1

The Serial Killer at Work

There's been another murder.

"It was a hundred-foot drop," Kara-from-Accounts says as she presses the door close button at the end of the day.

"One fifty, at least," says Stanley-from-IT. "It's a fifteen-story building."

The elevator lurches as it begins its descent, and everyone goes quiet for a moment, contemplating that fairground feeling of falling, falling.

"Have the police done a press release yet? Do they know for certain it's connected to the others?" Tiffany-from-Project-Management asks. Her commuting sneakers squeak as she rocks back and forth.

"It only happened yesterday. They haven't said anything yet."

"It wasn't a murder," Stanley-from-IT says. "He threw himself off."

Tiffany-from-Project-Management gasps. "How do you know?"

"It's what I wanted to do when I worked there." Stanley-from-IT guffaws.

Kara-from-Accounts doesn't laugh. "Nine falls in five years, each at a different office building downtown," she muses. "There's someone behind it all."

Everyone thinks there's someone behind it all. The existence of the Paper Pusher has been a topic of speculation at every temp job I've had. Every downtown office building I've worked at in the past five years.

I know a little more than most.

"Maybe it was an HR exercise. A trust fall gone wrong, eh? Eh?" Stanley-from-IT doesn't get a laugh from Kara-from-Accounts, so he turns to Tiffany-from-Project-Management. He doesn't get his dues there, either. He frowns. "It's just an urban legend," he says irritably. "You don't actually believe someone's going around pushing people off rooftops?"

Kara-from-Accounts sniffs.

The elevator doors open on the fourteenth floor to welcome a newcomer dressed in all black, her red lips a surprising pop of color at the end of this boring, dreary day. She slides in like a shadow, bearing her phone like a talisman that will protect her from small talk, and slinks against one wall of the elevator, the collar of her black trench coat flipped up and her face angled down at the screen. I don't know her name yet, but I make a point of learning names and departments. I'll figure her out soon enough.

"It's a serial killer. I know it," says Kara-from-Accounts.

The shadow perks her ears.

Stanley-from-IT sticks his hands in his pockets and gazes up at the grille ceiling, shaking his head with a stupid smirk on his face and sighing indulgently. Stanley is a bit of a bully. "Serial killers don't push their victims off rooftops. They strangle them, or slice them up. They like to watch their victims die."

Tiffany-from-Project-Management turns green.

"Maybe this serial killer is squeamish," Kara-from-Accounts persists. "Maybe he doesn't like to get his hands dirty."

"He? Who says it's a he? It could be a she," Stanley-from-IT says indignantly.

"Are you agreeing with me that this person exists?"

I watch the newcomer from across the elevator. Her eyes gleam, and she presses her lips together like she's heroically restraining herself from joining in the conversation. And normally I wouldn't join in, either. Generally, I prefer to watch and listen. I stick to the fringes. But . . .

"What's the appeal of serial killers?" I ask, and everyone startles. They'd forgotten I was there. Unremarkable, dull, in my gray coat and gray slacks and gray tie, my everyman haircut and glasses. I melt into the walls wherever I work.

"What?" Stanley-from-IT says.

"Why do people enjoy the topic so much?"

There's an awkward little pause while they sit with my accusation that they're enjoying this, and the woman in black jumps into the silence.

"Wish fulfillment, obviously."

"Is there someone you want to kill?" I ask.

She holds my gaze, and her lips quiver in a tiny, vicious smile. A good serial killer would never draw attention to her target.

We reach the ground floor and the public transportation cohort spill out when the doors open, nattering all the while. Normally I'd be with them, but I drove today, the first day of my new temp job. I have an errand after work. The doors sigh shut, and I'm left alone with the shadow bundled stiffly in one corner, her black leather bag clamped under one arm. She glances at me-just a quick lizard-brain reflex to scan her environment-but our eyes catch, and I'm surprised to find myself talking again. Chitchat is not something I do.

"What would your MO be? Would you push someone off a roof?"

She answers immediately, as if she's been waiting all day for this question. "I'm a straight razor kind of girl. Small, portable, quick. Wouldn't require much physical exertion. And there's a certain retro classiness to it, don't you think?"

