“There’s nowhere else for you,” Adrian says.
“Well, then how about leaving that slot open. And I’m going to need water. Plenty of it.”
“I can do that, I guess. Also, umm, I wanted to, you know, to thank you for telling me the police would find us. That was really nice of you and, and. . and what I want to know is, is it true what they say about serial killers wanting to kill their mothers?”
Like you killed Pamela Deans? Is it possible after all his years in Grover Hills Adrian formed a connection that made him look at Nurse Deans as a mother figure? It takes him only a second to decide that yes, it’s entirely possible.
“In most cases,” he answers. “Why?”
“If you kill your mother will that make you a serial killer?” Adrian asks.
“You think you’re a serial killer?”
“No,” Adrian says, looking away. “I’m just, you know, curious.”
“I don’t know,” Cooper says. “It depends on whether you kill other people too.”
“What about your mother?” Adrian asks.
“What?”
“I’ve read heaps and heaps of books and they all say that serial killers grow up hating their mothers. They say that the one person a serial killer wants to kill more than anybody is their abusive mother, and instead they kill other women as surr. . surr-goats,” Adrian says.
“Surrogates.”
“Sir-gates. Is that why you killed all those other people?”
The answer is no. And there aren’t all those other people. There are only two. “My mother is a good person,” Cooper says, and it’s true. He loves his mother. Right now she’ll be sitting in her living room, photos of Cooper and his sister staring down from the walls. His sister probably in the middle of some long-haul flight back to New Zealand to be with their mum. Friends and other family members trying to keep her comforted, a damp handkerchief in her lap, an absolute blank stare on her face, hoping her son is alive but believing otherwise. When people go missing in this country they don’t show back up. At least not alive.
“Your mother made you who you are,” Adrian says. “She’s the reason you became a killer.”
“That’s not true.”
“But the books say. .”
“The books aren’t always accurate, Adrian. They’re a generalization.”
“A what?”
“It means the books say what works for most people, but not for all. There are always going to be exceptions.”
“The books didn’t say anything about exceptions.”
“But there are. You didn’t become fascinated with killers because of your mother, right?”
“That was different. That didn’t happen to you, which means you must hate your mother.”
“I don’t hate her. I love her.”
“Do you think she’s collectable?”
For a split second the words don’t make sense, at least he doesn’t think they do, but he knows, he knows what Adrian means. “What?”
“If you really love her, then bringing her here is the best thing I can do for you. If you hate her and want her dead, then bringing her here is also a good thing for you.”
“Don’t bring her here,” he says, his words low.
“What?”
“I said don’t bring her here,” he repeats, louder this time.
“But she’ll be perfect for the collection!” Adrian says, sounding out of breath. “Both serial killer and the woman who made him that way.”
“She didn’t make me this way.”
“We can talk about it when I come back with her.”
“Wait, wait,” Cooper says, moving toward the slot, but Adrian closes it and he returns to the darkness. “Wait!” he shouts, but it’s no use. He bangs on the padded door and can’t make much of a sound. “Adrian! Adrian!”
But Adrian is already gone.
chapter thirty-six
I take a time-out to have a slice of life moment. I’ve hardly eaten all day and my body is starting to crash. I hit a drive-through and pick up a hamburger and fries and some kind of Coke substitute that consists of syrup and about four carbonated bubbles. It tastes exactly how I remember it tasting, which is a real shame. I stay in my car, parked under the shade of some large elm trees as burger juice runs down my fingers onto my wrist. There are kids playing cricket, which means that school is over for the day, which means it’s much later than I thought it was. I think about my daughter as I eat my burger. I think about her friends from school and wonder how many of them still remember her. Then I think about the blood on the steps leading down to the basement at Grover Hills and how, at the moment, the place is most likely now a crime scene. The ice in the Coke melts and makes the drink a little more bearable. I think about Jesse Cart-man and the Scream Room. If there were any truth to what Cart-man said and the room was still active and I was still a cop with my daughter in the ground, would I blow the whistle on that room and all the bad things that happened there? I finish off the hamburger. I’d want revenge the same way many others would, but seeing Jesse Cartman, seeing he was never really responsible for his past, does that change things? I don’t know. I think it should. I like to think it would have changed things enough for me not to have lost my mind, pay off a couple of orderlies, and go into a basement with a baseball bat looking for revenge.
I bundle up the mess and drop it into a trash bin.
If what Jesse Cartman said is true, then the Twins did this city a service by taking care of some of the trash-the trash being those who faked their illness. But they did the city a disservice by beating on those who were ill, hurting those who couldn’t defend themselves. There’s no excuse for that. After I find Emma Green, I’m going to find those twins.
It’s less than a ten-minute drive to the halfway house. The friendly construction of old places being knocked down and replaced by the new in this part of town hasn’t reached this block of homes, tall miserable-looking state homes with unkempt yards and junked-out cars parked up on front lawns, warped clapboards and twisted fences and dog shit every few feet. The halfway house is a two-story place that hasn’t been quite as neglected as the neighboring properties, the difference being only one third of the fence is missing compared to the others, which are shooting around half. I park opposite it, thankful there’s still five hours of sunlight left; this is one neighborhood I wouldn’t want to be caught in after dark. The house is painted a poor choice of green, the roof a poor choice of red, the front door a poor choice of black. The whole thing would look good in orange; nice large engulfing orange flames. I separate the remaining cash Donovan Green gave me into two one-thousand-dollar piles and fold them into separate pockets. I cross the road and knock on the front door and hope I haven’t just contracted syphilis.
A guy in his midsixties opens it. He’s wearing a white buttoned-up short-sleeve shirt with a black tie and pants and a fedora. He looks like he’s about to head to the track in 1960. There are cigarette burns all up the insides of his arms that look as old as his outfit. His blue eyes burn out from his deeply tanned face and I realize forty years ago this guy would have done well with the ladies. “You lost, son?” he asks, his voice is low and gravely.
“No. I’m. .”
“You the police?”
“Yes.”
“Somebody done something?”
“Yes.”
“What exactly?”
“I need to talk to somebody in charge.”
“I’m in charge.”
“Are you really?”
“We’re all in charge, son. We all have to be in charge of our own lives to take responsibility for ourselves.”
“That’s admirable. Is somebody else here responsible for everybody else besides themselves?”
He starts picking at one of the burns on his arms, but it’s an old burn and he can’t lift any of the scar tissue. No way of telling whether he gave them to himself or had a helping hand. My cell phone starts ringing and I reach into my pocket to mute it.