Collecting Cooper

chapter fifty-seven

I think about my promise to Donovan Green. He wants his five minutes with Cooper Riley, and if Adrian Loaner wasn’t involved, maybe I’d give it to him. Instead I call Schroder. It’s the best thing for Emma, for Schroder, and for me. I need things to stay good between me and Schroder. No doubt I’ll need him in the future. The prison phone is covered in scratches, names and dates etched into it, and the guard stands next to me, listening to the whole thing.

Schroder tells me they’ve gotten a warrant for the Grover Hills patient and staff files and will have them within the hour. He tells me interviewing of the staff will start by lunchtime, and that everybody who ever worked there now has a lawyer. I tell him that’s good, and then I give him the address where I think Emma Green is being held. He asks how I came to that conclusion and I tell him there isn’t time to explain it all, that he needs to meet me there, that I’m right on this one. I have probably a twenty-minute head start on him. Anything can happen in twenty minutes. He tells me to wait and I tell him that I’ll check it out and call him if I see anything suspicious.

“From where? Adrian smashed your cell phone.”

“I’m not just going to stand around and wait. Twenty minutes is a long time.”

“Tate. .”

“I gotta go,” I say, and I hang up.

I start to walk away from the phone, and go two paces before changing my mind. I call Donovan Green.

“You got a pen?” I ask.

“Sure.”

“Then write this down,” I tell him, and give him the address. “I’m pretty sure this is where Emma is.”

“Is she okay?”

“I don’t know. If you want your five minutes with Cooper Riley, you’re going to need to hurry.”

I hang up, confident there’s no way Green can get out there before the police do. If Emma is alive, it’s going to be a fantastic reunion. If she’s dead, then I’ve just given Donovan her location and he’s going to see his daughter’s body and he’s going to fall apart. But it’s what he wants, it’s what I’d want in his situation, and it’s what I owe him.

Edward Hunter has given pretty good directions, but it’s been years since he was last out here, which gives him plenty of room to be a little vague. For the most part he was confident, and for the most part that made me confident too. I compare his map against the map in the car, vowing that when this is over I’m going to purchase the most expensive GPS unit on the market. More paddocks and wire fences and if a case ever brings me into this part of the country again I’m turning it down.

The farmhouse comes into view. It’s a big building with a large A-frame roof, the sides of the building painted red, the roof is black, lots of white trim around the windowsills and door. It looks like the grandparents saw a nice farmhouse in a movie or jigsaw puzzle and wanted the same one. What’s missing is a steaming pie on the windowsill, but what is here at the top of the dirt road leading up to the farmhouse is Emma Green’s car. I keep driving. Problem is I have to drive another five hundred meters before I can find anything to park behind that will hide my car. I check the trunk and find a crowbar for wrenching off wheels that get stuck when you’re changing a flat. I jump the fence. Nothing has been farmed here in a long time, there are areas of hard dirt, areas of tall grass and even taller weed, some of it up around my knees. I move diagonally across the section staying low, approaching the house from only one side to decrease the number of windows I can be seen from, waiting, waiting for a gunshot from the gun Donovan Green gave me to ring out and drop me like a rock.

By the time I get to the building my legs are itchy and blotchy from the grass. I pause against the wall. The wood is warm and the heat soaks into my skin. There is no sign of anybody. No sounds. I look through one of the windows, struggling a little to see beyond the netting. There’s a large living room suite with flower-patterned upholstery, an oak coffee table with sculptured legs, a boxy TV that must weigh a ton. It all looks very neat, as if Grandpa and Grandma Hunter are still living here. I move past the window and look into the next one. It’s a master bedroom with a queen-sized bed and the blankets all thrown back. The next window is completely black and I can’t see anything beyond it. It’s covered on the inside with something much thicker than curtains.

I head around to the back of the house. The deck leading up to the back door groans as my body weight shifts onto it. I come to a complete stop. I give it a few seconds and there’s no indication anybody is coming to check out the sound. I walk as close as I can to the wall and the groaning stops. I turn the handle on the back door and it opens freely. I step into the kitchen. It’s tidy. There are lots of white tiles behind the sink and a table off center for the family to sit around. There’s a calendar hanging on the wall dating back nearly sixty years showing a painting of an orchard. It’s faded and the edges are creased and one of the dates has a fading circle around it. Inside the circle in a script that looks old-fashioned and has also faded are the words Our wedding. The sun is still reasonably low and shining in under the veranda and through the windows, casually hitting every surface and filling the kitchen with light. I close the door behind me and stop and listen. It’s me and a crowbar up against an ex-mental patient with a gun and a Taser.

