How a Mortician’s Hands Give Away the Whole Story

Martin Krause came to the station to file a report while I was archiving the paperwork on a convenience store robbery. He stood at the front desk, rubbing his hands together, his tall, gaunt frame leaning slightly forward, his face oddly round and plump—like a portrait that had warped out of proportion. He said someone had changed the locks on his rental property. I said that was fairly common. He said the girl was three months behind on rent, her phone was dead, and she wasn't answering texts.

As he spoke, his left hand kept tugging at the cuff of his right sleeve, exposing a strip of dark blue uniform lining. I caught a glimpse of white lettering printed on it: Eternal Rest Mortuary Services. He noticed my glance and pulled the fabric down with a quick flick of his fingers, hiding the blue. His fingers were long and thin, knuckles slightly bowed; the kind of hands that spent years working with small, precise tools.

The tenant was Emily Cole, twenty-four, a vet's assistant at the clinic on Banner Road. The boyfriend was Jake Harris, a freelance graphic designer who worked from home. Six months ago they'd moved into his top-floor unit in that old apartment building on the West Side.

My partner Baker and I followed him there. Sixth floor, no elevator. Martin walked ahead of us, his footsteps light, rubber soles landing on the steps almost without sound. His shoulders were habitually drawn in, the back of his neck canted slightly forward; the kind of posture you see often in mortuary workers, a particular reserve common to people who've spent too much time around the dead, as though permanently stepping aside to make room for them.

The lock was new. A cheap thing from a hardware store, bright and shiny, screwed into a weather-beaten wooden door with peeling paint. Baker took a set of tools from his pocket and had the cylinder picked in about fifteen seconds.

The door opened a crack, and the smell pushed through first. Not gas, not dead rodent. Sweet, and sticky, like a bag of fruit that had rotted in a trash can and been forgotten. Baker leaned back. I held my breath and pushed the door fully open with the toe of my boot.

The blinds in the living room were shut tight. A half-finished Starbucks latte sat on the coffee table, its surface grown over with a grey-green fuzz of mold. A laptop lay open. A Columbia windbreaker was draped over the couch. A hiking backpack in the corner, zipper gaping. Everything was still there, as though the two of them had just stepped out to the 7-Eleven for cigarettes.

Baker crouched down in the bedroom and aimed his flashlight under the bed. He looked for three or four seconds, then turned to face me. His expression was blank, but it was the kind of blank that comes from suppressing something.

A human shape was curled under the bed.

Plastic wrap. Layer after layer, wound densely, then wrapped on the outside with silver-grey duct tape, like a package that had been packed with great care. The sweet, putrid smell was seeping out of it.

The forensics team arrived. They dragged the package out from under the bed and began cutting through the layers with a utility knife. The sound of plastic wrap tearing was unnervingly loud in the quiet apartment. When the last layer was peeled back, someone in the room turned away.

It was Emily Cole. Her hands were crossed over her chest. Her skin was a waxy, ashen white, but her lips were tinted pale pink. Her eyes were closed, a faint trace of mascara still clinging to her lashes. She was wearing a floral-print dress, the tag on the collar flipped outward—the dress had been put on inside out. Someone had dressed her.

The coroner, Davis, lifted her eyelid and shone a small penlight into it. He straightened up and tugged at his latex gloves.

"Formaldehyde. Femoral artery perfusion." He said. "Dead at least two weeks. Decomposition consistent with about two days at room temperature. The embalming was done professionally." He pinched the collar of the dress. "Clothing changed postmortem. The positioning of the arms has been adjusted. Someone spent time arranging her."

I looked back at the doorway. Martin stood there, the hallway light cutting his plump, round face into halves of light and shadow. His hands hung at his sides, all ten fingers curled slightly, suspended in midair, perfectly still.

We sat him down in the interrogation room. Martin settled into the hard plastic chair, his back ramrod straight, both palms flat on his thighs. His posture was oddly proper, like a child waiting to receive communion.

I asked him why he'd waited three months without rent before coming to us. He said he wasn't good at pressing people, that it always made him uncomfortable. Baker placed the crime-scene photos on the table, spreading them out one by one.

"The embalming was done via femoral perfusion. The formaldehyde concentration is consistent with professional mortuary standards." Baker said. "Mr. Krause, has your mortuary conducted an inventory of its embalming supplies recently?"

The color slowly drained from Martin's face. His lips moved for a long moment before he managed to speak, and what he said stopped both of us cold.

"Officer… that girl… she sent me money ten days ago."

He took out his phone and placed it on the table. A Venmo notification glowed on the screen: Emily Cole paid you $1,200, with the note: For the back rent. I'm really sorry. The transfer date, according to the coroner's determination, fell after her death.

