The Cleaner (6 page)

I lean my broom against the door. The conference room is pretty big. To my right, a window the width of the room overlooks the city. To my left, a matching window looks into the fourth floor. At the moment the view is only of thin, gray, venetian blinds, which have been pulled closed. In the center sits a long rectangular table with several seats around it. In the past this room has been used to interview suspects because it looks intimidating. What happens is hundreds of photographs are hung up, stacks of paper are piled against the walls, and officers walk past the window carrying files before popping in to whisper something to the detective doing the interview. The murder weapon is nearby so the killer gets a good look at
it, and he soon feels they have more than enough information on him. He cracks under the pressure. In the corner, alongside the window, is a huge potted plant. I take special care when watering it.

I step up to the wall of photographs—pictures of victims and crime scenes have been pinned to a long corkboard. Pictures of the latest victims, Angela Durry and Martha Harris, are up there, making a total of seven bodies over the last thirty weeks. Seven unsolved murders. It only took two for the police to make the connection, even with the different MO. Modus operandi. An MO is what’s similar about the way two or more crimes are committed—the same gun, the method of breaking in, the way he confronts his victim. This is different from a signature. A signature is what a killer needs to do for fulfillment—he may need to masturbate over the body, or follow a script, or force his victim to participate. An MO is upgradable. The first time I broke into a house I smashed a window. Then I learned if you put duct tape over the glass, it doesn’t shatter and make as much noise. Then I learned how to pick locks.

A signature isn’t upgradable. A signature is the whole point of the murder. It’s the gratification. I don’t have one because I’m not like those sick perverted bastards who go around killing women out of a sexual need. I do it for fun. And that’s a big difference.

Of the seven unsolved murders, only six are mine. The seventh has been tacked onto my lot because the police are inept. It’s strange how things in this world have a way of balancing themselves out; one woman I killed has never shown up. And where is she?

Long-term parking. I dumped her body inside the trunk of her car, drove into town, grabbed a ticket for a parking building, and left the car on the top floor. It’s very rare that the building is so full that cars reach the top floor. I wrapped her body in plastic, figuring it would stop the smell for maybe a
day or two. Three, if I was lucky. If I was really lucky, nobody would go up there for maybe a week.

She was the second of my seven, and she’s still there now, with the wind gusting through the exposed top floor and dissipating the scent. The chances are high that nobody has even been up there.

I would never have thought to look in the trunk, Detective Schroder.

I still have the ticket as a memento. It’s hidden beneath my mattress at home.

When I first started out it seemed to me that dumping the body was the way to go. That quickly evolved, though, because in all the other cases somebody ended up finding them anyway, and the first place the cops went after identifying them was to their houses. All I was doing was putting myself to extra work. Well, live and learn, I guess. I decided to start leaving them in their homes.

The woman in long-term parking isn’t among the faces looking at me. Instead a stranger looks out from the lineup. Number four in the allotted seven. I know her name and I know her face, but until her picture was pinned up I’d never seen her before. She has been up there for six weeks now, and every day I pause to look at her features. Daniela Walker. Blond. Pretty. My type of woman—but not this time. Even in death her eyes sparkle out from her corpse like soft emeralds. She has both a pre- and post-death photograph. At first Detective Inspector Schroder didn’t want me coming in here because of these pictures. Either he simply forgot after a while, or he just doesn’t care.

The picture of Daniela Walker in life shows her as a happy thirtysomething, two or maybe three years before her death. Her hair shimmers over her shoulder as she turns toward the camera. Her lips are parting in a smile. Her picture has been on my mind every day since it has been up here. And why?

Because whoever killed her pinned her murder on me.
Whoever killed her was too scared to take the credit, so rather than try and get away with it in his own clever fashion, he gets away with it by using me. All without my permission!

I keep looking at her picture. One in life. One in death. Green eyes sparkling in each.

For the last six weeks I’ve thought of little other than finding the man who did this to us. Can it be that difficult? I have the resources. I’m smarter than anybody else in this department, and that’s not just my ego talking. I scroll my eyes over the victims. Look at them closely. Fourteen eyes staring at me. Watching. Seven pairs. Familiar faces.

