The Cleanup Crew Never Leaves
A Slasher Novel

About this book:

Roxanne Vance doesn't just clean crime scenes—she erases them. As the owner of Last Look Remediation, she's built a career on protocol: enzyme soaks, quaternary ammonium, the precise geometry of blood spatter reversed until a slaughterhouse looks like a showroom. Twelve years ago, she survived the Camp Red Cloud massacre, carved her own tourniquet mark into a cedar post while a killer in a burlap mask butchered her friends. She turned trauma into procedure. Procedure into control.

Then a call comes from Upper Bucks County. A librarian named Claire Higgins has been dismantled in her sunroom, and the scene is wrong in a way that makes Roxanne's scar throb. The killer didn't flee. He stayed to clean. He used her proprietary towels. Her salt perimeter. Her exact wipe patterns. He pressed her stolen job clipboard—Job ID 104-B, TECH: VANCE, R.—into the victim's cooling blood like a signature. The newspapers never printed the cleanup details from Red Cloud. The police reports buried them. Only Roxanne knows the protocol this perfectly.

Now the rain is rising, the dehumidifiers are already running in the crawlspace beneath the floorboards, and her mentor Sergeant Dolan is staring at a crime scene that reads like a love letter written in her own handwriting. The original butcher died in a canal. The dentition didn't match. Roxanne told them that twelve years ago. Nobody listened. Now someone has her manual, her clipboard, and her address. He isn't copying a killer. He's grading a technician. And the final exam has just begun.