The Embalmer: A Steve Jobz Thriller Read online

  I eat some burger and several fries at once.

  “You got a hunch?” I say out the corner of my full mouth.

  “All the victims have been from Albany, thus far. And the bodies have been found in Albany. The latest in Washington Park. On a park bench in a seated position.”

  “Classy,” I say. Then, my eyes once more locked onto the computer screen. “Any names stick out at you?”

  “Let’s funnel out the suspected unemployment insurance fraud people first.”

  “Wait,” I insist. “How do you know the killer is also committing insurance fraud?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Which is why you’re sitting here clogging your arteries. But it’s something that fits the profile. The first victim was found inside her car in a parking garage, her one hand on the wheel, the other on the gear shift, her head positioned like she was about to back out of the parking space. Eyes open, sunglasses on.”

  “The guy, again if it is a guy, is putting them in realistic situations, as if they were wax figures, or even those human mannequins you sometimes see at fairs or amusement parks.”

  “Exactly. It’s part of his MO.”

  “And the second?”

  “Redhead, about forty. Discovered sitting in a chair at an umbrella-topped table outside the Starbucks in Loudonville, North Albany. Get this, her hand was wrapped around an iced latte, and she appeared to be sipping from it with a straw.”

  “I must have missed that in the papers, Miller.”

  “You know about the third one in the park, sitting on a park bench, her hair made to look like it was blowing in the wind.”

  “And you believe the perp is collecting unemployment illegally. From off the victims?”

  “Not at all. Unemployment lasts what, six months?”

  “Under special circumstances it can go a year. But that’s a stretch.”

  “Well, Jobz, this guy has been killing for over a year. Tells me he was fired maybe fourteen or so months ago and has long since run out of unemployment. It’s possible he even has a new job but is still gaming the system. That would be my guess.”

  “Maybe he’s just privately wealthy and doesn’t need either a job or UI.”

  “Again, doesn’t fit the profile. But the profile does fit a middle-aged white guy with a soft underbelly who would do anything to get rich, short of robbing a bank. Or could be he was already rich and lost it all.”

  “Let me get this straight in my brain. He won’t rob a bank, but he will commit murder in one of the most creative ways I’ve ever heard of.”

  “It’s not murder in his eyes, so much as creative expression. He’s creating works of art while taking out his revenge at the same time. My hunch is he doesn’t take rejection very well and that all his victims dated him at one time or another. But not for very long. More like one shot deals that came from online dating sites. Something that would allow him to remain anonymous at least for the time it takes to have a quick coffee or drinks date.” He sighs. “Anyway, it’s worth getting you involved. We’re at a dead end here, and it’s worth taking a good look at the database for what it tells us.”

  We both steal more bites of our lunch.

  “Tell you what, Detective Miller,” I say. “For now, I’ll eliminate all female employees and go with males only.” I type in the new, narrower search, press enter. “Okay, eight hundred possibilities.”

  “We’re getting somewhere, Jobz. I’ll need a printout.”

  “I’ll forward a PDF to your email. What is it?”

  He tells me, and I forward the link for him right there and then.

  “That it for now, Boss?” I ask.

  He nods, eats more salad. Picking up my burger, two-fisted, I chomp down on it, then follow up with several more fries and wash it all down with a swig of Coke. I feel Miller looking at me.

  “You know,” he says, “you’re not in half bad shape for a little guy. You’re not in my kind of shape, but not half bad all the same. But let me tell you something, Jobz, you keep on eating like that, by the time you’re my age, you’re laid out on a marble slab getting your own embalming fluid injection.”

  “Thanks, Detective,” I say, swallowing, wiping my mouth with a napkin. “I forgot how pleasant it is to eat lunch with a cop.” I put the napkin down. “You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”

  “Had my first heart attack in 2000,” he adds. “Don’t plan on having number two.”

  We finish lunch in relative silence. I consume every morsel, just to make a point. He examines my plate after and gives me a look like, Job well done, Jobz.

  Janice returns.

  “My, my” she says, “when I’m right, I’m right. You are indeed one healthy boy.”

