Chapter Eight
“Gould’s bike,” Cooper muttered as the four of them stood at the back of the house examining the Yamaha. He glanced at Park, who was biting his lip and looked almost upset. Cooper wasn’t surprised. Park really hadn’t thought Baker was the unsub.
“That looks like suitable cause to me,” Harris said, a little cheerfully considering they may be about to walk in on a sliced-up Gould.
Cooper drew his gun and walked into the open house. Christie, Harris and Park followed behind him. The floor was a terracotta-colored linoleum laid to look like Tuscan villa stone if you squinted very hard. It squeaked under Cooper’s weight as he walked down the hall and systematically cleared the rooms.
The house was empty. No sign of Baker. No sign of Gould.
“We should split up and do a search of the house and property,” he said. “There must be twenty storage sheds scattered out there at least.”
“I’ll contact the station to get some crime scene guys up here,” Harris said, unclipping his radio and heading towards the front door.
“I’m better outside,” Christie mumbled. “I’ll start on the sheds on the far side of the property where the ground is worse. Watch your step.” He followed Harris out.
That left Cooper standing with Park in the living room. Park had that closed-off look on his face again and Cooper wondered if he was angry with him. He felt the insane urge to apologize. For what? Sorry for being right? Sorry your childhood bogeyman turned out to be a grown-up monster who killed three, or more, men?
Park had screwed up. He should have said something about Baker from the start, and they both knew it.
Cooper started looking around while in his periphery he watched Park do the same. The house was neat enough, compared to outside, but whole rooms seemed stale and dusty. Cooper spent an embarrassing amount of time in his apartment when not at work, and there wasn’t a speck of dust on the tables, not because he was necessarily a clean freak but because he was using them all the time.
“I thought he was supposed to be a hermit. What kind of hermit isn’t found at home?”
“Maybe he knew we were coming,” Park said, poking at a small welded sculpture in the corner that was either a kneeling man with horns or an out-of-control shrubbery.
Cooper looked at a jumble of repurposed metal pieces. Between the horns, or branches, a small chunk of yellow quartz was wedged. “Baker made that sculpture at the Pumphouse.” It wasn’t a question so much as a spoken epiphany, and Park just shrugged.
“Do you think someone warned him we were coming? Whittaker or his boss?”
“And scare off the only reason you’re not booking Whittaker right now? No. Besides, just because Rudi supports his...art doesn’t mean they’re close.”
“True. But it does suggest he’s at least a little familiar with the Pumphouse. He could have crossed paths with Gould there.”
“Offered him some work and when he got up here...what? I don’t smell any blood and even Baker’s scent is faded. He must have a secondary location.”
“Any ideas?”
“I don’t think he has any other property or family. But I also didn’t think Baker was capable of murder, so what the hell do I know.” Park sounded a little disgusted with himself.
“Everyone’s capable of murder,” Cooper said, glancing over the shelves. Art books mostly; some more figurines with Baker’s signature “what the hell is it” style of metal shapes wrapped around that peculiar yellow quartz; a framed photograph of a laughing man and woman in baggy ’80s sweatshirts and stiff high-waisted jeans. Between them a towheaded boy of about twelve with huge ears hung from their arms and cheesed at the camera. Geoffrey Baker and his parents. Cooper tried to imagine this dopey-looking boy becoming the local Boo Radley, avoided and mocked by the locals and chasing bratty kids off his property, snarling. Kids who couldn’t have been more than a decade younger than him, really.
He tried to imagine this boy kidnapping and torturing young men before dumping their bodies in the woods.
“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Park said.
“What?” Cooper realized he’d picked the picture up and quickly replaced it on the shelf where it overlooked the room in a place of honor. Whatever had snapped in Baker, it wasn’t a lack of love for his family.
“Everyone’s capable of murder. You don’t believe that,” Park clarified.
“Yeah I do,” Cooper said, moving into the adjoining room, a small bedroom with a twin bed, a couple of posters on the wall. Rothko and Chagall prints. A book was open on the bedside table, The Creative Spirit. “Maybe not cold, calculated murder. But in the right situation anyone could become a killer.”
“Any wolf, you mean,” Park said. He’d followed Cooper into the bedroom and started looking through the closet and delicately sniffing the clothes.
“No, I said anyone. I meant anyone,” Cooper said a little tersely. First the comments about Whittaker and now this. He wasn’t used to people viewing him as a bigot. Or maybe he just hadn’t been forced to notice before. “It’s not like you’ve got the market cornered on rage. Though I do think wolves have a better chance of successfully killing someone. But that’s just logistics. Not morals or whatever it is you think I think about wolves.”
Park didn’t respond, so Cooper turned to check he was still there and not...holding Gould’s hidden head pulled out of a hatbox or something.
