The Embalmer: A Steve Jobz Thriller

by Vincent Zandri

  Now my empty stomach constricts from the sudden image of this poor girl being strapped to a table or chair or a bed while the creep who did this to her fills her body with embalming fluid. In my head, I hear her screams, see her body convulsing against the straps that hold her down.

  “Okay,” Miller goes on. “So, mechanism and manner of death.”

  “Heart stoppage is mechanism, and manner is no blood for the heart to go bu-bump, bu-bump, bu-bump.” Phillips smiles, pats my back like this is the most fun we can possibly have with our clothes on.

  “How long you think she was dead when he set her on the bench?”

  “Well, like I said. Not very long. I’m guessing she’d been clinically dead at least five hours by the time she got to me. So, I’d say he killed her sometime around four o’clock this morning. Give or take an hour.”

  “You got evidence of sexual assault?”

  “You mean like, did I do an internal?”

  “Yup.”

  Suddenly, the seemingly happy Dr. Phillips isn’t so happy anymore. His already tight face grows just a little bit tighter. Just enough for me to know that his emotions have made a significant change, and now he’s pissed off. He steps over to the counter, grabs hold of plastic specimen jar that had a lid on it, and a white label with something written on it in black Sharpie.

  He holds the cup up for Miller to reveal some cloudy, milky liquid residue.

  “My guess is he got his rocks off three times with her after her soul had left the building. You see, her sex parts would still be warm and alive soon after death. The female sex organ would maintain some heat for a while due to the toxicity of the embalming fluid and chemical reaction with her flesh. Identical scenario with the first two victims.”

  Miller raises his right hand to his forehead then down his chest and over, makes the sign of the cross.

  “I need to find this creep, put him down,” he says, swallowing.

  “Ya think?” Georgie says, replacing the cup onto the counter.

  “Last question, Georgie,” Miller says. “Was there evidence of a struggle?”

  Now with the sickness having abated and the sight of Lisa Barrett no longer repulsing me as much as it did just a few minutes before, I feel my own blood heating up.

  “Did she at least punch the motherfucker?” I add.

  Dr. Phillips nods. “I took some skin samples from under her fingernails. They’ll be on the way to the APD lab along with an internal sample soon as I’ve sewed her up and shipped her off to the funeral home.”

  “Which one?” Miller asks.

  “Fitzgerald’s down in Cohoes. I called for a hearse. It’s on the way now.”

  The detective glances at his watch once more.

  “We got just enough time, I should think,” he says.

  “For what?” I say.

  “To pay Lisa’s mortician a visit.”

  Driving.

  Out of the city onto Inner-State 787, north toward the city of Cohoes. The smartphone in my pocket vibrates. Reaching into my jacket, I pull it out. It’s my mom again. Heart beats, pulse rises. Good Steve whispers into my ear, Get it. Be a good son. Bad Steve tells me to put the phone away. Mom is being well cared for. I go with Bad Steve and once more, hate myself for it.

  I need to divert my attention, shift my focus back on the dead.

  I say, “Shouldn’t we be visiting Lisa’s apartment in Troy, Miller? Interviewing neighbors and such? Cross referencing our data with the Troy PD? What’s the mortician gonna tell us?”

  “Slow down with the twenty questions,” Miller says from behind the wheel. “We’ll get to that soon enough. Besides, the blue uniform foot soldiers have already conducted their door-to-door public relations bit with the neighbors. And like I already said, forensics has scrubbed the place. We’ll have our turn at it, but right now, I have another hunch about something.”

  “What is it?”

  “If our perp fancies himself a master mortician, then it might make sense that he’s scoped out the funeral home where Lisa Barrett is being delivered. I want to talk with the head mortician see if he’s noticed any strange people hanging around recently.”

  “He already got the strange email,” I say. “So, maybe your strategy makes sense.”

  “Gee, you really think so, Jobz?” he says sarcastically. “’Cause I’ve been second guessing myself all day. You know, with my lack of experience and all.”

  I feel the slow burn.

  “Sorry,” I say, tail between the legs. “Don’t mind me.”

