Collecting Cooper

chapter twenty-three

I stand outside Cooper’s office, reading through Melissa’s file while waiting for Schroder. Only it isn’t Melissa X anymore. It’s Natalie Flowers. She was nineteen years old when she became a student at Canterbury University. She was studying here for two years before wanting to get a degree in psychology. She took it for three years before taking criminal psychology, where she entered Cooper Riley’s class. One and a half months after joining his class, she dropped out. At the same time Cooper Riley took five weeks off work. I do the arithmetic. Melissa X in the video I saw would have been around twenty-six years old. She looked a little older, but maybe she has an old soul.

I get tired of waiting in the hall, and my leg is hurting from all the walking, and in the end I decide there’s no harm in waiting in Cooper’s office. I sit down behind the desk. I go through the basics, opening the drawers, going through anything I can find. I keep looking outside, I have a perfect view of the path that leads to the psychology department. I’ll have time to get out when Schroder shows up. I move the mouse and the computer monitor becomes active. There’s a desktop showing an island surrounded by clear water Cooper might have dreamed of visiting. I navigate my way through the files, finding nothing of interest. There isn’t anything personal on it, only work related. I glance over a few of the topics that Cooper is teaching and it’s very dark stuff, the kind of stuff that gives good people bad dreams and bad people good dreams. I look for any mention of Natalie Flowers and there’s none.

I look at the photograph of Natalie taken on the day she enrolled here, I try to imagine what kind of thoughts she had back then, I wonder if she knew the person she would become, or if the Natalie back then was a completely different person. I imagine her sitting in front of the camera just as Emma Green would years later, each of them with smiles on their faces, a click of the shutter, a flash going off, a say cheese and then a next please as the photographer ushered them through, their image stored onto a. .

Memory card!

Jesus, I’d completely forgotten!

I reach into my pocket, and there it is, the card I took from the camera in Cooper’s driveway. I slot it into the computer and it grumbles for a few seconds trying to read it. If we’re lucky, he has a photo of the man who took him. Or there’ll be a location, or at least something we can use to track him down. A new icon appears and I click on it to open the files, and it goes about the process slowly. I click on the first one and it takes about ten seconds to open, the computer drawing the image from the top, the rest of it coming into view an inch at a time. The second image opens much quicker as the computer gets into the swing of things. There are just the two images, and I flick back and forth between them until the door opens and Schroder steps inside.

“Jesus, Tate, how the hell did you get in here?”

“Emma Green,” I say, pushing my chair back from the computer. Despite the heat of the office, my skin has gone clammy and my spine feels chilled. “Jesus, Carl,” I say, my mouth dry. “I think Emma Green is still alive.”

“Look, Tate, you can’t. .”

“For once, Carl, just shut up,” I say, and he does. “Take a look,” I say, and I nod toward the computer. He comes around the desk and I watch him as he looks at the photographs, the only sound in the office is the computer fan whirring and the occasional click of a mouse button. There is laughter and yelling from outside, students at work. Schroder’s sleeves are rolled up and he’s leaning forward with his hands on the desk and I can see goose bumps littering his forearms. He’s slowly shaking his head and I’m slowly doing the same thing. I stand up and Schroder takes the chair. I move to the window and stare out at the students in the sun below, all of them hovering a year or two either side of twenty years old with so much to learn, but there are things in the real world I pray they never have to see. The saying goes that a picture tells a thousand words. Looking at them, it couldn’t be more true. What they don’t tell us is an ending.

“We need to search the office again,” I say, still looking out the window. There’s a couple of students beneath a tree making out in the shade for everybody to see. They notice others are watching and start to get into it more, putting on a show. I want to throw a bucket of cold water over them.

“We’ve already searched it,” Schroder says.

“Yeah, but you were looking to see what happened to Cooper. You were looking at him as a victim.”

“And not a suspect,” he says. “Where the hell did you get these?” he asks.

“They were on a memory card. I found it at Cooper’s house.”

“Jesus Christ, Tate. You didn’t think of mentioning this earlier?”