  “Miller begs to differ,” I say, cleaning my teeth with a toothpick.

  “No one’s as healthy as Twenty-Six-Mile Miller,” she says.

  “Twenty-six?” I say.

  “She’s referring to the length of a full marathon,” he offers. “I run at least one per year.”

  “You are healthy for an old geezer, Miller,” I say. “No Dunkin’ Donuts for you.”

  “Haha,” he says. “I get it. Donuts/cops . . . Cops/donuts. Don’t forget, you were a cop once. And I haven’t quite yet reached geezer status, Steve Coronary-To-Come Jobz.”

  “Good to see the boys are getting along,” Janice interjects.

  Miller gets up, digs into his pocket, sets a ten spot onto the table.

  “That’s for you, love,” he says to Janice, giving her a peck on the check. To be honest, the move makes me slightly jealous. “That ten is all for you. Don’t be putting that in the communal jar.”

  She picks the ten spot up, shoves it inside her lacy bra. She catches me looking at her finger stuffed inside her cleavage, and she shoots me another wink.

  “Snagged,” I say, getting up while shoving the computer back into its bag.

  Miller heads to the front of the narrow diner and the front door. I hang back just a little with Janice.

  “I was wondering . . .” I say, my voice suddenly raised an octave higher, as if at my age I’m going through a second puberty.

  She immediately pulls a piece of paper from her apron pocket.

  “. . . If you could ask me out.” Grinning proudly. “At my age, you sense these things coming on, Mr. Jobz.”

  She hands me the paper. It’s got her name and phone number on it.

  “That’s a cell,” she says. “But don’t text. I prefer to hear a real voice.”

  “Great,” I say, my face no doubt redder than a fire engine. “I’ll keep it real.”

  I slip past her and take in a glorious whiff her lavender perfume.

  “Coffee or drink this weekend, Janice?” I say, not wanting to jump in headfirst with a full-on dinner date right off the bat, and scare the wits out of her.

  “Absolutely,” she says. “Who can resist an offer from Steve Jobz?”

  Turning, I head out of the diner, glad for once that I have such a stupid ass name.

  We drop ourselves back into Miller’s unmarked cruiser.

  “Here’s the way I see it, Jobz,” he says. “I can either take you back to your place of employment, which I’m sure you’d love more than anything else in the world. Or, you can swim for the deep end on this one, get more involved, help me out with nailing the right perp.”

  “I like the idea of not going back to that sweat shop, and I especially hate to eat and run, but how can I possibly help you more than I already have, Miller?”

  “For one, you’ve already helped me narrow down my search to something manageable. Listen, Jobz, I mean it when I say that was an impossible situation just this morning. And second, you bring a unique perspective to the investigation.”

  “What’s that exactly? The state worker fall-asleep-inside-my-cubical-from-utter-boredom perspective?”

  He starts the cruiser, pulls out of the lot. Instead of going right, toward the direction of the state campus and my car, he
takes a left, like he already knows my answer.

  “You deal with the common, everyday worker. You don’t just give away unemployment cash. You demand reasons behind a job’s termination. You might be able to shed some light on what could be motivating our perp. Why he’s choosing to kill by utilizing a specific skill set he could only have learned at a job that rejected him.”

  “Or maybe it’s like that motor-mouth guy, Bryan, says,” I say. “He doesn’t know he’s fucked up. He does what he does because he has to.”

  In my head, I see the muscle head, Bryan, his thick black hair held in place almost perfectly with a headband.

  “But our boy is utilizing a specific skillset. He’s learned a trade, and he’s learned it well, and now he’s putting it to use in the most god awful of ways.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I sort of see your point. But there’s one over-riding question here. How do you know the perp is even unemployed? Or was, until relatively recently unemployed.”

  “That’s easy,” Miller says.

  “Easy?”

  “He told us he was unemployed.”

  We drive towards the city until we come to Washington Park where the detective hooks a left into the New Scotland Avenue entrance to Albany’s largest and oldest park. A park that rivals Central Park in its landscaping, despite it being hundreds of acres smaller than its Manhattan cousin to the south.

