The Cleaner (38 page)

He’s sweating so much I’m starting to worry that he might be able to slip out of the knots and that the duct tape will just run off him in long, silver streaks.

“Do you know who I am?”

He shakes his head. “No.”

“Come on, you do know. I’m the Carver.”

“I don’t know who you are, and after you’ve let me go, I won’t even think about it. Okay, Joe?”

This, of course, is all bullshit. Bullshit that is taught to these guys when they become cops. He’s trying to negotiate with me, but he has nothing to bargain with. He knows that, but what else can he do? He keeps using my name, trying to relate to me, trying to make me see him as a real person.

“Let’s make a few assumptions. First of all, let’s assume I’m telling the truth. Secondly, let’s assume I’m not about to let you go. Thirdly, let’s assume you don’t cooperate with what I want. Do you know what happens then?”

He nods. Assumptions are something that cops aren’t supposed to make. They’re supposed to use facts, not maybes. However, Calhoun has been to some of the crime scenes. He can safely assume what will happen to him without needing any further evidence. All he has to do is swap, inside his mind, his own body for that of one of the women.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Good. Then let’s get a few of the ground rules out of the way. First of all, you’re all alone. Help isn’t coming, and you have no way to escape. However, don’t let this get you down. You’ve probably figured out that if I wanted you dead, you’d be dead already, right?”

He nods. He probably knew that from the moment he came to.

“Because if you agree to what I want, which is most likely, you’ll not only get out of here with your own life, but you’ll get paid an income for surviving.”

At this, he slowly starts nodding—at the word
income,
not
life.
Suddenly he not only survives, he becomes richer. This is sounding like a pretty good deal to him. He’s already paying for more hookers and he doesn’t even know yet how much he’s earning.

“The second thing is that I ask the questions, and you answer them truthfully. Failure to do so will jeopardize both aspects of the first ground rule. Any questions?”

He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. Yes, he understands. Perfectly.

“I suppose you want to know how much money and what you need to do for it?”

“Please.”

“Twenty thousand dollars, and it’s simple to earn. You don’t need to kill anybody for it, because you’ll be leaving that to me.”

He nods at this. Thinks twenty grand isn’t a lot of money to get tied up for, but it’s better than getting tied up and shot. Twenty grand is a lot of money to earn for doing nothing. This is the part of the plan he likes. The part of the plan I knew he would like.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

“I don’t want anybody to die,” Bob starts, as if he really means it, and as if I’d really care even if he did. People dying isn’t a relevant factor for him, or for me. Under other circumstances—better circumstances, he’ll be thinking—we could have laughed at his joke.

What is relevant is Daniela Walker.

I lean back on my elbow. If I smoked, now would be the time to casually light up an expensive cigarette. If I were an evil mastermind, now would be the time I started petting my white Persian cat. But I’m just a cleaner with no goldfish to feed. An average, everyday Joe. If I had my mop, then maybe I would stroke it. If I had my metal bucket, I could beat out a rhythm. All I can do is turn the knife over and over in my hands, watching him watching the blade.

“Come now, Bob, you’ve killed before. I don’t see how you can feel bad about somebody else dying.”

“I haven’t killed anybody.”

I shake my finger back and forth. “No, no, no. I said no
lying. Do you remember what I said would happen if you lied?”

He nods. He remembers.

“Good. I know of a couple of ways we can do this,” I say, reaching into my briefcase and rummaging around. “I can start by using these,” I pull out a pair of sharpened gardening shears, “on your fingers. For every answer I don’t want to hear, I’ll remove one finger.”

Actually, I won’t. I’m not going to remove any of them, but as long as he believes I’m going to, that’s all that really counts. This is where his assumptions are going to lead him astray. I watch his face as he studies the gardening shears. It takes no effort to imagine how they can wrap around any one of his fingers, how the blades can sink through his flesh, and how with a little bit of extra effort I can get them to snap through the bone. His imagination already has all his digits scattered across the floor behind his chair.

I’m capable of this. Melissa would be too. And so is he.

