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plans he had and do his work. But it was apparent that Don, an older gentleman, had died of natural causes. Putting him in the cooler and waiting until Monday morning was not going to hurt anything. On top of that, what did his family want?
    The one injury Ortiz-Reyes noticed as he wound down his hasty examination was on Don’s right eye. He had “an old injury” there. Probably two days old, the doctor later noted.
    The one thing Ortiz-Reyes was obligated to do was come up with a preliminary finding; in other words, he needed to spend enough time with the body in order to determine a cause of death that he could put before the medical examiner on the death certificate, which the medical examiner would then have to sign off on.
    Taken into account all Ortiz-Reyes had heard from responding officers and the OCME investigator sent to the scene, Ortiz-Reyes was comfortable with not proceeding with a formal autopsy on this day—i.e., cutting Don open and examining his innards, weighing organs, cutting open his brain with a buzz saw and initiating the lab to begin testing samples of tissue. Lab workers would come in early Monday, and if they weren’t facing a backlog, they would test Don’s blood and urine just to make sure there was nothing out of the ordinary as far as poisons or anything else that might cause alarm.
    â€œWhen we have a body . . . [and] nothing out of the natural is related to the death of this person,” Ortiz-Reyes explained later, “we usually see the body to check for any kind of injuries. If everything is within the normal, we don’t do autopsy.” Furthermore, Ortiz-Reyes added, because of Don’s age being in the neighborhood “where most Americans die of heart problems, I thought he had died of heart problems.”
    As Ortiz-Reyes stood over Don, still taking notes, thinking about the situation and all of the factors involved, he told himself, There is no need for an autopsy. He then reflected, This gentleman more likely died of problems in the heart . . . arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, meaning that the heart—that the vessels around the heart are in bad shape and do not give enough blood to the heart to support the life.
    It was an educated guess, based on Ortiz-Reyes’s experience.
    Generally, when a medical examiner thinks a human being died of a heart attack, the first thing he or she does is open that person up and have a look at the heart. But because Don was so old, by Ortiz-Reyes’s swift estimation, he didn’t feel the need to do that, at least not on this day.
    Ortiz-Reyes took a sample of urine and blood from Don’s body. He posted them to the lab for examination on Monday when they came back from the weekend.
    â€œHeart attack,” Ortiz-Reyes later said in court that he thought at that moment.
    There wasn’t a doubt in his mind.
    Ortiz-Reyes took one last look at Don’s body, finished his notes and told the weekend staff Don needed to be put in the cooler.
    He then shut off the lights in the autopsy suite and left.

CHAPTER 8
    VONLEE NICOLE TITLOW DECIDED to head back to North Carolina to pick up her new car, and then head home to Tennessee, where her former life was waiting for her. She could walk into the Waffle House and ask for her job back. She could explain she fell off the wagon and that she was now working with a clean slate and a clear head. She’d go back to AA. She’d clean up her life. It was a bump in the road. Everyone deserved a second chance.
    The one lesson Vonlee took away from her time in Michigan with her aunt was that “I was seeing for the first time how Billie Jean wasn’t the sweetheart that I had always thought she was.”
    Back in Tennessee as the middle of July 2000 came around, and Billie Jean was home in Michigan with her son, Vonlee went to see Billie Jean’s sister, her other aunt. She sat down and had coffee and explained what happened in Michigan