The Cleaner

CHAPTER FIFTY

She’s in bed when they come for her. In bed thinking about Joe. Wondering where he was tonight when she went to his apartment and knocked on the door. She hadn’t gone inside. Hadn’t driven to his mother’s in case he was there. Hadn’t driven to the house where she saw him last night, even though she supposed she should’ve.

The last time the police came to her house was five years ago. They came two days after Martin had died. Back then it had been one police car. They had come to take statements in the most gentle way they could. This time several of them are parked right outside. They have their lights flashing, but their sirens are muted. The banging on the door, however, is not. The lights send red and blue patterns racing left and right across her wallpaper through thin gaps around the curtains. There is nothing gentle about this.

She hears her mother and father asking what’s going on, then her name. She climbs out of bed and puts on a robe just as the door opens. Detective Schroder is there, looking stressed and tired and pissed off. He’s looking at her as if she’s guilty of something.

“What’s going on?”

“You’re going to have to come with us, Sally,” he says, and she’s never heard him sound like this.

“What?”

“Come on, Sally.”

“Can I change?”

He stalls, obviously wanting to say no, but then calls for a female officer, who comes into the room. “Make it quick,” he says, then closes the door behind him.

The officer doesn’t talk to her as she changes into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She recognizes the woman, has seen her around at the station and even spoken on occasion, but right now this woman is acting like a stranger. She tugs on a jacket, some socks, and her shoes.

“Let’s go,” the woman says, and opens the door.

Half a dozen policemen stand in the hallway. They’re asking her parents questions and not answering the questions her parents are asking them. She tries to tell them everything’s okay, but she doesn’t know if that’s true. They don’t handcuff her, but they put her in the back of a squad car and rush her away. She notices that over half of the police cars stay at her house. If they’re searching her room, she hopes they’ll tidy it up afterward. Almost all her neighbors are standing on their front lawns watching. She doesn’t know what’s going on. She’s scared and confused. Has she done something wrong at work? Do they think she’s stolen something? Have they decided, five years later, to charge her for her brother’s death?

The drive to the police station is the quickest she’s ever had. The urgency to get her there seems undermined when they take her into an interrogation room, leave her alone, close the door, and disappear for half an hour. She paces the room, sits down, then paces it again. Her heart’s racing, her hands are shaking slightly, and she’s becoming more frightened with every passing minute She’s never been in here before. The room is cold and she’s thankful for her jacket. The chairs are uncomfortable. The table is marked with the passages of other people’s time. Fingernails, keys, coins, anything they could find to scrape messages into the wood.

She doesn’t know the man who comes into the room at the thirty-minute mark. Just an average-looking guy with average features, but he frightens her. He asks her to hold out her hands and she does. He takes swabs of her skin and when she asks why, he doesn’t tell her. Then he leaves.

It’s another ten minutes before Detective Schroder comes into the room, by which point she’s crying. He sits down opposite her and places a folder on the desk. He doesn’t open it.

“Sorry for all the drama, Sally, but this is important,” he says, and smiles at her as he slides a coffee across the table toward her. It’s as if he’s suddenly become her best friend. But there isn’t any trace of warmth in that smile.

“What’s going on?”

“How well do you know Detective Calhoun?”

The detective who went missing? What has that got to do with her? “Not well. Why?”

“Do you ever socialize with him?”

“Socialize with him?” She shakes her head. “Never.”

“Never been for a drink with him? Never run into him at a restaurant? At a shopping mall?”

She glances at the coffee, but doesn’t touch it. “I already told you never,” she says, annoyed that Schroder thinks she’s lying.

“Ever been in his car?”

“What?”

“His car, Sally. Ever been for a ride with him?”

“No. I’ve never seen him outside of this building. I’ve never had dinner with him, never had a drink with him,” she says, her voice growing a little stronger now, but inside she’s just about ready to break down.

“Seen him today at all?”

“You asked me that this morning.”

“I’m asking you again.”

“Why don’t you believe me?” she asks.

“Answer the question, Sally.”

“No. I don’t know the last time I saw him. Yesterday, maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I see everybody here all the time. I don’t even know if I saw you yesterday but I’m sure I probably did.”

He nods, accepting her answer. “Do you like fire, Sally?”

“Fire?” As confused as she was a moment ago, this question makes even less sense. “I don’t understand.”

“Fire. There was a fire tonight. That’s why your hands were swabbed. We were looking for signs of any accelerants.”

“But you didn’t find any, did you,” she says, not as a question but as a statement.

“You could have worn gloves.”

“But I didn’t set fire to anything!” she says, her voice raising.

“It was a house.”

Suddenly everything she’s seen on TV, all the cop shows and all the movies she’s watched with her dad, it all comes in handy, because right then she knows exactly what to say next. “I want a lawyer.”

