Collecting Cooper
Authors: Paul Cleave
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #General, #Mystery & Detective
From internationally bestselling author
Paul Cleave—a gripping new thriller about a
former private investigator’s search for redemption
and a mental patient’s dark obsession
P
EOPLE ARE DISAPPEARING IN CHRISTCHURCH. COOPER
Riley, a psychology professor, doesn’t make it to work one day. Emma Green, one of his students, doesn’t make it home. When ex-cop Theodore Tate is released from a four-month prison stint, he’s asked by Green’s father to help find Emma. After all, Tate was in jail for nearly killing her in a DUI accident the year before, so he owes him. Big time. What neither of them knows is that a former mental patient is holding people prisoner as part of his growing collection of serial killer souvenirs. Now he has acquired the ultimate collector’s item—an actual killer.
Meanwhile, clues keep pulling Tate back to Grover Hills, the mental institution that closed down three years ago. Very bad things happened there. Those who managed to survive would prefer keeping their memories buried. Tate has no choice but to unearth Grover Hills’ dark past if there is any chance of finding Emma Green and Cooper Riley alive.
For fans of Dennis Lehane’s
Shutter Island,
Thomas Harris’s
Silence of the Lambs,
and Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series,
Collecting Cooper
is another “relentlessly gripping, deliciously twisted, and shot through with a vein of humor that’s as dark as hell” (Mark Billingham) novel by this glimmering new talent in the crime thriller genre.
ALSO BY PAUL CLEAVE
Blood Men
Cemetery Lake
The Killing Hour
The Cleaner
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Paul Cleave
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Atria Paperback edition July 2011
ATRIA
PAPERBACK
and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at
www.simonspeakers.com
.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cleave, Paul, date.
Collecting Cooper : a thriller / Paul Cleave.—1st Atria pbk. ed.
p. cm.
1. Murderers—Fiction. 2. Christchurch (N.Z.)—Fiction.
3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PR9639.4.C54C65 2011
823ˈ.92—dc22
2011002934
ISBN 978-1-4391-8962-7
ISBN 978-1-4391-8964-1 (ebook)
To Paul Waterhouse and Daniel Williams—
we’ve been friends for over thirty years with much more to go
COLLECTING
COOPER
Emma Green hopes the old man isn’t dead. It’s one of those moments that come along in life where you think one thing and pray for another. The one thing dead for sure is the café. There have only been two customers over the last hour and neither ordered anything beyond a coffee, and her boss isn’t the kind of guy to let anyone go home early even on a slow Monday night, and just as equally he isn’t the kind of guy to be in much of a good mood because of it. The parking lot out back has her car and her boss’s car and a couple of others. There’s a dumpster off to the side and some milk crates stacked against it and the air smells of cabbage. There’s not much in the way of lighting. But some. Enough to see the old guy slumped in the front seat with his mouth open and his eyes closed, his head angled to one side, looking exactly the same way her granddad looked a couple of years back when they had to bust down the bathroom door after he went in and didn’t come out.
She walks up to the car and peers in. A string of saliva dangles from his lower lip to his chest. His hairline has receded about as far as a hairline can go before being considered bald. She recognizes
him. He was in a couple of hours ago. Coffee and a scone and he sat in the corner with a newspaper trying to solve the crossword puzzle. “The devil lives here,” he kept whispering over and over while he tapped his pen on the table, and she glanced over his shoulder thinking she knew the answer and saw there was only space for five letters. Christchurch has twelve. “Hades,” she had told him, and he had smiled and thanked her and been pleasant enough.
She wants to tap on the window hoping he’s sleeping, but if he is sleeping then she may startle and frighten him and then it’s all going to be very embarrassing. But if he isn’t sleeping, maybe his heart only stopped beating a few seconds ago and there’s a good chance it can be kick-started. The sums don’t add up, though, because he left the café over an hour ago. No reason for him to sit out here for an hour before dying, unless he was working on the crossword. Well, maybe the devil got him. She stares through the window. She reaches out to it but doesn’t touch it. She should just let the next person deal with it. But if she did that the old man would still be just as dead in the morning only he’d be poorer, and his car stereo would have gone too.
If she was the one sitting freshly dead in a parked car, would she want people to keep passing her by?
She taps on the window. He doesn’t move. She taps again. Nothing. Her stomach drops as she grabs the handle. The door is unlocked. She swings it open and places a few fingers on his neck, her wrist snapping the drool from his chin where it dangles over her arm like a strand of spiderweb. His skin is still warm but there’s no pulse, not there, and she shifts her fingers and . . .
He gasps deeply and pulls back. “What the fuck?” he blurts, blinking heavily to clear his vision. “Hey, hey, what the hell are you doing?” he shouts.
“I . . .”
“You goddamn thief whore,” he says, sounding nothing at all like her granddad—at least nothing like him before the Alzheimer’s set in—and he grabs her hand and pulls her in. “You were trying to . . .”
“I thought . . .”
“Whore!” he shouts, then spits on her. She can smell old man sweat and old man food and his clothes smell of old man and his bony grip is strong. She feels sick. Her back hurts from the angle, her back has hurt pretty much from every angle since the car accident last year, and she reaches for his hand and tries to break his grip.
“You were trying to steal from me,” he says.
“No, no, I work at the . . . the . . .” she says, but the words get caught up in the tears, “coffee and a . . . a scone and I, I thought you . . .” This close his breath is almost hot and humid enough to start her makeup running. She can’t finish what she’s trying to say.
He lets her go and slaps her across the face. Hard. Harder than she’s ever been slapped by anybody in her seventeen years on this earth. Her head twists to the side and her cheek is burning. Then his hands are on her chest, at first she thinks he’s trying to feel her up, but then he’s shoving her and the stars come into view and swirl overhead, and her back is hitting the pavement, her hands behind her breaking the fall.
The car door slams shut. The engine starts. He winds the window down and shouts something else at her before pulling away, but she doesn’t hear him over the car and over the blood rushing in her ears. He races toward the exit, hugging the wall too closely and clipping the edge of the dumpster there. It grinds a long dent into it, and she expects him to pull over and scream at her some more, but he carries on, racing out onto the street where there’s the squeal of another car’s breaks and somebody yells out
“Asshole
.
”