Collecting Cooper

My parents arrive only moments after my lawyer leaves. I hear them pull up and go back outside and meet them. They climb out of the car and Mum runs over and hugs me and Dad, who has never hugged a man in his life, shakes my hand and I invite them inside and we sit down drinking cold drinks while we catch up on all the same things we caught up on when they visited me twice a week in jail. Dad is in his midseventies, his hair white but full, no signs of it receding out of existence, a fact he’s proud of. He has a beard with no mustache, which is a real shame. He is relieved when I tell him I no longer need to borrow a car. Mum is in her early seventies and knows she may not be around in twenty years, and is making up for that by getting in as many words as she can before passing away. She has thick glasses that hang around her neck, a holdover from her years working as a librarian in town, and dark blond hair that’s been coming out of a bottle for the last twenty years. She offers to stay longer so she can help me around the house but I turn her down. My parents are lovely people, but spending the last four months without them calling me every day or popping in all the time certainly gave jail an upside. There aren’t any uncomfortable silences because my mum doesn’t give them time to develop. Mostly she updates us on what other family members are doing. I don’t have any brothers or sisters, but I wish I did because it’d spread Mum’s attention toward me a little thi

It’s nice seeing them, but it’s also nice seeing them leave. When they’re gone I drive to a nearby mall. I was once told that Christ-church has more mall space per capita than anywhere else in the Southern Hemisphere. The rental is quiet and easy to speed in by accident. The air-conditioning works a treat and the seats are comfortable enough to fall asleep in. There’s a huge bouncy castle set up in the parking lot, with dozens of laughing children jumping in or around it, a couple of clowns making balloon animals, and a few barbecues endlessly cooking hot dogs that nobody seems to be eating, all of it covered by large sun sails set up to make shade. Parents are standing around and chatting while keeping an eye on their kids, the occasional calm down, Billy or a don’t sit on her, Judy coming from them.

I find a parking space and head inside and spend two minutes looking at cell phones before deciding on a cheap model, figuring any extra features won’t do me any good with the luck I have when it comes to keeping a cell phone in one piece. The guy behind the counter has earrings in each ear and a small one in his left nostril and to be honest I just don’t get the point. He tries to sell me an expensive plan to make the phone cheaper and I have to turn him down four times before he lets it go. He puts in a new SIM card and lets me know my phone will take about an hour to co

From the mall I hit a thin flow of traffic, which gets even thi

“I’ve missed you,” I tell her, and I hope that she’s missed me when the reality is she doesn’t even know I’ve been gone and doesn’t even know I’m here now. My wife is a sponge that absorbs the words but can’t do anything with them. “And I’m sorry,” I add.

I check the cell phone on the way back into town and it’s co

“What can you tell me about Emma Green?” I ask.

“The girl from the accident? Why would you ask that, Tate?”

“You didn’t tell me she’s missing.”

“It’s not my case, and as it stands we don’t know that she’s missing.”

“Yeah you do. She’s been gone almost two days and that makes her missing, only you’re hoping she’s 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.”