My name is Maren Doyle. I clean crime scenes for a living, and I owe a lot of money.
Aaron Pryce-Hollister is the man who pays me.
He has a thing about being clean. He also has a pair of hands that make accidents happen.
He produces the bodies. I tidy up after.
Three years. I paid off the collections, traded apartments, traded names, and buried seven deaths dressed as accidents with my own two hands.
Tonight he sent me one last address.
It's my apartment.
The scene is a little tricky this time, his text said.
The thing being cleaned is you.
I looked at the screen and smiled.
He doesn't know.
That apartment was never my home.
The first time I met Aaron Pryce-Hollister, I was at the Strand.
The Strand is a vaudeville house on Washington Street in Roxbury. Boarded up since 1978. It still has its marquee, the letters mostly gone, and the lobby smells like wet velvet and mice. I'd just come off a decomp call in a triple-decker over in Fields Corner. The body had been on the kitchen floor for nine days. My Tyvek was still in the back of the van, the gloves still on my hands, when the phone rang.
Unknown number.
The voice on the other end said one sentence.
"Maren Doyle. You looking to clear what your old man left you?"
My father went off the top of the Government Center garage in 2019. He left behind three hundred and forty thousand dollars in hospital bills and a payday loan he'd signed in my name when he was running out of options. The collections agencies had been working me for two years.
I said, "Who is this."
He said, "Somebody who can get the wolves off your sister."
I drove to the Strand. Two in the morning. He was standing on the mezzanine, looking down at the orchestra. Navy suit. White cuffs. The cuffs caught the one working houselight like they'd been folded by hand five minutes ago. There was forty years of dust on the carpet runner he'd walked across to get there, and not a speck of it on his shoes.
Center stage, under a single bare bulb, a man was laid out on his back.
Aaron came down the aisle and handed me a manila envelope. "He fell. Drunk. Off the catwalk."
I didn't take it.
He glanced at his watch. The watch was a Patek. "In ten minutes," he said, "two men I know will pull up in front of Boston Latin Academy in Dorchester. Your sister has a study session at the library until nine forty."
My hand went numb.
"Reese Doyle," he said softly. "Sixteen. Sophomore. She walks home through Fields Corner."
I took the envelope. My fingertips were cold against the paper.
That was the night I became his cleaner.
He never showed me the work. He gave me addresses, times, payment. Money orders, never wired, never a paper trail he couldn't burn.
Every scene came pre-arranged. The dead had debts, or enemies, or a prescription history, or some other reason the BPD could close it as an accident inside a day. My job was to take Aaron Pryce-Hollister out of the room before the room was looked at.
I got sick. I threw up in alleys. I ran.
The first time I ran he had Reese's school cardigan on my doorstep by morning.
The second time he sent me phone-camera stills of my mother in her hospital bed, taken from inside her room.
The third time I didn't run.
I told myself I'd pay it down, see Reese into college, and vanish.
But Aaron didn't like other people writing his endings.
He only liked writing the last page himself.
In three years I saw Aaron Pryce-Hollister lose control twice.
The first time was a wake.
The dead woman was Maeve Devlin. Thirty-five. Brookline mother of one. She'd drowned in her own clawfoot tub, the ME wrote, after a bad combination of Ambien and a glass of pinot. She'd also, that month, been about three weeks out from subpoenaing her husband's offshore accounts in a custody fight. Halsted & Pryce had been managing the marital estate.
The visitation was at Levine Chapels. I came in through the service entrance like family-services. My job was to pick up a hand-knit cardigan Maeve had been wearing the night she died. The kid had it. Aaron didn't want it in the house when the investigators did the second pass.
The kid was five. His name was Owen. He had the cardigan balled up against his face, both fists around the wool, sitting on a folding chair in the back room where the cousins kept walking past him without seeing him.
He looked up when I came in. He had her chin.
"When is Mom waking up," he said.
The funeral home carpet felt like it had nails in it.
Aaron was in my ear through a Bluetooth bud. "Move."
"There's a kid," I said. Quiet.
He was silent for two seconds. When he came back his voice had cooled. "Maren. Don't make yourself a person."
I hung up.
That was the first time I disobeyed him.
I left the cardigan in the kid's hand.
He found out.
He found out three days later, and he sent me an address in the Seaport.
The address was the fourteenth-floor conference room at Halsted & Pryce.
Carrara marble floor. Carrara marble walls. White orchid on a glass table. Floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at the harbor at eleven at night, with no door I could find from the inside — the door was a slab of frosted glass that slid into the wall and didn't have a handle on the room side.
