“Can you tell me when he had his accident?”
He looks confused. “Accident? What, a car accident?”
“Not quite.”
“Then what kind of quite?”
“Can you recall a time when he was off work, maybe for a month or so? Quite suddenly? Would have been around three years ago, around the time of his divorce.”
His eyes flick to the left as he tries to recall, then slowly he shakes his head and his mouth turns into an upside-down smile. “Not that I can remember.”
“He wasn’t sick all of a sudden and couldn’t show up?”
“I’m sure he was. It happens to us all at some point. Life does get in the way of work, detective. Why, does his being sick in the past relate to his disappearance now?”
“I’m not sure,” I tell him.
“Try the administration office,” he tells me. “They’ll have all those kind of records there.”
I follow Collins’s directions to a building more modern than the rest, large tinted glass frontages overlooking a concrete fountain that’s currently home and toilet to a dozen pigeons. There’s a foyer that is like a doctor’s waiting room, with students sitting in chairs reading textbooks or magazines while waiting to talk to somebody. The woman behind the desk is in her late forties and has hair pulled tightly back into a bun and glasses that hang around her neck on a thin chain. Her perfume is sharp and I can feel the hint of a hay fever attack lurking. She’s wearing a blouse that has cat fur caught around the buttons.
“How can I help you?” she asks, smiling up at me.
“You know we searched Cooper Riley’s office earlier?” I ask, hoping she’s going to make the same mistake Professor Collins made, and she does.
“Yes, of course. Everybody knows.”
“There’s something else you may be able to help us with,” I tell her. “There was a time when Riley took a month or more off work. Possibly around three years ago. Can you look that up for me?”
She doesn’t answer me. Instead she puts on her glasses and adjusts the distance between the lenses and her eyes as she looks at a computer monitor, then her fingers fly across the keyboard.
“It’ll take a minute,” she says, and about ten seconds later she finds it. “Here we go. You’re right,” she says. “Almost three years ago. April through to May. Five weeks in total.”
“I need to get a look at names and faces of his students from that year.”
“Why?”
“Please, it’s important. We’re trying to save Cooper’s life,” I tell her.
“Is it true his house was burned down?”
“It’s true.”
“There are hundreds of students from three years ago,” she tells me.
I need to check them all for the arsonist, but that can wait till Schroder gets here. “Just the female ones.”
“I guess I can print them out,” she says. “It’ll take an hour, unless you can narrow down who you’re after.”
“What about students who dropped out during the year? Around the same time Professor Riley was off work?”
“Why? You think that means something?”
“Please,” I tell her, “we need to hurry.”
“Hmm. . let me see,” she says. She taps at the keyboard again. “Four female students dropped out during that time.”
“Any of them named Melissa?”
“Melissa? No, none of them.”
“Can I see their photographs?”
She twists the computer monitor toward me and I have to lean over the desk to get a better view, entering her perfume zone in the process. She cycles through the photos. She gets to the third one when I stop her for a better look. The eyes look familiar.
“I remember this girl,” the receptionist says.
“You do?”
“Not so much her, but her parents. They came in here looking for information.”
“What kind of information?”
“Anything that would help them track her down. She went missing. Oh no,” she says, making the connection. “You think the same thing that happened to Emma Green happened to her?” she asks, tapping the monitor.
I don’t think so. I think these two girls ended up with very different fates. I think the girl on the screen might be the woman who attacked the Christchurch Carver and killed Detective Calhoun. This could be the woman that put Professor Riley in hospital three years ago. Her image has been in the papers and all over the news, an image taken from the video I watched yesterday, but that image isn’t the same as the one I’m looking at now. Similar, but not the same, different haircut, different color hair, a little less weight around the face-but it’s the eyes. Those eyes are the same, I’m sure of it.
Cooper Riley would have known it too. He would have seen the news and he would have known who she really was, and he never came forward to the police.
Why would that be? Is he still afraid of her?
Or is there something he’s hiding?
chapter twenty-two
Cooper’s head is much better today, but it’s still throbbing a little and he’s tempted to take the pills he found in his pocket yesterday. The wound on his chest is starting to itch and when he touches it with his fingers they come away damp with blood and something else too, something that’s not quite yellow. If he doesn’t eat something soon he thinks he’s going to go crazy.
He recognizes the girl. Shoulder-length red hair that is knotted and frayed. Her skin is pale and flushed. She can’t be any more than twenty. A student? Perhaps a former one. Even one from this year-there are always so many. Or it could be somebody from the supermarket, a checkout teller, some girl he’s made idle chitchat with while his groceries were scanned before he swiped his credit card. Maybe a hairdresser from the mall, a Jehovah’s Witness who banged on his door one morning, a receptionist at his doctor’s office. He’s seen her around but can’t place where. She’s in a dress that’s too big for her and covered in flowers that, under the lamplight, all look pale blue. It’s something his mother would wear in the summer.
Jesus, his mother. . she’ll be a mess. His mother will be eighty years old in July, and already the family is planning a huge party for her. His sister is going to fly back from the UK-and he suspects she might be flying back now because of what’s happened, assuming people even know he’s disappeared, which they must do if it’s true what Adrian said about burning down his house. He hopes his mother is holding up okay. She’s a strong woman. Has been ever since his dad walked out on them when Cooper was twelve years old. He hasn’t seen him since. Has no idea whether the man is even alive and doesn’t care. But his mother. . he owes her everything. With a weaker mother, his life would have taken a different path. When he was fourteen years old, he stole a car. He and his friend got drunk, and they crashed it. Neither of them were hurt, but his mother came and picked him up from the police station and didn’t say a word on the way home, didn’t say a word until the following morning when she made him breakfast.
He had apologized, and she had told him she wasn’t the one he should be apologizing to, that he should be apologizing to his future self, that it was his future self he was damaging. He didn’t care. Back then he didn’t care about much except that his dad had left, and how good beer tasted when he snuck out at night to meet his buddy. She made him write himself a letter for the future, in which he told himself how sorry and how stupid he was. She made him write down how much he had hurt his mother. He did that too. Then she went into her room and cried. When she came back out she sat down with him and ate breakfast and told him she felt sorry for the man she was going to give that letter to in ten years’ time. She never gave him that letter. Instead things changed. Every day she would tell him whether his future self would be happy or disappointed with his actions. He started to care about that future self. He didn’t want to grow up to be like his dad. He started to study harder. His grades were good.