Collecting Cooper

chapter forty-one

I wonder if Jane Tyrone and Emma Green knew each other. I wonder if they had more in common other than being young and blond and the type of girl Cooper Riley wanted to rape and murder. I try not to think about the hell Karen Ford went through here with one mentally unstable man and one madman. Whatever the relationship is between Cooper Riley and Adrian Loaner, there’s no doubt that Karen Ford suffered. Her body is a mess. There is glue residue and torn skin around her lips with a drinking straw hanging from her bottom lip. I try not to think about her last few minutes but it’s all I can think about-what a fucking cruel place to die.

The team of police searching the area has expanded over the last hour. So far only the one extra body has been found, this one has also been in the ground for several years according to the medical examiner, as many as twenty. Dozens of high-wattage halogen bulbs have been strung up around the scene. Moths are attracted to the lamps, they fly in at full speed, some of them impacting against the lamps and burning, others basking in the light as they dance in the air. From a distance it all looks like some archaeological dig, or a group of scientists unearthing an extraterrestrial find. So far no sign of Emma Green. Fingerprints taken from her flat, from her hairbrush and the books she was reading, have been run up against fingerprints found at Grover Hills and so far no match. Grover Hills is Adrian Loaner’s hiding place, but it wasn’t Cooper Riley’s.

Schroder has made some calls to some of the staff who worked at Grover Hills. The first call he made seemed to be going well until he mentioned the Twins. Then he was shut down. The woman he was talking to said she wanted a lawyer. Every phone call since has followed a similar pattern.

“They’re lawyering up,” Schroder tells me. “Getting anything out of them is like getting blood out of a stone, and this is why. They knew shit was going on there. We’re going to have to start getting warrants and bringing them in for questioning, and this is going to take a fuckload longer than it should.”

Over the last thirty minutes media vans have started showing up. Men and women in expensive-looking outfits have been pouring out of vehicles and hitting the dirt roads, unable to pass the cordon that was erected only minutes before the first van arrived. Others are circling the perimeter, heading toward the trees on the hill in the near distance, all of them hoping for a better shot, wanting so desperately to be the first to share the tragedy with the rest of the country, to have their smiling faces on the ten-thirty news tonight to speak of horrors unburied, all of them aware the more bodies we find the bigger the story, the longer the story can survive, the better the ratings. At this point they have no idea what story they’re covering, only that for this amount of police attention they know it’s a big one. Emma Green and Cooper Riley are names that will pass across the airwaves as TV anchors bounce theories back and forth with the journalists live at the scene. As I watch them, a BMW that can only be a year old at the most pulls up and Jonas Jones steps out, the psychic here to predict that there are bodies in the graves. I allow myself a brief smile as I imagine what it would be like if a small earthquake opened the ground beneath the media and the city was suddenly short a couple of dozen journalists, but the smile disappears when I realize only more would come to replace them, only now with more to report on, bigger smiles and bigger news and bigger ratings.

“We’re running out of time,” I say, and Schroder nods. I turn toward Benson Barlow. “Who killed Karen Ford? Adrian Loaner or Cooper Riley or both of them together? And who abducted her? Did Riley abduct her and they were both taken by Adrian, or did Adrian take her by himself, and if so, why?”

“It’s possible Riley and Loaner may start working together,” Barlow says. “There are many cases of relationships between killers where one personality dominates over the other. I say it’s possible, but I imagine highly unlikely. Riley won’t have any time for Loaner. I think you’ll find if an opportunity comes to kill Adrian Loaner, Cooper Riley will take it. If he’s still alive, Cooper will be doing what he can to manipulate his way to freedom. I would imagine Adrian is trying to please Cooper, and the girl was a gift to him.”

“Jesus,” I say. “So you think Cooper Riley is still alive then.

“Until the novelty wears off, yes.”

“And Emma Green?”

“If she’s still alive, it won’t be for long. That’s one thing I can be certain of.”

“We don’t know anything for certain,” Schroder says. “For all we know Adrian might try eating Cooper.” He puts his hand on my shoulder to steer me away from the graves. “Look, I know you’re not going to give me any peace, and like you said, there are things you can do that we can’t.”

“What are you asking, Carl?”

“I don’t really know,” he says, but I think he does know, he just doesn’t want to voice it. He looks back to see if Barlow is following, but he isn’t. He opens up his car door and leans inside. He pulls out four folders. One each for Adrian Loaner, Cooper Riley, Karen Ford, and Jane Tyrone. He holds them against his chest. “Look, Theo, you have a way of finding people and finding out about them, and if Emma Green really is still alive. . just, I don’t know, I want to say just do what it takes. I guess that’s what I am saying. Do what it takes, and in your case dial it back a little.”

