Grigor Ash preferred the dead to the living.
They were quieter. They didn't lie. And most importantly, they didn't check their watches while he was working.
The apartment smelled of three things: cheap lavender air freshener fighting a losing war against cat piss, stale Fancy Feast crusting in a bowl by the window, and the copper-penny tang of blood that had been sitting for three days in a New York summer. To Grigor, this was the scent of a Tuesday.
He adjusted his respirator, the rubber seal biting into the bridge of his nose with familiar discomfort. With a gloved hand, he squeezed the bottle of industrial-grade enzymatic cleaner.
The clear liquid hit the hardwood floor with a chemical hiss, foaming pink as it made contact with the dried pool that used to be Mr. Henderson.
"Enzymes eat the protein," Grigor muttered to the empty room. It was a habit. A ritual. A way to fill the silence without breaking it. "Protein breaks down. Stain lifts. World resets."
'Six hours of scrubbing. Four hundred in contractor fees. Fifteen years of forensic work, and this is still just chemistry.'
He was a Forensic Cleaner. The police solved the puzzle; Grigor erased the pieces. He didn't care why Mr. Henderson had been bludgeoned to death in his own living room. That was someone else's problem. He only cared that the arterial spray had reached the crown molding, and that the victim had apparently bled out slowly enough to soak through the floorboards and into the apartment below.
That was going to be a pain to bill.
Grigor moved with the precision of a machine built for one purpose. Scrub. Wipe. Bag. Repeat. His hands—raw, cracked, the skin around his nails permanently stained a faint yellow from years of industrial solvents—worked without conscious direction. His body knew the choreography.
The radiator in the corner ticked as it cooled. Somewhere outside, a car alarm wailed and died. The city existed in layers of sound that Grigor had long since learned to filter out. What remained was the wet squelch of his work, the chemical hiss of dissolution, and the occasional creak of old floorboards settling under his weight.
In the reflection of a picture frame he hadn't yet bagged, he caught a glimpse of himself: lean to the point of gauntness, pallid skin that suggested either vampire or vitamin D deficiency.
Deep-set eyes the color of diluted ammonia stared back. His cheekbones were too sharp, his jaw too narrow. He looked like a man who had spent too long in rooms with no windows, breathing air that smelled of other people's endings.
'Handsome isn't the word. Pragmatic, maybe. Purpose-built.'
He didn't look like a killer. He looked like the man who cleans up after one.
The distinction was important—to him, at least.
Grigor was a man of the Sterile Room. In his mind, the perfect world was white, tiled, and smelled of nothing but bleach. A world without rot. Without the messy, leaking biology of human emotion.
He didn't believe in souls, ghosts, or karma. He believed in chemistry and thermodynamics.
When the heart stopped, the electrical impulses ceased. The meat spoiled. The self scattered into atoms. The end.
It was comforting. The void was clean.
''Unlike this floor.'
He scraped the brush against a section where the blood had dried in layers—Mr. Henderson had apparently tried to crawl toward the phone before the final blow. The movement pattern was textbook: initial incapacitation, desperate scramble, cessation. Grigor had seen it a hundred times. The human body always tried to survive, even when the brain had already done the math and arrived at zero.
'Stubbornness. The final biological imperative.'
He knelt beside a particularly stubborn clot near the baseboard—arterial spray always reached the most inconvenient places—and noticed something glinting in the mess.
Grigor paused. He reached for his forceps.
The object was small, partially buried in what had probably been Mr. Henderson's abdominal contents. He extracted it carefully, the wet squelch of disrupted tissue registering somewhere in the back of his mind as mild inconvenience rather than horror.
A silver cat.
Egyptian, from the look of it. Bastet, goddess of home and protection. The statue was coated in gore, but even through the red-brown film, Grigor could see the quality.
The metal was old—genuinely old, not antique-shop old. The silver felt heavy, distinct, with a density that modern alloys couldn't mimic. The craftsmanship was intricate, the cat posed mid-stride with one paw raised, muscles carved with obsessive anatomical precision.
Its eyes were inlaid with stones that caught the dim light of the apartment.
'Lapis lazuli. Original. This isn't a reproduction.'
He wiped it on a rag. The silver gleamed through the blood like a tooth through a wound.
'Henderson was a collector. The police report mentioned pieces worth six figures. This one wasn't on the insurance manifest.'
Which meant it was either stolen, illegally acquired, or deliberately hidden from the estate appraisers. In Grigor's experience, the answer was usually "all three." The rich didn't get rich by declaring everything to the taxman.
Logic dictated he bag it as bio-hazard waste. Protocol dictated he photograph it and call the detective assigned to the case—possible evidence, possible murder weapon, definitely above his pay grade.
Grigor did neither.
He felt a sudden, illogical itch in his chest. A compulsion. The same compulsion that had filled his apartment with other people's belongings over fifteen years: a watch from the Bronx double homicide, a tie clip from the Wall Street suicide, a child's shoe from the custody dispute that had ended in the bathtub.
'Souvenirs.'
He'd never examined the compulsion too closely. Therapists cost money, and self-reflection cost time, and both were commodities Grigor had learned to spend elsewhere. The objects didn't mean anything. They were just proof. Proof that he'd been there. Proof that he'd done his job. Proof that the stain was gone and the world had reset.
'Proof that you existed at all.'
He slipped the cat into his pocket.
'Just trash', he told himself. 'Nobody claims the trash'.
The weight of it against his thigh was a cold, dense comfort. Solid. An anchor.
---
The front door creaked.