  Miller says, “Funeral parlors still do the job they set out to do decades ago, which is to assist the family in the grieving process by preparing the dead for burial. But they’ve also entered into the digital age, and now anyone who wants to can share a memory on their electronic guestbook. We don’t have a whole lot on the Mortician Murders, but in all three cases, there have been strange messages left on the funeral home’s electronic guest book.”

  “Such as?”

  “For the first murder, the perp, or suspected perp, sent an email that went something like this: ‘Unemployment insurance wasn’t good enough for her. Too bad. If she stuck with me, she might still be alive. I was her man.”

  “You gotta be shitting me,” I say. “He came right out and said it in the third person like that?”

  “Yup. Funeral home moderator read it, flagged it, removed it, sent it our way.”

  “And the second?”

  “The killing took place months later, but apparently he was still unemployed because he wrote something to the tune of: ‘The price of a Starbucks coffee is an extravagant expense for him, the unemployed and the lonely. But true love means never having to say you’re sorry. I was her man.’”

  “He said that? Or you making that up, sort of?”

  He taps the side of his skull with his index finger.

  “The hair’s gray,” he says, “but the mind is sharp as hell. That one I recall verbatim. It’s almost like poetry when you examine it closely.”

  “Bad poetry, maybe. But I’ll tell you one thing, Miller.”

  “What’s that?” he says.

  “I don’t see Bryan writing something like that. I also don’t see him knowing how to go about embalming a woman while she’s still alive.”

  He nods, winks.

  “Good thinking,” he says. “And it’s because of those things he’s not a suspect. Right now, anyway. Like I already said.”

  We drive further into the park until we pull over, stopping just a few feet away from a park bench which has been positioned beneath the shade of a thick old oak tree. A strip of plastic yellow Do-Not-Enter-Crime-Scene ribbon is tied to both ends of the bench’s metallic frame, blocking off access to anyone who wishes to sit on its wood slats. Presumably to preserve the perp’s prints. Once more, I see Bryan. See him jogging by the early morning’s light. See him coming up on a beautiful dead young woman who he took for a living, breathing human being. Hell of a way to start the day.

  “And what about a third personal note?” I ask.

  “Posted just last night now that Lisa Barrett’s body is about to be released from the morgue later today to the funeral home.”

  “And?”

  “It said, ‘He’s flush now. Back to the old grind. So why does she still hate me? I’m her man.’”

  “Subtle. But if he’s flush he either came into money or at the very least, is no longer unemployed.”

  “True that, Jobz.”

  “You able to trace the email?”

  “Far as we can tell, texts come from a cell phone, as opposed to laptop or desktop computer type server.”

  “Phone records? Verizon? AT & T?”

  “Worse than your situation at UIF. A lot worse since both companies require a court order to subpoena records. And in this climate where the perp has more rights than the innocent people they kill, it’s just about impossible breaking into their database.”

  “Getting harder and harder to be a cop, isn’t it, Miller?”

  He looks at me quick, but then refocuses his gaze through the windshield, as if seeing not the park but the future. Which is not so good.

  “It’s not us against the bad guys anymore, Jobz,” he says. “It’s us against political ideology. Old timers like me, we have to get creative in the ways we fight crime. Standard Operating Procedure is so diluted with rules and regs, it’s impossible for a cop to protect and serve the public much less watch his own ass.”

  My eyes locked on the park bench. I feel something happening inside me. My blood speeding through my veins faster than it normally does. Hotter too. My brain’s buzzing, not from a quick and fleeting adrenaline rush, but from a steady drip that began the moment Miller and I took off from the UIF parking lot on the state campus and hasn’t abated even for a moment. Maybe someone up there is trying to tell me something.

  “You really want me to help you out with this?” I say. “You really think I can be of some use?”

  “I know you can,” he assures.

  “I won’t be pissing in someone else’s sandbox.” It’s a question.

  “It wasn’t their sandbox to begin with. It’s Albany County’s.”

  Another glance at the park bench. In my head, I picture a blonde woman seated there. Her veins filled not with blood but embalming fluid.