Scrolling up, there were several iMessages. She'd said the apartment had a strange smell, asked if he could come by and check it out. He'd gone over. No one answered his knock. His spare key couldn't open the lock. So he'd come to the station.

Baker and I exchanged a look.

We found a Stanley utility knife buried at the bottom of the kitchen trash can. Dried blood on the blade tip, DNA pointing to Jake Harris. In the U-bend of the bathroom floor drain, luminol testing showed a strong positive reaction. The residue extracted also matched Jake.

A picture began to form: Jake likely died before Emily. Emily killed him, then was herself killed by someone else, her body embalmed and posed like an exhibition piece under the bed.

But where was Jake's body? Who embalmed Emily? And who was sending messages from her phone?

The coroner's full report arrived on the third day. Emily Cole. Cause of death: asphyxiation. Pressure marks on the neck, the force applied with deliberate restraint, as though someone had been careful not to leave obvious bruising. But another finding turned the entire case on its head.

In her stomach contents, there was a fragment of a human fingertip.

DNA matched Jake Harris. The edge of the fingernail bore cutting marks, the cross-section clean. The tool was the utility knife.

Before she died, she had swallowed a piece of her boyfriend's finger.

We dug back through Martin Krause's file. Divorced twenty-three years ago. One daughter, custody awarded to the ex-wife. If she'd lived, she would have been exactly Emily's age. But the county death registry showed the girl had died of leukemia at six years old.

I placed the photocopied death certificate on the table. The paper was old, toner flaking off in spots.

Martin hung his head. The fluorescent light on the ceiling of the interrogation room emitted a faint electrical hum. He didn't speak for a long time, and I didn't push. Finally, he raised his head. His plump, round cheeks were trembling slightly, his expression impossible to read as either grief or laughter, like an actor trapped in a role for too long who'd forgotten how to return to his own face.

"The day she came to rent the place, I took one look at her and froze." He licked his lips, the sound of his tongue dragging across dry, cracked skin rasping in the quiet room. "When she smiled, her eyes curved into little crescents. Exactly like my daughter. Exactly."

"So when she fell behind on rent, I didn't press. She called me in the middle of the night, said her boyfriend was hitting her. I hung up the phone and drove straight over."

"When I got there, Jake was on the floor, not moving. She was curled up in the corner of the kitchen, gripping the knife, shaking so hard she couldn't stop. She said she didn't mean it. Said Jake had grabbed her throat first." Martin paused. Both his hands rose unconsciously, thumb and forefinger coming together in a tiny, precise twisting motion in the air—a practiced gesture, repeated tens of thousands of times over a career. "I crouched down and felt his carotid. No pulse."

"She said she was going to turn herself in. I stopped her. I said, Baby, don't be scared. I've been in this line of work for thirty years. Disposing of a body is a simple thing for me."

His tone had gradually flattened out, as though he were recounting what he'd eaten for lunch the day before.

"I told her to stay at my place. Don't go out. But while I was at work, she went back to that apartment on her own. By the time I got there, she was already lying on the bed. Gone." He looked down at his own fingers. "The last text she sent me was three words. I'm sorry, Martin."

He lifted his head and looked at me.

"When my little girl passed, the mortuary did a terrible job on her makeup. She didn't look like herself at all. I spent thirty years learning, just so I could leave every person with a little bit of what they looked like alive." His fingers performed that same twisting, pinching motion again, and this time I saw it clearly—the gesture of tying off a suture at the corner of a decedent's mouth, finishing the job. "She was the most satisfactory piece of work I've ever done."

The interrogation room fell silent for perhaps ten seconds. The ballpoint pen in Baker's hand stopped moving.

The case closed. Jake Harris's body was found in the deepest corner of the cold storage unit at Eternal Rest Mortuary. The name on the cremation request form was a fabrication. Martin Krause offered a full confession to unlawful disposal of a body, destruction of evidence, and the rest.

But there is one thing I have never been able to put down.

Buried in the autopsy report was a footnote: the stomach contents of Emily Cole, in addition to the fingertip, showed traces of zopiclone. The dosage was sufficient to render a grown woman deeply unconscious.

In Martin Krause's interrogation transcript, there was not a single word about sedatives. Not from beginning to end.

For months afterward, every time I walked through the Kroger and passed the frozen foods section, seeing those racks of ribs and whole chickens bound tight under plastic wrap, the sweet, cloying smell of that sixth-floor apartment would rise again. I would stop and stand there, staring at those pieces of bone and flesh sealed under cling film, as though I were waiting for one of them, at any moment, to come up a piece short.