by E. R. FALLON
He stopped by the main elevator with gold doors, the one we hadn’t arrived on. Then he pressed a button and turned around. “Hey, are you guys here because of that body they found in 102?”
I thought about what to say, and then Em spoke for me. “We’re a cleaning crew, sir.”
“You aren’t—really?” The guy touched his mouth. Our large, mitt-like gloves probably gave us away. He lowered his voice. “Was it a murder or something? I tried looking for some information about it online but didn’t find much. So, you know what happened, right?” He didn’t seem gleeful, just genuinely curious. The elevator arrived on the floor and the doors opened.
“We’re just the cleaning crew,” I said.
I motioned to Josh and Em to wait until the guy left before securing their hoods with the attached masks.
“Of course you are,” the guy said. He tossed a final glance in our direction before stepping into the elevator.
“We actually are,” I said, but by that time he couldn’t have heard me.
Josh, standing at my side, picked up the large shop vacuum and breathed out. “Let’s haul this stuff in,” he said.
We flipped up our hoods and sealed them. The yellow police tape had been removed by someone. Arnett? He wasn’t supposed to take it down but probably had, so as not to tarnish his building’s pristine image.
The key got stuck in the lock and I had to jostle the knob a few times to open the door. “Funny that such a posh building doesn’t use key cards,” I said.
“Maybe they’re trying to be quaint,” Em remarked.
“I believe you’re right.” Then I said to both of them, “Let’s not sing as we work today.” I pocketed the key and entered the apartment first. Sometimes we sang while we worked because at times it was the only way to get through the visceral realism of what we saw on a daily basis, and also because we were so accustomed to the routine that we sang to pass the time as we cleaned.
“That’s a given,” Em said.
“Yeah,” Josh agreed.
Em held open the door as Josh and I lugged in the shop vacuum, the steam equipment, the pressure washer, and the containers of robust disinfectants so potent gloves had to be worn at all times when using them. She shut the door once we’d put everything inside.
“Should I lock it?” Em asked me.
“Arnett wouldn’t like that,” I replied, glancing around the place.
The apartment looked as though it hadn’t been lived in for months. A set of white stairs dipped down into the sunken living room. I folded a black body bag that had been left behind on a step by law enforcement and set it by the front door to take away with us when we left.
The long windows with no curtains allowed sunlight to fill the wide space. The hardwood floors shone in the living room, and were clean save for the shoe scuffs and dusty footprints the cops had left behind. With the ample light from outside, there wasn’t a need to switch on the lamps. I scouted for wall sockets to plug in our equipment, and was pleased to find plenty in the open-floor style apartment. I stepped into a kitchen that looked small and out of place with the rest of the spacious apartment, but with new looking appliances, yet with dead flies crusty on the counters. Larvae. Flies.
The smells of a corpse still permeated the air in the whole place, a smell far worse than the worst thing you ever inhaled in your life. I didn’t know all the details of the incident but the body must have been inside the apartment for a good amount of time for the air to have stunk like that even after the corpse was removed. I’d intended to get rid of the dead flies in the kitchen even if the building’s manager was an asshole, because I prided myself in doing the best job possible.
But the kitchen wasn’t where the body had been found. The source of the odor came from another, more distant area in the apartment. Em and Josh trailed me as I, led by my nose, followed the stinking remnants of the corpse’s scent into the apartment’s sole bedroom. The faster my nose twitched, the closer I knew I was getting to the source.
A large walk-in closet where the corpse had been, roomy enough to hold two of us, its doors open, had a faint dark imprint made up of blood and postmortem bodily functions on the white interior carpet. No matter how long I’d been in my line of work, without my mask, even I would retch at the smells the dead left behind.
From the faintness of the impression, the body had been wrapped in something but some blood and decomposition fluids had seeped into the carpet, creating a brown-red sketch of what looked like had been a tall, thin person. The body appeared to have been folded inside the closet but the outline of what would have been the torso and arms were long.
