“Pretty much.”
“Yeah. That took a toll on that family, and when Natalie went missing, well, you can figure out the rest. We showed her the images we had of Melissa X. She says it looks like her daughter, but it’s not her. She saw the photos in the papers last year and thought the same thing. I think she can’t get her head around the possibility of what her daughter was capable of, that’s why she can only see a stranger in those pictures. Look, Tate, if we do it your way then maybe we get the guy and we find Cooper and they take a walk because their defense attorney points out how a convicted felon was contaminating the crime scenes. We do it that way then I lose my job too and then I’m no good to anybody else that goes missing.”
“The connection between. .”
“Jesus, Tate, let it go.”
“I’m trying to help you here.”
“No you’re not. You’re trying to help yourself. You feel responsible for Emma Green, but you’re not.”
“I. .”
“I’m hanging up now, Tate. It’s for your own good.”
I start pacing the study, loosening up my knee. It’s still swollen but not as tight as yesterday. The rain has eased off and the gutters on the roads are no longer overflowing. There are patches of blue sky far in the distance. I understand what Schroder is saying, but it’s hard to give a damn when I’m trying to save Emma Green’s life. I’m talking short term and he’s talking long term. I’m talking about saving one girl and he’s talking about saving future girls.
There has to be a copy of Cooper Riley’s book somewhere. If he was working on it at home, then any trace of it there would be destroyed, but Riley seems the kind of man who would keep it backed up. Maybe it’s hidden on a flash drive somewhere taped to the back of a filing cabinet. Or, more likely, it’ll be on his office computer.
I step outside and there’s a warm wind flicking rain water from the trees into my face. By the time I get to the university all the dark clouds have disappeared, the sky out to the east is gray but in the west it’s all blue, the sun beating down on half the city. There are more cars in the parking lot since yesterday and more people around. Everybody seems more awake than the last few days. Though that might change, because the morning is getting muggier by the minute. In my lifetime I can remember Christchurch going above one hundred degrees less than a dozen times. It’ll hit ninety degrees ten times in a good summer, perhaps once in a bad one. Last week it kept closing in on one hundred and ten, and I get the feeling today isn’t going to be any different.
I park in the shade of a silver birch and leave my windows open a crack so the pressure inside from the heat doesn’t punch a hole in the roof. There’s a patrol car parked outside the psychology building. I walk past a set of double doors with a sign out front saying Psychology Loading Bay. Maybe they load crazy people into the lecture halls for the students to practice on. I make my way upstairs and keep walking past Cooper’s office, nodding toward the two constables stationed outside. When I’m out of the hallway, I call Donovan Green. I can hear pigeons up on the roof through the air vents, they’re loud enough that I have to jam my finger into my other ear.
“I heard about the photographs,” he says. “But the police won’t show me.”
“It’s for the best.”
“You were the one to find them?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you didn’t call.”
“I’m calling now.”
“We had a deal, remember? You were meant to report to me first, not the police.”
“That just puts Emma in greater danger.”
“At least she’s alive. I told you she was a survivor.”
“I think Cooper Riley being abducted may have saved her life,” I tell him, “but we just don’t know.”
I walk up and down the corridors of the psychology department until I find the server room. Inside I can see lots of computers all hard-wired together. I can hear the fans going and the air-conditioning unit inside keeping the room cool. There’s a guy inside so pale-looking he can’t know there’s a heat wave outside because he hasn’t stepped into the sun since turning thirteen. He’s about twenty now, with messy hair and long sideburns and I watch him and try to figure out how much money we’re going to need. I figure I’m going to need more than I have on me.
“So now where do we look?” Green asks.
“I have a lead, but I need some cash.”
“How much?”
“Five grand. Hopefully less.”
“What for?”
“I’ll explain when you get here,” I say, and I tell him where I am and hang up and wait.
chapter twenty-six
Adrian is settling into the routine. For the three years he’s been gone from the Grove he’s missed the place, which, honestly, he doesn’t understand because for the twenty years he was here he hated every minute of it. When he was forced to leave, as they were all forced to, groups were put into halfway houses, where they would be integrated into the community, some successfully, some not so, others killing themselves, others dying homeless in the streets. They were given bank accounts and sickness benefits, almost two hundred dollars a week going to them from a government that didn’t care where they ended up. Adrian had never had nightmares until he began living in the halfway house, a run-down wooden version of his real home run by a man who called himself the Preacher. The house was less than a quarter of the size of Grover Hills, with only one kitchen and two bathrooms they all had to share, his bedroom shared with a man the same age as him but in a wheelchair, wheeled in from another institution that closed down around the same time. In all that time the man never spoke a word to him, and for a long time Adrian resented him for that, but that resentment faded once he learned the man’s silence was brought about by the fact he’d had his tongue bitten out. Adrian was unclear whether the man had bitten his own tongue out or if it had been done for him, and either possibility made his muscles contract around the back of his neck and his stomach sag. The most noise that man ever made was about five months ago when he choked on a chicken bone and died, the color drained from his face leaving dark bags under his eyes. The halfway house always stunk of food and the carpets were damp and his shared bedroom was smaller than his room here. The windowsills in the bathrooms were full of rot and the ceilings in them sagged and if you put your face against the wall it would be sliced up by flakes of dried paint. He hated it there. His mother never came to visit, even though she promised she would.
Adrian’s real mother never visited him at all since he left home twenty-three years ago, not since the incident with the cats. He has two mothers, the one who abandoned him when he was sixteen, and the one who abandoned him three years ago when his home was closed down. Both were hard women. Both left him to fend for himself. Both he holds in contempt, as well as loving them fully. His original mother died eight years ago. Nobody told him it had happened, and he only found out when he was released. He has no idea if she died being the same person he remembered her being when he was a kid. He doesn’t even know how real his memories are, whether they’re true accounts of their relationship or whether they faded and twisted over time. He knows he was sad when he found out about her. He had it all planned-a trip back home, a knock on the door, his mother would hug him and everything would be okay. Only back home wasn’t home anymore, it still felt that way until he knocked on the door and a stranger answered. The stranger was a man in his fifties, he had bought the house years earlier and knew nothing about Adrian or his mother, but the neighbors next door were still the same. So it was from next door that he got the news his mother had died, and he broke down and sobbed, the old lady there doing her best to comfort him. His mother had died of a brain embolism. He doesn’t know what that is, what causes them, but was told an embolism is basically a ticking time bomb inside your head that can go off at any time. His mother’s had gone off while she was standing in line at a supermarket. The checkout aisle was the last thing she ever saw. One second she was alive and the next second she wasn’t.