On a hush of stagnant air, Frank Ratti strides from the elevator into a shadowy basement, turns a key in an unmarked door and enters the morgue.

The autopsy room of the Sacred Heart Medical Center is purposefully generic, institutional in the manner of examining rooms and university labs, those spaces where the antiseptic demands of science intercept the quotidian tasks of data-keeping. Fluorescent light yellows the mottled linoleum and pallid walls, the steel sinks and neatly labeled cabinets, the scrubbed counters, trays of test tubes and syringes. The light tastes faintly of disinfectant, and its sallow sheen intensifies the waxen stillness of the one extraordinary thing in this ordinary room: the body lying lifeless on the gurney.

Three thousand people will die this year in the Oregon county served by this medical center. Ninety percent of them will pass away in hospices and nursing homes and hospitals.

It is Frank Ratti’s job to find answers for the rest.

His jurisdiction extends across 4,620 square miles of forests, mountains and valleys stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Cascade Mountains and covers every accidental, suspect, human-caused, and "indeterminate" death in between. He sees mountaineering accidents, drownings, and drive-by shootings. Auto crashes, murders, overdoses. Drunken stumbles onto the railroad tracks. Suicides.

In his seventeen years as chief deputy medical examiner, Frank has had his hands on just about every unnatural death in the county — some 4,500 cases since he started this job in ’85. Fifty-two years old, mustachioed, sharp-eyed, with energetic brows and a badge at his hip, Frank investigates the scene of death, presides over the case, and, if need be, escorts the victim’s family down to the morgue to view the corpse.

Quite literally, Frank sees death everywhere, but after sixteen years he doesn’t feel like the grim reaper is waiting around every corner to ambush him. It’s more mundane than that: He’ll be driving through town or along the farm roads that maze and wander the county, and he’ll look over and think, hey, I’ve been in that house before.

He was there to discover the how and the why of someone’s demise. The cause and the manner of death. The scene talks, and the body talks, and the job of the medical examiners is to listen.

The body is the focus of the medical examiners’ work, both in the examining room and at the scene of death. Frank is concerned with where the body is, how long it’s been there, how it got there, why it’s there. Was whatever’s been done to it done by the person who owned the body, or by somebody else? What happened to initiate that one-way trip from personhood to bodyhood?

Two days ago, the body now lying on the morgue’s steel table belonged to an eighty-year-old man. Then he wrote a succinct letter, put a plastic bag over his head and taped it tight round his neck. Now, he lies naked and still, his mouth slightly ajar, his eyes blank and wide. His bald, bare head, roughly wrinkled, is colored the vigorous rouge of broken capillaries. The ruddy intensity contrasts vividly with the undersea pallor of the rest of him.

Now the body belongs to the medical examiner.

Frank steps past the body on the gurney without a second glance and booms a greeting to his colleagues — autopsy assistants Johnnie Bergman and Shelly Tuebner; Jeanne McLaughlin, a fellow investigator; and Ed Wilson, the medical examiner, who stands at the dead man’s shoulder with elbows tucked to his sides, purple-gloved palms up, like a chapel statue. The M.E., "the doc," patron saint of those who would untangle the mysteries of death.

"No petechial hemorrhages in the face, whites of the eyes, lining or skin of the eyelids, or lining of lips, period. Next paragraph," Wilson says, acknowledging Frank with a nod as Johnnie jabs a syringe into the dead man’s eye. "On the anterior left lateral neck at the level of the Adam’s apple is a red tram-line pattern of the strapping tape with the upper rail, R-A-I-L, one-and-a-half inches by one-eighth inch and three-quarters inch between —"

He taps the pedal at his foot, pausing the recording, and leans in. He sees a tiny scratch on the crimson skin of the corpse’s throat. His glasses, with wire rims noticeably bent, slip even lower on his nose.