Josh patted Em’s shoulder. “They don’t even have to tell him where to find it. Man’s got a nose like a bloodhound’s,” he said.
The masks we wore made breathing difficult, and although they filtered the air to protect us from contaminants—no matter how clean-looking a scene appeared, one never knew what you could catch—I never liked wearing the masks because they muffled the wearer’s voice and made it difficult to hear someone. Josh and Em moved out from next to me and made a movement toward the door to collect our equipment in the living room.
I whistled at them and they stopped in their tracks. “You know what? Why don’t you two get started in the kitchen first—you saw the flies in there, right?—and I’ll get started in here.” I wanted the bedroom to myself for a while so I could check things out before we cleaned up and got rid of anything that might have been there, like a clue the police had somehow missed.
“Sure thing, chief,” Josh said.
Em gave me an unsure look over her shoulder as they walked out, and I gave her an unwavering smile, because I couldn’t let them know anything was wrong, although I was certain something was. Very certain.
The closet was empty save for a few wooden hangers and a cracked dressing mirror shoved against the back wall portion of the interior. When I could barely hear Em’s and Josh’s voices in the other room above the ear-splitting roar of the shop vacuum—if noise concerned Arnett, I’d expected he’d show up any moment and complain—I reached up to the closet shelf and felt around, came up with a little dust on my fingertips but nothing else. The rest of the bedroom was empty, like the living room and the kitchen. No bed, television, couch, tables, or chairs, or personal items like photographs. Why was someone paying the rent to keep an empty apartment?
“Do you want me to bring some equipment in for you? You don’t have anything.” Em’s voice came from the doorway at my back. Sometimes she was a bit more intuitive than Josh, who scrubbed and scraped in the other room, whistling to himself as he worked.
I gave her a pointed look. She held a UV light in her hand that we used to find stains that weren’t visible. “I was just on my way out to fetch something. Thanks for checking.” Had she seen the truth beyond my false smile?
“Do you want me to bring something in for you?” Em asked.
“No, thanks, I’ve got it.” And I hoped my reply wasn’t too quick.
“You’re sure?”
I nodded in silence and avoided looking at her thoughtful face.
“Just trying to be a good assistant,” she said softly, and backed out of the room.
Halfway into our cleaning, someone began to open the door to the apartment. I stepped into the living room and the apartment fell silent as Josh shut off the whirring pressure washer in the kitchen. It was so quiet I could have heard a pin drop. Even through the mask, the acrid smell of cleaning fluids burned my nostrils. Josh exited the kitchen followed by Em, who went toward the door as it was opened. I motioned to them that I’d deal with whoever it was, presumably Arnett coming to grumble about the racket we were making, or coming early to check on us. Until that moment, I’d figured we were in the clear since we’d made it halfway through and he hadn’t come by.
Arnett had his fingers stuck in his ears when he pushed his way inside. He spoke before I had a chance to. “Should you be doing that to our wood floors?” He in
dicated the pressure washer.
“That won’t damage the wood,” I said, but even I wasn’t convinced. “You can always re-polish it later.”
Arnett frowned. “I wasn’t going to interrupt, but you simply cannot keep making this noise.” He made a gesture to some of the equipment Em and Josh had unloaded in the living room. Arnett stepped over the body bag by the door. “I thought the police already removed the—the body.” He didn’t look at the bag but gestured at it.
“They did,” I said. “They left a bag behind. Don’t worry. It’s empty.”
“You look like Martians,” Arnett said. “How can you hear me through those things?”
“We can,” I said, but I removed my hood and mask and carried them in the crook of my arm. “As bad as this seems, the noise could be worse. We’ve made a point not to use all the equipment at the same time. You shouldn’t be in here while we’re working, Mr. Arnett. Who knows what we’re kicking up into the air when we clean.”
He gestured to my hood and mask in my arm. “You seem fine without all that.”
