The Cleaner (Professionals 9)

Sliding the locks, then punching the code, I waited for the beep, then opened the door, I made my way down the narrow wooden steps that always made my stomach do a flip-flop at the idea of falling down them, then having someone finding my half-decomposed body a week later.

The air slipped a few degrees cooler as I got deeper underground. My basement wasn't much to speak of. When I'd been looking to buy a house, there had been several units that had finished basements that offered more living space. I already had more living space than I needed. And I found something creepily appealing about the bare cinder block walls and the cement floor splattered with the paint of several former homeowners before me.

It was like a part of me knew that a finished basement wouldn't match the theme that this space would eventually become.

My command center, if you will.

My bullpen, even.

And I was the old, hardened bull, scratching the ground and snorting.

Okay, not snorting.

Fine, maybe snorting sometimes.

The basement was a narrow, but long space, much like the upstairs was. At the far end was a utility room that I will admit I'd only been in twice since moving in. The second time, I encountered a creature known as a "cave cricket," which is basically a prehistoric beast of an insect that jumps super fucking high.

We'd locked eyes.

I named him Harry.

I kindly asked him to find some other basement to feast on old wood and fungus and bugs in.

He told me to fuck off.

He did this by showing his superior jumping abilities.

I screamed like a little girl, slammed the door, and declared that the utility room was his domain.

We were civil neighbors, of sorts.

He got to continue living in the utility room.

And I would just have to live the rest of my life in the dark should the circuit breaker trip.

It was fine. Everything was fine.

Because Harry didn't judge me for my command center. Or if he did so, he did it in cave cricket language. And I was luckily not fluent.

Three fold-up plastic desks lined the longest wall, each of them overflowing with paperwork, with books, with newspapers.

Slightly creepy, sure.

But it got real weird when your eyes moved up from there, and came in contact with all the pictures and papers hanging on the wall.

In case you were wondering, yes, there was actually even string connecting some of the pictures and papers.

Full-on crazy, right?

Except, I wasn't.

I was passionate.

I was dedicated.

I was maybe even a little bit obsessed.

With something I didn't tell a single soul on Earth about.

You see, I believed there was a serial killer operating in and around Navesink Bank.

It sounds crazy. Of course it does. You don't hear about a lot of legitimate serial killers these days. They seemed to have really peaked in the seventies, what with Bundy and Gacy and the Golden State Killer and many others really making people paranoid to exist back then.

But serial killers were still alive and well.

They were just a hell of a lot better at what they do.

They, like me, like all my true crime junkie brethren, watch all the shows on TV about people getting caught based on trace evidence. So they got really good at cleaning up after themselves.

Forty percent of all homicides go unsolved each year in the US alone.

And if that doesn't make you look twice at shadows that might not quite be shadows, and sleep with a knife in your nightstand, and other self-defense items strategically placed all around your home, well, then we are very different kinds of people. Cut from different cloths, and all that jazz.

It wasn't crazy to believe there were serial killers active in your state. Hell, most experts say we have about two-thousand undetected serial killers active in the United States at any given time.

And, let's face it, when it comes to crime of any damn sort, the chances were much higher of it existing in Navesink Bank.

The town slogan should be "Bikers, and Loansharks, and the mafia, oh my!"

Let's just say, a lot of people died in our town. And after a few years, the sounds of gunshots didn't really even rouse you from sleep most of the time.

It went to follow, too, that people would go missing.

But this was different.

These people weren't in outlaw biker clubs. They didn't break kneecaps for a living. They weren't "made men."

These were mostly just, you know, people.

People who had very normal, workaday lives. They paid their taxes and went out with friends and family. They had money in the bank, and no clear reason to simply... disappear.

It was the disappearances that first got on my radar. I shrugged off a handful of them with the sort of hardened indifference that came with my line of work, knowing that a lot of times, the people whose family swore up and down would never "leave their families behind" because they "loved them too much," often did up and leave those families because they just got sick of them all.