “at least not one that’s alive.”

“Let me go,” I say again, but they don’t let me go, instead they drag me further from the fire and I let them do the dragging because they’re right, I keep protesting but even if they let me go I don’t know if I would try to go back in there, not now. If Emma Green is in there then it’s already too late for her. Nobody can go in there and come back alive.

We watch as the house loses the battle, as clouds of smoke flood the air and extend out to the car and gardens and the heat pushes us back.