I nod and he hands me the folders. The one with Adrian’s name on it is by far the thinnest of them all. I open it up and there’s a photograph of him from the institution. I don’t know when it was taken, but it doesn’t look much like the sketch I tore from the newspaper.

He leans back into his car. “Don’t lose this one again,” he says, and hands me the Melissa X file, only now it’s thicker and the front of it says Natalie Flowers / AKA Melissa X.

I get lost on the way back home. There is no point in hanging around at Grover Hills, and there aren’t any names jumping out at me as to who to speak to next. It’s dark and there’s no other source of lighting on these roads other than what’s coming from my car and the sliver of pale moon. Nothing is recognizable, and certainly nothing looks the same as it did this afternoon. I have no idea how the media made it out here, and can only assume that in the deal they made to sell their souls, the Devil threw in GPS as a bonus. I drive up and down a wrong set of dirt roads until lucking my way back into what I’d deem civilization. The highway gets me back onto the road to town where traffic is thick but so far flowing quickly, and for the first time in my life I make it through town hitting less than half a dozen red lights.

The Friday-night crowd is spilling into town, guys in tight T-shirts with big biceps and girls in jeans so tight they look painted on. Shiny cars with bright paint race the streets, tires spinning at every intersection with smoke hanging in the dry air. Other cars are parked in groups, teenagers in black hoodies leaning against them as they laugh and smoke and drink beer and give the finger to anybody driving by, all of them in jeans way too low, showing way too much, making me want to way too much run all of them over. It’s such a different world from the one I just left, and these kids have no idea just how lucky they are.

I park the rental in my driveway. Nobody from the media shows up. Plenty of them yelled questions at me as I drove through them earlier, most of them recognizing me and asking if I was back on the payroll. In my study I open up the four new files and spread the contents across the desk and set the Melissa X one to the side for later. As much as I want to find Natalie Flowers, she isn’t the one who kidnapped Emma Green, she isn’t the one who abducted Cooper Riley. There is a connection to her, but not a relevant one that will help us find Emma. Even if we found Natalie within the hour it wouldn’t do Emma Green any good.

I pop open a Coke and start reading. Adrian’s file is only one page. It has his name and age and when he was committed but it doesn’t have the reason why. Medical privilege and all that. Which means we’ll never know what made him crazy. It lists the halfway house as his current address.

The file on Cooper Riley is the thickest one. It traces back his history from when he was a child, his education, university, becoming a criminologist and then a professor. Karen Ford’s file is thin because she was only reported missing earlier today. She was a known prostitute, but since prostitution isn’t illegal in New Zealand, she doesn’t have a record. Jane Tyrone’s file is thick. It has all the information from the investigation into her disappearance last year. There’s a photograph of her, a smiling happy-looking girl in the prime of her life. I look though Emma Green’s file, but there isn’t much that I already didn’t know. We know who took her, and we know who took Cooper Riley.

If I pressed Ritchie Munroe, if I threatened to take Melina away from him, would he know anything more about his best friend? I wonder how easily Adrian was able to make his way to and from Grover Hills. I wonder if Cooper struggled with the drive the first few times. Jonas Jones wouldn’t-he’d have used his psychic abilities. But for the rest of us, driving out there is a challenge. I figure Cooper would drive out there then drive to one of the others to conduct more interviews to save on petrol.

“Damn it,” I say, slapping the desk. How could I have missed it?

I missed it the same way we all missed it, but it’s no excuse. I grab my cell phone. There are two more buildings almost identical in nature to Grover Hills. Both are abandoned. And Cooper Riley knows that better than anybody. Barlow said Adrian would want to return somewhere familiar to him, and though Adrian never grew up in either of the other two places, the similarity may be enough. In fact, that similarity may be all he has. And for Cooper Riley, what better place to take Emma Green? There could be other rooms like the Scream Room, and there are certainly going to be some padded cells.

I dial Schroder’s number. I walk through the living room to the French doors. Schroder answers and I open the door to step out onto the deck, wanting to escape the hot air inside.

“Oh fuck,” I say.

“Tate?”

“She’s here,” I say, and the words are thick and catch at the back of my throat.

“What?” he asks.

“Barlow. .” I have to hold a hand up to my mouth. “Barlow was right.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Only it wasn’t the pets we had to worry about.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Jane. . Jane Tyrone,” I say, and her name is covered in the taste of vomit.

“What about her?”

The corpse has the same hair but beyond that it’s a mess, any of the features blurred by five months of rot and decay. “She’s hanging from my roof,” I say, and I crouch down and throw up off the side of the deck and onto the lawn.