It’s too hot to head back outside, and ironically, after four months of wanting nothing more than to come home, I’m hit with an incredible sense of boredom. I stand at the kitchen sink and stare out the window. Though tidy, the backyard looks tired, the heat having drained much of the life from every living thing planted out there. My cat, Daxter, comes in and gives me a sad look, then comes back in a minute later with a bird in his mouth. Daxter is an overweight ginger cat who, for a piece of food, will be your best friend. He puts the bird on the floor next to my feet and steps back and meows at me. I don’t know whether to tell him off or cuddle him. I do the latter, then toss the bird into the garden recycling bin outside.
Like I knew I would, and like Schroder knew I would, I turn my thoughts to the folder with the green cover and rubber bands—a folder full of death. It couldn’t hurt to look. Schroder’s hoping there is something I can see that nobody else can. It’s unlikely, but possibly I can offer a different perspective. Plus I have a mortgage to pay and nothing in the way of job prospects. I pick the file up from the dining table and carry it to the study.
chapter four
The heat is bad—not as bad as earlier this morning when Adrian set fire to his mother, but still hotter than he’d like. People complain about the heat. His mum did. She complained and screamed until the pretty-colored flames melted her tongue to the roof of her mouth and then she couldn’t scream anymore. People like to walk around complaining that it’s too hot and six months ago those same people walked around complaining it was too cold, and people, he knows, just can’t be pleased. Adrian doesn’t like the heat, but he isn’t making a fuss about it. He knows you just have to be careful enough to stay in the shade and drink enough water. If you don’t you can get skin cancer or your skin gets old quickly and gets blotchy and he doesn’t like the idea of that. When he gets too hot he sweats, which makes his clothes stick to him and makes him itch, and he hates itching, because his are the kind of itches that he can never quite get to, they travel as he scratches at them, forcing him to chase them with chewed-up fingernails, which roughs his skin and makes him bleed.
He doesn’t know how to work the radio in the car so he can’t hear the temperature on the news. He wishes he could. He loves to listen to music, any kind of music as long as it’s not that heavy metal stuff you rip your throat up trying to sing along to, or worse, hip-hop. For twenty years he never heard a single song, a life without music, only sad, lonely humming from some of the others he lived with. When music came back into his life, he just didn’t get it. It was like all the rules had changed. Even records and cassette tapes had been replaced with songs you listened to on a computer, and he barely even knew what a computer was let alone how to use one. He listened and adapted to the new styles and now he hates to be without it. His favorite is classical. As a kid he never liked classical music. He used to have a paper route, and he’d save his money, and he was always spending it on cassette tapes. He used to collect them. He liked bands and he liked solo artists, but he didn’t like women singers that much. Every week he would spend his pay on another tape, building his library of music. All those bands and artists are in the past and didn’t date well, but classical music stays the same forever, and now he can’t fall asleep without listening to his tape player.
The car stereo isn’t the only thing not working. For air-conditioning he has to make do with having the window down. He doesn’t have a driver’s license and isn’t sure he’d pass the test if he tried. The thought of it makes him nervous. He could have every piece of information memorized, he’d know in the little diagrams presented if the blue or red car had to give way, he’d know how much tread your tires needed, how much alcohol you could drive with in your blood, but if he sat in front of an officer who watched him trying to complete that test, it would be like a magician came along and made his answers disappear. It would be worse trying to pass the physical part, the part where he had to drive through town with somebody next to him, judging every move he made. He knows he’d only manage a few hundred meters before throwing up all over himself. No, he doesn’t need a license as long as nobody ever pulls him over, and there’s no reason anybody should. He’s a careful driver, and the body in the trunk isn’t making any noise. He just wishes he could get the air-conditioning to work. He isn’t sure whether it’s his fault or the car’s. The car is at least ten years old—surely not everything can be working right on it. The same goes for the radio.
There aren’t many people on the streets as he drives through them. All the faces look the same. The houses seem to fall into two categories—nice ones that he’d like to live in, and bad ones he wouldn’t. His last house was in that second category, but he’s moved out now and living in the house where his mother, God bless her soul, raised him. It’s not a nice place, but it’s home, and there’s a certain something to be said for that. He just doesn’t know what that something is.
The driveway leading to that certain-something house has never been paved. It’s made up from loose tooth-sized pieces of shingle that over the years have compacted into the dirt. Some of that dirt blankets the air behind the car as he drives over it, and when he comes to a stop it settles over the warm metal. He sits in the car and waits for the air to clear, humming to himself, not wanting the dust to stick to his damp body and make the itching worse. Soon the tranquillity returns. He loves it out here—the isolation, the peaceful-ness—out here there are no such things as home invasions and loud cars and people being rude.
The thumb he took from Cooper’s house is sitting on the passenger seat in a glass jar filled with fluid that, if he holds it up to the light, is full of small gray flecks. He shakes it and the flecks float aimlessly like a snow globe but nowhere near as pretty. The thumb doesn’t move much. The nail is longer than he grows his own, and he remembers hearing somewhere that people’s nails still grow after they died, but he isn’t sure that’s true. It makes sense the nail stays the same and the fingers and toes shrink as the body dries out. Cooper would know. Cooper is a professor and a smart person, and this would be just one of a hundred things that he knows. He can’t tell if Cooper cut the thumb from a man or a woman. The nail doesn’t have any polish on it, but that doesn’t mean anything. The cut that removed it from the hand is clean and the bone doesn’t look splintered, but would be under a microscope. Something pretty sharp must have been used. He knows serial killers like to collect moments and . . . and no, not moments, and not moment-o either—he knows the word, has read it a hundred times, but for the moment it just won’t come to him. Whatever it is, he knows that serial killers collect them and that it’s normally a piece of jewelry or clothing they save somewhere private. It’s dangerous for Cooper to have taken an entire thumb, and even more so to have put it on display. Adrian climbs out of the car and rests the jar on the roof where it forms a ring in the dust. The air is full of grasshopper sounds and birdsong. He moves to the back of the car and pops the trunk.
Cooper Riley’s face is grazed from the fall he took when the Taser hit him, and he looks beaten up from banging around in the trunk of the car. His face is puffy and his wrists have swollen and turned purple from being tied behind him. Next time, Adrian thinks, he’ll pad the trunk with blankets first. If nothing else, he’s learning. Cooper would be proud of him.