The kitchen is open plan into a dining room, from where there are two doors, one leading into a living room, another into a hallway. I can see into the living room and there’s nobody in there. I enter the hallway. It branches off in two directions, one is up a flight of stairs, the other goes straight ahead where it turns right. I stay on the ground floor and follow the hall around the corner, passing some pretty old furniture and some paintings on the wall. There’s a door wide open. The hinges have been reversed so the door opens outward rather than in and it blocks the rest of the hall. The front of the door is facing me. I step up carefully to it and look around it. There are two bodies in the hall further down. I close the door slightly so I can look into the room. It’s empty inside. The entire thing is padded, ceiling and floor. There are stains on the floor-this is the Scream Room the Hunter twins built. This is where at least nine men lost their lives. Despite the heat a cold shiver runs the length of my body. Could be they kept their victims in here for only a day, or it could be they kept them for months.

I swing the door completely closed and approach the bodies. One man and one woman. The woman looks to be in her late seventies. The man is who I saw setting fire to Cooper Riley’s house and tried to collect me from my own. There’re a pair of bullet holes in his chest. His eyes are wide open and one of them is ruined, there’s a hole in it and the area has swollen and there’s been some seepage. I crouch down and check the woman for a pulse. Nothing. I don’t even bother with Adrian. No point. There’s no immediate sign of the gun. Cooper Riley probably has it. He probably has Emma Green too. He can’t know how much the police know about him, and has to be thinking the best way he can get out of here and resume any kind of life is by making up his own version of events, and to do that he can’t let anybody live.

So why isn’t Emma Green laying on the floor here too?

There’s a sound like a small gunshot and then a muffled scream from further down the hall. I move in that direction. There’s another gunshot sound that isn’t loud enough to be a gunshot. I want to rush the rest of the way, but I just keep taking one step at a time, slowly, carefully, past a bathroom and an empty bedroom and toward another one that has a queen-sized bed with Emma Green on top of it. She’s naked. As I watch, Cooper Riley, standing in front of her, swings his belt down against the bedside drawers, on top of which is resting the gun and a Taser. Emma jumps at the sound. It’s the noise I heard earlier. Her hands are bound behind her and she tries to push herself further into the mattress. I move forward. Either he senses me or he notices Emma change as she senses me, because he turns quickly, the large bedroom window behind him, and I think about running hard at him and trying to push him right through it, only he could take me with him and I could end up landing on a rake and he could end up landing in a pile of hay. He snatches up the gun and brings it up toward me and I throw the crowbar forward. It hits his arm and he shouts out as he lets go of the gun, both items go hurtling in the same direction, the pry bar hitting and cracking the window, the gun flying out the smaller open window to the world outside. Cooper comes forward and I meet him, he throws a fast right punch that catches me in the jaw at the same time I swing one, mine catching him in the cheek. He comes at me again and I block him, grab him, and then we’re tipping over into a chest of drawers. Solid objects start littering down on us, a hairbrush, a mirror, some figurines, a couple of novels, a crossword book with a pen hooked onto it, a thick glass jar with something floating inside. Emma Green is off the bed and she’s gone for the door. I push up and hit Cooper in the side of the face again, and before I can follow it up he grabs the glass jar and swings it down.

It shatters against the side of my skull, but it feels like half of it has gone right through the bone. What looks like a severed thumb hits me in the nose before bouncing away, then the fluid washes into my eyes, the pain is instant and burns and everything goes fuzzy from the liquid and from the blow to my head. I can barely open my eyes. I try to blink away the fluid but it’s not helping.

Cooper leans down on me. His outline is blurry. His hands tighten against my throat. I reach for them but can barely even lift my arms. I can smell urine and sweat. I can hear creaking wood. I can taste blood. I’m quickly losing a battle against something I can do nothing about, and all I have is the hope that Schroder is about to walk through the door.

He doesn’t.

Cooper’s hands tighten.

I blink away more of the fluid. Pressure is building up inside my head. My eyes are going to pop out. Then something comes into view. A black object that looks like a gun but is too thick to be one. Cooper tilts his head up to see it and a moment later the end of it is jammed into his mouth.

“You fucker!” Emma Green yells and pulls the trigger.