“Actually, Carl, no, I didn’t. I forgot I had the damn thing,” I say, snapping. “Why the hell do you always have to assume the worst?”

He doesn’t answer.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, and then I tell him how I found the card. “And if I hadn’t been there on time, it would have gotten destroyed like everything else and you wouldn’t have those,” I say, nodding toward the computer where there are images of Emma Green lying on a floor with her hands tied behind her. In one photo she’s wearing the clothes she went missing in, in the next she isn’t wearing anything. She has duct tape over her eyes and none over her mouth. “You wouldn’t even know there was a connection.”

“We don’t know that she’s still alive,” he says.

“And we have no reason to suspect otherwise. What if Cooper was interrupted? What if he was planning on going back?”

“Back? You don’t think these were taken at his house?”

I shake my head. “I doubt it. She’s not gagged. These were taken where nobody could hear her scream.”

“We’ll know soon enough if there were any bodies in the fire.”

“Listen, Carl, there’s another connection too.”

“With who?” he asks. I hand him over the file. “Natalie Flowers,” he says, looking at the picture. “Who is she, another of Riley’s students?”

“She was.”

“Was? What happened, she go missing too?”

“In a sense.”

“You want to be more specific?”

“Take a closer look at the photo.”

He does, but he still doesn’t get it. “What am I looking at here? You think Riley took her too?”

“I think so. Only things didn’t go the way they did with Emma Green. You don’t recognize her?”

“Should I?”

“Yes.”

“Well, stop playing around,” he says, “and just tell me what you want to tell me.”

So I tell him. What color had managed to return since first seeing the photographs of Emma drains out of his face. He takes a closer look at the picture and slowly starts nodding. I explain about the Professor Mono comment, about Riley being off work three years ago on sick leave the same time his wife left him, the same time Natalie Flowers went missing. I explain the chain of events that have led me to handing over the file.

“Jesus,” he says, and for the moment it’s all he can say. “You think Melissa X is involved in this somehow? You think she is the one who took Cooper?”

“I don’t think so. None of her victims were shot by a Taser, and she wasn’t the one who burned down his house.”

Schroder snaps on a pair of latex gloves. He opens up the drawers. He starts going through them. Then he starts pulling them all the way out and sitting them on top of the desk. He checks behind them and under them for anything taped out of sight. People always think they’re being clever when they hide things in those sorts of places, under drawers, under the carpet, behind books or above a suspended ceiling or in the tank above the toilet. They’re all places the police wouldn’t have checked because earlier Cooper Riley was only a man who had gone missing. He wasn’t a man who knew Melissa X, and he wasn’t a man who had tied Emma Green up and photographed her.

“So what about the car?” he asks. “The paint on the dumpster. The witness said it pulled out around into the street in a hurry, and the timeline proves he saw it just after Emma finished work.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Maybe it’s unrelated,” he says.

“Yeah, it’s possible, but like you say, it’s around the same time.”

I get up on the desk keeping the weight on my right leg. I push up at the ceiling tile.

“What the hell, Tate? Leave that to me,” Schroder says.

I reach into the ceiling cavity and pray I’m not about to be bitten by a rat. I search with my fingers but don’t find a thing. My knee jars a little as Schroder helps me down. He continues to check beneath the drawers. I twist the filing cabinet away from the wall. There’s a USB flash drive taped to the back of it. I thought Cooper would be different because I thought he’d have an insight into where he shouldn’t hide things, but he either thought he’d never be the victim of an office search, or he thought his hiding place was suitably sufficient. I hold it up and Schroder stops searching. I hand it over to him and we stand adjacent to each other staring at it. It’s as if whatever bad news is stored on there can be averted if we don’t open it, and we know it’s bad news-we’ve both been doing this for long enough to have a sense of what we’re about to see. The horror isn’t in seeing the images, the horror is in the quantity. How many others has Cooper killed?

