Once I get past the blocked RV, traffic thins out. I miss two more calls from Donovan Green. I pull into the university parking lot and stop in a handicapped spot. There’s a student sitting in a shopping cart with another student pushing him along a sidewalk, both of them laughing.
I limp to the psychology department wishing I had crutches. I struggle with the stairs, leaning on the handrail along the way. A couple of people pass me and stare at me while pretending not to stare at me, I can see part of them wants to offer to help, but the bigger part doesn’t want to suggest that I need the help. It’s like opening a door for a person in a wheelchair and not knowing whether they’re going to say thank you or fuck off. I reach the second floor where all the offices are lined up. There’s a montage of photographs on the wall of faculty members, the kind of thing you’d see where dead people were being remembered, small hand-sized portrait shots forming a grid. I search through them for the man who lit the fire and decide it could have been about half of them. Cooper Riley is among them, his hair not so gray and more of it in the photo. I head down the corridor. Everything up here looks old enough to predate the very subject of psychology. All the office doors are blue and they’re all labeled by name and Cooper’s office is no different in that aspect, but very different in the fact there is crime scene tape crisscrossed over the door. There’s a large poster pinned to the wall between two of the offices labeled Personality Study with flow diagrams and long complicated words that give me a headache. Nobody is around. I try the door. It’s locked. I take out the keys I found in the front door to Cooper’s house. One of them fits. I pull down the tape and toss it onto the floor. The blame will go to the students.
The air in the office is thick and stale. The desk is pine and there are dents and scratches covering the surface, and nothing on top of it shares any of the same angles. The desk drawers are open and the filing cabinet is open and the computer is running and there’s fingerprint powder on plenty of flat surfaces. The police came here looking for any clue as to what happened to Cooper Riley. I can imagine Cooper being the kind of guy to keep everything in straight lines and if he were to come into his office right now he’d be pretty upset. My cell phone rings and it’s Schroder.
“Where are you?” he asks. “The sketch artist just showed up at your place.”
“Shit. I completely forgot. Tell him I’m on my way.”
“Listen, there’s no record of Cooper Riley reporting any crime,” he says. “Why did you want to know?”
“So you’re on the case now?”
“Two fires in two days. It could be connected, so yeah, I’m on the case. The fire department will know for sure hopefully later on today.”
I tell him about what the neighbor said.
“And you think our Melissa X did that to him?”
“I think so.”
“Why wouldn’t Riley report that?”
“That’s the question. Why wouldn’t a victim report being a victim?”
“Happens every day, Tate,” he says. “You know that. Only about one in seven rapes are reported. Could easily be the same psychology behind that as what happened to Riley, assuming what the neighbor said is true,” he says.
“Can you access his medical records?”
“I’ll try to get a warrant.”
“How’d the search of Riley’s office go?”
“It hasn’t turned up anything. We’re hoping forensics will find something at the house or Cooper’s car once we can go through the ruins, but it’s not looking hopeful.”
“I’m thinking of taking a run out to his office,” I say, leaning against the edge of the desk. “See if I can spot something you missed.”
“Are you trying to offend me?” he asks.
“No. It’s like you say, I have an eye for this kind of thing. So, are you cool with that?”
“That depends, Tate. Are you already there?”
“What if I was?”
“Then you’d be entering a crime scene, which can go a long way to damaging whatever case we’re building up here.”
“Technically it’s not a crime scene,” I tell him. “Come on, Carl, what can it hurt if I take a look around?”
“I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes,” he says. “Last thing I want is you messing things up.”
He hangs up. I start flicking through the files on Cooper’s desk the same way somebody else would have earlier today. They’ve gone through all the student and staff files because so far that’s the only link between Cooper Riley and Emma Green. Maybe an ex-psychiatry student who was pissed off about a failing grade wanted to get even. Maybe he blamed Emma Green somehow too.
I check the filing cabinet and the files have been jammed in one direction and obviously thumbed through, they cover this year’s students and last year’s students but don’t go back any further. I think about Melissa and whether she’s the reason Cooper Riley has become Professor Mono to his neighbors. If she was, she could have been a student here. He had to interact with her somehow.
I step out into the corridor and move down to the next office. A plaque on the door says it belongs to Professor Collins. The door is slightly ajar and I knock on it and open it the rest of the way. A man sitting behind a desk looks up at me. He has wiry gray hair and eyes that are too big for his face and his ears stick out almost ninety degrees. The office has the same layout and same view as Cooper’s, only nowhere near as messy.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
“Professor Collins?”
“Just like the door says,” he says, smiling and leaning back in his chair. “You’re not a student,” he says, “so you’re either a reporter or a cop. I’m going to go with cop. Am I right? You’re here to ask questions about Cooper Riley? I’ve heard his house burned down this afternoon, and you guys were searching his office an hour ago.”
“Well done, sir,” I say, stepping inside.
“Please, take a seat,” he says, and I sit opposite him, stretching my leg out in front of me. “So, any word on Cooper?”
“None yet. How long have you worked here?”
“Going on fifteen years,” he says.
“You know Cooper well?”
“What do you think happened to him? Do you think he’s going to be okay?”
“We’re looking into it,” I tell him. “Please, anything you can tell me might help.”
“Sure, I knew him well. We have offices next to each other. We’ve both been working here the same amount of time. We both went to each other’s wedding and sometimes we’ll still have dinner together.”
“How long has he been divorced?” I ask, aware these are things that Schroder already knows.
“Hmm, let me think. Three years ago, give or take. His wife moved on, you know. Met somebody else. I heard they met online. Happens all the time these days. It’s an interesting psychological phenomena, really, how people form online relationships to find a connection in the offline world. I’m actually thinking of writing a paper on it.”
“She still around?”
He shakes his head. “Australia, last time I heard, but Cooper never talks about her. Just one day she was in his life, the next day she wasn’t. It’s a shame. They’re both good people, but it didn’t work. It happens that way sometimes,” he says, but he doesn’t follow it up by saying he’s thinking of writing a paper on it. “Cooper took it pretty hard.”