A Clean House
A forensic cleaner who specializes in crime scenes finds the body of someone who was supposed to be already dead.
Petra Solano has seen the aftermath of almost everything. In twelve years as a forensic cleaner, she's worked 340 crime scenes, three disasters, and one incident she never talks about. She doesn't get rattled. She's made a point of it.
The woman in apartment 4C would have rattled anyone.
Not because of how she died. Because of who she is: Mara Voss, according to every official record, died eleven months ago in a highway accident outside of Brno. Petra knows this because she cleaned the car.
The same face. The same unusual scar on the left clavicle. The same woman — dead twice, in two different countries, by two different methods.
When the police case is closed as a straightforward homicide and Petra is told to finish the cleanup and send the invoice, she makes a decision she knows she shouldn't make.
She keeps a photograph.
A neo-noir mystery about the bureaucracy of death, the ethics of witnessing, and a woman whose professional detachment is about to run out.
Chapter One: The Work
The job came in at 5:15 PM, which meant they'd been sitting on it for hours. Clients who called at 5:15 were clients who'd spent the afternoon arguing about whether to call at all.
Petra logged the address, loaded the van, and drove across the city with the radio off.
She had a system for approaching scenes: she looked at the building first, before she looked at anything else. Architecture told you things. The building at 14 Kellner Street was three stories, 1960s concrete, the kind that had looked functional when it went up and had looked like a civic apology ever since. Intercom panel with half the names scratched out. A single buzzed-out fluorescent light over the entrance. This was a building where people were not particularly invested in their neighbors.
Apartment 4C was on the third floor. A police seal on the door, already cut — she'd been cleared. The detective on file was a Sergeant Vašek whom she knew slightly, reliable and unimaginative. She'd worked two of his scenes before.
She suited up in the hallway, practiced economy of motion, and went in.
The cleanup itself took four hours. She'd worked larger scenes in smaller spaces, and she moved through it with the particular focus she'd developed over the years: not detachment, exactly — she'd learned early that full detachment was a lie you told yourself until it stopped working — but a kind of disciplined attention to the task rather than the context. What needed to be removed. What needed to be treated. What the room would look like when she was finished.
It was in the final pass, checking corners, that she noticed the photograph.
It had slipped behind the radiator — missed by the police sweep, which happened more often than detectives liked to admit. She retrieved it with a gloved hand and was about to bag it for the effects pile when she looked at it.
She held it for what was probably fifteen seconds but felt like considerably longer.
Then she put it in her inside jacket pocket instead of the bag.
She had a rule about this. She'd never broken it before.
The face in the photograph was a face she knew. She'd seen it eleven months ago, upside-down and partially obscured, through the driver's window of a crumpled vehicle on a highway outside Brno. She'd documented it for the insurance cleaner's report. She'd thought about it occasionally in the way you thought about the ones that got to you despite your best efforts.
Mara Voss. The accident victim.
She was also, apparently, the person who had just been murdered in apartment 4C in a city three countries away.