Collecting Cooper

chapter thirty-eight

It takes an hour for the tow truck to arrive. It’s a nervous wait in case the guys with the dog come back, forcing me to shoot them and their dog and then spending twenty years in jail before getting back onto the case. It’s also a frustrating hour because I want to push forward. The tow-truck driver arrives and steps out of the truck and walks around the rental. He has his arms out of his overalls so the top half of his outfit is hanging down past his legs. His white T-shirt is drenched with sweat and has become see-through. His hands are stained with oil and grease.

“You must have really pissed somebody off,” he says, looking down at the wheels.

“Sometimes I’m misunderstood,” I tell him.

He connects a hook and chain under the car then stands next to the back of the truck as he holds a button, a pulley winding the car forward and up onto the deck. He makes sure it’s secure and we climb up into the cab. The cab is full of so many hamburger wrappers that my cholesterol level spikes when I inhale. We make the kind of small talk that small talk was invented for-the weather, traffic, sports news. He drives me to the tire shop the rental agency told me to take the car to. The people there have been advised about the problem but tell me it’s going to take another hour before they even take a look at it because they’re busy. I sit on a bench outside in the fading heat, spending five minutes staring at a tree, five at the side of the wall, bunches of other five-minute intervals staring at whatever else is around. The air smells of rubber. I call Donovan Green and update him on the case. I tell him I have a few names that I’m following up tonight and that he should keep his cell phone nearby in case I need more money. He tells me money isn’t an issue. He asks me if I’m still carrying the photograph of Emma he gave me, and I tell him that it’s in my wallet. He asks me to take it out and take a look at it, and I do. He tells me that her life is in my hands, that she’s alive somewhere, that money isn’t an issue, and reminds me that I’m doing this for Emma and for him, not for the police. He reminds me that when I find Cooper Riley that I’m to go to him first, that I’m to give him a few hours alone with Cooper Riley.

“Okay,” I tell him.

“Promise me,” he tells me. “Promise me Riley will pay for what he’s done.”

“I promise.”

I hang up and call Schroder. “Any hits on the fingerprints from my house?” I ask him.

“Nothing. There were some good ones too. So it wasn’t Melissa and it wasn’t somebody with a record. .” he says, then trails off. “Hang on a second,” he says, and he takes the phone away. I can hear muffled voices but not what they’re saying. He comes back a moment later. “Listen, I have to go.”

“Wait a second. Maybe this guy we’re looking for was young and didn’t get a criminal record, but got a medical one instead.”

“What are you getting at, Tate?”

“I got something for you,” I tell him. “This is important. I know who took Cooper Riley.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“An ex-patient from Grover Hills. His name is Adrian Loaner. If he was just a kid when he went there, there’d be no criminal record.”

“Uh huh. Good job, Tate. We’ll look into it.”

“Hang on,” I say, his lack of enthusiasm telling me what I need to know. “You already knew?”

“Of course we knew. What, you think we can’t function without you?”

“How long have you known?”

“Listen, Tate, I have to go.”

“Can you meet me?”

“What?”

“With some corpse dogs.”

“Oh man, are you shitting me?”

“Grover Hills.”

“Look, Tate, we know what we’re doing.”

“Grover Hills. .”

“We’re already out there.”

“You find anything?”

“We sure as hell found a lot more than you did.”

“You found Cooper Riley?”

“Not yet.”

“But you found somebody.”

“A couple of bodies.”

I break out in a cold sweat. “Emma Green?”

“No,” he says, and I breathe a sigh of relief. “Listen, Tate, don’t even think of coming out here.”

“I’ll be there soon,” I tell him, and I hang up.

It’s closing in on seven o’clock by the time my car is hoisted up on a hydraulic lift. It’s an anxious wait, and I end up pacing the footpath outside, looking at the other cars parked around the shop wondering how hard it’d be to steal one. Each of the wheels are taken off. It takes ten minutes per tire to replace, then the car is lowered and I’m back on the road.