He wasn’t, thank god, but he had stopped sniffing the closet and was watching Cooper with a strange expression.
“What’s up?”
“I don’t get you, Dayton,” Park said. His voice was quiet, frustrated and something else Cooper couldn’t identify.
“What’s not to get? Unlike some people, I say what I’m thinking.” Too often, when I’m with you.
Park smiled and shook his head. “That must be why you don’t make any sense.”
Cooper flipped him off. “Got anything over there, Sniffy?”
“His scent is especially faded in here. I don’t think anyone’s slept in this bed for at least a week.”
“Definitely a secondary location then. An accomplice? Friend? Lover?”
“I don’t think so. He’s lonely.”
Cooper made a face. “Oh really. What does that smell like?”
“Smells like Baker and no one else ever touched these clothes. Ever.”
“Maybe he liked being alone. That doesn’t make him lonely,” Cooper said, feeling oddly defensive of a wolf he was pretty sure was in the middle of a killing rampage. But the memory of their argument last night had drifted awkwardly into the room. He wondered what Park would know from taking a whiff of his apartment. Not that Park was going to be in his apartment.
“Maybe,” Park said in a way that clearly meant he didn’t agree. “Anyway, none of it’s been worn in a week at least, either. If he is around he’s not wearing these clothes.”
They left the bedroom and quietly worked through the rest of the house.
Cooper wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He frowned at the multiple containers of takeout. He couldn’t get the delivery guy to walk up to his third-story apartment, but Baker was getting delivery up here to Deliverance? Maybe Baker went down to town more than they’d realized.
He sang softly to himself, “I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand. Gonna get a big dish of—” Cooper opened a container with his pen “—pad thai.”
“Nope,” Park said from right next to his ear.
Cooper jumped. “Jesus! Make some noise every once in a while, why don’t you.”
“No nuts.”
“What the fuck did you just say to me?”
Park’s eyes narrowed in amusement but his face remained serious. He nodded at the fridge. “I don’t smell any nuts. Pad thai is cooked in peanut oil and served with nuts. Ipso facto, it’s not pad thai.”
Ipso facto? “Oh, well, case closed then.” Cooper slammed the fridge shut. “What are you, the Food Network’s next hit series, Chef Detective?”
“I like to experiment.” Park flashed a smile. “I want to show you something.” He led Cooper to the entryway by the front door and crouched. “What do you think about this?”
Cooper crouched beside him and their knees brushed. Park pointed at the doormat.
“What I am looking at?” Cooper said.
Park rubbed his hand across the bristle of the mat and dirt bounced up. No, not dirt. More of that crap that had been on the dead bear. He picked up a piece and squeezed it between his fingers. Again some distant childhood memory peeked through the haze, and this time Cooper let it. He thought of being ten and kneeling on the sidelines, relieved his mom was too sick to come to his soccer game that day and see him sit the whole thing out. And then feeling guilty for being relieved.
“It’s Astroturf,” Cooper realized. “For sports fields, you know, with fake grass?” He was surprised it had taken him this long to recognize it. He’d had a particular loathing for it as a child. It was forever working its way inside his shoes and sticking to his socks and shorts where it would hide—even when he took his cleats off before going inside as he knew he was supposed to—until his father came home and demanded to know who had tracked dirt all through the house and made Mom upset.
Park was frowning. “I don’t think Baker’s the type to kick a ball around with some buddies.”
“On a hunch I’d say neither was that bear.”
“The field where they found Jenny this morning, that’s Astroturf.”
They both paused to think about that. “Is it the only one?” Cooper asked.
“I think so. Not a very modern town, Florence. But I’m not sure. Do you think Jenny’s abduction is connected to the killings after all?”
Cooper wasn’t ready to answer that. “Let’s check out those sheds.”
Christie and Harris were still clunking around the front yard, so Park took the containers in the side woods and Cooper headed to the back, where five more containers of varying sizes were perched in a loose circle like some weird, ritualistic Stonehenge. In between them perched more sculptures Cooper was beginning to recognize as figurative. Various animals and people with gleaming quartz eyes that seemed to watch him wherever he went. He shook off their gaze and started working through the containers.
Inside he found more metal and various rusted machines. A ton of camping and climbing gear. A lot of magazines. A cream-and-yellow-flowered couch wrapped in thick plastic and other dated furniture that had probably belonged to Baker’s parents. Sentimental? No wonder the house was so neat. Like an undercover hoarder, the guy had just boxed up everything out here. Despite the amount of stuff, nothing looked out of place or gave any clue of another property.
It was slow going, and by the end of it Cooper felt tired, dusty, sweaty and discouraged. He stepped out of the last shed and even the still summer air felt like a fan against his skin.