Schroder plugs the flash drive into the computer and we go through the same process as I went through with the camera card. The first image loads up and he clicks the arrow to move to the second and then the third. There are thirty pictures in total. All of the same girl, which is an awful thing to be thankful for, but we are. Scared and clothed in the beginning, naked and dead in the end. The photos are a progression of the last week of her life according to the time stamps on the files. She’s laying on the same floor as Emma Green. The photos are in a sequence, and looking through them is like reading a story. The sequence shows the girl become paler as the days pass, she loses weight, blisters and a rash appear on her face, mean-looking welts appear on her skin. Seven days of hell. Seven days of knowing you were going to die but praying for the best. There is duct tape over her eyes in all of them except the last. Cooper liked the idea of not being seen but being able to converse. I bet the bastard loved hearing them cry or beg for their lives.

“She’s alive,” I tell him.

“What?” he asks, lost in his own thoughts.

“I said she’s alive. Emma Green. If he was going to do to her what he did to this girl then. .”

“Jane Tyrone,” he says.

“What?”

“That’s who this girl is,” he says, tapping the monitor. “She went missing nearly five months ago. “She was a bank teller at that same bank that got held up just before Christmas. A woman was shot and killed.”

“You thought she was involved with the robbery?”

He shakes his head. “No. She went missing three months before the robbery. Her car was found abandoned in a parking building in town with her keys in the trunk along with traces of blood. Whatever happened to her, it started there.” He turns toward the window and looks at the same view I was staring at earlier. “He kept her for a week,” he says. “A whole week she was begging for us to find her and we never did.”

“Emma Green is begging for the same thing,” I tell him. “Come on, Carl, she has to still be alive. We’ve got two photos of her from his camera. He hadn’t copied them to the flash drive yet. He wasn’t done with her.”

“And Melissa X?”

“I’m thinking three years ago she was Riley’s first, but something went wrong and she ended up attacking him. He kept quiet, because what was he going to say, that a woman he was trying to rape and kill assaulted him?”

“You think this is what got her started?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “She could have gotten a taste for doing bad things and just kept on doing them, and I think there aren’t any pictures of her because she was the first and it was an impulsive act. After her Cooper was too afraid to try again. Could be it took him three years to get up the nerve.”

“So what in the hell happened to him? Who abducted Cooper and burned down his house?”

“Maybe it’s somebody Cooper has hurt in the past. One more thing that doesn’t make sense is why wait a day between kidnapping Cooper and burning down his house? And why use Emma Green’s car?”

“You don’t think Cooper torched his own place to try and hide evidence, faked his own abduction, then ran?”

“No reason to,” I say. “Nobody was on to him. Only reason he became a suspect was because he didn’t show up for work. And why torch his house and leave these,” I say, nodding toward the photographs, “in his office?”

“They weren’t exactly on display.”

“Still, he wouldn’t try cleaning up one scene by torching it without getting rid of the USB key from another.”

“He would if he killed the girl at his house,” he suggests.

“He wouldn’t have left his camera in the driveway, and we have a witness who saw him taken. And those were definitely ID tags from a Taser I was looking at.”

“Okay, so what about Donovan Green? He could have done it.”

“Possible,” I answer, “but why come to me about it?”

“Because he wanted an alibi. He wanted to make out he had no idea what happened to his daughter. You think he’s the kind of guy who could do it?”

“I don’t know,” I say, thinking back to last year when he wanted to kill me. Absolutely Donovan could have done it. But Donovan Green was waiting for me to give him a name. It’s possible, I guess, that he had that name first, that he killed Cooper Riley, panicked, and then came to me to start building a story to make him look innocent. I think about the look on his face, the grim determination to get his hands on the person who hurt Emma. No, he didn’t know who took his daughter. I’m sure of it. “Donovan Green wouldn’t kill the only person who knew where she was.”

“Maybe he’s torturing it out of him.”

“Wasn’t him who lit the fire.”

“He could have hired somebody.”

“Then why drive around in Emma’s car?”

He doesn’t have an answer.

“You looked into a connection with the fires?” I ask.

“There could be a link there between Cooper Riley and Pamela Deans, but it’s a very tentative one if it is.”

“Want to share?”