I still get somewhat lost on the drive back to Grover Hills even though I was there earlier today. The sun is in my eyes for most of it, creeping under the angle of the sun visor, so when I do turn corners and head in different directions I have bright lights dancing in my vision. I pull in behind one of the patrol cars at Grover Hills. One side of the building is lit up with the sun reflecting in all the windows, the other sides are dim in the shade. I have to shield my eyes as I look for Schroder. The building hasn’t been cordoned off because there’s nobody out here to protect it from. There are around thirty people working the scene and about half of them watch me get out of the car, but nobody comes over. They seem to know who I am, and Schroder must have told them to let me though. He’s standing next to a man with a beard and a comb-over. He breaks off the conversation and comes over. His shirtsleeves are rolled up and dust and dirt has settled into the folds.

“Jesus, Tate,” he says, shaking his head.

“Why don’t you just give up on the indignation, Carl, and accept I’m part of this. Let me help you. That’s what you wanted from me when you picked me up from jail, remember? My help? Stop bullshitting me by pretending you want me out of here when you need all the help you can get.”

He seems about to argue, and he already has his hands ready to form the angry gestures that go along with it, but then they drop to his sides and he smiles. “You’ve got a point,” he says, “and cutting out the bullshit you put me through would save me a lot of time, and is probably good for my heart too.”

“What have you got?”

“So far we’ve got two bodies.”

“So far?”

“Yeah. We’re looking for more. One of the two we have is fresh.”

“How fresh?”

“First body we’re talking about years. Second body the medical examiner says around twenty-four hours. We think her name is Karen Ford. We’re still waiting to confirm an ID, but everything matches. She was a street worker reported missing this morning. She’s twenty years old,” he says. “Twenty years old. Jesus.”

“Got a murder weapon?” I ask.

“Not yet. And there’s more. You see the cell downstairs when you were out here? We got blood down there.”

“I saw it,” I tell him. “The residents here called it the Scream Room.”

“What?”

I tell him about Jesse Cartman. Schroder stays dispassionate for the first ten seconds before rolling his hands into fists and slowly shaking his head. When I tell him about the Twins, he’s gritting his teeth so hard I’m worried one of them is going to snap away and bite me in the face.

“Jesse Cartman isn’t exactly a reliable source of information,” Schroder says, but I can tell he partly believes it the same way I believe it, especially now that bodies are showing up.

“You’re going to have to make some calls,” I tell him. “The staff knew what was going on. If it’s even remotely true, you’ve got multiple cases of assault and murder and God knows what else stemming from this room.”

“Jesus,” he says. “It’s going to be a nightmare.”

“What about Emma Green? Any signs she was out here?”

He shakes his head. “We found some fresh prints in the downstairs room on the inside of the iron door. They match prints we took from Cooper Riley’s office. We’ve been searching the other rooms and have found no sign of Emma Green, only signs of Karen Ford. Looks like she was tied up in one of the beds. Also we got some Taser ID disks on the floor in the basement. There were a couple on the couch and a couple under it, about twenty short of what there should have been so Adrian tried cleaning up.”

“You’ve run the serial numbers?”

“Yeah. It’s a dead end. It was part of a batch that was stolen five years ago in the US. Two hundred Tasers in total went missing and made their way around the world, along with about a thousand cartridges.”

“How the hell would Adrian get something like that?” I ask.

“Maybe it belongs to Cooper.”

“He was shot by his own Taser?”

Schroder shrugs. “Maybe.”

“So Adrian was keeping Riley locked up in the basement,” I say. “As a prisoner. Which means if he’s not in the ground here, he’s probably still alive. Maybe Cooper did something to him years ago in the Scream Room when Adrian was a patient here. What about the blood?”

“Too early to have made a match. Looks fresh though. Probably belonged to Karen Ford. We got some other stuff too. Clothes, some personal belongings, some utensils, even some plates. Found them in cardboard boxes stuffed in the taller grass near the tree line,” he says. “Looks like Adrian left in a hurry and didn’t have room for everything. How did you figure out Adrian Loaner?” he asks.

I tell him about the halfway house. “You?” I ask.

“It was simple. We spoke to some of the staff that used to work here. We showed them the composite sketch and we told them about your cat. They gave us a name of somebody who used to dig them up who looked like that sketch. I sent somebody to the same halfway house and learned pretty much what you learned. We heard you’d already been there. What took you so long to get here?”

“Car problems.”

“We brought out a couple of the corpse dogs to take a look around before upgrading to the ground-penetrating radar. The ME thinks the other body has been in the ground at least ten years. We’ve started to expand the search.”

