Collecting Cooper

by Paul Cleave

  “We’ll run the prints and get the cat autopsied. You should fill the hole back in and stay awake tonight in case he comes back,” Brody says.

  They pack everything up. Daxter is slipped into a dark black bag made from thick plastic. I follow them out to the street.

  “I want him back when you’re done,” I say, nodding toward the bag.

  “I’ll make sure of it,” Brody says.

  I make sure the doors are locked. I retrieve the gun. My knee is getting sore again. I refill the grave. I get a strong sense of déjà vu. I hold out hope the fingerprints will get a match. If it is somebody from Grover Hills they might have been sentenced there after committing a crime. We could have a name within an hour. We could have Emma Green by the end of the day. Or they might match Melissa’s fingerprints, which are on record from surfaces she touched when she murdered Detective Calhoun. If they do belong to her, how did she know I was working on the case? Only Schroder knew. No, it can’t have been her.

  I sit in the shade and read another chunk of Cooper’s manuscript. I’ve read similar things before, written by profilers from the UK or the US, and I imagine this is what Cooper was attempting to do. Cooper’s one reads like a textbook. There is no flair, no emotion in those words, not like other books I’ve read where the author is genuinely disgusted and upset about the cases they’re writing about, the kind of author who you think was crying into his keyboard as he detailed each victim he had to look at. Some of the names in here I remember from when I was on the force, there’s even one that I arrested, a man by the name of Jesse Cart-man who raped and killed and digested parts of his sister-and not in that order. Cooper attempts to explain the criminal mind. He tries to get inside their heads. It works when police profilers do it, because they’re dealing with people who for the most part are sane. Many of the people locked away at Grover Hills and the other institutions Cooper visited were purely delusional, which skews all of Cooper’s data. He’s not studying a criminal mind, he’s studying one where two and two equal nineteen. He struggles to draw connections from one patient to the next. Some have bad backgrounds, some come from good homes, some are making stuff up. He will make one point and then a chapter later he will contradict it. This could explain why the book is still in manuscript form and not for sale in bookshops. Or he stopped trying. The version I got from the university hadn’t been touched in three years. Did Cooper give up writing after he was attacked?

  I jot down every name I come across, thinking of each as a potential suspect. I list them by the institution they were kept in, focusing mainly on Grover Hills. In the end I have a list of forty-one names. It’s possible one of these people abducted Cooper Riley and killed Pamela Deans, and it’s equally as possible none of them did. It’s possible the two things are unrelated, it’s possible they’re related but by different means.

  Forty-one names. I start with the Internet, using an online newspaper site and running their names through the search engine. I rule out six of them due to suicides. Another six are currently in jail for crimes ranging from breaking-and-entering to rape, one for repeated defecation in the middle of a shopping mall, another for killing his mother. There is little information on the others, and none on the rest. Jesse Cartman, the man who ate part of his sister twelve years ago, was released along with all the others, having served the term equivalent to what he would have done if he had gone to jail, and on the days he remembers to take his medication he works as a caretaker at the Botanical Gardens.

  Other than Pamela Deans, Cooper doesn’t mention any of the other staff, and I can’t find any other nurses or doctors or orderlies mentioned online. Getting hold of any medical records is going to be impossible. Schroder would have shown the sketch to some of the doctors and nurses who used to work at Grover Hills. Maybe he already has a name.

  Grover Hills.

  It’s at the center of all of this and I don’t even know what it looks like.

  Is it possible that’s where Cooper is now? It’s an abandoned building that would make an excellent place to hide out.

  Is it possible an ex-patient has returned to it, thinking of Grover Hills as home?

  I load up the city map on the computer and write down directions to the abandoned mental institution, grab my gun, and jump into the car.

  chapter thirty-three

  “They’re going to come here,” Cooper says.

  “What? Who are you talking about?”

  “The police. They’re going to come here. You need to let me out. We need to go into hiding,” Cooper says.