I smiled tolerantly and started to put my arm around him to guide him into the hall, but then noticed his grimace and thought better of that. I motioned for us to step outside to talk so Em and Josh could continue working, but Arnett wouldn’t budge.
He quietly shut the door and walked farther into the apartment. “We’ll do this right here, thank you very much. I don’t need my tenants being disturbed more than they already have, why, with the police blocking everything off and not letting people up into the building at one point, and now look at what you’re doing. I want you to leave now. I’ll clean this apartment myself if I have to. You don’t even need to be here. I never would have permitted this if it wasn’t for the owner of the building—”
I cut him short and held his stare. “If you’ll let us do the job the city pays us to do for you, we’ll leave.” Arnett’s breathing hitched. A look passed between Arnett and Josh, who was double his size. I watched Josh next to me. A vein in his neck pulsed. “Let us do our job, and then you can do yours,” I said. My tone conveyed we weren’t discussing the matter further.
“People aren’t always glad to see us but more often than not they’re grateful,” Em remarked after Arnett left. “But not him.”
“You got that right,” I replied.
On that day, we worked straight through lunch. As I pulled out of the Cove’s parking lot, Sammie sent me a text letting me know to meet her for drinks and dinner at Kelly’s Pub, our favorite local watering hole, after I went home and showered. She’d already gone home after work and fed Paige and was now out doing some shopping. It was her turn to get the groceries. I’d gone shopping for us last week.
I dropped Josh off at his house and tried to avoid Em’s questions on the way to her place. Em crawled up front to sit next to me, which was something new.
“Thanks for the door-to-door service,” she said.
“It’s no problem. It’s my job.”
“No, driving us home isn’t part of your job description. Technically, we could’ve driven to the garage this morning and then after work you could’ve taken us back to the garage and made us drive home from there.” She removed her eyeglasses and cleaned the lenses with her sleeve.
“The garage is far away from where the both of you live. It’s easier for me to pick everyone up.”
“That’s what I mean—you’re doing us a favor so we’ll get home sooner. Thanks.”
I avoided getting too sentimental. “You’re welcome. Will Trent be home from daycare by the time you get home?” My clothes stuck to my skin from perspiring inside the suit earlier at the Cove.
“Yeah, my babysitter’s picking him up. Can I ask you a question?”
Usually, the answer would have been yes, but from the way Em looked at her hands, folded in her lap while she talked, I felt I knew what she wanted to talk about; something I didn’t want to talk about.
“Back in the apartment, when you were alone in the bedroom, it looked like you were trying to find something,” she said. “I remember you asked us to clean out the kitchen first—”
My skin heated as I felt her watching me, and my grip on the wheel tightened. A few moments passed between us, with the sound of my increasingly heavy breathing filling the space around us. “I wanted to pay extra attention to the stain in the closet. I was worried we wouldn’t be able to get rid of it by the time we were scheduled to leave. You know, there’s still a faint outline there anyway. I noticed it before we left. I couldn’t get it to come out all the way. I’m sure Arnett will notice.”
“An outline of the body?” Em said. I’d succeeded in distracting her. “I’ve noticed that happens sometimes even when we really try to clean—I think fluids from the body stain the area it decomposes in.”
“You’re right. I’ve heard that, too.” I scratched the beard I’d started to grow.
“We should invent something and sell it to the crime scene clean-up industry, then we could retire.”
“You know, that’s not a bad idea.” I glanced at her next to me and smiled.
After dropping off Em, I drove the van to the municipal garage, thought about leaving the equipment inside the back of the van, and then decided to put it into the garage’s storage room. As I put the equipment away, I hoped I wouldn’t be unloading it again for a long time. Then I cleaned out the van, which was something I usually ended up doing myself. It took longer than I expected, and when I got home, I had just enough time to shower, dress, and take Paige for a walk before I met Sammie for dinner.
