Paul Cleave - The Cleaner

“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.

According to notes in the file, another one hundred and twenty photographs were taken-quite the portfolio-and these pictures detail many of the items in the house, as well as the rooms. The catalog of those photographs is specific: door, stairs, bed, furniture, smudges on the handles. Anything and everything.

I look hard at the pictures, but see nothing. So I look at them harder. I’m trying to imagine myself inside her house. It’s hard, because the pictures I have were all taken in the bedroom. The natural insight I was waiting to experience from my own experience doesn’t come along.

I glance through the report. She was found by her husband, her entire body draped by a sheet. Did her killer feel bad at what he’d done? Was covering her an act of decency?

I read the toxicology report. It takes most of my lunch break to decipher that the ten-page report says only that I’ve just wasted my time, that there were no drugs in her system. Or any alcohol. Or any poisons.

The postmortem is an even longer report, but less complicated. It makes for easy reading, and I know how it’s going to end even before I finish it. It reveals in an exceptionally unenthusiastic manner what Daniela went through, probably because the pathologist has seen it all before and has got bored with it. The report comes with pre-illustrated diagrams of the female body and its anatomy, and the pathologist has used these to point to where and what was damaged during her ordeal. There were no traces of semen. A condom was used. Her pubic hair had been combed and washed by the killer, removing any hair and skin cells he would have left behind. This isn’t something I’ve been doing, and I won’t do it now-even though it isn’t such a bad idea. It indicates her killer is far from crazy, and has an insight into police forensics.

There were extensive bruises in all the places where there ought to be bruises, and she suffered two cracked ribs. She was punched once in the eye and once in the mouth. There were other, older injuries there-some as recent as two months before she died. Injuries that had not been reported. Injuries, in the opinion of the pathologist, consistent with being beaten. So Daniela was used to what she was getting. Cause of death: strangulation.

The rest of the postmortem is both standard and uninteresting. It’s like reading a mechanic’s report about fixing a car. The body was fully dismantled and tested. The weight of the organs. The size of her brain. Detailed references to photographs taken during the autopsy take up two pages-photos of her hands, of her neck, of her feet. I don’t bother with any of this.

DNA was found at the scene. No fingerprints. The killer used latex gloves, like the type I wear. A residue from the gloves was left on the door handles from the tips of his fingers. Also there was plenty of residue all over the victim. The only prints found were latent smears on her eyelids, but these were only partial and too badly damaged to be of any use. That’s the beauty about human skin-it’s one thing fingerprints struggle to stick to. They did find hair, though, in other places. And carpet fibers. And shoe prints. So far they have narrowed them down only to the husband who found the body, and the officers and detectives who worked the scene. It’s impossible to keep a crime scene free of any contamination. In order to do that, the room would need to be inside a large plastic bubble that nobody would ever be allowed to go inside to collect the pristine evidence.

The police have their own DNA databases of their people who go to scenes. This way they eliminate evidence left by their own men and women. Next, they take blood from the victim’s family, friends, and neighbors, until they narrow the field right down. Last night, I left plenty of evidence behind: saliva on the two bottles of beer, carpet fibers, hair. But I have no criminal record. Nothing to match my name to these samples. So I’m a free man.

Whoever killed Daniela may have a criminal record. The evidence I leave behind ties my killings together. I don’t know whose decision it was to include Walker among those women, but it was a bad one. Lunchtime is nearly over. I’m still hungry. No eggs today. I keep studying the autopsy report. Her fingernails were clipped after death, so it seems she scratched her killer. I’ve been scratched several times, never in the face, though, and I don’t mind because that would be like a chef complaining about getting burned or a crash-test dummy complaining about being dumb-it comes with the job. I just never roll my sleeves up until those scratches are gone. I’ve never even thought about clipping their nails afterward to hide the evidence. Why would I cut the nails from this victim and wash her pubic hair, and not any of the others? How can the police really toss this death into the same mix?