Collecting Cooper by Paul Cleave Read Free Book Online Page A

one thing, Joe.”
    “And what’s that?”
    “I don’t need him.”
    Melissa steps into view, this tall woman brimming with sex appeal, but her eyes don’t fit with the package, her body and face transmit the kind of beauty you’d expect from a woman used to showing off the latest fashions on a runway, but her eyes tell a different story, her eyes reveal somebody you’d expect to spend her nights skinning kittens. She moves gracefully toward Calhoun and the veins stand out in her neck from the effort of plunging the knife into his chest. The camera doesn’t move. Joe doesn’t enter the frame. I want to put the TV on mute because I don’t want to hear the sounds Calhoun makes because somehow they’re worse than seeing him convulse beneath her. There’s a long gargling sound, like the last of the water draining from a bathtub. When it’s over, Melissa tucks her hair over her right ear and looks toward the camera, but not right at it. The Carver never comes into view.
    “You stupid bitch. How could you do such a thing?”
    She pulls the silver duct tape away from Calhoun’s mouth and blood spills out of it and down his front. “I’m surprised that you thought I wouldn’t.”
    I’m surprised too.
    She carries on. “I told you no tricks, Joe.”
    “No you didn’t.”
    “Well you should have assumed it. I still want my money.”
    After that the footage gets even worse. There is a coldness with this woman that I’ve never seen before, a cold beauty that remains even when she withdraws the knife and drags it across the dead detective’s throat. Not long after she walks away the footage ends. Melissa said no tricks, but filming her was a trick. I wonder what the money is she’s talking about. According to the file the question has been posed to Joe, but he hasn’t given an answer.
    I switch off the TV and walk slowly down the hallway to the study with a stronger determination to help Schroder. This is why he included the DVD. The connection between Melissa and the Carver is hard to understand. She tortured him, they became lovers, and he won’t give up any information on her. It doesn’t make sense. If the Carver hadn’t been arrested, would they have stayed together until one of them killed the other?
    By the end of the first hour there aren’t any spare surfaces on the desk and I’ve had to lock down the fan to keep it from blowing the papers away. By the end of the second hour parts of the floor are covered and some of the images are taped to a whiteboard I have in my study and the fan is back in the wardrobe. All the windows in the house are open. I can hear a stereo thumping from one of the neighboring houses and somebody singing along to it. I wanted to think in silence, but I turn my own stereo on preferring to listen to my own music rather than somebody else’s. I listen to a Beatles album and think things were easier back then before figuring things are never easy. In the two hours I’ve created piles of chaos with no real clear insight to who this woman is.
    The security guard on the golf course was the last body found, and that was three weeks ago. I wonder what Melissa wants their uniforms for. All that wondering, though, tires me out, and by the end of the third hour I start moving through the house, putting some distance between me and the collection of evidence. I pause in the kitchen and make a sandwich. I’d planned on arriving homeand somehow making my way out to see my wife, but somehow three hours have gone by and I haven’t even thought of her. I feel like getting a drink. Start with a beer and see what follows, but there’s no alcohol in the house. I end up sitting at the dining table with my lunch and a glass of milk the same way I did when I was a kid.
    There is a world waiting for me back in the study, a world that I thought I had escaped. I finish my lunch and I’m halfway down the hall back toward that world when somebody knocks on my front door. My parents said they’d