The dead don’t haunt Alice Neary Jackson. For eight years, she has made a business of scrubbing some of the most grisly crime scenes in Southwest Florida. It’s the faces of the living that stick with Jackson. One look rattles her to the core. “It’s the same one I had when my father passed away,” Jackson said. “It’s a look of being lost. That’s the one that makes my heart ache. (In dreams) I will see that person’s face and wake up crying.” But it’s the exposure to blood, body parts, maggots and other horrors most people have trouble imagining. “This type of work takes a very special person, and Alice is just that person,” said Nicole DeGaetano, who hired Jackson’s firm, A Neary Biohazard Company, as a client. Businesses such as Jackson’s must be licensed by the state. They can be permitted as biomedical waste generators, transporters or disposers. Jackson is both a generator and a transporter. She is licensed through Collier County and in full compliance, said Collier County Health Department spokesman Jeff Welle. Jackson, 43, is hired, usually by family members, when someone is murdered, commits suicide or dies several days or longer before being discovered. “It’s in my blood,” she said. “It’s second nature to me.” Jackson’s grandfather started the family business years ago: a funeral home in New Jersey. Her father took it over and imagined passing it on to someone -- perhaps one of his four sons, Jackson said. “And here comes little Alice, the youngest, with all these questions.” Jackson did regular housecleaning until her son was born, then was a stay-at-home mom until he was in school for several years. She was ready to go back to work and said she discovered her calling when tragedy struck her husband’s family. His brother shot himself in a situation she calls self-inflicted but not a suicide -- he survived. “His wife said ‘And now I’ve got to clean that up?’ You know how you’re sent here to do God’s work?” she said. “That’s what I was supposed to do.” When she arrives at a scene, the body is gone, and that may provide some kind of emotional shield. She doesn’t want to see pictures of the person or anything personal, even grocery lists. “I don’t want to see what they picked out to watch in the TV Guide,” she said. But there are moments that break through those emotional barriers. “The phone will ring and an answering machine will pick up and I’ll hear the person’s voice, or I’ll find the person’s watch and it’s still ticking, but they’re dead,” she said. At the North Naples home of Mesac Damas, which Jackson and one of her two employees cleaned, she remembers neighbors placing “a little shrine” in front of the apartment where five children and their mother were found dead, their throats slit. Damas is awaiting trial on first-degree murder charges. “And we had to go back and forth to the truck and we would see these children on roller skates and bikes and scooters, all looking at and adding to the shrine, and inside we’re cleaning it all up,” she said. “That’s when the mother instinct kicks in and you can’t wait to go home and hug your child.”