Somebody shouts out from behind the building and a few of the detectives start making their way over. I follow Schroder in the same direction. I ask him what he knows about Adrian Loaner, and he doesn’t know much. A group of detectives are forming a half circle. I can see piles of dirt through the gaps between them. We cross the shadow line formed by the building and step into the shade to the south, the air much cooler. There are already two open graves on this side, each with dirt piled waist high next to them, the soil on the bottom dry and thin, the stuff on the top thick with dark clods. The detectives have gathered in front of a third pile of dirt. We step into the group. Everybody is looking down at the half-excavated grave, a skull and part of an arm exposed, no flesh attached. Suddenly Jesse Cartman’s story doesn’t seem as crazy.

“Jesus,” Schroder says. “What the hell are we digging up here?”

Nobody answers him. The person doing the digging has stopped digging for the moment while somebody else takes photos. The digger doesn’t pose against the shovel and smile. He just waits until he can carry on, much slower now. There’s an overwhelming feeling spreading through the group-nobody here thinks we’re going to be stopping at only three bodies.

Laying on a blue tarpaulin about ten meters from one of the fully open graves is a woman wearing a shapeless dress with a large bloodstain on the front. Karen Ford. Right now her friends and family are somewhere looking for her and praying she’s still alive, praying she’s gone away for a few days, but for a woman in Karen’s line of work, they’ll know she’s gone away forever.

“I fucking hate this job,” Schroder says, noticing me looking over.

“It would raise some serious red flags if you didn’t,” another man says, the man Schroder was talking to when I arrived.

“This is Benson Barlow,” Schroder says, introducing us. Barlow’s comb-over is being backlit from the sun, making it look even thinner than it is. His face is shiny from suntan lotion and looks red. He has a deep, smooth voice that could talk a suicide off a ledge. I shake his hand.

“I’ve heard about you,” he tells me.

“And you are?” I ask.

“He’s a consultant,” Schroder tells me.

“A psychiatrist,” Barlow adds.

“We worked together a couple of months ago,” Schroder says. “It made sense that since we’re dealing with patients from here, he may have some insight that could help us.”

“Some of them I dealt with over the years,” Barlow says.

“Adrian Loaner?” I ask.

“Unfortunately, no,” he says.

“Loaner does have a primary psychiatrist who he has to check in with twice a year,” Schroder says. “Doctor Nicholas Stanton.”

“I actually know Stanton,” Barlow says. “He’s a good man.”

“But unavailable,” Schroder says. “He’s on holiday somewhere in a different time zone where it’s cooler. We’re working on a warrant to get his patient files.”

“And how’s that going?” I ask.

“A warrant to get patient files from a psychiatrist? I’d have more luck talking my wife into giving up her credit card,” Schroder says.

“Loaner only had to check in twice a year?” I confirm. “That doesn’t sound like much.”

“It’s not much,” Barlow says, “but it is what it is and, remember, it’s not my fault, it’s not Doctor Stanton’s fault, it’s the number the courts and the government doctors came up with.”

“So tell me,” I say, “where would Adrian have taken Cooper now?”

“Somewhere familiar to him,” he says. “That’s all I can tell you.”

“That’s not much,” I say, “and not something we hadn’t figured out.”

“Listen. .” he says, but I put my hand up and stop him.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound dismissive,” I say. “It’s just been a long day.”

“It’s okay,” he says, nodding slowly. “It’s something all psychiatrists have to get used to when we’re dealing with cops.” He looks at me to say something else and I have an idea what it is, but I don’t give it to him. He carries on. “First some ground rules,” he says. “This is all speculation. It’s science, I’m nothing like one of those psychic assholes you see on TV. What I’m saying has merit. In my opinion there’s a chance he’ll come back here. First of all this is his home. He won’t want to leave it behind for too long. He’s been forced to leave his home and therefore he’ll be feeling stressed and upset, and stressed people like to return to the things that comfort them. That means anybody involved with the case should keep their pets locked inside tonight. You may consider posting some unmarked cars outside each of your own houses since each of you make targets, though in your case, Mr. Tate, it’s perhaps too late. That aside, I think you’ll also find he’s eager to return here. This has been his home for many years and he’ll be watching closely. In fact, he may even be out there now,” he says, and we all look out to the trees and the road looking for a madman looking in. “I would set up some patrol cars to intercept anybody who comes this way.”

“Have you read Cooper Riley’s book?” I ask.