Chapter 3
I spotted Sammie—tall, slender and refined—straight away, sitting at the bar, facing the entrance door, with a vodka with cranberry and a twist of lime, her usual drink, and the tall glass of beer she’d ordered for me, my usual drink. I waved to her and she motioned at me to come over.
With Sammie’s dark hair, porcelain skin, and a statuesque build that was striking even when she was seated, she would have been noticeable anywhere, the kind of woman too beautiful to blend into the crowd, even in a bar that was packed in the evening. And she was all mine. I knew how lucky I was to have her.
We came to Kelly’s for dinner a couple times a week. Sammie had managed to save me a seat at the bar, and I made my way through the exuberant crowd blocking the door to get inside. Kelly’s wasn’t the type of place to have a hostess or a set of rules, so if you had someone waiting at a table for you, or in my case, waiting at the bar, you could walk straight in.
The voices of everyone talking at once hurt my ears, and I caught bits of conversations as I walked toward the sleek, dark wood bar. Someone mentioned a news story they’d read about a murder, but as I listened more closely, I realized it wasn’t any my team had handled recently. My mother’s story had been played up in the press partly because the boys she murdered were ordinary teenagers from average homes. The young men being found in the present had no one coming forward to claim them so far. It felt rotten taking comfort in the fact that that aspect of the murders was different.
I touched Sammie’s shoulder and squeezed in next to her at the bar. “Hello, gorgeous. I love you.” I kissed the side of her face. “I hope you didn’t leave the ice cream in the car.”
“Hello to you too.” She accepted the kiss but wouldn’t look at me. “I didn’t buy any this time, but the rest of the groceries are in the car.”
“Oh.” Usually, she bought ice cream for us, no matter the season. I put my arm around her and pulled her close to me. Was something wrong? I’d walked to Kelly’s from our apartment and planned to drive back home with Sammie and help her unpack the car there. “How was your day?” I asked. We’d texted a little throughout the day and I’d told her about the new victim—I wasn’t supposed to but since Sammie was a retired detective, I’d figured it was okay.
“Upsetting,” she said. “But isn’t it always?” She shrugged in a half-hearted way and I rubbed her back. “Yours?”
“Not th
at messy, surprisingly. Had to work through lunch to keep the manager at that place from breathing down my neck.” I looked around the jam-packed room. “Let’s order from the bar menu. That’ll be quicker.”
“That should be fine.” Sammie hadn’t touched her drink so I knew something was wrong. She waited a beat. “Are you okay? Seeing where these boys, it must be . . .” She touched my shoulder.
Sammie was the only person in my life then who knew about my mother. “It’s not pretty but I’ll manage.” I smiled and picked up my beer and drank. Sammie lowered my arm, stopping me from downing the glass.
“What is happening now has nothing to do with your mother.” Sammie spoke as though she wanted to reassure me, but from the quiver in her voice I wondered whether inside she felt like I did, that things were awfully similar to have been just a coincidence. She put her hand over mine and held hers there.
I pointed to her glass. “Don’t forget to drink that or I might end up drinking it for you.”
“Don’t change the subject.” Sammie frowned, and I looked into her warm brown eyes.
“I meant it when I said I’ll drink that if you won’t.” I reached for Sammie’s glass and she swatted my hand away.
“You’ve had one of those days, huh?” she asked.
I nodded, and I finished my beer while she drew on her bar napkin with a pen she took out of her purse. “Do you know what you want to order?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She didn’t look over at me and continued drawing on the napkin.
I reached over and slid the napkin to my side of the bar. Sammie had drawn a picture of a house with a slanted roof and a small garden out front. I had my own artwork to worry about, like the fact that someone had written Evelyn on those dead young men. My palms moistened, and I smoothed out the paper over the bar. It had been some time since Sammie and I had talked about buying a house and, possibly, getting married. Kids? The thought of being responsible for someone’s life worried me. I figured Sammie wanted to discuss those commitments now, that it was on her mind, even subconsciously, and I attempted to make light of the drawing. “Are you trying to tell me something?” I said.
