‘Maybe you should describe to me the exact sequence you go through when
a body leaves here.’
‘You mean everything that happens?’ Marvin said.
‘Please,’ Laurie said. ‘I mean, I have a general idea, but I don’t know
the specifics.’
‘Where do you want me to start?’ Marvin asked.
‘Right from the beginning,’ Laurie said. ‘Right from the moment you get
the call from the funeral home.’
‘Okay,’ Marvin said. ‘The call comes in, and they say they’re from
so-and-so funeral home and they want to do a pickup. So they give me the
name and the accession number.’
‘That’s it?’ Laurie asked. ‘Then you hang up.’
‘No,’ Marvin said. ‘I put them on hold while I enter the accession
number into the computer. I gotta make sure the body has been released
by you guys and also find out where it is.’
‘So then you go back to the phone and say what?’
‘I say it’s okay,’ Marvin said. ‘I tell them I’ll have the body ready. I
guess I usually ask when they think they’ll be here. I mean, no sense
rushing around if they’re not going to be here for two hours or
something.’
‘Then what?’ Laurie said.
‘I get the body and check the accession number,’ Marvin said. ‘Then I
put it in the front of the walk-in cooler. We always put them in the
same place. In fact, we line them up in the order we expect them to go
out. It makes it easier for the drivers.’
‘And then what happens?’ Laurie asked.
‘Then they come,’ Marvin said with another shrug.
‘And what happens when they arrive?’ Laurie asked.
‘They come in here and we fill out a receipt,’ Marvin said. ‘It’s all
got to be documented. I mean they have to sign to indicate they have
accepted custody.’
‘Okay,’ Laurie said. ‘And then you go back and get the body?’
‘Yeah, or one of them gets it,’ Marvin said. ‘All of them have been in
and out of here a million times.’
‘Is there any final check?’ Laurie asked.
‘You bet,’ Marvin said. ‘We always check the accession number one more
time before they wheel the body out of here. We have to indicate that
being done on the documents. It would be embarrassing if the drivers got
back to the home and realized they had the wrong corpse.’
‘Sounds like a good system,’ Laurie said, and she meant it. With so many
checks it would be hard to subvert such a procedure.
‘It’s been working for decades without a screwup,’ Marvin said. ‘Of
course, the computer helps. Before that, all they had was the logbook.’
‘Thanks, Marvin,’ Laurie said.
‘Hey, no problem, Doc,’ Marvin said.
Laurie left the mortuary office. Before going up to her own she stopped
off on the second floor to get a snack out of the vending machines in
the lunch room. Reasonably fortified, she went up to the fifth floor.
Seeing Jack’s office door ajar, she walked over and peeked in. Jack was
at his microscope.
‘Something interesting?’ she asked.
Jack looked up and smiled. ‘Very,’ he said. ‘Want to take a look?’
Laurie glanced into the eyepieces as Jack leaned to the side. ‘It looks
like a tiny granuloma in a liver,’ she said.
‘That’s right,’ Jack said. ‘It’s from one of those tiny pieces I was
able to find of Franconi’s liver.’
‘Hmmm,’ Laurie commented, continuing to look into the microscope.
‘That’s weird they would have used an infected liver for a transplant.
You’d think they would have screened the donor better. Are there a lot
of these tiny granulomas?’
‘Maureen has only given me one slide of the liver so far,’ Jack said.
‘And that’s the only granuloma I found, so my guess would be that there
aren’t a lot. But I did see one on the frozen section. Also on the
frozen section were tiny collapsed cysts on the surface of the liver
which would have been visible to the naked eye. The transplant team must
have known and didn’t care.’
‘At least there’s no general inflammation,’ Laurie said. ‘So the
transplant was being tolerated pretty well.’
‘Extremely well,’ Jack said. ‘Too well, but that’s another issue. What