“Just how did you manage to get a copy of that, Tate?” Schroder asks.

“Yes, Detective Schroder gave me a copy when he updated me on the case,” Barlow says. “It’s very poorly written,” he adds, “and inconsistent. The man believes he knows much more than he does, and he gives that away with his conclusions. I can do a much better job. In fact it’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last few years, and perhaps, well, I hate to sound like an opportunist, but perhaps there may even be some material here for it.”

“Jesus. .” I say.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says, “but without people like me studying people like Adrian and Cooper, people like you wouldn’t have a clue where to begin.”

“Okay, point taken,” I say, annoyed that he’s made a good one. I’m just thrilled that at least somebody can make money from all this death and misery. “But there is something I still don’t get.”

“Just the one thing, Tate?” Schroder says.

I ignore the jibe. “Adrian wanted revenge on Pamela Deans and he killed her,” I say. “If he wants revenge on Cooper Riley, why not just kill him too?”

Barlow raises his eyes and his forehead twists into a string of wrinkles. “And that’s the big question, isn’t it? Yes, I’ve been giving it some thought. I don’t believe revenge is the motivation behind Cooper Riley’s abduction.”

“No? Then what?” I ask, genuinely curious.

“I think it’s fascination.”

“Fascination?” Schroder repeats.

“I think when Cooper Riley was coming out here conducting his interviews and his tests, I think Adrian became obsessed with him.”

“You think he’s taken Cooper to own him?” I ask.

“It makes sense.”

And it does make sense. I should have seen it earlier. Should have figured it out from the moment I saw the cell downstairs.

“If he’s that obsessed, why wait three years?” Schroder asks.

“He will have needed to build the courage to act,” Barlow says, “and needed to acquire the tools. If it was about revenge then Cooper would already be dead. I’m certain of it. You say Adrian used a Taser? Why not use a knife, or a gun? No, it’s not about killing. It’s about collecting.”

Ritchie Munroe said he taught Adrian to drive. That had to be part of it. Until recently, Adrian didn’t have the means to bring somebody out here. It’s not like he could have put Cooper into the trunk of a taxi.

“You think Adrian knew Cooper was a killer?” I ask.

“It would suggest a greater degree of intelligence than we first thought,” Barlow says. “It’s more likely a great degree of luck.”

“You think he just happened to be following Cooper and found out he was a serial killer?” Schroder asks.

“The alternative would mean he’s better at doing our job than we are,” I say. “There’s no way he could have figured out Cooper was a serial killer.”

“Our job?” Schroder asks.

“You know what I mean.”

“I agree,” Barlow says. “The question now is just how much longer is Adrian’s luck going to hold out?”

Only it’s not Adrian’s luck I’m thinking about. It’s Emma Green’s. She was lucky Cooper was abducted, but it could mean she’s been without food and water since Monday night. I know on average a person can last around four days, give or take, without water, but these aren’t normal conditions. With the heat wave. . well, it comes down to how hot it is where she is. The pile of dirt at the latest grave gets bigger as more skeleton is exposed. I look out at the grounds and the graves still yet to be found, praying to a God who abandoned them to not abandon Emma Green and to let me find her alive.

“Loaner is an unstable person, Detectives,” Barlow says, “and under the right stress conditions, he’ll be capable of anything-and right now, he’s stressed. Taking over his home like this, trust me, if Adrian knows what’s going on out here he’s going to enter full panic mode, and that means he’s going to be capable of almost anything.”

“And Melissa X?” I ask, and I look over at Schroder.

“He knows about her,” Schroder says, giving me the okay to keep talking.

“Anything happening there?” I ask.

Schroder shakes his head. “We’re talking to her friends and family and trying to build up a profile,” he says.

“She’s not the same person she was before Riley attacked her, assuming that’s what happened,” Barlow says. “Part of her has taken on the role of her dead sister, and is looking for revenge.”

“And the other part?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I couldn’t tell you. Some would suggest the other part is pure evil, but I don’t think that’s the case. The person she is now, that’s a product of her past. With the right medication and the right help,” he says, but doesn’t finish the sentence, because both me and Schroder are staring at him as if he just doesn’t get it. Not everybody is meant to be cured-some people are meant to be locked away forever. It wasn’t Natalie’s fault she set foot on this path, but she’s killed innocent men while on it, and for that she has to pay.