By then it was Monday at quarter to four, the time of day when people at work begin thinking about leaving, and people left at home begin thinking about taking a nap. So there’s no one around. Nobody driving, nobody walking. No helicopters picking up accident victims on the highway. Nothing and no one, just a weird silence punctuated every ten minutes by an airplane cruising at thirty thousand feet. A forty-year-old woman leaned out the window of an apartment building across the street and pegged socks to a laundry line. Then she went back inside. The front door had two locks. I knocked first and wasn’t surprised when nobody answered. I used the keys and entered the house.

The cleaners had lived like pigs. The furnished house was made up of a living room, kitchen, and two small bedrooms with a small toilet and a shower closet. The living room, kitchen and bedrooms were overflowing with take-out food containers and empty beer bottles and cans. Crushed boxes of cheap cigarettes had been tossed willy-nilly around the place. Any available receptacle had been used as an ashtray.

In the kitchen, a burner phone rested on the counter. A black charging cable fed it juice from the wall plug. I pressed buttons and found the call history log. It was empty. Looked as if the cleaners had been more careful than their meat truck colleague, and routinely deleted any incriminating logs as soon as they finished a call. I pocketed the phone.

One of the bedrooms was shared. Two suitcases were pushed under the single beds that lined up on either side of the room. The cleaners, brothers or cousins. I found French passports in the suitcases with French names. False identities no doubt. They also had back-up guns. Identical Berettas with boxes of 9mm ammunition. I wrapped the weapons in a clean towel from the bathroom closet. Stuffed the package into a backpack I found on the bed, alongside the two boxes of ammunition.

The other bedroom was a single. Just one bed and one suitcase. The passport was French and so was the false name given to the meat truck psychopath. His suitcase contained a collection of two hand axes and a large fireman’s axe. Charming guy.

I estimated by the garbage and the state of the toilet that they’d been in the house for a month. Which gave the whole situation a time span. A month ago, three freelance professionals had been brought into town for some cleaning and public butchering. Which was by any measure an extreme step.

But, instead of getting out after the first killing, they’d stuck around, on call. Shacked up in the house. Playing cards, ordering take-out and drinking beer. Until the next assignment. Which meant they hadn’t been afraid of getting caught. Which meant they’d felt safe and protected. Until I showed up.