Read Online Collecting Cooper by Paul Cleave - Free Book Online

only a matter of time before he kills. It was no different from a man firing a loaded gun into a crowd of people.
    I put a bullet in his head and filled in the grave he had dug.
    My lawyer knows I did it. I told him. When he pointed the gun at me wanting to do the same thing, I told him how it was going to feel.
    “She’s gone missing,” he says. “Emma.”
    “What?”
    “Nobody has heard from her in two days. She was at work Monday night and left to go home and never showed up.”
    “You’ve gone to the police?”
    “What?” he asks, almost flinching as though my question is the most stupid one he’s ever heard. “Jesus, of course we have. But the police, the police only care once somebody has been missing twenty-four hours, so they’ve only cared since last night, and they haven’t cared much because they’re not out there looking for her,and even when they do start looking there are things I know you can do that they can’t.”
    “The police, you have to trust them. They know what they’re doing.”
    He starts drumming his fingers across the tabletop then stops and stares at his fingernails as if disappointed by the tune they made. He looks back at me and there is genuine pain in his eyes and I know the feeling and I know I’m going to help this man.
    “When girls like Emma go missing,” he says, and the words are slow and considered and must hurt to say because I know where he’s going with this, “there’s only one way they’re ever found.”
    I don’t answer him. He looks up toward the sun and I know he’s fighting back tears.
    “When was the last time somebody her age went missing and there was a happy ending?” he asks.
    I still don’t answer him. I can’t tell him the truth, and I don’t want to lie to him. Girls like Emma who go missing normally show up a few days later floating naked in a river.
    “I already know she’s probably dead,” he says, and the words come from him in small stops and starts, like he really has to force them.
    He looks back at me. “Statistically, I know the deal,” he adds. “My wife, she knows it too. Right now she’s sedated because she’s borderline hysterical. The police tell me in cases like this, they never really know whether the girl just ran away from home or got herself a new boyfriend and is holed up in a bedroom somewhere. It’s bullshit. They know it’s bullshit when they’re spinning that possibility to me and my wife. If there’s a chance she’s still alive, she won’t be by the time they find her, and if she was alive in the time they were looking and not finding her and I didn’t do everything I could . . . then . . . I don’t know. I think you know, right?” he says. “I think you can figure out how it would feel. So I’m doing everything that I can, and that means coming to you. It means you’re going to do everything you can because you owe me and you owe her. Then . . . and, if she is, you know, dead, then the police will findwho hurt her and then what? Send him to jail for fifteen years and parole him in ten?”
    “I know it’s wrong, trust me, I really do, but that’s just the way it is,” I say.
    “I know. Jesus, don’t you think I know that? But it shouldn’t be that way, and it doesn’t have to be. I remember what you said to me in the woods. I know you killed the man who killed your daughter. What gives you the right to have that justice and stop others from having it?”
    “You don’t need to remind me of my own daughter.”
    “Do I need to remind you that you almost took mine away?” He slowly shakes his head. “When you ran into her it changed her life. It sent her down a different path. You jumped into her timeline, and instead of her turning A,” he says, tapping his right forefinger with his left to make his point, “she turned B. It brought different people into her life. Doctors and rehab, new friends. She lost three months studying and had to take private tutoring. She almost didn’t