  “We already are in hiding,” Adrian answers, disappointed at Cooper. He doesn’t want to play more of these games. Why can’t Cooper just like him? It would all go so much easier if he would. To be honest, he’s beginning to find it frustrating. So far he’s had a pretty good day-he dug up Theodore Tate’s cat and bought Cooper a newspaper and had a good breakfast and soon he’s going to sit down outside in the shade and start reading Cooper’s book. Why does Cooper have to ruin it with more lies?

  Cooper holds the newspaper up. Watching his face on the other side of the small glass panel is like watching a small TV set. Actually, it’s more like watching the news where it’s one bad story after another.

  “The police won’t come here,” Adrian says. “They have no reason to.”

  “They have every reason to,” Cooper says, waving the newspaper back and forth. “You’ve given them every reason.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No, Adrian, goddamn it, I am not lying. I can’t afford to be caught here covered in blood, and nor can you.”

  “But. .”

  “Listen to me. The paper,” he says, waving it again. “You’re on the front page.”

  Adrian shakes his head. No, if he were on the front page he would have seen himself.

  “Take a look,” he says, and holds the paper over the glass.

  Adrian takes a look. The sketch he saw earlier stares back at him, but it doesn’t look like him, not really. Well, maybe a little.

  “That’s not all,” Cooper says, pulling it away.

  “It’s okay, nobody is going to. .”

  “Shut the hell up,” Cooper says, and he bangs the door with his palm and Adrian jumps. He goes quiet, unsure what to do. “You need to listen,” Cooper says, carrying on. “We don’t have much time.”

  “I. .”

  Cooper bangs the door again. “I demand you listen to what I say.”

  Adrian is scared now. He used to get spoken to like this all the time and he doesn’t like it now any more than back then, but he does as he’s told.

  “It’s simple if you think about it. Just follow the dots,” Cooper says.

  “What dots?” Adrian answers, confused as well as scared.

  “The dots you’ve made.”

  “I don’t make dots,” he says, shaking his head.

  “You abducted me. You burned down my house. Somebody saw you, and somebody from Grover Hills will recognize you. And you burned down Nurse Deans’s house.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “It’s on page bloody two!” Cooper says, turning the newspaper and pushing it against the glass again. “And let me guess, you burned down her house the same way you burned down mine.”

  “It worked so well the first time,” Adrian says, talking at the newspaper now, “so yeah, but I burned them down in a different order and. .”

  “And the police have made the connection,” Cooper says, pulling the paper away and folding it up.

  “I don’t see how.”

  “They will have,” Cooper says. “You killed Nurse Deans, didn’t you?”

  “She called me a freak,” he says, clenching his fists, and damn it, he didn’t want to confess that to Cooper, not yet.

  “Is there anything else you’ve done?”

  “No,” he says, thinking about Theodore Tate. He killed Tate’s cat, and tonight he was going to go back to the house and knock on the door and shoot Tate
with the Taser. He’s starting to think Tate will be an easier item to maintain.

  “The police probably already know who you are,” Cooper says.

  “No, no, they can’t.”

  “They’re going to send somebody out here to look around.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s routine. Because they know I’ve been abducted by an ex-patient and they know that same ex-patient has to have taken me somewhere and they know this place is as good as any.”

  “It doesn’t make sense. How will they know I’m an ex-patient?”

  “You took my book off Theodore Tate. The police know about it. They’ll connect the dots.”

  “Oh,” Adrian says, understanding what the dots are now. “Is that really what will happen?”

  “They’re on their way, Adrian. They may only be five minutes away. Or five hours. But they’ll be here. Today. Trust me. And if you don’t trust me all you have to do is wait around and see for yourself. Then they’ll take away your collection.”

  “I don’t want them to do that,” Adrian answers.

  “And they’ll put us both in jail.”

  “I’d rather kill you than lose you.”

  Cooper goes quiet for a few seconds. “Let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that. First thing we need to do is figure out where we can go.”

  “Go?”

  “We can’t stay here, Adrian.”

