CHAPTER ONE
Wren
There's no blood.
That's the thing that's bothering me, and I'm aware of how deranged that sounds coming from a woman kneeling in a dead man's penthouse at four in the morning with a bucket of enzymatic cleaner between her knees.
"Mari."
"Mm."
"Come look at this."
"I'm doing the bathroom."
"The bathroom can wait, the bathroom's not going anywhere, the bathroom has been the same bathroom for six thousand years—"
"Wren." Marisol's head appears around the doorframe, respirator pushed up on her forehead, hair in the world's most aggressive bun. "I have been awake for nineteen hours and I have looked at a lot of tile tonight. What."
I point at the rug.
We do this for a living. Kelleher & Ocampo Biohazard Remediation, LLC — we're the last people you want to see, which Mari says is bad marketing and I say is honest. Four years of unattended deaths and kitchen accidents and one memorable meth lab that I still dream about.
I know what a body leaves behind. I know how it soaks, how it wicks up drywall, how it goes under laminate and lives there.
I have scrubbed the ceiling of a two-bedroom in Cordell Heights.
The police report said the victim — Mr. Trevor Ansel, forty-one, hedge fund something — was found here, on this rug, with his throat opened.
The rug is spotless.
Mari comes over slowly. Crouches. Puts one gloved finger to the wool and drags it in a line.
"Huh," she says.
"Right?"
"That's a nice rug."
"Mari."
"I'm processing." She sits back on her heels. "Okay. Nobody cleaned it. If somebody cleaned it there'd be a ring, or a bleach ghost, or the pile would be crushed, and — no. Nothing. It's like he was drained into a bucket."
"Or a person."
"You're doing the thing."
"I'm not doing a thing."
"You're doing the true-crime-podcast thing where your whole face gets pointy."
"My face is not pointy, my face is a normal amount of pointy—"
She stands up, knees popping, and gives me a look I've earned over four years of friendship and one shared business loan.
"It's a weird job. Weird jobs pay. Cash the cheque and stop building a conspiracy corkboard in your head, please, I want to be home before my mother wakes up and starts asking me about my ovaries. "
So we work.
The penthouse is on the fortieth floor of the Aldren, which is the kind of building where the elevator has its own smell — cold stone, money, faint lily.
Floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides. Ashmoor spread out underneath us in the rain, the harbour lights smeared, the old cathedral spike downtown lit up green for some charity or other.
Beautiful, if you like a city that's been described in three separate travel articles as moody.
I don't clean up the beautiful part. I clean up the part where a man's last forty seconds happened.
There's a way to do this that most people never learn, and it's not about chemicals.
It's about order. You do the ceiling before the walls and the walls before the floor and the floor before the trim, because everything falls, and if you go the other way round you'll do the whole room twice and still miss the thing under the radiator.
You photograph before, during and after.
You bag as you go. You never, ever put a hand anywhere your eyes haven't been first.
And you do the parts nobody's asked for. That's the actual job. Nobody in this business gets rich, and the only thing separating us from the two outfits in this city who'll undercut us on price is that when a family walks back into that room, it smells of nothing at all.
By five I've done the baseboards and the underside of the coffee table and the inside of the light switch plate, because people never think about the light switch plate. By five-fifteen I'm on my back under the console table with a UV torch, and that's when I find it.
Not blood.
A mark. Cut into the underside of the table's lip where nobody would ever look, three inches across, still pale at the edges where the wood dust hasn't settled. Two curves crossing, and a line through them like a strikethrough on a word.
Somebody carved that tonight.
Somebody carved that while they were in here with him.
My phone's in my back pocket and I get it out with two fingers, hand shaking just enough to annoy me, and take four photos.
Then I lie there under the table for a second longer with my heart going like a bird in a jar, and I have the very clear and unhelpful thought that the room is too quiet, forty floors up, in a building where nobody's home.
"Mari."
"If it's the rug again—"
"It's not the rug."
