“That’s not it.”

“Bullshit. You’re one of the good guys, Carl, and that restricts you. I don’t know how you justified it to yourself, but when you gave me that file this morning that wasn’t just you asking for my insight, that was you asking me to get my hands dirty.”

“You’re reading too much into it,” he says.

“And you’re doing the same thing now.”

He picks the file back up. “You want me to walk out of here to prove how wrong you are?”

“I just don’t want you complaining when I’ve crossed a line you knew all along I was going to cross.” I reach out for the file. “We’re on the same side here, Carl. Let me find this girl and then I promise I’ll help you find Melissa.”

He takes his hand off the file. “I don’t feel good about any of this,” he says.

“This isn’t about feeling good,” I tell him. “It’s about getting Emma back. Her dad thinks she can talk her way out of anything. Seems to think she knows how people work, and if anybody could survive, it would be her.”

“Any father would be saying the same thing.”

I nod. It’s true. “She is a psychology student,” I point out.

“Yeah, for barely two weeks. I doubt she’s learned enough to talk some lunatic who wants to probably rape and kill her into letting her go.”

I keep nodding. That’s also true.

“Just remember, Tate, when you find something, you come to me with it, okay? You’re helping me out now, not Donovan Green. You come to me first. You clear everything with me.”

“Of course,” I tell him.

He doesn’t believe me, but he doesn’t say anything. He stands up and I follow him to the front door.

“Look, Tate, there’s some info in there that’s new. There was a search this afternoon in the parking lot behind Emma’s café.”

“I know. I was there earlier.”

“Yeah, well, I really hope her father is right about her being able to handle herself, because right now it isn’t looking good.”

“Was it ever?”

“Good luck, Tate,” he says. “And this time do me a favor.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Try not to kill anybody.”

chapter twelve

Adrian found happiness hard to find when he was a kid. He found it with his music and his comics, and he also had a collection of toy cars that he loved more than anything. They were all small-scale metal cars with moving parts, and each time he got one he’d dream that when he was older he’d be able to afford the real thing. No matter what happened to him at school, those cars would be waiting for him at home, so would his tapes and comics, and nobody could ever take that away from him. He would space his cars along a shelf he had in his bedroom, he would measure them so they were the same distance apart, and every week he would dust them. His music collection he would line up by color, so the spines of the tapes merged into each other. His comics he would never bend the covers, never. That made him happy.

The other thing that made him happy was Katie. When he was thirteen years old he fell in love with the new girl in school with the green eyes and long red hair tied into a ponytail and frazzled on the ends. She was a little taller than him and a little heavier, but not by much, and it would have taken a day to count the freckles on her cheeks and each one of those freckles he wanted to collect. Her family had moved up from Dunedin, a city down south that made Christchurch look large. When he first saw her his stomach felt tight and his chest warm and his mouth went dry. She had a nervous smile that he took with him wherever he went and he dreamed of holding her hand and walking her home. She was put into his class and sat on the opposite side of the room, but forward a little from him, where he could steal glances at her all day long. He didn’t know what he’d do if she ever looked back and caught him, but she never looked back. As it was with every new student who came to the school, there was one of two ways things would go—the other kids would be interested and befriend them, or they would tease them. In Katie’s case, they teased her. Occasionally, on lunch and recess breaks, they would push her and try to make her cry, and sometimes she did.

Adrian loved the idea of standing up for her as much as he loved her, but he was a coward and he knew it. The girls were stronger than him. The boys could crush him. One of the horrors of school was public speaking. He hated giving speeches. He had to stand up in front of the class in his secondhand uniform, the shorts too baggy on him, his arms and legs stick thin, and no matter how many times he rehearsed he could never remember the words. No matter how much water he drank his mouth would always be dry. Every time he could hear the others sniggering, could feel his face turn red, and every time all he wanted to do was run from the classroom and just keep running. A few months into the new school year and the sun was lower as the mornings grew cooler and the leaves from the ground were being trudged into the classroom. They were giving speeches on people who inspired them. He had chosen Neil Armstrong because, since the age of ten, Adrian wanted nothing more than to be able to run as far away as the moon. Truthfully, and he didn’t mention this in his speech, he fantasized about captaining his own starship and exploring the galaxy. He wanted to be the first man to step foot on Mars. He gave his speech talking about the Gemini and Apollo missions and about Armstrong’s test pilot days, and he stuttered through much of it, the nerves getting the better of him to the point where his hands were shaking so hard he dropped his cue cards, getting them out of order, which was a problem because he hadn’t numbered them, so in his speech Neil Armstrong grew up and flew to the moon before joining NASA. At the end nobody clapped and the teacher, Mrs. Byron, with her horn-rimmed glasses that magnified her eyes to twice their size, told him to take his seat, before telling Katie it was her turn to go next.

The girl Adrian loved stood up in front of the class and spoke about Beethoven. Adrian didn’t know much about Beethoven except that Beethoven had cut his ear off, though Katie didn’t mention it in her speech and he wasn’t sure why, but she did say the composer had gone deaf, and cutting your ear off would certainly make that happen. Halfway through the speech some of the kids started laughing. Mrs. Byron told them off. Mrs. Byron was the kind of teacher who was always telling people off, the kind of woman who looked like she may have been born at the age of forty. Katie slowed down and carried on, then the laughing began again, and then she started to cry. She ran out of the room. Adrian wanted to go after her. He thought it would be an amazing gesture and she would have to love him back. The coward living inside of him wouldn’t let him. He hated that coward. He wanted to kill it, but didn’t have the courage. Not then—but he decided in that moment he would at least try to fake it.

When lunch came he went up to the boy who had started the laughing.

“I want you to leave Katie alone,” Adrian said.

“You what? Fuck you, you’re kidding, right?”

“I mean it.”

The boy, his name was Redmond but everybody called him Red, was holding a rugby ball that he was about to start throwing with his friends. Redmond was one of those fat kids with fat cheeks who later on in life would call himself big-boned. “You mean it?” Red said, then pushed a fat finger into Adrian’s chest. “Little Aids,” he said, because that’s what they called Adrian, “doesn’t want us teasing his girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

Red pushed him again, only this time one of Red’s friends had knelt down behind Adrian, so when he moved backward he tipped over, the ground knocking most of the fight out of him, the rest being knocked out a moment later when Red jumped on top of him, punching him hard twice in the stomach, and then rubbing his face in the dirt. There was nobody to help him. Other students started to come over to watch. Including Katie. A couple of the bigger girls brought her over. Adrian looked up at her. He tried to smile at her but couldn’t. He was in too much pain, and he was using all of his effort just to keep his bowels in check.