The doors opened onto a holding bay. Two dozen linen-filled carts stood there. Karen muttered that the laundry service would be by at midnight for pickup. The shower rooms for staff stood beyond the bay, and, next to them, a locked dressing room. Karen found a master key on her chain and unlocked the door. Uniforms were inside, hazmat suits, booties, all those things. She tossed me hat, gloves, mask, and a white jumpsuit and told me to get into a cart and get covered. I grabbed my gun and Miss Claudia’s Bible, then stripped out of my gray suit, burying it in the middle of one of the other carts, and pulled on the white jumpsuit. I put on the hat, the gloves, and the mask, and burrowed into the cart. A few minutes later, Karen appeared, and when I peeked at her she looked ominous in her own jumpsuit, hat, gloves, and mask. She flashed a bright red placard at me that read DANGER! HIGHLY INFECTIOUS, then covered me up. She whispered that she was tying the placard over the top of the cart. We’d hope for the best.

She pushed the cart onto the elevator. I lay there as it wheezed up a story to the entrance of the parking garage. The police had placed a guard there. I lay sweating in the linens while he demanded to know who Karen was and what she was doing.

“I’m getting these AIDS-infected linens to our cleaning service as fast as possible.”

“I’m checking all hospital IDs,” he said. A brief silence, and then he said, “You’re the pastor? And you’re handling linens? I don’t think—”

“Officer, it is my job to certify every death in this hospital. It’s my job to go through possessions and make a list for the next of kin. It’s my job to take bloody linens off a bed and cart them off when one of our patients passes and the cleaning crew has finished for the day. I can’t have foul matter in a room overnight. Another lady shares that room, and I won’t have her waking up and seeing the dreadful after-math of someone else’s death. But if you want to carry these out for me, I would be very grateful. My day started at six this morning, and I am weary. I would love to get to my own home.”

I wanted to applaud and cheer. The pastor might have been pushing wanted detectives out of hospitals for years, she was so smooth, so natural, in her mix of admonition and arrogance. The officer apologized, and said hastily he’d leave her to handle the cart.

We bumped quickly through the parking lot. I heard the chirp as she unlocked her car and the thump as she opened the trunk.