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data that the police ignored. Those men relied only on their computers to sift through all the tips that came in to tell them if something was related to a cold case. Ben hated that phrase—cold case. It made everything impersonal, like they couldn’t even be bothered to care about it anymore.
    Ben popped open the beer on the corner of his desk and took a long pull while studying the maps. He was looking for holes and clusters. Tracing from one pushpin to the next, his fingers danced across the strands of the map, and he felt at peace, for a moment, seeing how much he’d accomplished already. After a few minutes, though, he started to feel restless again, so he put the beer down and picked up a large wooden box from his desk. The box had seen better days; it was cracked and there were slivers of wood missing, which made the intricate parquet of the lid uneven.
    There was a small stutter in his heartbeat every time he picked up the box, an echo of guilt that he pushed down, hard; a constant reminder. Ben strode to the wall and opened the box, revealing more pushpins. He sorted through them until he found a clear one and placed it on the map where his new apartment was. A second clear pushpin went in for the location of the warehouse.
    He turned back to his desk and set the box down, aligning it with the corner of the desk with a special reverence. He opened a thick file that sat in the middle of his desk. There were several strata of papers, each distinctly older than the next. Some were crumpled and stained, the ones on top newly printed. He emptied his beer and returned to the kitchen for another one before starting to go through the pile, his movements practiced and measured. This was his meditation and his prayer. The key was to let his mind drift, to not so much focus on the words as to let his subconscious take them in and start to make connections. He idly twirled a pen in his fingers as he studied the pages, occasionally making a note.
    It was in these pages that he knew he would find the key to his loss, find the way to bring his son back to him. Every evening, weekend, holiday, “sick” day, he sat this way and had for almost a year, skimming through the pages of tips and police reports. And as soon as he figured out how to use all the new search programs at work, he would add even more pages to the pile: people who had moved directly after Benny’s disappearance, John and Jane Does who might have lived in that area. Any new scrap of data that he could add to the pile of information in front of him that would finally make everything clear.
    He sat this way for a while, skimming through the printouts, until he tried to take a drink of his second beer and found it empty. He returned to the kitchen for another and found leftover Chinese when he opened the refrigerator door. He brought the cold lo mein and a third beer back to his desk.
    The takeout box was empty when he let out a small exclamation and pulled one of the newer printouts out of the stack. There had been a report of a woman who had forced a blonde little boy who was just his son’s age into her car all while the boy screamed about wanting to go home. That could be his son, crying for him. He ripped off a portion of the page with the information and fumbled with the box to pull out two red push pins. At the map of Atlanta, he stuck a push pin into the zoo and pinned the printout to the wall nearby. On his way back to his desk to grab a length of string, he brushed the poster of his son, the caress gentle.
    “I’ll find you, just wait. I promise.”

Cataloging
    There is a certain Zen to properly cataloging items. A pattern, a patter, almost mesmerizing. It’s soothing, this repetition, but it can also lull you into a false sense of security. And that’s the way you misplace things.
    ~ Gertrude Biun, Property Office Manual
    B en arrived at the Center the next morning, bleary-eyed but on time, and made his way to his office, intent on figuring out