The driver is a woman, which I wasn’t expecting. I’m hoping that will make her more inclined to talk, but for the first half an hour I get nothing out of her but standard, monosyllabic answers.

You get a lot of customers back and forth to Indianapolis? Sometimes, ma’am. Where do you live? Not far, ma’am. How long have you been working the job? Four years, ma’am. You like it? Yes, ma’am. She might be a robot programmed with only a dozen replies.

I try again to land on something, anything, that will inspire her to talk. “Are you full-time with Prestige?”

On the subject of schedules, she warms up right away. “I do forty hours, sometimes more. But my schedule’s mine. That’s the good thing. I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old. I used to work at the Target but the day I had to leave my family on Thanksgiving to open was the day I quit.”

“And you never feel unsafe, driving late at night?”

“Oh, no,” she says quickly. “We don’t get that kind of customer, not at Prestige. It’s mostly repeats, especially this leg, between Optimal and Indianapolis. Can’t imagine making the commute every day myself…”

“Big tippers, at least?”

Finally, I’ve landed: she snorts. “Hardly. Corporate guys. You ever noticed the fatter a wallet, the less it opens?”

“Oh, I know. I used to be a waitress,” I play along. This is sort of true. I did spend a record two months working as a hostess at a hotel bar in Chicago before I got fired for going home with one of the regulars. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except for the fact that I wasn’t going home with the manager.

“Then you know. Some of these guys, they’re top, you know? I’m saying Washington, real movers-and-shakers, think their shit don’t stink.”

My pulse leaps. “Anyone famous?” I ask, trying not to sound too eager. But I’ve overstepped.

“I can’t say, ma’am.” She catches herself. “I do my job like everybody else. I get in the car, and I drive.”

I know I won’t get anything else from her, so I turn to the window, watching the fields run into a geometry of roads and housing and strip malls that announces the outskirts of Indianapolis. Half the evil in the world, I think, must be someone just doing their job.

Maybe it’s paranoia, but I have the driver drop me a good ten blocks from my destination and instruct her to wait. The neighborhood is nondescript, and well outside the central business district. I pass more than a handful of shuttered warehouses and storefronts boasting Available for Lease signs. A homeless woman roots around in a trash can.

Clean Solutions Management is wedged in the dingy second floor above an office-supply warehouse, and next to a vacant office that seems to have housed a divorce attorney at one point. It has no sign, nothing to announce its presence, other than a sticker peeling from above a buzzer that goes unanswered no matter how many times I ring.