The Cleaner

The apartment smelled like vanilla and bleach. Like someone had tried to mask the scent of dying with Bath & Body Works. Dante stood in the doorway, his latex gloves already slick against his palms, watching afternoon light slice through venetian blinds and carve the living room into precise geometric wounds.

"You're early," said the woman behind him. Her voice carried the kind of smoky authority that suggested cigarettes and hostile takeovers. "I wasn't expecting you until six."

Dante didn't turn around. In this business, you learned to read a scene before you read the client. The coffee table: crystal, spotless, positioned exactly eighteen inches from the couch's edge. The magazines: Architectural Digest, Forbes, Town & Country—arranged in a perfect fan by hands that understood chaos lived in the details. The throw pillows: fluffed, positioned, then repositioned by someone who believed control was an art form.

"Traffic was light," he said.

Behind him, heels clicked against hardwood like a metronome counting down to something. Louboutin, probably.

"Drink?" she asked.

"I don't drink on the job."

"How disappointingly professional of you."

Now he turned. She was younger than her voice suggested—maybe thirty-five, maybe ageless in that peculiar way of women who could afford to stop time with scalpels and Swiss bank accounts. Red hair pulled back in a chignon that probably took an hour to perfect and a lifetime to afford. Black dress that whispered expensive secrets. Diamond earrings that caught the light and threw it back like accusations.

"You're not what I expected," she said, studying him the way collectors studied artifacts before deciding their worth.

"Neither are you."

The apartment told stories in a language only blood money could speak. The kind where people bled quietly into Persian rugs and died with their portfolios still balanced. Dante had seen it before—the sterile perfection of lives that looked beautiful from the outside and rotted from within like elegant fruit left too long in the sun.

"Where is it?" he asked.

She gestured toward the bedroom with a martini glass that materialized in her hand like sleight of hand. Gin, not vodka. Three olives speared with surgical precision.

The bedroom was a study in white. White walls, white bedding, white furniture—all of it pristine except for the dark stain spreading across Egyptian cotton sheets like spilled communion wine. The stain was roughly body-shaped. Had been body-shaped.

"How long?" Dante asked.

"Two hours. Maybe three."

"Who knows?"

"Just me. And now you."