The Cleaner

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I pull out the latest cassette tape from the conference room and listen to the private words falling from the small speaker of my recorder as I pace back and forth. Not just hear, but really listen. I’ve heard all of the other tapes over the months, but I was only ever listening to see how the investigation was going. Now I have something new to listen for.

Detective Taylor is for the theory that they’re looking for more than one killer.

So is Detective McCoy, who suspects the killers are working together.

Detective Hutton is still of the opinion that it’s one person.

Other theories. Mixed theories. Confused theories.

A confused investigation is a messy investigation. Nobody can agree. Nothing gets done. This makes people hard to catch. Makes things good for me.

I make some dinner. Nothing exciting. Instant pasta that cooks quickly in the microwave, and some coffee. Then I change into something more casual-jeans and a shirt. I’m looking pretty good, better than good. I put on a dark jacket. Even better.

I’m just about to go out when the phone rings. My first thought is that it’s Mom, and then I remember the bad feeling I had this morning, so my next thought is it may not be Mom, but somebody calling about Mom. I have no idea where it comes from, but an image of making funeral arrangements and sausage rolls for the after-funeral party flashes through my mind. I sit to prepare for the shock that will put both my investigation and my life on hold. My heart races as I put my hand out to the receiver. Please, God, don’t let it be so. Don’t let anything bad happen to my mother.

I pick it up and do my best to sound calm. “Hello?”

“Joe? Is that you?”

“Mom, boy, am I glad to hear from you,” I say, the words coming out in one long clump.

“It’s your mother. I’ve been trying to ring you all day.”

I look at my answering machine. The little light isn’t flashing. “You didn’t leave any messages.”

“You know I don’t like talking to a machine.” This, of course, is a fallacy. Mom will talk to anything if the opportunity is there. “Are you coming to see me tonight, Joe?”

“It’s Wednesday.”

“I know what day it is, Joe. You don’t need to tell me what day it is. I just thought you might want to come around and visit your mother.”

“I can’t. I’ve got plans.”

“A girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Oh. I see. Well, I wish you weren’t-”

“I’m not gay, Mom.”

“You’re not? I thought that maybe-”

“What do you want, Mom?”

“I thought you might want to come and see me after I was sick all night.”

“Sick?”

“More than sick, Joe. I’ve been up all night sitting on the toilet,” she says, and already that’s more information than I needed. Before I can stop her or shoot myself she carries on. “I had stomach pains. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I was squirting water.” I look around my room for a security blanket, something to keep me in reality, to stop me from fainting. To kill the imagery. Luckily I’m sitting down. Luckily I was expecting a shock. “The diarrhea was so bad, Joe, I spent an hour running back and forth soiling my nightgown before deciding to spend the whole night in there. I ended up taking a blanket because it was cold, and I took my jigsaw puzzle in with me to stop the boredom. I actually got the other corner done. It’s looking good. You should come around and see it.”

“Good thinking,” I hear myself say.

“I didn’t even need to push, Joe. It was just falling out of me like, well, like water out of a garden hose.”

“Uh huh. Uh huh.” To me my words sound like they’re coming from a mile away.

“I felt so sick.”

“I’m sorry, Mom, I’ll come over one night soon and help, okay?”

“Okay, Joe, but-”

“I’ve really got to go, Mom. Taxi’s waiting. Love you.”

“Well, okay, Joe, I love-”

“Bye, Mom.” I hang up.

I go to the sink. Gulp down a glass of water. Rinse out my mouth and pour a second glass thinking I need something stronger, then remembering the beers I transferred from the Walker fridge. I grab one and pop it open with the Walker bottle opener. Pictures of my mother sitting on the toilet with a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle on a board on a stool in front of her and soiled underwear around her ankles are hard to shake. Cottage. . blue sky. . flowers. . trees. I walk over to the sofa and sit down with my fish. I feed them, and a second later, the phone rings. What does she want now? To tell me how many sheets of toilet paper she used? I let the machine get it.

It’s the woman from the veterinary clinic. She identifies herself as Jennifer, and tells me the cat is doing fine. She tells me they’ve had no luck in finding the cat’s owner. She asks me to call her, and adds that she’ll be at work until two in the morning.

I finish the beer and say good-bye to my fish and am just heading out the door when I suddenly remember I have done nothing about Candy-haven’t made the anonymous call I was supposed to make. I’ll wait now until I narrow down my list. It will be easier to watch for Daniela’s killer when there are only a few names left.

Because the police have no leads, I have no time limit for solving my own case. I can take days or weeks. However, I have this competitive streak inside me. Right now it’s ordering me around, telling me to keep focused and sort out this investigation. I want to prove to myself I can do this, and do it well. I want to prove I’m better than the police, not just at eluding them, but at solving their own case. What sort of man doesn’t try to better himself? What sort of man doesn’t test himself?

