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sever the piece and lift it dangling to the scale, it’s as long and limp as a salmon, and the loss seems so cruelly nullifying. Without a tongue, is a being human, even in death?
    In by two, out by seven. That’s the unofficial motto at the Orange County morgue. Our coroners work on a contract basis. When you come right down to it, that’s piecework, and in this impartial inventory of parts, something is lost to the idea of reverent handling.
    Once I watched a performance here in a case of severe decomp that gave me new respect for the morgue people. Severed hands had been brought in after they had spent a few days in a moisture-filled trash bag. A morgue tech named Barney, for Rubble, we tell him, slipped the skin off and soaked it in saline to bring up the ridges. When it was ready, he pulled it on like gloves to ink for prints. Even if a corpse is mummified by heat, the fingers can be hydrated by injecting saline, inflating into slender balloons ripe for rolling.
    At the last station lay a thing that looked like burned and sea-soaked timber off a ship that had broken apart after an explosion and floated ashore. The legs, or stumps, were as shiny black as japanned wood. This poor piece of human flesh and sometime bone that the coroner’s caddies extracted from the husk of ravaged steel in Carbon Canyon would be examined systematically and thoroughly; and if we were lucky, the thing would emerge a person with an identity.
    Doug, behind me, looked solemn and very pale, but when I gazed at him, he whispered, “I’m okay.” He looked away from the bodies and into the empty viewing room where people come to ID their relatives.
    The photographer leaning against the wall between Watanabe’s and the East-Indian doctor’s stations stepped forward to shoot, fulfilling the requirement for all autopsies to be photo-doc’ed. In high-profile cases, such as those involving serial killers, a couple thousand shots may be filed; and in jail deaths, the autopsy is videotaped; cover your fanny, the first rule of the road. I did not know this photographer very well, and sort of missed the man he replaced, a cheeky guy named Billy Katchaturian, the one who was fired for using blood spatter shots in a photo exhibit. You grow older, your tolerance level deepens, I guess, and so even I, after a while, along with the rest of my tasteless colleagues, came to think his flagrant lack of judgment was funny.
    At our Jane’s table was Dr. Margolis, without a mask, as were all the doctors except Schaffer-White in her clear plastic guard, though all but one wore gloves. There are eyewash areas and first aid kits nearby, but I think we all get a sort of fatalistic attitude about what might happen to any of us who hang around the dead. A story went around for a while about a killer virus that escaped from a corpse into the air-conditioning system of a morgue, knocking off members of the medical examiner’s office somewhere in the East. I was never sure the story was legit and the doctors here didn’t seem worried, even about squirts and splashes that might be carrying the AIDS virus.
    Doug took a position so he could observe only our corpse, not the others.
    Dr. Margolis’s shoulders bumped the scale, sending it swinging on its hook. He looked up, switched off his mike, and said, “Pretty picture, huh?”
    â€œNot too,” I said. There was no sign of Les, and I was surprised they started without him. “Is Detective Fedders here, Doctor?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œThe homicide investigator for this case.”
    The doctor and a male technician moved out of each other’s way as the tech finished suctioning out the pool of blood filling the peritoneal cavity, using a device much like the one in a dentist’s office, with a screen in it to capture any possible bullet fragments. Dr. Margolis picked up a scalpel, stared blankly at me a second, and I’m sure forgot the