Free The Dead Janitors Club by Jeff Klima Page B

gone to the wrong house and someone answered the door only to find two men standing there wearing polo shirts that read "Crime Scene Cleaners."
        A pleasant policeman in uniform answered the door and led us into the well-lit home. This time I had prepared myself for the sight before we knocked, effectively readying myself for a scene where neither of us knew what to expect.
        The house was immaculate, and I wondered how the owners had the time to keep it so clean. My first crime scene had been a welllived-in ode to all things collectible, but this house was most definitely what I thought of as a home. Plain and uncluttered, it seemed as if it could be a showroom for other houses, featuring the dream layout your home could have if you bought one of the surrounding properties.
        Only a few picture frames, not hung on the wall but instead standing freely on the polished tile countertop separating the kitchen from the dining room, indicated that anyone lived there. One picture in particular caught my attention. It was of a middle-aged man who was bald on top but had a crescent ring of hair that started above one ear and carried around to the other. The man's thick glasses made his eyes appear owlish and almost perennially surprised, and a short, small grin betrayed an otherwise serious expression. But it was the view over the top of that photo and into the kitchen that stopped me short.
        A pond of blood, the circumference of a throw rug, lay on the smooth linoleum of the kitchen floor as though someone had dropped the world's largest red egg onto it. And in the center, comprising its yolk, was a piled-up, large crimson mass with a jellylike consistency.
        Aside from the sight of the horrifically unidentifiable mass, which I speculated was a brain, and the pool of blood around it, the kitchen was as sterile as the rest of the house. I found it odd that there was no body, but residual trash from attending paramedics told me where it had gone.
        "He was a minister," the older of the two policemen said, emerging from a back bedroom to fill in the blanks. "He shot himself in the head with a pistol."
        "Who should we get to sign the invoice?" Dirk asked.
        "Oh, the wife's down at the hospital. She took it pretty bad. They gave her something to calm her down, so…I guess we'll sign for it," he answered.
        "It's going to be nine hundred dollars," Dirk said evenly, and I almost gasped aloud. In the car on the way over, we had talked about how we were going to charge more money for this one, regardless of the scene, because our half of $435 split two ways wasn't going to cut it. But nine hundred dollars? The scene was much less serious and still fresh; nine hundred dollars sounded like silly money.
        "Not a problem," said the cop, signing off on the invoice. I exhaled slowly, hiding a smile, and got my game face on. It was time to clean.
        The same two policemen had picked the minister up on a DUI charge the day before, and rather than face his congregation with the shame of having done wrong, he compounded his "sin" and shot himself.
        He'd called his wife on the phone while she was at work in the morning and told her what he was going to do. She had begged him not to and said she'd come home and they could talk, but then she heard a popping sound. She called the police, who beat her to the house and then refused to let her go inside and see what her husband had done to himself.
        I noticed that small traces of blood had been tracked onto the carpeting and a large rug in the dining room from when the paramedics, detecting a pulse, attempted to revive and transport the minister to the hospital. He arrived DOA.
        Dirk and I suited up, nervous because the cops were hanging around, watchful and curious about what we did and how we did it. I had only a general idea of how to proceed, since my training was still nonexistent and I had only the one