The silence wrapped around him like a welcome blanket. Only when he was alone did he relax-at least, as much as he ever relaxed. The rooms were spare, not because he couldn’t afford to buy furniture, but because he liked the space, the emptiness. He had a place to sleep, and a place to sit. He had a television, and a computer. The kitchen was supplied with just enough for him to get by. He didn’t need anything else.

When he moved from here, he would wipe everything down beforehand with a cleaning solvent to remove any fingerprints he’d left, then he would donate all the furnishings to a charity. Finally, he would have the apartment professionally cleaned, and it would be as if he’d never been here at all.

He would take some of his clothing with him, but, like the furniture, he wore things only a few times before donating them. If a sharp forensics tech found a thread that had first escaped his own notice and then the attentions of the cleaning service, and if by some colossal stroke of good luck on an investigator’s part led to him, nothing in his wardrobe would match that thread.

His computer was his Achilles’ heel, but he couldn’t do the necessary research prior to each job without it, so he did what he could to limit the risk, periodically wiping the hard drive, then removing it and installing a new one. As a final precaution, he would physically destroy the old hard drive. His safety routines were time-consuming, but they were simply part of his life. He didn’t fret about them, he simply did them.

He traveled light, and he traveled fast. He had a sentimental attachment to nothing, so there was nothing from which he couldn’t walk away. As for people…they were much like his possessions: temporary. There were people of whom he was fond, in a distant way, but no one who elicited any strong emotions in him. He didn’t even get angry, because he saw it as a waste of time. If the issue was minor, he walked away; if it was something he had to handle, he took care of the matter calmly and efficiently, and wasted no time worrying about things afterward.