“Okay,” Charlie said. He didn’t waste any time, rocking to build up momentum. He gathered up enough force to turn over, then kept on rolling, right up to the side of Grandma Rose’s chair. He was able to move his feet just enough to scoot himself up to the side of the wicker basket beside the chair, which he pulled over with his teeth. Everything inside spilled out—needles and pins and thread, and finally . . . the scissors!

“Hurry,” Grandma Rose said. The noise from the kitchen had masked the noise of the basket toppling, but there was no telling how long they had before Stanley returned.

“I’m trying,” Charlie said through a muffled mouth. With the scissors secure between his teeth, he rocked until he had enough momentum to roll back over to Grandma Rose. He dropped the scissors next to her. “Now what?”

Grandma Rose’s hand slowly began to emerge through the silver bindings. “Now we try to get out of here,” she said.

Stanley was neat. He’d always been neat. As a kid, he used to arrange his socks by color, and then by day. His sports trophies were lined in a row by date, and then by height. He used to come home during the school lunch hour just to make sure nothing was out of place, that his mother or younger brother hadn’t disturbed the order of his life.

Stanley came to understand that not only was he neat; he was a neat freak. So it was no surprise to him that his compulsive neatness would play a vital role in his work as a professional cleaner.

It was difficult in the beginning: hacking people into pieces was a dirty business. But with an intense desire to find a solution, and a voracious appetite for serial killers’ biographies, he made progress.

First came the floors. A thick tarp usually did the trick, though he had been surprised at how many were easily compromised by a sopping of blood. Towels or rags followed, lining the edges of the tarp. This prevented any excess from spilling out onto the floor.

Next came the procedure itself. The victim had to be calm. A rapid heartbeat meant a quick flow of blood, and that in turn meant that splattering was likely, a definite problem. How to calm a victim had become the problem to overcome for the last eleven months. He’d tried poetry as a possible method, but that just seemed silly now. Most of the time it only made the victim more anxious, more ill at ease with the surreal goings-on. He’d most recently settled on a mild tranquilizer, stolen from a veterinarian he dated for a short time, though it bothered him to use anything so counterfeit. Killing was natural, and the drug so artificial. Using it seemed like cheating. But it worked.