  “Look,” he goes on, “what I’m wondering is if the perp watches the place. If he’s actually waiting for the body to be delivered. If he makes that much of an investment in his work of art.”

  We get off the highway, drive into the city of Cohoes. The word city is stretching it a bit. The downtown consists of a single main thoroughfare, aptly named: Main Street. It’s two-sided by boarded up commercial wood, brick, and stone buildings that at one time must have housed a healthy business district, but is now reduced to just a few scattered operations. We pass a drugstore, a small diner, a dollar store, and a bank. Then, what was once the downtown, quickly becomes history.

  The road leads uphill, past some old mills that have been rehabbed into apartments. The mills were constructed in the nineteenth century along the banks of the Mohawk River. In my head, I see the mills filled with hundreds of migrant workers chained to their tables, sewing fabric together. Women, men, and kids. All of them working ten and fifteen hour days for pennies. Until the unions sprung up. The unions were a good idea then. A necessary one. The unions saved lives and made honest men out of the very rich and very powerful. Today, the unions are political machines. As empty and corrupt as Cohoes’s once vibrant downtown.

  We drive further up the hill until we come to a residential area that looks as if World War II is still being fought. Old bungalows and ranches from another era. Nostalgic. A suburb lost in time.

  When we come to the Fitzgerald Funeral Home, we pull into the small, empty lot that abuts a two-level Victorian home on its eastern side. We park the cruiser beside a long black hearse. We get out, and I follow Miller around the front and up the few steps onto the porch that accesses the front wood and glass door. Miller tries the opener. It’s not locked, so we step inside.

  There’s a young woman dressed in black, and she’s vacuuming the center hallway and the small vestibule that separates two viewing areas. She turns and gives us a startled look. She kills the loud vacuum and places her hand on her heart.

  “You trying to make me a client of my own funeral home, Detective Miller?”

  “My apologies, Donna,” he says. “The door was open.”

  No wonder he was so eager to come here. He knows the owners. Means he has a relationship with them.

  “Your dad in?” Miller asks.

  Donna approaches us. She’s tall, thin, and wears her straight sandy-blonde hair shoulder length. She gives Miller a hug. Further proof they are more than just acquaintances. When she pulls away, she looks at me, says hello.

  I hold out my hand.

  “Steve,” I say, purposely avoiding the last name.

  Donna takes it, squeezes gently, shakes once.

  “Go ahead,” Miller says. “Ask Steve his last name.”

  I shoot him a look. I thought we were done busting my balls over my name.

  “Well,” Donna says, her brown eyes shifting from me to Miller and back to me again.

  Miller’s quite the prankster. The pattern is becoming obvious. First, he takes me out for a big lunch, then causes me to lose said lunch by walking me into the middle of an autopsy and a pot smoking pathologist who cannot resist consuming goopy raw fish while carving out someone’s brains. Now, he wants to make a circus of my name to this nice young woman. Okay, I could be a jerk and refuse to reveal it. But better to just play along like a nice rookie.

  “Jobz,” I say. “Steve Jobz.”

  The place goes as quiet as a, well
. . . quiet as a funeral home.

  “Steve . . . Jobz,” Donna says, pursing her lips. “Isn’t that the name of . . .”

  “Yup,” Miller interjects.

  She giggles.

  “How funny,” she says. “You must love having that name. Everyone you meet must think you’re like a genius. A very rich genius.”

  Usually, I can just brush off the commentary on my name, but her comments cause a slow burn to kindle in my toes and flash fire quickly throughout my entire central nervous system.

  “Thought and reality are not identical in my case,” I say. “Despite the identical sound of the name.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, her pretty face filled with remorse. “I didn’t mean . . .”

  I hold up both hands as if to say, say no more . . . and she doesn’t. Instead, she says a name. Lisa Barrett.

  “You’ll be expecting her,” Miller says. “You been seeing anything strange happening around here over the course of twenty-four hours?”

  She shakes her head.

  “If you mean oddball people,” she says, “this is a funeral home. There are always strange people coming in and out. But no one person more odd than the standard odd, if that’s what you mean.”