The three of us have all killed.

“You did kill her, didn’t you?”

He nods.

“Can you tell me why?”

He shrugs. “I’m still not sure.”

Not a detailed answer, but I believe it to be the truth—at least as far as he understands it.

“Would you like me to help you understand why?”

He does the wise thing and nods.

“It’s because you can,” I start. “The ability is inside you. You’ve always wanted to feel the power. What would it be like to kill somebody? Imagine the control! You imagined it, but of course it’s only a fantasy. You couldn’t admit to yourself that it’s something you’d actually like to try. In your mind you think about the outcomes, of how you could escape the blame, of how to make yourself look like the innocent party. Plenty of ways of doing it, but why explore them? After all, you’re only
thinking about it, you’re not exactly considering it. Then one day the fantasy is no longer enough. Not the fantasy of killing, but of sex. Violent sex. So you hire a whore, but it isn’t the same, because she isn’t a real victim. You want to kill her, because that’s ideally where the violent sex leads, but you know there’s no point in killing a whore because they’re already dead. They’re zombies tanked up on bad luck and bad breeding. You needed to kill a better class of person, and then along came Daniela Walker. A victim of domestic abuse who refuses to follow through with laying charges against her husband.”

He says nothing. I think about the indications in the pathology report that said Daniela had previous injuries. If she’d left her husband, she’d still be alive. And somebody else wouldn’t be. Calhoun surely would have found somebody else.

“She threatens him, she even goes to the police, but at the end of the day her fear of him and her love for him prevent her from acting. This woman is a loser. You can’t understand how she could even have married a guy like that, let alone have his children. But you forget he’d been charming when she met him, the same way you were charming when you met your wife.”

I look at him. My speech hasn’t made any impact. If it’s true, and I believe most of it is, then he isn’t going to let me know. This annoys me, but not enough to jump up and cut his throat. I sit and wait.

“You’re new in the city,” I continue, “so the opportunity to act out is irresistible. You know her address and learn the pattern of her movements. Her husband’s at work, her children are away at camp, so what could be better? Before you attack her, you decide to frame the husband, because what possible candidate could look any more attractive as her killer? Then you answer the question. One person fits the bill perfectly, and that person is me. So what do you do? You frame me for a murder I didn’t commit, and to be honest, Bob, I never really appreciated it. But you’re lucky, because you’re being
given the chance to change the way I feel about you. You can either leave this house a richer man, in terms of both money and character, or you can leave inside a body bag on your way straight down to hell. Of course, needless to say, punishment down there will be eternal, and eternity, Bob, is a very long time.”

I start wondering what I’m talking about. Hell? Who gives a damn about Satan? The limp-wristed, red-skinned motherfucker is a figment of the Christian imagination, designed solely as a deterrent for killers, thieves, rapists, liars, hypocrites, and mime artists—yet a lot of bloody good that’s done.

“Whether you rot in hell or not isn’t my concern. What is my concern is what you did to poor Daniela Walker. From what I’ve learned, and from being here,” I spread my arms out to encompass the room, “I’ve come to some expert and insightful conclusions.”

“Good for you.”

I smile. “You broke into her house during the late afternoon, climbed upstairs while she was showering, and waited for her in the bedroom. In this bedroom.”

It’s a familiar scenario.

“She had no chance. After all, you had the element of surprise on your side, as well as being bigger and stronger. Her fear, her imagination, made her react, but not quickly enough to escape you. You struggled with her, managed to force her onto the bed, and she managed to reach to the bedside table and clutch at the only weapon she could find.” I point to the table for effect. “She fought with you and managed to stab you with the pen she’d been using to fill in her crossword puzzles. The wound wasn’t deep, but it was enough to piss you off. You tossed it away, then got back to business. Except the pen was your mistake, Bob, but you know that, don’t you? At the time, after you killed her, nothing else mattered. The pain was gone, as was any concern of being caught. The pen was the furthermost thing from your mind. Until you came back. Then
it became the biggest thing on your mind, and it was only a matter of good luck that you were able to swap it unnoticed. At least unnoticed by everybody except me.”

