“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.