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tidies the basement. He doesn’t need Cooper to wake into this mess and form an instant bad impression. He straightens the memorabilia on the shelves, tidies the bookcase that has dozens of autobiographies of serial killers. There is a couch down here and a scarred coffee table but not much more. Anyway, today is only day one, and as he learns he will begin to improve.
    “Cooper?”
    Nothing.
    He heads upstairs and turns on the radio. It’s small, and has a belt clip so he can hang it from his pants, and it can play tapes andeven record things too. He’s sure Cooper will enjoy the same kind of classical music, and he carries the radio back to the basement, but when he starts to climb down the stairs the reception fades. He plays with the dial but can’t get any of the stations to work, not until he climbs back up the stairs into the corridor. He replaces the batteries, but the same thing happens and he doesn’t understand why. Can the music not get past the concrete walls from the radio station? He could play a tape, but playing tapes uses up the battery faster, and he doesn’t want to use it up that way. He’s disappointed. Hopefully this will be the only setback.
    Suspecting Cooper will be hungry as well as confused when he wakes up, Adrian, not wanting to be a rude host, heads to the kitchen where the radio works again, and he clips it onto his pants and listens to one of the modern rock bands he’s come to like, and starts preparing lunch for his new housemate.

chapter five
     
    They’re calling her Melissa X. It’s not a Roman numeral—she isn’t the tenth Melissa in the city to have killed a cop, or the tenth Melissa to become a serial killer still on the loose, or the tenth Melissa to fill what I imagine to be boxes and boxes of evidence stored in an evidence warehouse. It’s an X because it’s an unknown. The media, normally quick to come up with catchy names for crimes and killers, have dubbed her The Uniform Killer. She became famous when a videotape found in the Christchurch Carver’s possession—a serial killer named Joe Middleton who was caught last year—showed her stabbing a knife into the chest of a currently missing detective. The Christchurch Carver was arrested the same day I killed the serial killer I was hunting last year, a man dubbed the Burial Killer. In the month between the accident I caused, the sentencing, and then being put in jail, I saw on the news that Melissa was still on the run and was now the suspect in other homicides. She was big news back then, and I guess she’s even bigger news now because the police still have no idea where she is or who she really is. Another day, another serial killer—each one trying to outdo the other. For the last fewyears the city was under siege by the Christchurch Carver, now it’s dealing with his girlfriend.
    I open the windows in the study and let the outside air force its way in; it’s warm air but at least it’s fresh. It’s circulated slightly by an oscillating fan that I drag out of a wardrobe and plug in, thick dust blowing off the blades and clouding the air for the first ten seconds and sending me into a sixty-second sneezing fit. The contents of the folder are two inches thick and I stack them on the desk into different piles. The fan lifts the corners of the pages every twenty seconds as it passes by. There are reports, statements, copies of forensic evidence. There are photographs of bruises, cuts, blood; there’s a DVD with a recording of Melissa X murdering Detective Inspector Calhoun. Four dead bodies and a lot of paperwork, and Melissa is on the loose. They have DNA and fingerprints and even footage of the woman, and with all of that she’s a ghost. Her face has been plastered in the papers, headlining the news. Three episodes of New Zealand’s Most Wanted have been dedicated to finding information about her. Even the psychics have come out of the woodwork. Nobody knows where she is, and even stranger, nobody has