Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“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.”

“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 today off 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 almost white hair swings it open. She’s wearing a pair of shorts and a cream blouse and looks about as tired as the big pine tree out front. She adjusts her glasses and smiles at me and I tell her hello, and when she answers it’s obvious the woman is deaf, and I’m sure we’re not far away from a time where deaf will be considered an insult, and we start going with hearing impaired . She says hello and talks exactly the way people talk when they don’t know how they sound. I speak slowly and ask to speak to Rodney and she holds her finger up and taps her watch, telling me she’ll either be one minute or one hour and then disappears. Rodney comes to the door thirty seconds later. He’s a skinny kid with beer-colored eyes and black hair and his cheeks are flushed from the heat. He’s wearing jeans and his T-shirt is salmon pink and he looks well fed and tidy and not on drugs or wearing any dark eyeliner, and therefore I have no reason to immediately hate him. Except for the T-shirt, which hurts my eyes.

“I’m Rodney,” he says. “You’re here about Emma?”

“That’s right.”

“What are you? A reporter? I’m sick of reporters. I swear to God if you’re a reporter I’m going to kick your ass.”

I suddenly like him even more. “Her dad hired me. I’m a private investigator.”

“He hired you to talk to me? Why? He thinks I had something to do with her going missing?” he asks, his voice starting to raise. His right hand grips the door frame as if he has to stop himself from lunging at me.

“So you’re confident that’s what she is? Missing? That she hasn’t gone away for a few days?”

“Emma’s not like that. I recognize you, you know,” he says, “but I can’t tell where from.”

“I have one of those faces,” I answer. “And her dad doesn’t think you’ve done anything to hurt her. I’m here to help, to try and get her back.”

He relaxes his grip on the doorframe. “Is she dead?” he asks, and his question is so genuine that it really seems he has no idea one way or the other, but I’ve been fooled by grieving boyfriends before.

“Can I come in?”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I don’t know.”

“But you think so.”

“I hope not,” I say, giving Schroder’s answer from before.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Theo.”

“Theodore Tate?”

“Yeah,” I say, and for a second I look down.

“The man who. .”

“That’s why I’m here,” I say. “It’s why her dad came to me. He knows I’m going to do what it takes to find her. That gives you two options. You can stand there and be pissed at me like you deserve to be before closing the door, or you can answer my questions and help me find Emma before it’s too late. What’s it going to be?”

He leads me inside to a living room that nobody could come to an agreement on how to decorate. I sit down in a chair that tries to swallow me. Rodney’s mother carries out a tray with a teapot on it and three cups. She sits on the couch next to Rodney and pours me a cup, then points to the milk. I can’t stand tea and nod at the milk figuring it will help dilute the problem. There’s a light on the wall above the door that I figure must flash when somebody rings the doorbell. The mother signs something to Rodney, and he signs something back, and I feel like an outsider.