"Very Sweeney Todd."

She frowns and turns to face me properly with dark, inscrutable eyes. One slim hand slides her phone into her pocket.

"I was thinking Black Widow. Kept her first husband's razor as a trophy."

"Sounds messy." I don't like messes myself.

Her red lips twitch. "Why do you think I'm wearing all black? How would you do it?"

I adjust my cuffs while I contemplate my answer.

"Ah. You have strangler gloves," she says.

I flex my fingers in my black leather gloves. "Like Stanley said," I say. "A true serial killer has the good manners to keep it personal. A good firm stranglehold and then eye contact till the end."

She snorts. "Don't threaten me with a good time."

My insides twist pleasantly and unexpectedly. It's not unlike that fairground feeling. "What's your name?"

The amused twist to her lips flattens. She doesn't need a straight razor. She slits my throat with a scowl and returns her attention to her phone.

A moment later the doors open onto the dim basement parking, and her heels fire a gunshot staccato that echoes in the cavernous space. I follow. She walks to a black car, swings her bag into the front seat, and turns to me.

"You're following me."

"No. This is my car." I lean against the car next to hers.

She considers the sleek car and weighs it against my temp uniform. "That's definitely not your car."

"It is."

"Prove it. Open up the trunk and show me your latest strangle victim."

I don't move.

She twists sinuously on the spot and flicks her eyes up and down, from my head to my toes. "You're a creep," she says, and I can't tell if it's an insult or praise. She hops in her car and I watch as she drives off. She flips me the bird as she vanishes around a cement pillar.

I stare after her, my thoughts twisting this way and that. There was something about how she looked at me and really saw me-the faceless office temp who no one normally sees, who no one is supposed to notice. It feels risky, and exhilarating.

I fish my keys out of my pocket and pop the trunk. There's a rolled-up rug inside, blond hair spilling out one end.

I could have shown her. Wouldn't that have been hilarious.

2

The Temp

My life is like this:

My alarm clock says 4:00, or 3:47, or 5:10, or something like that, when consciousness stitches itself together. I never actually rely on my alarm clock to wake me. I don't sleep well. I don't think people tend to sleep well when they're living with the sorts of things I am. Thoughts that go bump in the night. Secrets that scratch away in my head.

Sometimes I drink my coffee in the dark living room while watching the news. The housing crisis. The climate crisis. The crisis crisis. Luckily none of it affects me. Sometimes I watch the sleeping neighborhood from the balcony. Sometimes I stand in my roommate's doorway and watch him snore as Verity lies unnaturally ramrod-straight beside him. No normal woman sleeps like that, although it's been a while since any woman has slept next to me, normal or otherwise. I stand there and wonder what I'll do with him. I wonder what I'll do with her, when the time comes. We're going to run out of rugs.

The apartment building grumbles to life, radios and TVs flick on, cars outside start, and I come alive by proxy, a robot humming awake from a pulse of ambient electrical power. When my roommate comes out, I fire a bright shit-eating grin at him, because that is what humans are supposed to do.

"Good morning, Grant," I say.

The morning traffic squeezes my bus down Main. I offer my seat to the elderly and pregnant women and mumble “Sorry” and smile self-effacingly when someone steps on my foot. I’m the perfect extra in the background, with my messenger bag and glasses; my hair and clothes neat, appropriate, forgettable; a free city newspaper folded in half in one hand-which I never read. When the credits roll, my part will be Morning Commuter #6. My bus spits me out at Richeson and I catch the SkyTrain to Bylling, then walk the remaining five minutes to one of a hundred skyscrapers rearing up like late-stage capitalism’s middle finger held up to humankind. I’m a cog in the corporate machine. I’m one of a billion fruiting bodies on the capitalist fungus that permeates the globe with a fine, hairlike mycelium. I’m no one. A nonentity. I like it that way.

