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family member of Billie Jean’s] hundreds of thousands of dollars and not seeing any of it,” Vonlee recalled. “And he really didn’t have a say in it.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” Vonlee asked. It was early morning. He was pouring his first glass of vodka of the day already.
    â€œWell, she went down to the bank and signed off on it—I didn’t know about it. She’s my wife and they allowed her to do it.”
    â€œThat’s horrible, Don . . . ,” Vonlee said. “Can’t you do anything?”
    He shrugged his shoulders and threw his hands up in the air. He was tired. Don didn’t want confrontation.
    Vonlee decided she needed to leave as soon as possible and go back to her life in Tennessee. Her aunt was a bad influence. She was obviously doing things Vonlee did not subscribe to. Sure, going out with her to the local casinos and drinking was fun. Spending some of her and Don’s money was a good time, but this was not the way Vonlee wanted to live her life anymore.
    â€œI’m going back home,” Vonlee told Don.
    â€œI don’t blame you.”

CHAPTER 7
    DR. ORTIZ-REYES HAD BEEN waiting for Don’s body on August 12, 2000, when it came into the OCME. Ruben Ortiz-Reyes, a medical doctor trained in pathology, had been told that he needed to be ready for an older gentleman with obvious signs of alcoholism and perhaps other, more chronic medical issues. There was “nothing abnormal” about the death scene, Ortiz-Reyes was told, and the “family had found him on the floor.” For all intents and purposes, although sad, Don Rogers’s death seemed to be a fairly common situation the OCME ran into all the time.
    Ortiz-Reyes figured he’d conduct a routine examination on what he had been told was a “natural death.” It would be one more of about two thousand that Ortiz-Reyes had been involved in during a career spanning some ten years by the time Don Rogers’s body came across his metal slab.
    The word “autopsy” means, essentially, “see for yourself.” Many pathologists report that about 25 percent of all autopsies reveal some sort of surprise nobody ever saw coming. Doesn’t mean there was nefarious behavior behind the death, but maybe the person did not know he or she had a bad heart valve or a growing tumor on the brain. Part of searching the body for answers is to give the family that much-needed closure at a time when they’re trying to figure out what happened.
    Getting started, Ortiz-Reyes first noted how Don was dressed in blue jeans, a T-shirt and undershorts. Perhaps most importantly at this juncture, Ortiz-Reyes reported: There were no . . . obvious injuries on the body.
    There had been quite a bit of discussion about Don’s alleged rectal bleeding back at the scene, Ortiz-Reyes had been told. Vonlee and Billie Jean had both mentioned Don bled a lot. Ortiz-Reyes took a quick look at Don’s anus and found no dried blood, nor any sign of fresh blood. On Don’s undershorts, where one might expect to find bloodstains, either old or new, Ortiz-Reyes did not see any.
    It was a Saturday, so Ortiz-Reyes was limited by time. He had come into the office especially to accept the body. He conducted a cursory examination, making several notes, and decided to put an actual autopsy off until Monday morning, when he could devote more time and attention to it. (If the ME, Ortiz-Reyes’s boss, warranted further examination and wanted him to cut Don open.) This was not highly unusual for a pathologist to do on a weekend. The guy had a life, too. He could not just drop everything to conduct a full-on autopsy on a Saturday morning. Sure, if there was some sort of serial killer on the loose and the autopsy was crucial in finding him or identifying a victim, he’d gladly drop everything and do it. If the TPD had requested immediate answers in Don’s death, Ortiz-Reyes would forgo any