His body goes tight for a second before going completely loose. There’s a low crackling sound of volts being transferred. Tiny lights are dancing in front of my vision that turn out to be small pieces of paper with serial numbers on them too fuzzy to read. Cooper’s hands slip off my throat and he falls on me, his face pressing hard against my face, the full weight of his body on me. I push him off to the side and he rolls onto his back. There are two thin wires leading from his open mouth to the Taser in Emma’s hand. Her finger is still on the trigger and Cooper is jerking on the floor until she lets go.

I wipe at my eyes but things still remain blurry. I crawl away and get to my knees and when I stand up I walk sideways and crash into the wall then back down to the floor. Emma puts the Taser down and picks up the crowbar. Her hands are still tied together, but now they’re in front of her. She must have hooked her feet up and through.

“Who are you?” she asks. “Who the fuck are you?”

I hold my hands over my head, ready to defend myself if she starts swinging, not sure that I’m going to be able to. “Your father, he, he sent me to, to find you,” I say.

“You look familiar.”

“That’s, that’s because. .”

“You ran into me last year. What the hell? Have you come here to hurt me?”

“No, no, of course not,” I say, trying to get my breathing under control.

Cooper starts gagging. He’s trying to move his arms but he can’t. His mouth is open and his tongue is swelling up. There’s a bulge growing in his throat. His face is turning purple and he can’t breathe. He’s trying to reach his mouth but he can’t.

“Your father hired me,” I tell her. Sweat is mixing with the blood from my scalp and whatever fluid was in that jar. I keep wiping it from my eyes. It stings like hell. “He thought that I owed it to you and to him to find you. That’s why, why, I took on the case.”

“Stay where you are,” she says. “Stay on the floor. If you try to move I’ll start swinging. I’m not kidding.”

“What about him?” I ask, nodding toward Cooper. His face is dark purple now.

“Was he going to kill me?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Then let him die,” she says.

“You don’t want that,” I say. “You do now, but soon you’ll regret it. Trust me.” I push myself up from the floor. I wipe at my eyes and suck in some deeper breaths. I try to move over to Cooper. My knee isn’t bending again and hurts to take any weight.

“Stay where you are,” she tells me.

“He’ll die.”

“If you move one muscle I’ll put this through your skull. You got a phone?”

“No.”

“Bullshit,” she says. “Everybody these days has a phone.”

“Yeah? Where’s yours?” I ask.

“I don’t know. He took it from me.”

I wipe the bottom of my shirt over my face. My vision is starting to clear. Cooper is making gagging noises.

“Why do you want to help him so much?” she asks.

“The police are on their way, but they’re still five or ten minutes away, and honestly I’m just as happy as you are to stand here and watch him die. But he has information I need. There’s another woman I’m looking for. Another girl that he hurt.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You have to trust me.”

“I’m never trusting anybody again.”

I reach into my pocket. I find the photograph Donovan Green gave me the day I got out of jail.

“Your dad gave me this,” I tell her, and I show it to her. “He said the day this was taken you turned ten. He said all you wanted for your birthday was a puppy and when they didn’t get one for you, you ran away. He told me they found you two blocks away at the park on the merry-go-round trying to talk to the birds in the trees and make friends with them. They were so relieved you were okay and when they were about to tell you off, you talked your way out of it. Your dad said you told them you ran away because you felt bad about having wanted so much from them, and not because you hadn’t gotten it, and that you ran away because you were a bad girl. He knew you were making it up, but the way you said it was believable and made them feel bad and they couldn’t bring themselves to tell you off. He said you’ve always been able to talk your way into getting what you want from him. Put down the crowbar, Emma, and let me help him.”

“He told you all that?”

I nod.

She doesn’t put down the crowbar, but she nods toward Cooper. “Help him,” she says. “Ask him what you need to.”

I move over to Cooper and crouch down next to him.

“Calm down,” I tell him.

He doesn’t. He isn’t moving much, mostly just shudders, but I need him to stay perfectly still.

“Stop struggling or you’re going to die. Now, this is going to hurt but at least you’ll live. You got that?”

He stops moving.

I take the pen off the crossword book and snap it in half, giving me a plastic tube.

“What are you doing to him?” Emma asks.

“I’m going to save his life. You know what I’m about to do?” I ask Cooper.

His eyes tell me that he gets it. I pick up a piece of glass from the broken jar, put my hand on his forehead and push his head against the floor to keep him still, then drag the glass down his throat, between two little ridges. He starts struggling again. His face is covered in sweat. When the cut is big enough, I jam the tube into the wound.