I work for a temp agency, which means I'm a warm body for hire. As long as I have a pulse, I have a job. At the moment, I'm a placeholder for a human with actual value. Harriet is on unpaid leave, and so that some bean counter doesn't decide that her position can be cut since no one is performing her job or taking her salary, her supervisor, a man called Doug, who has been promoted several strata past his zone of competency, has hired me to fill her spot. Her tasks were redistributed to her team members, so my job is to sit at her desk and keep her chair warm. I am given work to do: I have an intimate relationship with the photocopier, the coffee machine, the collator, and the rooftop, where I take about twelve breaks a day.

People call me Jacob and Jack and Jonathan. Quite a few people don't bother with my name at all, although I make a point of learning everyone's. I always do. A few busybodies patted me down for gossip about a week after I arrived, found me empty-pocketed, and have left me alone since. I'm a little friendless island in the workforce sea. I prefer it. I'd rather watch, and listen, and work on my list to pass the time and ease the boredom. Adding names, removing names. Adding them back again.

At the end of the day, I take public transportation home with my fellow hollow-eyed survivors of the downtown commercial hell zone. I smile vacuously at them. Good job, team! Same time tomorrow? I let myself into the apartment and find Grant and his latest consort, Verity, sprawled on the sofa watching reality TV. He cradles her against the side of his body and absently strokes her hair. I know better than to be envious of what he has.

I clean. I restore order. And then I cook. Healthy meals with expensive ingredients-organic vegetables, grass-fed meat, and things like saffron salt and truffle oil-carefully and thoughtfully prepared, all at Grant's request and on his dime. If it were just me, it would be a bowl of cereal. I'm not planning to live to a hundred. I make a show of inviting Verity to join us, because Grant likes for me to be polite, but of course she never accepts. Grant doesn't date the sort of woman who eats. Instead, she watches us with wistful eyes too large in her perfect, sculpted face.

Rinse, repeat.

3

Hello, Dolly

Until Dolores.

It isn't easy figuring out her name. My new place of work is a massive termite colony, each department compartmentalized and unto itself, and it's difficult to find anyone who knows anything about the woman dressed like Satan's shadow, always in black, with long sleeves and high collars; the one with the vibrant lipstick and the cruel heels, who swirls through rooms without others registering her presence. Purposeful but aloof, like a malevolent spirit with shit to do.

"Who was that?" I ask Tricia-from-Marketing after another spotting in the break room.

"Who was what?" Tricia-from-Marketing asks, attempting to eat her yogurt daintily, not realizing she has a smear on her chin.

I trail the shadow down a hallway, round a corner, and she's gone.

Another time, she materializes in a packed elevator next to me. She doesn't acknowledge my existence, and I certainly don't say anything. I watch to see which button she'll push, but she doesn't so much as glance at the numbers. She steps off at the sixteenth floor when it opens to let someone in, and I watch, waiting to see if she'll go left or right, but she does neither. She dawdles, looking at her phone, and just as the doors slip shut, she looks left, then right, and ducks into the stairwell.

"Who was that?" I ask Brennan-the-Intern.

"What was who?" Brennan-the-Intern asks, swiping right ten times in a row on a dating app while waiting for his floor.

Whoever she is, she acts like a secret agent. She gets off at the wrong floor and uses the stairs to throw off anyone who might be watching. She always has her phone out or pressed to her ear to deflect conversation. There's no way to figure out who she is. I decide she must be a consultant, or a freelancer, or maybe even a client representative. Not a Spencer & Sterns employee at all.

Several days go by without any sightings, and then at the end of the day one Thursday, later than usual, I catch the elevator by myself, down, down, down, until it stops at the fifteenth floor. The doors yawn open like the gates to hell, and there she is.

She wears a black dress with a neat white collar under her open coat, and her lipstick makes her look like she's just finished devouring some poor man's heart, raw. She steps into the miasma of elevator Muzak with me, presses B, and turns to face me-a slow, graceful pirouette, her arms extending as she leans back on the handrail. Her sharp nails rasp the metal of the rail and the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. Then she cocks her head to one side, exposing the bareness of her own neck, and she looks like a vampire offering herself up to her lover. The elevator doors close, her eyes meet mine, and there's that lurching fairground drop in the bottom of my stomach again, except the elevator hasn't started moving yet.