The Cleaner by Paul Cleave Page B

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 breakto 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