“Look, Tate, I have to call this in. You should go. If you’re here when the other detectives arrive, you’ll get me fired.”

“You’ll call me later today?”

He nods. “I’ll keep you in the loop and update you later. Tate, you’ve done a good job with this Melissa X thing,” he says. “If what you’ve learned leads to an arrest, don’t worry-you’re still looking at the reward money.”

I look down at the photographs. “I’m not doing this for the money,” I tell him.

“I know. But you need it.”

I head back into the hall and close the door behind me. I think of the girls wandering these halls and how close any one of them came to being Cooper’s next victim.

Donovan Green calls again before I reach the parking lot. It’s no longer blue skies in every direction. There are white fluffy clouds to the north and it’s completely overcast out to the east, the cloud cover over the ocean stretching the length of the horizon. The temperature must have dropped a few points too. I answer the phone and give Green an update. I don’t tell him about the photographs of his daughter tied up and naked. I don’t share with him my theory that she may still be alive. Last thing I want to do is feed him false hope only to have to confront him with the worst news of his life a day later. I tell him that I have made some progress, that I have some leads, and am hoping for some more news soon.

I head for home. Peak-time traffic makes it a long trip. I make some strong coffee once I walk through the door and fire up the computer. I go online. Rain starts to splash on the windows, just a couple of drops every few seconds. I get up and close them, the breeze coming through is warm and feels charged. The trees outside the study window are being thrown about by the wind. The pre-autumn leaves that have already fallen are scuttling across the lawn. There is no more blue sky, no more white clouds, just darkness in every direction. I step out into the rain as it starts to come down heavy, and I’m not the only one. Neighbors are standing in the street with their faces turned up to the sky, their arms stretched wide and smiles on their faces. For days on end this city has felt like it was going to burn, and for the moment everything is okay. Children are laughing. People are dancing in circles. It’s absolute pure happiness, and it’s infectious. I start laughing too. I let it soak my clothes, my first touch of rain in four months, and like the sunset last night, I’ve never seen rain looking so good. When the lightning comes, I head back inside, then thunder rolls over the city, loud enough to rattle the pictures on the wall. The house lights up like a camera flash as more lightning splits the evening apart. I dry off and put fresh bandages on my feet and hand, then I sit in front of the computer.

I look up articles about Natalie Flowers. She was reported missing almost three years ago, but the police didn’t look into it. According to the articles, Natalie cleaned out her bank accounts and packed up all her clothes and moved out of her apartment, telling her flatmate she had somewhere else to be. There were no suspicious circumstances. Her parents reported her missing, they pleaded in the media for their daughter to come home.

Eight years before that Melissa Flowers, Natalie’s sister, was raped and killed by a police officer. Melissa Flowers was thirteen years old, an unlucky number for some, especially unlucky for her. I can still remember the case. It wasn’t an officer I knew, but I knew all about him after the fact. There was no investigation because he confessed to the crime within an hour of doing it, confessed with a note and by putting a bullet in his head, his body found next to the young naked girl. The note had an apology, it told what he did but didn’t say why. It stunned the whole country. I think whatever happened that night with Cooper Riley, Natalie Flowers died and Melissa X was created. She walked away from her old life and started a new one. Either something inside of her snapped, or something inside of her lit up with the excitement of what she had done and needed more. Three years later she would murder Detective Calhoun while the Christchurch Carver filmed her, and she would go on to kill others. Maybe when Cooper attacked Natalie, whatever had started to break when her sister had been killed finally snapped. She was no longer Natalie. She became Melissa, and Melissa wanted revenge for what that officer had done. Is there a connection to the men Natalie has killed, other than the uniforms? Did these men remind her of the man who murdered her sister?

I read the rest of the articles on them both and there are no answers. So I start to look for the connection between Cooper Riley and Nurse Deans, and before I can find anything there’s a knock at the door. It’s the sketch artist. We sit at the kitchen table, and he goes to work and I keep thinking about Cooper Riley and Pamela Deans, I keep trying to figure out a way they can connect, and keep coming up with nothing.