Schroder leans back and sighs. “Come on, Sally. Just be honest and you won’t need one,” he says, which is something else the cops say on TV too. “How long have we known each other?”

She thinks about it. She doesn’t see the harm in answering this one without a lawyer present. “Six months.”

“You trust me?”

“Until tonight I would have, but no, not now. Not at the moment.”

He grunts, then leans forward again. “The place that burned down, it was a crime scene. It’s where Daniela Walker was killed. It was also where Lisa Houston was murdered.”

She recognizes the names: both victims of the Christchurch Carver.

“I didn’t burn the place down.”

“And you’ve never been in Detective Calhoun’s car.”

“No.”

“And we have your word for that.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. No need for a lawyer.”

She knows it doesn’t work that way. “Then why do I feel so worried?”

He smiles at her, but she can’t find any warmth in it.

“Let me show you two things,” he says. He opens up the folder, revealing a plastic ziplock evidence bag sitting on top of a photograph. It has a parking ticket in it. She can’t get a clear look at the picture beneath it.

“We found this today behind Detective Calhoun’s desk. It’s quite interesting really, what we learned from it. It has his fingerprints on it. We know that, because everybody who works here has their fingerprints on file. Everybody. Even people who aren’t police. The cleaners, for example. Even Joe. Even you.”

She doesn’t know what to say, so she says nothing. She tightens her grip on her crucifix. She’s been hanging on to it since the moment she arrived here.

“The second set of fingerprints on the ticket belongs to you.”

“What does that mean?”

“In itself? Not much. It means you and Detective Calhoun each held this ticket at one point. You know, we went to the parking building this belongs to. The date on it is five months old.”

“Five months?”

“That’s right.”

Five months? A small bell starts ringing in the back of her mind. Something familiar, but what?

“We went to the parking building and we drove up each level. We weren’t sure what we were looking for. It was probably just a false lead. Only on the top we found Detective Calhoun’s car. The ticket wasn’t for that, though, because his car could only have been there for a day at the most. When he parked it there, he hit the car next to him. Left a huge scrape all the way along the side of it. We’d found his car, that was good, but it meant we had to deal with the owner of the second car. Insurance companies were going to have to get involved. No doubt the owner would be pissed off. Any idea what happened then?”

She shakes her head, too scared to speak.

“We ran the plate. Turned out the car was reported stolen five months ago. Reported one day after the time code on the parking ticket. That means the car was stolen at night, parked there, and the following day the owner went to drive to work and found out he couldn’t. So we opened up the car. Want to guess what we found in there?”

She shakes her head.

“We found a body in there.”

She gasps and tightens her grip. The corners of her crucifix puncture her skin.

“It was wrapped in plastic, and surrounded by ninety pounds of cat litter.”

“Cat litter?”

“It absorbs the smell.”

“I had nothing to do with it.”

“It seemed odd that Detective Calhoun would dump his car next to a car with a body hidden in it. Odd that we would find the ticket for that car after we’d already searched his desk. It was as though it were placed there for us to find. Odd that your fingerprints are on it. Any idea why he would park there? Any idea how this ticket showed up?”

“No,” she says, but that’s not strictly true. She does have an idea, and she doesn’t like it. Not at all.

He lifts the plastic bag away. The photograph beneath it is of the car she saw parked up the driveway of the house yesterday. The same car Joe left in.

“This is his car. You’re telling me you’ve never seen it?”

“I. . I don’t know,” she says, remembering seeing somebody walk into that house, somebody she recognized from a distance but couldn’t place.

He lifts the photograph away, and beneath it is another evidence bag. Inside it is the small pad she wrote on yesterday. It’s the address of the house where Joe went.

“Why did you write down this address?”

“Is that. . is that the house that burned down?” she asks.

“Yes, it is,” he says. “You had the address written down on a pad in your car.”

“Oh Lord,” she says-not to Detective Schroder, but to herself. She knows why the house looked familiar to her. She saw a photograph of it in the folders at Joe’s house when she flicked through them. The same day she picked up the parking ticket from beneath his bed.

“Joe,” she whispers.

“What?”

She starts to sob. It’s all starting to make sense. The folders. The wound. Joe driving the detective’s car.

“I. . I had nothing.” She chokes on a sob, can’t catch her breath, and feels like she’s going to pass out. She shakes her head, grits her teeth, and inhales loudly. Then, surrounded by more tears, she finishes her sentence. “I had nothing to do with this. Please, you must. Must believe me.”

“Then tell me, Sally. Tell me how I’ve added all of this up wrong. Tell me where I should be looking.”

So she does. She starts by telling him about the smile Joe gave her that day in the elevator two weeks ago, she tells him what a sweet guy Joe is, then starts to tell him the rest.