She looks at the photo for a long time. Longer than I expect. Then she hands the phone back and pulls her respirator down over her mouth, and her voice comes out flat and muffled and not remotely like her.
"Delete it."
"What?"
"Delete it, Wren."
"Why?"
"Because my abuela used to draw that on the door frame," Mari says, "every August, in chalk, and she wouldn't tell me why, and she cried when I asked. So. Delete it."
I don't delete it.
That's the thing I'd change, if you let me go back. Not the rest of it. Just that.
◆ ◆ ◆
We finish at ten past six and neither of us says another word about it, which is its own kind of conversation.
The freight elevator at the Aldren takes ninety seconds to go forty floors and it plays music, which I have never once been able to get over.
Mari stands with her back against the wall and her eyes shut and eleven bags of regulated medical waste stacked between us, and somewhere around the twentieth floor she says:
"Don't ask me about it in the van."
"I wasn't going to."
"You were absolutely going to."
"I was going to wait until the van," I say, "which is a completely different thing, and I want credit for it."
Her mouth twitches. She doesn't open her eyes.
Here's what I know about Marisol Ocampo after four years.
She talks constantly and tells you almost nothing.
She has three brothers and mentions one.
She got us out of a bad contract in 2023 by being so relentlessly, cheerfully patient with a man on the phone that he eventually agreed to things that were not in his interest and thanked her afterwards.
And when something actually frightens her, she goes quiet and gets extremely organised, which is what she is doing right now, stacking bags in an elevator like she's building something.
In the loading bay she takes the manifest off me and does it herself, and her handwriting is worse than usual.
"Mari."
"Mahal, I love you, I'm going to my mother's, and I'm going to sleep for eleven hours." She hands the clipboard back. "Do the disposal run tomorrow. Don't do it tonight. You've been up since Tuesday."
"It's Tuesday now."
"Then you've been up since before Tuesday, which is worse." Her cousin's Corolla is idling at the mouth of the bay with one headlight out. She stops with her hand on the door. "Wren."
"Yeah."
"You didn't delete it."
"No."
She stands there for a second in the cold with the rain coming in sideways under the roller shutter, and she looks about nine years old.
"Yeah," she says. "Okay."
◆ ◆ ◆
The deli on the corner of Pell and Marsh opens at six and Bogdan is out front having what I have calculated to be his fourth cigarette of the morning.
"You look terrible," he says.
"Good morning to you as well."
"I say it with love. Coffee?"
"Two."
"Two." He gives me a look. "The friend not with you."
"The friend has gone to bed like a person with sense."
Bogdan makes the coffee and puts a bun in a paper bag that I did not order and will not be charged for, which has been happening for three years and which we have both silently agreed never to discuss.
It's still dark. The street is doing the thing Pell Street does at six in the morning, which is that the laundromat lights are on and nobody's in it and the whole block smells of detergent and hot lint, which is a smell I would defend in a court of law.
"Bad one?" Bogdan says.
"Strange one."
"Strange how?"
And I open my mouth to tell him and find that I can't. Not for any dramatic reason.
It's just that the sentence would have to start there was no blood, and there's no version of that which doesn't end with me standing on a wet pavement at six in the morning explaining to a man who sells sandwiches why I've been thinking about the exsanguination of a hedge fund manager.
"Strange like a rug," I say.
"Ah." Bogdan nods, deeply, like I've said something. "Rugs."
I take my coffee across the road and up two flights past the smell of the dryers, and I let myself into a flat above a laundromat with a bun in a bag and a phone with four photographs on it, and the sky over Ashmoor is doing that thing where it isn't getting lighter so much as getting less committed to the dark.
Detective Meatball is on the counter. He watches me the whole way across the room.
"Don't start," I tell him.
I put the coffee down. I take my boots off, one heel against the other. I stand in my own kitchen for a minute with my hands flat on the counter, and there's no reason at all for what I do next, and I do it anyway.
I go and check that the window's locked.