Paul Cleave - The Cleaner

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.

At two minutes past eight I’m sitting on the edge of my bed covered in sweat. For the first time in years, I’ve dreamed. Though the sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant, the dream certainly was. I was a policeman, investigating myself for murder. Attempting to coerce a confession, I played good cop, bad cop. Yet I wouldn’t give in. Instead I suggested and then mimed a rather lewd act to myself, which was followed by a demand for a lawyer. When a lawyer did arrive, it was Daniela Walker. She looked exactly as she had in her photograph. The bruises around her neck were like a string of black, deformed pearls. She never blinked, not once, her glazed-over eyes staring at me the entire time. Her only words were to tell me to confess to her murder. She repeated them over and over like a mantra. I was confused and confessed to a whole bunch of murders. Then the walls of the interrogation cell slid away as if I were in a game show, revealing a court of law. There was a judge and a jury and a lawyer. I recognized none of them. There was even a band. One of those old swing-time bands with guys dressed in suits. They were holding up freshly polished brass instruments but none of them were playing. Even with a guilty plea on offer, there was still a jury, and the jury found me guilty. So did the judge. The judge sentenced me to death. The band started playing the same song I’d heard on Angela’s stereo, and as they played, the two businessmen I saw on the bus yesterday rolled in an electric chair. I woke just after the clamps of the electric chair locked my arms and legs into place.

I can smell burning flesh even now as I sit on the edge of my bed. This is the first time my internal alarm clock has ever let me down. I close my eyes and try to push the big buttons inside to reset it. Why did I dream? How is it I’ve slept in? Because I’m trying to do something good? Could be. I’m trying to give Daniela Walker’s family closure, and that doesn’t feel right. I must suffer for my humanity.

I don’t want to miss my bus, so I skip breakfast. Can’t make myself lunch either, so I toss some fruit into my briefcase, then race out the door. I don’t even have time to feed my fish. The day is overcast and muggy. Warm and lethargic. This is worse than a sun-shining-hot day. I’m already sweating by the time Mr. Stanley refuses to punch my ticket.

I walk down the aisle and sit behind the same businessmen who were in my dream, making me suspect for a moment that I’m still in it, and I watch the walls of the bus to see if they give way to another court of law and another swing-time band. They don’t. The businessmen are already talking loudly. Business this. Money that. I begin to imagine what they do in their spare time. If they’re not sleeping with each other, they’re probably married to women who are having affairs. I doubt they would have the courage to dump their bitches if they found out they were being cheated on. And I don’t mean divorce.