  “But this is my home.”

  “Not anymore.”

  He’s confused. “But. .”

  “Listen, Adrian, if we stay here we’re both going to jail. We only need to find somewhere else for a few days. The police will come here and they’ll find nothing, and then they’ll move on and have no reason to come back. We can give it two days, three at the most, then come back here. It can still be your home.”

  He thinks he understands, and he’s certainly keen to make Cooper think he understands everything. He’s completely divided. Part of him believes Cooper is right and the police may well be on their way, and just as equally he thinks Cooper may be trying to deceive him. It’s a huge risk. His instinct is to hide and see if the police come, but if they do they’ll take Cooper away and he meant what he said earlier, he’d rather kill Cooper than lose him.

  “Where will we go?” he asks.

  “I know a place,” Cooper says. “A couple of them actually. East-lake Home and. .”

  “Sunnyview Shelter,” Adrian finishes. “That’s where you took Emma Green.”

  “How. .”

  “I’m not as stupid as you think,” Adrian says, enjoying this feeling of. . of what? He doesn’t know the name for it because he’s never felt it before. A word like super, but longer. And with a t in it somewhere.

  “You were there? Is that how you knew about me?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Adrian answers, not wanting to tell Cooper how he had been following him for days before collecting him. “If I agree to take you there, how do I know you won’t try to escape?”

  “You can do what you want to me,” Cooper says. “You can tie me up if you must, but please, Adrian, we must leave now. I cannot afford to be caught here.”

  “Because you killed that girl.”

  “Yes.”

  “For two days,” Adrian says.

  “Two days.”

  “And then we come back.”

  “And then we come back,” Cooper says. “I’ll pack up some stuff and hide everything away,” Adrian says. “Nobody will ever know we were here.”

  chapter thirty-four

  Grover Hills is a twenty-minute drive out of the city to the west, taking me well past the airport and the prison and beyond, into the Canterbury Plains, made up of farms with barbed-wire or electric fences keeping livestock and wheat at bay. It gets even hotter out there the further I get from the city, the extra kilometers west bringing me closer to the sun.

  I take a turn off the highway and begin following a series of neglected roads. The institution is hard to find because once you start heading down these roads there aren’t as many street signs as in the city. Either the council didn’t care about this part of the world or the locals took them down in the hope strangers would get lost out here long enough to enter the gene pool. Roads go from tarmac to stone and back to tarmac, changing from intersection to intersection where you have to slow down every few minutes to give way to a farmer moving sheep or cows from one paddock to another, the farmer high up on his tractor, sheep dogs barking and running around with their tongues hanging out, desperate for water and attention. A few days ago, coming back from the prison, we passed these kinds of sights, and the appeal at becoming a farmer and working the land hasn’t grown in that time.

  I get lost and pull off the side of the road into short grass with deep tire ruts from tractor tires, the car bumping up and down. I keep the windows rolled up and the air-conditioning cranked up on maximum. I study the map for five minutes. Map reading has never been my strong suit. I trace over the lines with my finger wishing my wife was here because she’d ask one of the farmers for directions. Whenever we went anywhere new, I’d drive and she’d read the map and Emily would sleep in the backseat and it was a dynamic we were all happy with. I take an educated guess at where I might be on the map but am probably better off just flipping a coin. I carry on driving. It takes me another fifteen minutes driving over unpaved roads to find the place. I figure if you weren’t crazy when the courts or doctors committed you to Grover Hills, you certainly would be after the drive.

