Collecting Cooper by Paul Cleave Page A

taken off somewhere with a boyfriend, right?”
    “Like I said, Tate, it’s not my case. Why are you asking about her?”
    “Her father came to see me.”
    “Oh, Jesus, don’t tell me he tried to hire you to find her.”
    “No.”
    “No he didn’t try and you offered? Or no he didn’t hire you and you’re doing this for free? Which is it?”
    “A bit of both.”
    “Jesus, Tate, you’re not even a licensed investigator anymore.”
    “Like I said, he didn’t hire me. I’m not doing this in a professional capacity.”
    “You can’t do this in any capacity.”
    “That didn’t stop you from asking for my help this morning.”
    “That’s different.”
    “Yeah? You really think so?” I ask.
    “Look, Tate, we’re looking into her disappearance. We really are. We’ve got people at her work right now taking a look around. Nobody thinks she’s run away. We’re sure something bad happened to her. Nobody knows a damn thing. She just vanished. But people go missing every day in this city. We’ve got boxes and boxes of files of people we just can’t find, but we’re looking, we truly are.”
    “And no leads?”
    “If we had leads then her father wouldn’t have contacted you so fast.”
    “So what do you think? You think she’s dead?”
    “I hope not.”
    “That’s not much of an answer, Carl.”
    “Let it go, Tate.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Why? Because you hurt her last year? You’ve paid your debt, Tate, you don’t owe her or her dad anything.”
    “Is that really what you think?”
    “It’s really what I think,” he says.
    “I don’t believe you. You’d be doing the same thing if you were in my shoes.”
    “Look, Tate, I get why you’re feeling this way, I do, I really do, but it’s a bad idea.”
    “It can’t hurt if I at least try.”
    “Come on, how can you say that?”
    “It’ll be different this time.”
    “Yeah? How’s that? You’re going to find the guy and let him live?”
    “That was an accident,” I say. He’s referring to the Burial Killer I caught last year. There was a fight in the cemetery where I caught him. He was digging up coffins, pulling out the occupants and replacing them with his victims. The original occupants he was dumping into the small lake nearby. During the fight we both ended up in an empty grave and the knife we were fighting with ended up inside of him. If you wanted to put a label on it, you could say it was a deliberate accident. “Come on, you know I’m going to do this anyway. Give me a copy of the file. Think of it this way—the more I know to begin with, the less people I’m going to upset along the way. That has to be good for everybody, right, including you.”
    “Goddamn it, Tate,” he says. “You have some strange logic in your world.”
    “But it works.”
    “Look, I gotta go,” he says.
    “The file?”
    “I’ll think about it,” he says, and breaks the connection.
    The first person I want to talk to is Emma Green’s boyfriend. They weren’t living together, not yet, but according to her dad it was only a matter of time. Donovan Green isn’t a fan of the boyfriend, but only in the same way I wasn’t going to be a fan of my daughter’s first boyfriend when she was old enough to start dating. The boyfriend’s name is Rodney and he’s the same age as Emma and still lives with his parents. Donovan Green gave me the boy’s address, and I drive to his house and he’s home because he’s taken todayoff because of Emma’s disappearance. The house is a single-story A-frame from the seventies, the roof steep enough to slide down and break the sound barrier along the way before breaking your neck. The front yard is brown grass with lots of bare patches and a large pine tree in the middle of it all, big roots breaking out of the ground and sucking the moisture from all the nearby plants. The bell on the front door rings loudly and there are some shuffling sounds on the other side of the wooden door before a woman with