Bar one.

A ring of deep bruises form a necklace around Daniela Walker’s throat from strangulation. They aren’t consistent—ruling out a scarf or a rope—and look like they were formed by knuckles. More pressure can be applied with knuckles than fingers. It’s also harder to defend against. The problem with strangulation is it takes four to six minutes to complete. Sure, they give up struggling within the first, but the pressure needs to be kept on for at least another three to starve the body of oxygen. That’s three minutes I could be using for something better. Using knuckles increases the chances of crushing the victim’s windpipe.

Beneath the corkboard is a set of shelves, and on top of these are seven piles of folders—one per victim. I head over to them. It’s like looking at a menu and already knowing in advance which item to choose. I walk to the fourth pile and pick up one of the folders from the top. Every detective on the case has one of these folders and the spares are here for anybody who becomes assigned.

Like me.

I unzip the front of my overalls, stuff it down my front, then zip them up again. Back to the wall of the dead. I smile at the latest two. This is their first morning here in the assembly. No doubt they were pinned up last night. They don’t smile
back. Angela Durry. Thirty-nine-year-old legal executive. She suffocated on an egg. Martha Harris. Seventy-two-year-old widow. I’d needed a car. She had caught me taking hers.

I take my spray bottle and rags and move to the window. I spend five minutes cleaning it, staring beyond the streaks and my reflection at the world outside to the little people walking among the little streets. I spend some quality time with the plant. I replace the microcassette tape from the audio recorder I have hidden in there, careful to touch the recorder only with the rags. I tuck the tape into my pocket. I still have a job to do, and I head back to my office to grab the vacuum cleaner, then return and use it to clean up.

Ten minutes later I leave the conference room as I found it—only tidier and without as many files. I wheel the vacuum cleaner into the supply room on the other side of the floor and start vacuuming. Nobody is around so I do the Boy Scout thing and stock up on a few more pairs of gloves—not that I’ll be killing anybody tonight. I don’t suffer from compulsions to kill all the time. I’m no animal. I don’t go running around venting childhood aggressions while looking for excuses to kill. I’m not itching to make a name for myself or gain the notoriety of Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. Bundy was a freak who had a following of groupies during and after his trial, and he even got married after he was sentenced to death. He was a loser who killed more than thirty women, but he got caught. I don’t want fame. I don’t want to be married. If I wanted fame, I would kill somebody famous—like that Chapman chap who loved John Lennon so much he shot him. I’m just a regular guy. An average Joe. With a hobby. I’m not a psychopath. I don’t hear voices. I don’t kill for God or Satan or the neighbor’s dog. I’m not even religious. I kill for me. It’s that simple. I like women, and I like to do things to them they won’t let me do. There have to be maybe two or three billion women in this world. Killing one every month or two isn’t a big deal. It’s all about perspective.

I grab some other stuff. Nothing major. Gear officers are always taking. Nothing anybody will notice gone. Nobody notices anything around here. The supply room is good like that. It supplies. No reason for it not to supply me. I look at my watch. Twelve o’clock—lunchtime. I head back to my office. The tools and the cords and the paint—this gear I don’t get to use. All I do is clean. Everybody here thinks I have the IQ of a watermelon. But that’s okay. In fact, it’s perfect.

CHAPTER EIGHT

My chair is uncomfortable and my lunch isn’t that great. With several nice sights out the window, I lean over and look at the women out there as prospective lovers. Should I go down there? Find where one works? Where she lives? Then, one night, find her in between those two places?

Men and women are walking back and forth, treating the warm afternoon street like a singles bar. Women dress like whores and take offense when men stare at them. Men dress like pimps and take offense when nobody notices. I use the two-inch knife to cut into my apple, small drops of juice spraying out. I slice it into sections. I’m chewing them while picking a target. My mouth waters before taking each bite.

Of course, I can’t go down there. I have other things to do now, a new hobby. What sort of guy would I be if I picked up a new hobby and dumped it after only an hour? I’d be a loser. The sort of guy who can’t finish what he starts. And that’s not me. I didn’t get to where I am by never finishing anything.