  The start of the driveway has a couple of big oak trees acting as sentries, then dozens of silver birches lining the way, their branches thin and twisted and silent in the still air. I park out front and step out and dirt and dust settles behind me and covers the car. It follows me as I walk up to the building. Grover Hills is run-down and nature is trying to reclaim it. Most of the grounds are knee deep in wilted grass and overgrown shrubs that look like giant weeds. The building started out white last century and may have been painted once or twice since then, but certainly not since the moon landing. It’s a giant building that wouldn’t look out of place on a plantation, lots of clapboard and small windows and plenty of rooms. Some of the boards are twisting and others are rotting but all in all the building looks to be in pretty good condition. Abandoned, no doubt about it, but certainly habitable. One whole side of the building is covered in ivy, streamers of it climbing up the walls and entwined in the clay roof tiles. The amazing thing is that nothing has been vandalized. People in this country have a habit of finding places no matter how hidden in the middle of nowhere they are. They find them and smash the windows and knock holes in walls and spray paint giant penises all over them.

  The rental car is the only thing out here making a sound. No breeze, no birds, just the car engine pinging as it cools down. It’s eerie. It’s like I’ve gone way off the map and into a different world, crossing over some Star Trek alternate reality barrier along the way. In prison there was always sound. The humming of the fluorescent lights. A toilet somewhere being flushed. Snoring, coughing, yelling, laughing, footsteps and fighting, air-conditioning. It became white noise, one sound canceling out another. But out here there’s nothing. I take a few steps forward, expecting my feet to make no sound, but they do, they pad against the ground and make exactly the amount of sound I’d expect them to make anywhere else, and the magical spell of being transported to another land is broken.

  I start by walking the perimeter, the gun firmly in my hand. Out front the ground is mostly stone and dusty dirt and some areas of sand; nothing but weeds poking through it every few meters or so, there’s a path that’s broken up by nature and time, triangle corners of cement broken and pushing upward like merging tectonic plates. There is absolutely nothing to suggest it rained last night. Off the path and I start treading carefully, not wanting to step into a rabbit hole and disappear or break my ankle. The grass gets thicker and scratches my legs. I do a circuit of the house. Behind it there’s even more ve
getation than out front. There’s plenty of mold all over the walls. The dirt is softer. I make it back around to the front without seeing anything of interest. No people, no cars, no graves, just two lines of compacted stones and dirt in the driveway where cars have come and gone, no way of knowing when the last one was here. There’s a block of trees about a hundred meters away that is the start of a series of woods.

  I keep the gun pointed down as I walk. Grover Hills feels empty. I have the feeling you get when you knock on somebody’s door and you know nobody is going to answer. But I still keep the gun out. The front entrance is a pair of wide double doors. I step up onto the wooden porch and try them. The left one swings open noisily, the hinges like that of an opening coffin that’s been unearthed. The sun is so high that the angle stops it from gaining entry through the doors because of the veranda. It’s dark inside. Not nighttime dark, but the kind of dark you’d get stepping into a boarded-up church. The air inside is dry and a little cooler the further inside I go, but not much. It doesn’t feel like anybody is here, but the building doesn’t quite feel abandoned either. It feels like something, not somebody, is here.

  It doesn’t look like the kind of building you’d expect an institution to be. It doesn’t have long white corridors with doors locking them off every fifteen meters. Instead it looks like a giant farmhouse, lots of wood everywhere, a very New Zealand version of what we must have thought mental institutions looked like back then. The windows have wire grills over them. There are lots of rooms, and I can see that each one of them has a lock on it. There’s a staircase leading up to a second floor. I haven’t had much luck with staircases lately so I start with the ground floor. I follow the path of the hallway, opening doors and looking into bedrooms on my way to a large communal area where maybe there was a TV set and a Ping-Pong table. There are still couches here, all of them in poor condition, some of them facing the windows overlooking the fields. There’s a door that leads to the kitchen. There is no sign of life, but there is the feeling of being watched. It’s creepy. I can’t shake the feeling that all the dark thoughts from the patients who were locked up out here have formed some malevolent entity that’s haunting the soul of this building, and if that entity came forth my gun would do me no good. In the kitchen there’s a large fridge that looks a hundred years old. I open it up and it’s empty except for layers of mold and no light comes on. I flick one of the kitchen light switches and nothing happens. No power. There’s a long stainless-steel bench with two sinks in it, there are clearings in the dust, circles and lines where objects have been placed and then moved very recently.