Collecting Cooper

chapter twenty-one

The sun seems to get a degree hotter for every degree it moves further to the west. The shadow from the fence grows slimmer. The sun comes around the tree and Daxter’s grave is flooded with sun and the bandages on my feet and hand are stained with dirt. I feel angry and frustrated that I couldn’t have done anything more for him. I feel stupid for feeling so sad for Daxter while Donovan Green and his wife are going through much worse with their daughter. I stare at the grave thinking a lot of things, many of them stupid, many of them morbid, none of them motivational. My knee has swelled more since the digging. The paramedic would be upset with me if he were here.

I finally push myself away from the table and go back inside. I pop a couple of anti-inflammatories and a few more painkillers and I go hunting for some bandaging in the bathroom. I call Schroder and he doesn’t answer. A minute later Donovan Green calls me and I don’t answer. It’s the circle of life. What am I going to tell him? That I might have just seen his daughter burn to death? That when I went inside I took the stairs before searching the ground floor, that there was no reason to that decision, that next time I might have taken the ground floor first, that his daughter might have burned in there because of a fifty-fifty chance that I got wrong?

I hobble outside to the car. I’m able to keep my left leg straight while using my right to switch between the accelerator and brake. My face is feeling a little sunburned from yesterday and when I scratch at an itch on my nose it feels like I’m clawing my nail an inch deep. Traffic is blocked near town where an RV has turned the wrong way into a one-way street. It hasn’t hit anything, but none of the drivers coming toward it felt like pulling out of the way to give it room to turn back around, and there’s a chorus of swearing and advice being thrown from dozens of directions as more traffic backs up. I switch on the radio and there’re a couple of DJs talking about the death penalty. They talk about Emma Green and how her disappearance is proof that New Zealand needs to bring back capital punishment. They’re saying what the rest of are thinking-that whoever took Emma has hurt other girls in the past, and harder sentences would save future victims. It’s all commonsense stuff. Kill the really bad people and they can’t hurt good people, and who could argue with that? Only really bad people. The DJs are saying they should start with the Christchurch Carver. They’re coming up with ways in which they would execute him, starting out with the clichés like hanging or lethal injection before delving, or devolving, into more imaginative ways that make me seriously wonder about the two men giving the commentary. Then they throw open the lines to the public, to Steve from Sumner who thinks they should start setting these guys on fire, to James from Redwood who thinks we should go old school and stone these bastards in front of rugby-sized crowds in rugby-sized stadiums, then to Brock from Shirley who says nothing beats a good, slow cutting in half right down the middle where they dangle the guy upside down to keep the blood in his brain so he doesn’t pass out as fast. I turn off the radio and pray to God I never piss off Steve, James, or Brock.

Once I get past the blocked RV, traffic thins out. I miss two more calls from Donovan Green. I pull into the university parking lot and stop in a handicapped spot. There’s a student sitting in a shopping cart with another student pushing him along a sidewalk, both of them laughing.

I limp to the psychology department wishing I had crutches. I struggle with the stairs, leaning on the handrail along the way. A couple of people pass me and stare at me while pretending not to stare at me, I can see part of them wants to offer to help, but the bigger part doesn’t want to suggest that I need the help. It’s like opening a door for a person in a wheelchair and not knowing whether they’re going to say thank you or fuck off. I reach the second floor where all the offices are lined up. There’s a montage of photographs on the wall of faculty members, the kind of thing you’d see where dead people were being remembered, small hand-sized portrait shots forming a grid. I search through them for the man who lit the fire and decide it could have been about half of them. Cooper Riley is among them, his hair not so gray and more of it in the photo. I head down the corridor. Everything up here looks old enough to predate the very subject of psychology. All the office doors are blue and they’re all labeled by name and Cooper’s office is no different in that aspect, but very different in the fact there is crime scene tape crisscrossed over the door. There’s a large poster pinned to the wall between two of the offices labeled Personality Study with flow diagrams and long complicated words that give me a headache. Nobody is around. I try the door. It’s locked. I take out the keys I found in the front door to Cooper’s house. One of them fits. I pull down the tape and toss it onto the floor. The blame will go to the students.

