The Cleaner (Professionals 9)

"It's not you. It's just the setup," he told me, waving his free arm outward. "It looks straight out of a movie about a stalker," he said, shaking his head. "Red string and everything," he added.

"Yeah, I guess I could have gone with some blue or something to shake it up," I mused, trying not to feel too relieved, because I was worried that made me seem entirely too needy.

"It's not you," he insisted. "I wouldn't laugh at you," he added, and there was a note of vulnerability in his voice. Like maybe he knew what it was like to be laughed at, how crummy it felt. "So where does this all start?" he asked, hand loosening on my arm, then sliding down it before releasing me completely.

"Well, I jumped on at the disappearance of Joseph Abernackie. That is the only place—and forward—where I have any evidence at all. That's here," I explained, standing next to the wall, and holding an arm out toward the more recent cases. "But I have hunches about all of this as well," I told him, waving at the other side of the wall.

It drove me nuts that some of the cases were too old to find anything to go on, that some of the apartments had been rented out several times over since then, so the chance of any evidence being left over was slim to none. And in a frustratingly high number of the cases, there was no one left to miss or look for those poor people. In some, the ones left hated them so much that they weren't bothering to look for them.

"And what do you have for Joseph Abernackie and the others after that you don't have for the ones before?"

"It's a bunch of little things. Like their homes, mostly. Honestly, that is all most of this is based on. But it is freaky."

"What is?"

"How perfectly clean their houses and apartments are. Like in a way that is the exact same every time."

"Maybe they're all just neat freaks," he suggested.

"How many true neat freaks do you know, though?" I asked. While I knew plenty of people who kept a tidier home than I did, I couldn't think of a single one who didn't have some stray dust bunny under a couch or fingerprints on the fridge. "I mean, these are clean to the point of having vacuum marks on their couches."

"Maybe they had a cleaning service," he reasoned.

"Nope."

"They might not have gone with a commercial company. Plenty of people do house cleaning under the table," he told me, moving closer to the wall.

"Yeah, well, I checked."

"How could you check?"

"I hired every single cleaning person I could find in the area."

"To clean your house?" he asked in a tone that likely didn't mean to judge, but was totally judging. Which was fine. I knew I wasn't the tidiest or most organized of people. I figured that so long as I wasn't wading around in my own filth—or look like I could belong on an episode of a reality show where they find dead kittens in piles of my junk—that it was just a part of who I was.

"I actually used a full, deep house cleaning as part of birthday, anniversary, and Christmas presents for a while. Then went ahead and dropped by the next day to check out the jobs they did. And they all did fine. But there are a couple specific things I was looking for. Especially this smell. I have yet to find anyone who cleans with something that smells like the product that was being used in these missing or dead people's houses."

To that, he made some sort of grunting noise, and it was impossible to tell if it was agreement or simply acknowledgment that he'd heard me.

"Is there anything tying them together? They're all over the map with age, sex, and race."

"I know," I agreed. That was why I hadn't been able to go to the police with my suspicions. Talk about laughter. They would laugh me right out of the station.

"Wait..." he said, brows furrowing as he moved closer to the wall, reaching upward toward a picture, pulling it out of the order.

"Hey," I objected, even though I knew I would be able to put it right back. I knew this information like the back of my hand. "What are you doing?" I asked when he reached for a second picture, then a third, flipping through them in his hands, analyzing each picture.

He'd taken down Maggie Hollis, Denise Bala, and Shayna Lyons.

The interesting thing about them was they did, in a way, fit a pattern. They were all straight out of high school, with various shades of reddish hair, blue-or green-eyed, tall, fit, yet curvy, and known for going out for runs on their own. Which were the leads the police had followed for each of them.