  “The email that was sent to your guestbook,” I say. “Something about the sender now having some money and she, the victim, still not wanting him. Even though he is her man.” Making quotations marks with my fingers when I say her man. “There’s no way to trace the return address?”

  “It was a no-reply address,” she says. “You wanna see it? It’s on my laptop in the office in back.”

  “No bother,” Miller says. “You already forwarded it to me. We’ve got the computer geeks working on it now.”

  Another slow burn. I guess maybe it’s better if I keep my mouth shut and observe instead of suggesting actions already being taken and/or investigated.

  “Dad in?” Miller says to Donna.

  “Isn’t he always?” she says, glancing at her wristwatch. “He’s working on the five o’clock while he waits for Lisa’s arrival.”

  Miller turns to me. He’s got that half smile/half smirk on his face. The same one he wore prior to our entering into the morgue.

  “Donna’s dad, Warren Fitzgerald, the owner . . . We go all the way back to grade school. St. Ambrose Roman Catholic School, not far from here.”

  “A nice Catholic boy,” I say. “I never would have guessed, Miller.”

  “I still say my prayers every night, pal.”

  “Amen to that.”

  He clears his throat. “So, tell me, you ever seen the workings of a real mortician operation before, Jobz?”

  “More dead people,” I say. “Oh joy.”

  “You’re in for another treat,” he says, wide-eyed and happy faced. “Instead of investigating jobs and careers from in front of a computer screen, you get to see these jobs in action, in real time.”

  “Hope you’re not the squeamish type,” Donna says.

  “He’s a got a cast iron stomach,” Miller says, turning, heading into the viewing room on his right-hand side. There’s a door located at the far end of the room. It’s a big, ornate, solid wood door. When he opens it, however, I can see that it doesn’t access a room or a staircase. Rather, it opens onto a small freight elevator enclosed in an accordion style metal door.

  We step onto the elevator and Miller fingers the single button on the panel that will transport us to the basement level. Or so I assume. The metal accordion door automatically slams closed. Suddenly, I get the feeling that I’m trapped and about to descend into a hell I’d rather not be a part of. But, just like death itself, there will be no choice but to go along for the ride.

  Oh well, it still beats the hell out of my day job.

  The trip south takes only a few seconds. When we come to a lurching stop the metal door opens up again, and we step out into a wide-open room. Like the hospital morgue, the room’s concrete floor is painted an industrial battleship gray, and the walls are covered with tiles—some of which have cracked and chipped over the years. The overhead lighting is bright, and it illuminates two stainless steel tables that are set beside open caskets that rest atop portable gurneys.

  A naked stiff is lying on the far table and a man dressed in an undershirt and blue jeans is attending to it. The man turns when the elevator door opens.

  “Nicky,” he says, smiling. “Wondering when you were gonna show up.”

  “Better late than never, old friend,” the detective says, crossing the room to the table and the dead man who lies on top of it. “Fitz, this is my associate, Steve.”

  No last name. Miller must not be screwing around anymore. Thank God, old jokes get stale real fast.

  Fitz gives me a how do you do. But I must be transfixed with the old guy on the table, because it takes me a minute to focus in on the mortician’s face . . . to look him in the eye, shake his thick hand.

  “You’re probably not used to seeing dead people,” he says, brushing back his thick head of gray-black hair. “But this is a second, almost third generation facility and I grew up with the dead.” He’s got a pair of reading glasses dangling against his sternum via a leather lanyard. He puts the glasses on. “You’re just in time to see how we operate down here, Steve.”

  “Now I see what you’re up to, Miller,” I say.

  Fitz says, “From what Detective Miller says, you guys are on the trail of a killer who embalms his victims while they’re still alive. A serial killer. My old buddy here thought it might be a good idea if you observed how a body is prepared for burial.”

  “Might open up our minds to be familiar with the process. Allow us to get into the mindset of the killer.”

  “At least I don’t have to worry about losing my lunch this time,” I say.

  “Fitz,” Miller says, “do the honors if you will.”