The air in the office is thick and stale. The desk is pine and there are dents and scratches covering the surface, and nothing on top of it shares any of the same angles. The desk drawers are open and the filing cabinet is open and the computer is running and there’s fingerprint powder on plenty of flat surfaces. The police came here looking for any clue as to what happened to Cooper Riley. I can imagine Cooper being the kind of guy to keep everything in straight lines and if he were to come into his office right now he’d be pretty upset. My cell phone rings and it’s Schroder.

“Where are you?” he asks. “The sketch artist just showed up at your place.”

“Shit. I completely forgot. Tell him I’m on my way.”

“Listen, there’s no record of Cooper Riley reporting any crime,” he says. “Why did you want to know?”

“So you’re on the case now?”

“Two fires in two days. It could be connected, so yeah, I’m on the case. The fire department will know for sure hopefully later on today.”

I tell him about what the neighbor said.

“And you think our Melissa X did that to him?”

“I think so.”

“Why wouldn’t Riley report that?”

“That’s the question. Why wouldn’t a victim report being a victim?”

“Happens every day, Tate,” he says. “You know that. Only about one in seven rapes are reported. Could easily be the same psychology behind that as what happened to Riley, assuming what the neighbor said is true,” he says.

“Can you access his medical records?”

“I’ll try to get a warrant.”

“How’d the search of Riley’s office go?”

“It hasn’t turned up anything. We’re hoping forensics will find something at the house or Cooper’s car once we can go through the ruins, but it’s not looking hopeful.”

“I’m thinking of taking a run out to his office,” I say, leaning against the edge of the desk. “See if I can spot something you missed.”

“Are you trying to offend me?” he asks.

“No. It’s like you say, I have an eye for this kind of thing. So, are you cool with that?”

“That depends, Tate. Are you already there?”

“What if I was?”

“Then you’d be entering a crime scene, which can go a long way to damaging whatever case we’re building up here.”

“Technically it’s not a crime scene,” I tell him. “Come on, Carl, what can it hurt if I take a look around?”

“I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes,” he says. “Last thing I want is you messing things up.”

He hangs up. I start flicking through the files on Cooper’s desk the same way somebody else would have earlier today. They’ve gone through all the student and staff files because so far that’s the only link between Cooper Riley and Emma Green. Maybe an ex-psychiatry student who was pissed off about a failing grade wanted to get even. Maybe he blamed Emma Green somehow too.

I check the filing cabinet and the files have been jammed in one direction and obviously thumbed through, they cover this year’s students and last year’s students but don’t go back any further. I think about Melissa and whether she’s the reason Cooper Riley has become Professor Mono to his neighbors. If she was, she could have been a student here. He had to interact with her somehow.

I step out into the corridor and move down to the next office. A plaque on the door says it belongs to Professor Collins. The door is slightly ajar and I knock on it and open it the rest of the way. A man sitting behind a desk looks up at me. He has wiry gray hair and eyes that are too big for his face and his ears stick out almost ninety degrees. The office has the same layout and same view as Cooper’s, only nowhere near as messy.

“Can I help you?” he asks.

“Professor Collins?”

“Just like the door says,” he says, smiling and leaning back in his chair. “You’re not a student,” he says, “so you’re either a reporter or a cop. I’m going to go with cop. Am I right? You’re here to ask questions about Cooper Riley? I’ve heard his house burned down this afternoon, and you guys were searching his office an hour ago.”

“Well done, sir,” I say, stepping inside.

“Please, take a seat,” he says, and I sit opposite him, stretching my leg out in front of me. “So, any word on Cooper?”

“None yet. How long have you worked here?”

“Going on fifteen years,” he says.

“You know Cooper well?”

“What do you think happened to him? Do you think he’s going to be okay?”

“We’re looking into it,” I tell him. “Please, anything you can tell me might help.”

“Sure, I knew him well. We have offices next to each other. We’ve both been working here the same amount of time. We both went to each other’s wedding and sometimes we’ll still have dinner together.”

“How long has he been divorced?” I ask, aware these are things that Schroder already knows.

“Hmm, let me think. Three years ago, give or take. His wife moved on, you know. Met somebody else. I heard they met online. Happens all the time these days. It’s an interesting psychological phenomena, really, how people form online relationships to find a connection in the offline world. I’m actually thinking of writing a paper on it.”

“She still around?”