He was sitting at the head of the table in shirtsleeves. White shirt, fresh, the morning's gone, must have been the third of the day. He was holding a Montblanc letter opener and a microfiber cloth, working the cloth slowly down the length of the steel.
"You left something behind," he said.
I said, "It was a five-year-old."
He smiled, polite. "Keepsakes turn into evidence. Evidence turns into trouble."
He set the letter opener down on the glass, point toward me, and slid it across with one finger until the tip was six inches from my hand.
"Maren," he said. "I keep you on because you're poor enough, scared enough, and you don't have a floor under you. Don't make me find out I was wrong about any of those."
The marble was cold. I could feel it through the soles of my work boots.
I didn't move.
He picked the letter opener back up and put it away in a leather sleeve and didn't look at me for the rest of the meeting.
The second time was six months ago.
He sent me to a suite at the XV Beacon Hotel.
When I let myself in, there was a vase of white roses on the writing desk. No water rings on the wood. He had been there before me.
On the nightstand was a small antique cigarette case. Silver, engraved with a monogram I didn't recognize. The case was open. Inside it, instead of cigarettes, was a four-by-six photograph.
A woman in BPD dress blues, eight-pointed cap, academy graduation pose. Maybe twenty-four. Dominican or Cape Verdean, dark hair pulled back, no makeup, a clean small smile. She had a chip in one front tooth.
I had time to look at her for about three seconds.
"Don't touch that."
I hadn't heard him come in. Aaron had never shown up to one of my scenes before. He crossed the room past me, lifted the photograph out of the case with two fingers like he was handling a communion wafer, slid it into the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket, and closed the case.
"Who is she," I said.
He didn't look at me. He said, "Dead."
After that night, I knew Aaron Pryce-Hollister had a place inside him he couldn't get clean.
At 9:17 p.m. tonight, Aaron texted me an address.
47 Auburndale Court, Apartment 4B. Mattapan.
I'd been on the lease there for a year.
The second message was a photo.
It was my living room. The pendant light was on over the table. My half-finished coffee from this morning was still next to my laptop. The kitchen window over the sink was open the two inches I always left it. And hanging in the open window, where she'd been since she made it for me in seventh-grade art class, was Reese's seashell wind chime — five chips of painted ceramic on fishing line, blue and white.
Third message.
You have forty minutes.
Fourth.
Past that, Reese gets to identify the body.
I turned the phone face down on the table.
The cold rose in my stomach the way it always did.
I wasn't at home.
I was at a twenty-four-hour laundromat on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan, a block past the church. A gray Carhartt work jacket was tumbling in the second dryer from the back. The pockets of the jacket had three years of money-order receipts in them, every one of them recorded against an address Aaron had sent me. Inside the lining was a USB-C drive I'd stitched in last Christmas with dental floss.
I had been waiting for him to move.
He moved faster than I'd planned for.
The front door of the laundromat swung open and the bell over it rang.
A white kid walked in, maybe twenty-two, peroxide-blond crewcut, black Bruins hoodie, white wire running from his ear under the collar. He looked around the room one time. He saw me sitting in the orange plastic chair against the wall. He looked at me a second too long.
Then he turned half away and spoke into his collar. "Yeah. She's here."
I stood up and threw the cup of laundromat coffee at his face.
It was the closest thing in reach. It was hot enough. He grabbed for his eyes and I hit the door lock with the metal chair on my way through.
I went out the back, through the alley behind the laundromat, between the dumpster and the chain-link.
The phone rang.
Aaron.
I answered.
He was somewhere quiet. The kind of quiet a Beacon Hill townhouse is at night.
"Maren," he said. "You move faster than you used to."
I had my shoulder against a brick wall. I was trying to breathe like a person who hadn't run.
"If you wanted me dead," I said, "why aren't you doing it yourself."
He laughed, low. "Because I hate getting my hands dirty."
Somebody came into the mouth of the alley. I saw the shape of him before he saw me.
"What's stopping me from calling the cops," I said.
"You won't," he said. "Seven bodies, Maren. You're the cleaner. You're not the victim."
I held the phone tight.
"Go home," he said. "Tidy yourself up. I'll let it be dignified."
I said, "Aaron. You always think you're so clean."
There was a half-second pause.
I watched the man in the alley take another step, slow, listening for me, and I kept my voice down to a thread.
"You leave more of yourself behind than you know."