Another part of me, the more recreational side, is suggesting why not make it harder for the police? Throw in another victim to investigate? When investigations deal with only one victim, the police can take statements from two or three hundred people, even a thousand. They cross-reference these statements in an attempt to draw a map of the person’s activities that day. Toss in another victim, and the number of statements doubles, and so does the workload. They spend less time with the people from the previous killing, and close to none with the people before that. One trail is fresh while the others get cold. Soon they stop focusing on the evidence, and wait for the next victim, hoping that will be where they catch a break in their case. They become increasingly understaffed and overworked. A stressed detective is a sloppy detective. Kill two people in a row, and all previous statements are tossed into a pile beneath a conference room table in a large box.

I vacuum around them every couple of days or so.

I catch the bus into town. Getting into a police station is easy when you work there and have a swipe card to open one of the side doors. I do just that, and step into a rear stairwell. I know a record is taken each time an ID card is swiped, but there is no reason for the records to ever be checked. If they are, and I get asked, I’ll simply say I got confused about the time, or that I came to get my lunchbox. I make my way to the fourth floor, taking the stairs. Less risky this way. I encounter nobody. Detectives, unlike beat patrol officers, work gentlemen’s hours. Unless a homicide is reported, or one is in the process of being solved, the detectives work from nine o’clock until five thirty. After that they go home, and the cubicles, the conference room, and the offices are close to empty.

I take another look at the conference room wall. The prostitute I killed last night is still to be discovered. Same with the woman I stuffed into the trunk at the long-term parking garage. Not wanting to hang around, I quickly swap the cassette tapes and leave. The microcassette recorder I use has a voice-activated system. This allows the unit to be left on standby mode, where it won’t actually start recording until it hears sound. When the sound stops, it stops, so I can leave it on and there will be no wasted tape. I also replace the batteries.

Of the ten names on my list, only a few work on this floor. Some of the others don’t even work in this building, but have come here from other cities to help with the investigation. The chances are high that it’s going to be one of these men-taking the opportunity of killing while away from the wife and family is pretty hard to turn down.

I decide to begin with the first name on my list.

Detective Wilson Hutton has been a detective far, far longer than I’ve been cleaning, and he has been overeating far, far longer than he’s been a detective. He, like the others, likes me. I move down the aisle, glancing at the cubicles to my left and right, double-checking that I’m alone. Most of the ceiling lights have been turned off. Only every fifth one is going, so it’s pretty dim, like being outside under a quarter moon. This gives the place a slight look of life, while also saving power. It also enables staff to come here and not knock themselves out on furniture. I can hear the slight humming of the lights. The ticking of the air-conditioning. But I can’t hear a single person. The floor has the feeling of an empty house. Like a tomb. No glowing desk lamps, no squeaking office chairs, no shifting of weight, or a cough, or a yawn. Things look tidier in this light. Cleaner. That’s because an hour and a half after I leave, a team of cleaners comes in and spends two hours doing all the things they think I’m too stupid to manage. Nobody has ever mentioned it to me. Maybe they think I think a team of magic trash fairies comes in and makes things sparkly and clean.

I find Hutton’s cubicle and sit down. He’s a big guy, and the ass groove in his reinforced office chair reflects this as I try to get comfortable. At forty-eight years old, he’s a candidate for a heart attack, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he has already had several minor ones. The only exercise I’ve ever seen him do is chew junk food. I feel nauseous just sitting in his chair. I also feel like I’m putting on weight.

I turn on his lamp. Staring at me is a name plaque sitting on his desk, probably a gift from his wife. It says Detective Inspector Wilson Q. Hutton. I don’t know what the Q stands for. Probably queer. I look at the photographs of his family that he’s pinned to the inside wall. His wife has similar weight issues, but her problems don’t end there. The hair on her arms and legs, and the small splashes on her face, look like wool. The couple looks happy together. I cross his name off the list and flick off the lamp. Mr. Doughnut didn’t do this. It isn’t possible. He would have come close to dying just chasing the victim up those stairs, and I doubt his ability to gain an erection-something the killer repeatedly used. Though he must have used one at least twice: there are two overweight children in the photographs.

Nine people left.

I push the chair back into the position it had been in, which isn’t hard to find. The carpet is nearly worn through where the casters normally sit. So is the floor beneath it. I move into the opposite cubicle.

Detective Anthony Watts has been with the police department for twenty-five years, a detective for the last twelve. I’m considering him as my next suspect as I sit down and flick on his lamp. There’s a photograph here. Watts and his wife sharing a happy moment together. Jesus, these people get happy and some prick has to take a picture as proof.

Once again I begin to see things for what they are. Watts has that wrinkled look that comes with being sixty. He has gray hair, but not a lot of it left. I’m trying to imagine him having the strength to fight Daniela, let alone strangle her, but I can’t do it. So I try to imagine him raping her in the way she’d been raped. Can’t see him doing that either. Watts just doesn’t have it in him. Daniela didn’t have him in her.