He shakes his head. “Australia, last time I heard, but Cooper never talks about her. Just one day she was in his life, the next day she wasn’t. It’s a shame. They’re both good people, but it didn’t work. It happens that way sometimes,” he says, but he doesn’t follow it up by saying he’s thinking of writing a paper on it. “Cooper took it pretty hard.”

“Can you tell me when he had his accident?”

He looks confused. “Accident? What, a car accident?”

“Not quite.”

“Then what kind of quite?”

“Can you recall a time when he was off work, maybe for a month or so? Quite suddenly? Would have been around three years ago, around the time of his divorce.”

His eyes flick to the left as he tries to recall, then slowly he shakes his head and his mouth turns into an upside-down smile. “Not that I can remember.”

“He wasn’t sick all of a sudden and couldn’t show up?”

“I’m sure he was. It happens to us all at some point. Life does get in the way of work, detective. Why, does his being sick in the past relate to his disappearance now?”

“I’m not sure,” I tell him.

“Try the administration office,” he tells me. “They’ll have all those kind of records there.”

I follow Collins’s directions to a building more modern than the rest, large tinted glass frontages overlooking a concrete fountain that’s currently home and toilet to a dozen pigeons. There’s a foyer that is like a doctor’s waiting room, with students sitting in chairs reading textbooks or magazines while waiting to talk to somebody. The woman behind the desk is in her late forties and has hair pulled tightly back into a bun and glasses that hang around her neck on a thin chain. Her perfume is sharp and I can feel the hint of a hay fever attack lurking. She’s wearing a blouse that has cat fur caught around the buttons.

“How can I help you?” she asks, smiling up at me.

“You know we searched Cooper Riley’s office earlier?” I ask, hoping she’s going to make the same mistake Professor Collins made, and she does.

“Yes, of course. Everybody knows.”

“There’s something else you may be able to help us with,” I tell her. “There was a time when Riley took a month or more off work. Possibly around three years ago. Can you look that up for me?”

She doesn’t answer me. Instead she puts on her glasses and adjusts the distance between the lenses and her eyes as she looks at a computer monitor, then her fingers fly across the keyboard.

“It’ll take a minute,” she says, and about ten seconds later she finds it. “Here we go. You’re right,” she says. “Almost three years ago. April through to May. Five weeks in total.”

“I need to get a look at names and faces of his students from that year.”

“Why?”

“Please, it’s important. We’re trying to save Cooper’s life,” I tell her.

“Is it true his house was burned down?”

“It’s true.”

“There are hundreds of students from three years ago,” she tells me.

I need to check them all for the arsonist, but that can wait till Schroder gets here. “Just the female ones.”

“I guess I can print them out,” she says. “It’ll take an hour, unless you can narrow down who you’re after.”

“What about students who dropped out during the year? Around the same time Professor Riley was off work?”

“Why? You think that means something?”

“Please,” I tell her, “we need to hurry.”

“Hmm. . let me see,” she says. She taps at the keyboard again. “Four female students dropped out during that time.”

“Any of them named Melissa?”

“Melissa? No, none of them.”

“Can I see their photographs?”

She twists the computer monitor toward me and I have to lean over the desk to get a better view, entering her perfume zone in the process. She cycles through the photos. She gets to the third one when I stop her for a better look. The eyes look familiar.

“I remember this girl,” the receptionist says.

“You do?”

“Not so much her, but her parents. They came in here looking for information.”

“What kind of information?”

“Anything that would help them track her down. She went missing. Oh no,” she says, making the connection. “You think the same thing that happened to Emma Green happened to her?” she asks, tapping the monitor.

I don’t think so. I think these two girls ended up with very different fates. I think the girl on the screen might be the woman who attacked the Christchurch Carver and killed Detective Calhoun. This could be the woman that put Professor Riley in hospital three years ago. Her image has been in the papers and all over the news, an image taken from the video I watched yesterday, but that image isn’t the same as the one I’m looking at now. Similar, but not the same, different haircut, different color hair, a little less weight around the face-but it’s the eyes. Those eyes are the same, I’m sure of it.

Cooper Riley would have known it too. He would have seen the news and he would have known who she really was, and he never came forward to the police.

Why would that be? Is he still afraid of her?

Or is there something he’s hiding?