  “Maybe I just wanna go along for the ride. The former cop in me wants to go along.”

  He crosses his arms over his chest.

  “However you wish to justify it is fine by me,” he says. “But I must warn you about something first.”

  Turning to him. “Kind of assumed this flight wouldn’t take off without safety instructions.”

  “Once you’re in, Jobz,” he says, “you’re in. There won’t be any backing out over a weak stomach, or fear, or nerves so shattered you can’t get it up even if all the women on Fox News sat on your face one after the other.”

  “Okay, that just made me hard.”

  Half his mouth forms a grin.

  “Let’s go look at a crime scene,” he says.

  I open the door, step out not into Washington Park, but into the first moment of my new life.

  He enters through the back door off the kitchen of his West Albany bungalow with his briefcase in one hand and the daily mail in the other. Making his way across the yellow linoleum floor, he enters into a living room that should sport a couch, and maybe an easy chair for watching the big LCD flat-screen mounted to the far wall. But instead, it contains a hospital bed that’s been reinforced with extra aluminum rods for stability to prevent sudden collapse under the great weight of its occupant.

  Making a quick check on the bed and said occupant, his wife, Wendy, he goes back into the kitchen where he slaps the mail down on the table, opens the refrigerator, and pulls out a can of beer.

  “Aren’t you even going to say hello, Pumpkin?” Wendy says, her voice sad but sprinkled with sarcasm. “I am still your wife, you know.”

  Ignoring her, he rummages around the refrigerator for some cold cuts and a half empty bottle of mustard. Pulling them out, he then grabs the Wonder Bread from the bread box that’s buil
t into the 1950s era cabinetry. He quickly constructs a bologna sandwich which he carries, along with the beer, back out into the living room.

  “Jesus,” he says, scrunching his face. “What in God’s name smells so bad?”

  “I haven’t showered or cleaned up in days, Pumpkin,” his wife of thirty years says, the tremble in her voice giving away the fact that she’s close to tears. “I wish you’d hire a nurse for me. I’m infirmed, or haven’t you noticed?”

  “I can’t afford a nurse, Wendy,” he says, setting his sandwich down on the bed at her swelled feet, but hanging on to his beer. “I’m just getting back on my feet. Besides, you did this to yourself. Look at you. You’re over five hundred pounds now. You can’t even get out of bed to clean up for Christ’s sakes. When I first met you, you were barely a buck thirty.”

  “Food,” she says, her voice hardly more than a whisper. “I like food. It’s the only bright light I have in my life since you decided that I wasn’t enough for you. Since you fell in love with that . . . that tramp.”

  “If you speak ill of her, Wendy,” he says, “I will see to it that you get no Kraft Cheese and Macaroni tonight. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Maybe you should take my food away forever, Pumpkin. Maybe you’re doing this to me on purpose. What do they call it? Enabling? No, wait a minute. I know what you are . . . What the psychiatrists refer to you as. You’re a feeder. You’re feeding me so that I’ll die. But not before I suffer horrid humiliation. Because that’s the kind of man you are, Pumpkin. You’re a feeder and a torturer.”

  “You go with that. And please stop calling me, Pumpkin. I have a real name.”

  She wipes her eyes with the backs of her meaty hands.

  Exhaling, “You are still my adorable, sweet little, Pumpkin . . . Even if you do make me sooooo mad sometimes.” Her big brown eyes focus in on the bologna sandwich set on the bed. “You gonna, ummm . . . you gonna eat that, Pumpkin?” she meekly poses.

  “You can have it. I lost my appetite.”

  She attempts to shift her body upwards so that she’s not eating while lying flat on her back. But her massive girth and doughy body are almost too heavy for what’s left of her muscles and entirely invisible skeletal frame. Looking at her from the foot of the bed, all he can think of is Jaba the Hut, the massively overweight slug from the original Star Wars movies. Sometimes, he sees the woman who played the big mama in the 90’s classic picture, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. In any case, hard to believe this is the same woman who once showed off her body in a string bikini on some of the world’s most exotic beaches. That was back when they had some real money. Back before the crash of crashes in ‘08.