My thoughts are interrupted by a knock on my door. Nobody ever comes here while I’m eating lunch, and for the briefest of moments I’m sure the police are going to burst in and arrest me. I start to reach for my briefcase. A moment later the door swings open and Sally is standing there, making me think I need to put a lock on that door.

“Hi, Joe.”

I lean back. “Hi, Sally.”

“How’s the apple? Is it nice?”

“It’s nice,” I say, though I’m quickly losing my appetite now. I jam a slice of it in my mouth so I don’t have to make more conversation. What in the hell could she want?

“I made you a tuna sandwich,” she says, closing the door behind her and heading over to my bench. My office has only one seat and I’m in it. I don’t offer it to her because I don’t want her to stay. I take the tuna sandwich from her and smile at her, showing my fake gratitude along with a mouthful of apple. She offers me the kind of smile that suggests she would sleep with me if only,
please God, if only he would ask.
But I’m not going to ask. Her tuna sandwiches are always pretty good, but not that good. I swallow my piece of apple and take a huge bite of tuna and bread.

“Yummy,” I say, making an effort to have crumbs spill from my mouth. Just because Sally is an idiot doesn’t mean I can drop the Slow Joe act around her. I can never, never let anybody—not even Fat Sally—get an idea just how intelligent I really am.

Sally leans against the bench and looks down at me as she takes a bite out of an identical sandwich. I guess that means she’s planning on hanging out here for a bit. She keeps smiling at me as she chews. Crumbs don’t fall out of her mouth, but if they did it might help her lose a bit of weight. I can’t remember ever seeing her without that stupid grin on her face. She talks to me as I eat my lunch. Tells me stuff about her mom and dad, about her brother. She tells me it’s his
birthday today, but I don’t bother asking how old he is. She tells me anyway.

“Twenty-one.”

“You doing anything to celebrate?” I ask, since it’s expected of me.

She starts to say something, then pauses, and I realize she’s going through one of her simple/special people routines where she has to think things through, starting with whether or not she even has a brother, and if he really is twenty-one today. Women may be from Venus, but nobody knows where the hell people like Sally come from.

“We’re just having a simple thing at home,” she says, sounding sad, and I guess I’d be sounding sad too if I had to have a simple family celebration at home. She reaches for the crucifix hanging from her neck. I’ve always found it ironic that retarded people can not only believe in God, but think He’s a pretty good guy. The crucifix has one of those bulky soldered-on metal figures of Jesus, and this Jesus looks to be in pain—not because he’s been crucified, but because his head is permanently cast downward forcing him to look down Sally’s top.

I can feel the minutes slipping away. The file is still in my overalls. I want Sally to leave me alone, but I don’t know how to say it. I start on the second sandwich she gave me. She tries to include me in her conversation by asking about my own family. I don’t have anything to offer on that subject, other than my mother is nuts and my dad is dead, and that neither of those things is ever going to change, so I keep it to myself. Then she asks how my day has been going, how yesterday went, how tomorrow is going to be. It’s as bad as talking about the weather—it’s all conversational filler I couldn’t be any less interested in.

After twenty minutes of chewing really slowly and nodding at the same pace, of having my stomach itch from the edges of the file, Sally finally straightens up and leaves, throwing a
Be seeing you soon
at me on the way out the door. As soon as she is gone, I pull the file from my overalls and lay it on the bench. I never used to be nervous with what I brought in here to look through, but now I am. Sally could come back in, but I figure she wouldn’t understand what she was looking at, so it’s safe for me to carry on. Carefully, like an archaeologist opening a just-uncovered gospel, I open the cover. The first thing I see is Daniela Walker. She looks up at me with eyes open and neck bruised. I pull the photo out and lay it faceup on my bench. It’s only one in a series of ten. Not all of them are of her, though most are.

I lay them side by side in a row like I’m playing some freak game of solitaire with creepy playing cards. She looks at me from four of the photographs, and in the progression it seems her skin gets grayer. Time codes on the pictures suggest they were taken over the course of an hour, so she may well have been changing color. In fact, in the last picture, her twinkling green eyes no longer twinkle. They have taken on the texture of spoiled plums. The other six photographs are of the bedroom from varying angles.