“What is it you want?”

I shake my head. “Bob, Bob, Bob. I thought we had an understanding. You know you’re not allowed to ask the questions.”

“Just tell me what you want.”

“That’s another question.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s a request.”

“And that’s a lie.” I hold up the gardening shears. “You’re just asking for it, aren’t you?”

He shakes his head. “No. I swear.”

“What about Daniela? Was she asking for it?”

Bob’s face is wet and he’s looking down into his lap. We’re both sweating. It’s not warm outside, but somehow this house is still retaining the heat from the summer. The windows have been closed for three months now, so the air is stale and tastes like bad meat. I move over to the window. Open it slightly. Suck at the air outside. The smell, the thick air, the pressure on my skin—it is similar to my apartment the week I spent in bed with a bleeding ball and a bucket full of piss. I’d got used to the feeling, but it is a great relief to be rid of it now.

I sit down, remove my jacket, and clutch at my damp shirt. Thoughts of going to the beach are hammering the front of my mind. I can feel the pull of the sea and the sand, even though I’m five or six miles from the nearest drop and grain, even though a trip to the beach tonight would be a pretty miserable experience.

“Answer the Goddamn question, Bob.”

He tilts his head to look at me. He looks sorry, but he’s sorry to have been caught, not sorry for killing Daniela Walker.

“I didn’t mean to kill her.”

The air seems to be getting stickier by the minute. I don’t reply to his answer. I just sit still, silently reasserting my
dominance over this man. The room is cooling. Somewhere, Melissa is dreaming about her money. Somewhere nearby a dog is barking. Some place further away the police are coming closer, if they’ve not done so already, to discovering a match for the fingerprints on the murder weapon they found in the dumpster.

Bob is now a condemned man. He’s effectively on death row. It’s just that nobody has told him. His family, especially his wife, will have to live with the stench of blame. How can she justify not knowing what a monster her husband really is? Or how does she explain that she knew and never did anything about it?

I’ve been wondering whether Bob has an alibi for several of the killings. He was in Auckland for the first few. However, because of the seriousness of this horrific series of murders, the police will work their way around any small inconsistencies, and when nobody else shows up dead, they will be satisfied with labeling Calhoun the Christchurch Carver. I’ve learned enough from cleaning their hallways to know that they’re so hard-pressed for a suspect, they’ll keep their mouths shut, never mention all the DNA evidence that never quite matched up, and if a few more bodies show up every now and again they’ll use a copycat defense. It’ll keep them happy, and the media, and the country. It’ll even keep me happy.

“Okay, Bob, explain how killing her was an accident.”

He looks up. Stares into my eyes. He shrugs, then he looks down at the floor, then he shrugs again. He seems really unsure. “I followed her home, to talk to her, right?” he says, still looking down. “I wanted her to charge her husband with assault, ’cause the guy’s a real asshole, right? Shit, you probably saw him. Stuck-up, arrogant bastard. So full of himself, sure that he’s above the law, that it’s his right to beat the crap out of his wife. So I follow her home to tell her she’s making a mistake, and when I get here, I find that she’s home alone.”

“It wasn’t your job, Bob. You were here to work on my case alone.”

He sighs. “I know. I know that, but, well, it just happened.”

“Did you know she was going to be home alone?”

“Not really.”

“That sounds like a
yes
to me, Bob.”

“I suspected.”

“Which is why you followed her, right? Because you could only talk to her while she was alone. Having her husband in the same room wasn’t going to make for a useful conversation.”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so. Okay, then what happened?”

“I sat outside for a few minutes, considering what to do.”

“Considering whether to kill her or not?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing like that.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know. I just sat there, watching the house, thinking about the best way to convince her of what she needed to do. Finally, when I went to the door and knocked, there was no answer. I was going to leave . . .” he says, but doesn’t finish the sentence.

“But you stayed,” I tell him.

“I stayed,” he says. “For some reason I couldn’t tell you, I stayed.”