I cross him off the list. Turn off his lamp. Push his chair back into place.

Eight suspects. I’m beginning to enjoy myself.

The center aisle, once it reaches the end of this floor, branches into a T formation. I go left, directly to Detective Shane O’Connell’s cubicle.

Here I don’t even bother sitting down. O’Connell, a forty-one-year-old detective with the ability to solve cases that involve signed confessions and not much more, broke his arm three weeks before the murder. His arm had been in a cast when Walker was killed. Even if he did have the strength to do this, there were no suggestions of plaster fibers found on the body or on the bed.

Seven suspects.

The next stop and two cubicles along for me is Detective Brian Travers. I slip in and flick on his desk lamp. No photographs of family here-all I’m seeing are swimsuit calendars. This year’s, last year’s, and the year’s before that. I can well understand his hesitancy in throwing away the old calendars.

I flick back through last year’s calendar. Look at the date Walker was murdered. He hasn’t marked anything on it. I flick through an old desk calendar and see the same thing. There isn’t any note saying “Kill bitch tonight. Buy milk.”

I open the desk drawers and rummage around. Look through files, folders, any scrap piece of paper, but there is nothing here relevant to the case. I find nothing to suggest his guilt. Or his innocence. I listen to his phone messages with the volume turned down low. I tip back the trash can under his desk, but it’s empty.

Travers is in his midthirties. He has a lean and strong body. Just under six feet, he has the type of casual good looks that easily attract women and could get him off on a rape charge with the He’s so clean cut he could have any woman he wanted defense, which juries still fall for. He doesn’t have a wife, and if he has a girlfriend, unless she’s Miss January, he hasn’t put up any pictures of her.

I put a question mark next to his name.

Still seven suspects.

I continue on my merry way and sit down behind the desk of Detective Lance McCoy. I start out with the same procedure I used in Travers’s cubicle. McCoy is in his early forties, married, with two kids. The photograph telling me all this sits in a small frame on his desk, center stage. Other pictures hang on the walls of his cubicle. His wife looks ten years younger than him. His daughter is quite attractive, but his son looks like a moron. McCoy is a dedicated family man, I can tell just by sitting here in his extremely tidy cubicle. Small mottoes are pasted around the place, on coffee cups and notepads and plaques: Work to live not live to work, and Sloppiness leads to a path of depression. I look for but can’t find one that says The only good bitch is a dead bitch, so I can’t have him as my lead suspect. I can’t find any notes that he’s made on the case. I put a small question mark next to his name.

Seven suspects. Isn’t this supposed to be getting easier? I check my watch. It’s nine thirty-five, but my internal clock tells me it is only eight thirty, so something must be out of whack. When I enter Detective Bill Landry’s office-yes, an office, not a cubicle-I confirm that my watch spoke the truth. Like Schroder and many of the other detectives, Landry is involved with trying to solve other crimes and finding other killers. A few months ago bodies were found in a lake in a cemetery, making me not the only serial killer in town-which, I have to say, is actually pretty annoying. It would have been great to have been the only one, just as it would have been great to have been the first. Before recently, the country had only ever seen one serial killer, and that was a guy who had a thing for killing prostitutes, and that was twenty years ago, a guy by the name of Jack Hunter who the media called “Jack the Hunter,” a cute allusion to Jack the Ripper.

Of course being the optimist, I can also see the positive side of there being another serial killer on the loose. It keeps the police busy.

Landry has been helpful by making a list of notes that point out how different the Walker scene is from the others. He wouldn’t do that if he were the killer. In fact his notes have the word copycat at the top of the first page, with a ring around it and a question mark next to it.

I cross Landry off my list. Then I head back up the center aisle and directly to Detective Superintendent Dominic Stevens’s office. Fumble with the lock. Eight seconds.

I close the blinds and use the small flashlight I’ve brought along with me. Sneaking around in Stevens’s office is far more obvious than sneaking around the cubicles. There’s a copy of a report he has written for his superiors on his desk. It explains in detail where the investigation is, which, in simple terms, is nowhere. It explains the running theories, while adding his theory that Daniela Walker was killed by somebody different. He recommends a separate investigation into her death. If Stevens is the killer, he sure as hell wouldn’t do that. I cross him off the list.

Five suspects left, and I’m starting to get the bad feeling I could end up crossing all of them off over the next few days, that I’m overlooking something.

When eleven o’clock rolls around I decide it’s time to go. I catch the bus toward home, but get off a half mile or so before my street hoping a walk in the fresh air will help clear my mind. It’s a beautiful night. There’s a nor’wester blowing like a cure for anybody feeling down. Same nor’wester that irritates everybody else. Weather’s great like that.

But I’m not interested in making a forecast.

Ahead of me are more long days and plenty of late nights, so I hit the sack the moment I get inside. I realize I didn’t call Jennifer about the cat, but that can wait. Right now I’m just too busy falling asleep.