He starts breathing, air going through the pen.

Sirens finally start sounding in the distance.

“The police are here,” I tell her. “Go and find some clothes. I’ll wait with him.”

Emma leaves the room. Cooper stays where he is. His skin is returning from the purple color back to normal.

“You remember Natalie Flowers?” I ask him.

He finds the strength to nod.

“Do you know where she is?”

He shakes his head.

“Any idea at all?”

He shakes his head again.

“If you knew, would you tell me?”

Another shake of the head.

“You sent her down a path, you know that, right?”

He nods.

“People are dying because of her, because of what you did to her. You’re a piece of garbage, you know that, right? The rest of the world is going to know it too because you were kind enough to take the photos to prove it. They’re going to know that you’re the worst kind of rapist. You know, I’ve been in jail, I know what it’s like, but for you, well, there’s a special place in jail for you. My experience in jail is going to look like a vacation compared to yours. Help me with Natalie, and maybe I’ll see what I can do. Maybe you don’t have to spend every day sitting on a bag of ice to keep down the swelling.”

He lifts his hand slightly and signals that he wants to write something. Every breath he makes is drawn in and out of the pen, accompanied by a hollow whistling sound. I find the nib and plastic spine that came out of the broken pen and hand it to him, along with the crossword book. He tilts it toward him and writes, then puts down the pen. I take the book back off him.

He’s written Fuck You in the margin. I look down at him, and he grins. Then he reaches to the plastic tube and pulls it out.

The smile stays on his face for ten seconds. He’s controlling the situation, controlling his fate, controlling the outcome. He’s avoiding jail, avoiding the responsibility, avoiding the media circus. He prefers death to the humiliation he’ll have to face with his peers. His thoughts are very clear in his eyes. He’s happy with the decision he’s made. Then that smile flickers around the edges. He begins to turn purple again, sweat is running down his forehead. He’s beating the system, but he’s not looking as happy with his decision anymore. Twenty seconds into it and there is no longer any hint of a smile. He begins fumbling with the plastic tube. He lifts it up to his throat. He gets the tip of it against the cut but can’t get it in there, there’s too much blood and he can’t get the angle right. It keeps slipping around the edges of the wound and also in his fingertips. He tries to widen the hole with his finger, but in the process he drops the tube. It rolls over the floor toward me.

Thirty seconds into it and his eyes are pleading for help. He tries to form the word but can’t make it, but he mouths it over and over.

Help.

I underline the message he wrote me and throw the crossword book onto his lap. He looks down at it, then back up at me. Forty seconds now and I’ve never seen such panic in anybody’s eyes before.

It’s hard to watch.

I don’t want to watch it.

And I don’t have to.

I reach down and pick up the plastic tube. I drop it into my pocket and step out of the bedroom. I walk down the hall, past Adrian, past the dead women, back past all the old furniture and antique calendar and step out the back door, away from the gagging sounds coming from the bedroom. I circle my way around the house. The gun is outside the bedroom window in the garden. I pick it up and drop it into my pocket. I look through the window. Cooper isn’t moving. I didn’t kill him, I could have saved him, and I’m comfortable with not doing so. I throw the tube back into the window. I don’t want to have to explain to Schroder why it was in my pocket. It rolls under Cooper’s body but he doesn’t make a reach for it.

Emma Green is standing in the driveway. She’s wearing a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans. She’s still holding the crowbar. I stop ten meters away from her because she looks like she’s going to swing that thing at the next person who enters her hitting zone. She keeps holding it even when the police cars pull into the driveway and Schroder, along with the other officers, jump out of the car and come over.

Donovan Green is following them, a woman in the passenger seat who must be Hillary, his wife. Emma recognizes the car and drops the crowbar and runs toward them. Before he can come to a stop his wife has the door open and her feet out, and she almost falls jumping from the car. Donovan leaves the engine running, none of them looking at me, mother and father having eyes only for their daughter. I smile as I watch them give each other the tightest embraces of their lives, and Schroder comes over. He’s armed, and so are the men who show up with him. They’re approaching the house carefully.

“Adrian?” he asks.

“Dead,” I tell him.

“Cooper?”

“The same.”

“Jesus,” he says. “Tell me what happened.”

So I tell him as we watch Emma and her family continue to hug each other, and as the Christchurch sun continues to try and set fire to fields around us.