  There’s a little green cloth covering the old man’s privates. I’m kind of hoping the cloth stays put since I’ve already had enough nastiness to look at today, including my own vomit mixed with a substantial amount of bloody medical waste. Okay, I’m making myself sick again.

  Fitz takes hold of the cloth, pulls it off. I’m surprised he doesn’t shout, “Voilà!”

  Sure enough, my stomach gurgles. Because the man’s junk is not only shriveled, it’s kind of long and veiny and covered in age spots. It’s also surrounded by a thick patch of gray hair.

  Miller catches me staring at it.

  “Like what you see, Jobz?” he says. “Because that shit’s your destiny.”

  “Don’t look at it, it bothers you, Steve,” Fitz says, not without a laugh, his eyes locked not on me, but his buddy.

  “I’ve seen worse,” I say. “Only about a half hour ago in the morgue.”

  “Okay, then,” Fitz says, his voice raised a decibel or two, not like he’s addressing a top cop and his sort of deputy for the day, but an entire classroom of college kids. “First things first.” He picks up the hose that’s attached to the table, flicks on the spigot, and begins to spray the body. He also grabs hold of a plastic bottle of Dove Antibacterial soap and squirts some of that onto the dead man also. “The embalming process begins with the complete sanitation of the body. Just like the old man was bathing himself at home. This removes any bacteria and contagions that might cause the skin and flesh to further decay. Because what causes a body to decompose, Nicky?”

  “Bacteria, Fitz.”

  “Correctamundo, as usual, Detective.”

  Fitz, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, slaps on a pair of latex gloves and proceeds to wash the body like he’s giving his little child a bath in the family tub. He even quietly whistles a tune while he works. But then he does something that most parents don’t do when bathing their kids. Placing a dime-sized amount of the antibacterial soap onto the pad of his index finger, he rolls the old man onto his side, and . . . how shall I say this delicately . . . goes about cleaning the old man’s bum.

  “Okay this is
unpleasant,” I say, finding myself looking away.

  “Unpleasant, but necessary. It’s important to clean all the entrances to the body of nasty bacteria. You see, Steve, I look upon this procedure not as a job, but as something sacred and historical even. Thousands of years ago the ancient Egyptians prepared their dead for the afterlife in much the same way. Even the term mortician, comes from mort, as it relates to the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. A word that became common vernacular among funeral types in 1885, or so it’s estimated.”

  “He’s full a shit,” Miller whispers into my ear. “But just go with it.”

  Fitz discards the gloves into a plastic medical waste bin set beside the table, then slaps on a new pair. He goes to work cleaning the eyes, nostrils, ear canals, and even the interior of the mouth with the soap and completes the process by washing every cavity with the high-powered water spigot.

  “Okay,” Fitz says, taking a step back, observing the old man’s now clean body, clearly proud of the work he’s accomplished thus far, almost like a sculptor admiring the rocks he’s chiseled from gigantic hunk of marble.

  “Time to give the old geezer a shave so that he looks handsome for his family and friends.”

  Discarding the gloves, the mortician goes to the counter set beside him, pulls down a razor and shaving cream from a metal shelf.

  “Tell you what, Mr. Jobz,” he says. “Since this is a hands-on field trip, why don’t you do the honors.”

  I feel an electric shock race up and down my spine.

  “I’ll pass, thanks.”

  Fitz shoots Miller a glance. Like the detective said, we’re not down inside this mortician’s workspace merely to gather more information on our killer, but we’re here to get inside the mind of our killer. To find out what makes him, or her, tick. What motivates him. That said, I ain’t got no choice but to play along.

  “You want me to touch this body, is that it, Miller?” I say.

  “It’s all a part of the education, Jobz.”

  “I already went to cop school.”

  “So did I,” he says, “but this is different. You’re educating yourself to the madness behind the mortician killer’s modus operandi. It’s not going to be enough to just examine a list of possible names printed on a list of suspected Unemployment Insurance Fraud suspects. We need to hone in on someone who wasn’t just good at his job, but so good he treated it with all the tender loving care of Da Vinci and his Mona Lisa or Michelangelo and his David.”