He couldn’t hear the others anymore. They were probably coming to the end of their search as well. Due to the lack of shouts, he doubted they’d found anything of substance either. Now that Gould’s bike had been found here, Baker’s involvement seemed guaranteed. So why wasn’t there more here? How did evil pass through and not leave any kind of trace? Why was the man—the monster—who had abducted, tortured and killed young men reading up on abstractionism and holding on to family photos and sentimental keepsakes? Cooper wasn’t expecting one of the sheds to be full of hanging skins, Ed Gein style, but, well, something.
There was the Astroturf on the mat, and Astroturf had been found on the dead bear near Bornestein and Doe, and where Jenny Eagler had been found, and your leg bone’s connected to your hip bone and what the hell did any of this have to do with anything?
Cooper walked around the sheds where the tree coverage thickened and the difference between light and shadow grew more severe. His eyes were still adjusting as he walked, so it was lucky he noticed the deep crevice in the rock floor before stepping, or rather falling, into it. The crevice—or pit, or hole to hell—was deep. Deeper than he could see, and started at about four feet wide, narrowed quickly and then seemed to open up again. A large piece of metal fencing was propped up nearby along with a couple more poles. About four feet down in the crevice something smooth and inorganic caught the sunlight and stood out against the dirt and rock. Could be a stray bit of metal. Maybe part of the big piece of fencing against the tree.
But if they were counting Astroturf as clues now, he couldn’t assume anything was unimportant.
Cooper got onto his belly and peered into the crack. It was a flattened oval shape and now he saw a bit of chain attached to it, too. Something delicate and too bright. It caught the sun better than the other bits of metal lying around the yard. It shone like polished jewelry.
Cooper hadn’t seen any indication in the bedroom that Baker wore jewelry.
What about Jenny? The doctor had said she was held somewhere cold and wet. Would Baker have put her underground? Maybe even in this crevice? Cooper looked at the loose fencing again and an involuntary shudder rippled through him.
He scrambled to his feet and fetched a long piece of climbing rope and a carabiner out of one of the sheds. He knotted it carefully around a tree large enough to hold his weight and then some, carefully looped it through the carabiner and tied the other end around himself.
“Figure eight, follow the snake,” Cooper said, remembering the rhyme his dad had taught him as a kid, and finished up the knot. Doing all the proper ties was probably overkill for rappelling down the crevice the couple of feet he needed to reach the chain, but he’d done too much climbing with his dad and brother on their “be a man” trips to not respect the whole procedure. Plus, climbing had been one of the few activities he had always enjoyed. Being the wiry one in the family had been an advantage for once.
Of course, he’d always been climbing up and not down. Nice wide-open cliff faces with the sun on his back and a fresh breeze in his hair. Not narrow rat holes balanced between tons of earth and rock.
Cooper eyed the murky darkness of the crevice and the sweat on his neck suddenly felt cold. He hated being underground. Hated caves. Hated being in a small, enclosed space and breathing his own breath over and over. A tomb.
He didn’t need to be the one to climb down, of course. Christie would probably leap at the chance to use that gear he insisted on toting around. But Cooper didn’t want to alert the others yet. He didn’t even know if the...whatever it was was important. It could just be another scrap for Baker’s art. Though as far as Cooper could tell, rust and quartz, not shiny silver, was Baker’s medium of choice.
Wouldn’t they wonder why Cooper had not simply retrieved the metal himself? Why he needed help to rappel a few feet down into a crevice? Ridiculous. He was perfectly capable of doing this himself. He didn’t need anyone. This would be a good way to prove it. To prove himself. Not that he needed to prove himself to anyone in particular.
He tugged one last time on the rope to triple-check the knot and lowered himself down, feet braced against one side of the fissure. This was fine. Easy. He had to pause for a long couple of minutes and work on maneuvering his body around the jutting rock where the crevice narrowed temporarily, but worked it out eventually.
Once he got around the obstruction, the crevice widened again and he could unfurl enough to check his progress. Most of the sky was obscured by the rock he’d just worked around. He couldn’t see the land, just a gray streak of sky. Brighter than it had looked when he was up there breathing the nice wide-open air.
Cooper’s lungs began to tighten and he cleared his throat. It was wet down here. Wetter than he would have expected solid rock to be. The sort of dank, dark dampness unique to the bowels of the earth. Even the air tasted dirty. It made his skin feel thick and rubbery.
The bracelet—it was definitely a bracelet now that he was close—was a foot below him, caught on the other side of the crevice. He twisted in his rope harness and reached down to grab it. His fingers brushed at the thin chain, carefully avoiding the pendant in the middle. There was something engraved on the surface.
A sprinkling of dirt fell from the sky and got stuck on his damp skin.
“That’s odd,” Cooper said before his heart shot into his throat as he free-fell into the earth.