Collecting Cooper

chapter forty-five

We split into two teams. Schroder lets me come along this time. We head to Eastlake House full of enthusiasm and determination, and the other team heads to Sunnyview Shelter. We know that Adrian Loaner has a gun and therefore armed-offenders units are coming along for the ride. The drive takes us out of town and back past the prison and the fields full of crops and animals but none of it is visible in the dark. There aren’t any streetlights on the motorway, just faded white lines down the center of the road keeping traffic on one side from smacking head-on into traffic on the other. Red and blue swirling lights belt out from the top of the cars, a string of vehicles consistent in their urgency, the lights warning anybody ahead of us to get the hell out of the way.

Schroder is armed and so is everybody else and I’m the only one who isn’t. I’ve never seen him drive so fast and it doesn’t mix well with the headache and nausea I still have. We hit another section of unpaved roads and Schroder barely slows down, not until the roads become a maze. The dirt streets all look the same and the GPS unit on Schroder’s dashboard doesn’t seem to have any better idea where Eastlake is than we do. In the end all the patrol cars slow down and a bunch of us get out and stand on the side of the road, the flashing lights coloring our skin first red and then blue and then merging to purple. The urgency and frustration is evident in the way everybody starts swearing about how hard it is to find anything out here. One call to the media and we could have followed them. The air is warm and sticky but fresher out here than in town. An entire community of moths, maybe a thousand or more of them, are hanging around in the headlights, the occasional one straying into our faces. We get out maps and bounce out some ideas and finally decide on a direction. Schroder takes the lead again and we sit in silence as he drives, a few minutes later bringing us to a stop a hundred meters from a driveway lined with oak trees. He kills the lights and the other cars line up in single file behind us and do the same. The night goes dark. There is no light pollution out here from the city, and the stars are as clear as you’ll ever get without flying up to greet them. Pale light is thrown out over the fields from a moon that in a few days will be full, there are shapes out in those fields, fence posts and trees and black objects the size of cars that could be just about anything.

“Wait here,” Schroder says.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I mean it. You step out of that car and I’ll shoot you myself.”

“Don’t make me beg. Damn it, Carl, you’re only here because of me.”

“Maybe you’re right. You should put yourself in the line of fire. It’d be worth the paperwork just to get rid of you.”

I watch through the windshield as the armed-offenders unit slowly moves forward, six people dressed in armor as dark as the night, and they fade out of view about ten meters ahead of me. Schroder goes around to the trunk of the car and puts on a bulletproof vest. I get out of the car and he hands one to me. I put my arms through the holes and strap it on tight. Out of the car I can feel the tension in the air, and I’m certainly contributing to what’s feeling like a trigger-happy mood. If there are any scarecrows out in the fields they’re in danger of being shot. Emma Green is in this building somewhere, she has to be, and if not then she’s in Sunnyview.

I follow the team with Schroder who has his hands tightly on a pistol, but I fall back with each step because of my knee. By the time they reach the driveway, I’m already twenty meters behind and frustrated. The road is hard-packed dirt and the heat of it is coming up through my shoes. The unit ahead splits up, two go left, two go right, and the other two go straight ahead. Schroder waits for me, then we follow the two straight forward at my pace, and come to a stop twenty-five meters back from the door. The building looms up out of the ground, the front of it lit up by the moon, it looks pale white and run-down, the ivy climbing the front of it so black that it looks like strings of holes in the walls. It looks like the sort of place we should have come armed with crucifixes and holy water. There are no cars out front. One of the teams makes it around the back and I can hear a voice coming through Schroder’s earpiece but can’t make it out. He puts his finger against it and listens carefully, cocking his head slightly to the side.

“No cars around the back,” he tells me.

“Doesn’t mean they’re not here,” I say. “Might just mean that Adrian is out and not back yet.”

“Well, if he’s on his way back we’ll get him. We’ve got two units hidden a few blocks back. No way anybody is getting past without getting pulled over.”

The team in the middle reaches the door. One of them stands off to the side, half crouching while pointing his gun ahead as the other person swings a metal battering ram that opens the door quicker than a key and echoes across the fields. Flashlights are switched on and the team disappears. There are loud footsteps as they make their way quickly through the building. I want to join them but Schroder puts his hand on my shoulder.

“Give them time,” he says.

We give them five minutes. The moon reflects off some of the windows but the light seems to be absorbed by others. There are constant updates coming through Schroder’s earpiece. None of the shapes out in the field move. Flashlights appear in all the windows. We can hear the officers moving around inside. There’s the occasional stuck door being shouldered open, the odd floorboard creaking. Then the scene is clear and we move into the building.

The building seems much bigger than it ought to be up close, and even bigger inside. We step in through the main door. The framework has been splintered from where the team knocked it in. The air is dry and has the texture of dust. We start on the ground floor and make our way upstairs. We take a good look around, there are padded cells that are empty and no basements with thick iron doors and scream rooms. There is leftover furniture abandoned, a few broken windows, but no vandalism, just like Grover Hills. The living arrangements are crowded, small rooms that would take two people and I can’t imagine there was much hope for anybody living out here, and I think about my wife, about her care home, about the room she has all to herself even though she’s not aware of it, and I can’t help but think the people sent here could have done better if they had rooms and care like that. How hard was it for the nurses and doctors to care about people who’d done really bad things? Surely many came here with good hopes but ended up being burned too many times until they just treated everybody like shit.

No scream room. No basements with thick iron doors. No Emma Green, no Cooper Riley, no Adrian Loaner, and no indication they were ever here.

“Shit,” I say, voicing my anger. “We chose the wrong one. She must be at Sunnyview,” I say, but nobody is listening. The armed team is going back through the rooms, and one man is covering the room I’m in with Schroder, while Schroder is on his cell phone, so I’m talking to myself.

Schroder is slowly shaking his head and I have a real good idea of what he’s about to tell me and a real bad feeling about it. He slips his cell phone back into his pocket.

“Don’t tell me,” I tell him.

“It was a good idea, Tate, and nobody here rejected it, but that was the team at Sunnyview and it’s empty.”

“No way,” I say, punching the padded wall of one of the cells. “It can’t be. They have to be there or here. Have to be.”

“There are signs somebody was there,” Schroder says. “Apparently there’s a new chain and lock hanging from the door that’s just been smashed, there’s dirt on the front steps, and there are some empty water bottles in one of the padded rooms. Forensics are going to take a look around; it’s possible she was being kept there, and just as possible some homeless guy was using it for shelter.”

“Emma’s still somewhere.”

“I know. She’s just not here.”

“Then where?” I ask, hitting the padded wall again, this time not as hard.

“I don’t know. But it has to be somewhere big enough for four people.”

“Why four?”

“I got another call while I was on the phone to the other team. Adrian’s collected another person.”

I almost can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Jesus,” I say, “are you joking? Who?”

“He’s taken Cooper Riley’s mother.”