The deaths this office gets are the tricky ones, the messy ones, the ones that shouldn’t have happened. After nearly forty years of burn victims and rape-slash-homicides and child abuse cases, Wilson’s not interested in where the soul is headed. When he looks at this eighty-year-old body on the steel gurney, he doesn’t see a suicide, doesn’t wonder about the pain that drove this man to take his own life. He doesn’t say, There but for the grace of God. Instead, he grabs his scalpel and digs in.

Frank still remembers the first autopsy he witnessed, sixteen years ago. Doc Wilson strolled up to the corpse and started cutting without a bit of hesitation. Frank was mortified. "Wait — stop!" he wanted to cry out. "Are you sure he’s dead? Shouldn’t we think about this for a minute?"

Frank sits down beside Jeanne McLaughlin, who’s shaking her head as she fills out the death certificate at an electric typewriter. She’s serious about what she does, but it always makes her laugh when Wilson’s written the cause of death as something like, "Asphyxia, due to head inside plastic bag." Surely this could be more eloquently phrased, she observes, to make the situation sound a little more dignified. But it’s what the doc said, so it’s what she types.

Jeanne works part-time for the county, taking the weekend shift for Frank and Lynn Walter, the other full-time investigator. Frank and Lynn both look like cops, from the old school, big, broad-shouldered guys with good hearts. The badges at their hips are no surprise, and in investigations the cops have no problem ceding respect to the tough-looking guys in their ties and rubber gloves. But in this college town, Jeanne looks like what she is: a twenty-eight-year-old grad student in anthropology. She’s petite and soft-spoken and pretty, with stunning green eyes and front teeth charmingly askew. Her black hair, pulled back from her face, trails down her back in tight shiny curls.

On the weekends, when she’s not in class, she does the grocery shopping, catches up on her schoolwork, cleans the house, goes jogging. Every now and then, her pager beeps, and be it noon or dinnertime or four a.m., she’s on the job. In her "kit" in the back of her truck, she keeps everything she needs for her work at the scene: a camera, notepad, change of clothes, and her archaeological tools — face mask, Tyvek suit, trowels, and measuring tape. And lots of gloves.

"Jeanne!" the doc interrupts her at her work. He’s hunched over the corpse’s belly, inspecting tiny pinprick scars. "Was this guy insulin-dependent?"

"Yes, diabetic, only two months," she replies. She knows this body well; she’s the one who "brought him in." She has searched through his meds, seen all his records. She’s been inside his home.

As an anthropologist, Jeanne’s specialty is "decomp" cases, and "skeletals" — situations where the body is so decomposed that an ordinary autopsy won’t answer the basic questions. Here in Lane County, she doesn’t get to use those skills too often, and when she does, ninety-nine percent of the time, what she does is tell somebody, "That’s not a human bone; that’s a deer bone."

Jeanne glances over at Wilson, who is reading the lessons of the corpse’s surface — the chest with its cardiac scar, the round Buddha belly, the genitals, the toes. Then Johnnie, the autopsy assistant, no cue needed, reaches over and hefts the body toward himself. The corpse moves like tire rubber, stiff but vaguely springy, revealing a flat white back bloomed with the pink flushes of livor mortis.

Once your mind and your gut get toughened to the gorier ways of leaving this world, the hazards of the job shift. Everyone has her Achilles’ heel, even Jeanne, who spent ten weeks working "triage" in the morgue at Manhattan’s Ground Zero, opening the body bags and trying to piece together whatever she found inside. She worked with a New York team, mostly NYPD and Port Authority. They all knew people who’d been lost in the tragedy, too, and that was the hardest part: when they identified someone that somebody knew.