The Removalist

by Matthew Franklin Sias

  Since I need to check the body for identifying marks, I open the bag under brilliant florescent lights. Marinating in a broth of foul seawater, the remains are more pungent now at room temperature. I snap a photograph or two of the tattoo and then steel myself for the task ahead—plunging my gloved hands into the man’s pockets in search of a wallet.

  While the job of securing valuables is a necessary one, I always feel a bit intrusive as I’m rifling through pockets and removing rings and watches, as if the dead are watching me, perhaps with disgust, as though I were a thief. My hands reach into the soaked denim rear pocket and pluck a waterlogged black wallet. In it are a driver’s license and the usual credit cards and business cards. These I will inventory at the office. A photograph of a beaming small child (maybe his son?) is remarkably well-preserved after three months underwater. I set it aside to dry before putting in storage. The man’s wife will undoubtedly want to have it back.

  I re-wrap the body in plastic and then, using a tape dispenser, secure the body with swathes of wide clear tape, as though I am wrapping a present—a very smelly present. Then, with a Sharpie, I write the man’s name, our case number, and the date on the outside of the bag. I wheel him into the cooler and slide him over to a shelf, awaiting autopsy in the morning.

  The Hoarder

  A large green lump lies before me on the sticky linoleum, taking up the majority of the bathroom, overflowing into the dirty bathtub, abutting the baseboard, and flowing semi-solidly around the commode. My eyes train downwards, towards my steel-toed boots and focus on a pair of bare purple feet, soles pointed skyward. I turn back to the threshold, where my father-in-law stares, in disbelief.

  “How are you going to do this?” he asks.

  Honestly, I have no idea. Yet, I have no idea isn’t a viable answer. I am charged with removing dead bodies, no matter the size, and safely getting them to their ultimate destination.

  “Well…”

  The paramedic who had been on scene had sent me a cheery text message prior to my arrival: “Five hundred pounds. She’s a hoarder. Good luck!” Jay, the other guy on the medic truck, had recommended a Viking Funeral.

  I reach out with a gloved hand and pull back the green bath towel that covers the body. What greets me nearly makes me gasp out loud. Before me lies five hundred pounds of dead female humanity, facedown, a flimsy slip pulled up to her chest and underwear pulled to mid-thigh. Otherwise, she is naked.

  I make my way to the door, kicking boxes filled with more boxes, defunct appliances, and a litter box to the side.

  “Dispatch the fire department,” I shout to the deputy sheriff who is waiting, safely, in the dreary drizzle outside. I’ll need as much help as I can get.

  My father-in-law, Lennie, and I clear debris out of the bathroom, tossing objects into the living room as though it were a dumpster, as we hear sirens wail in the night. The fire department has decided to respond rapidly to our call for assistance.

  Within minutes, a fire engine and fire department Suburban arrive on scene, red lights twirling. Aside from the gray-haired, gray-mustached volunteer who arrives first in the suburban, the fire crew appears to be composed entirely of kids, their skinny teenage bodies draped in traditional school-bus yellow firefighting gear.

  Like a flock of oversized ducklings, they crowd into the already cluttered entry area of the house, awaiting my instruction.

  I stand in the bathroom once again and contemplate my upcoming task. Though the woman’s size is daunting from the chest up, it is her lower extremities that are truly impressive. Her buttocks span four feet at least, and each one of her legs is twice the circumference of my own torso.

  I turn to one of the tiny firemen. “You got a sheet?”

  The fireman leaves and returns from his rig with a bed sheet. I step into the bathtub and shimmy it underneath her chest. My father-in-law and I each grab an end of the sheet and flop the top half of the woman onto the bathroom floor. Then Lennie and I puff, hands on our knees, sweat pouring off our foreheads, and plan our next move. This promises to be a long night.

  I consider the mountain of humanity before me and imagine this must be what it’s like to move dead livestock. Just when I begin to consider this an apt analogy, I am reminded that when an animal dies on a ranch, the rancher responsible for removal has considerably more room to work. Maybe if this were a pen of sorts?

  “I need a hose strap,” I gasp. One of the small and overly energetic young volunteers darts out the door, making a beeline for the truck, pausing only briefly to trip over a litter box and a phone book from ten years ago.

  When the fireman returns, I slide the hose strap, designed to allow an average-sized firefighter to control a high-powered hose line, down the woman’s torso and settle it underneath her ample belly. Next, we employ two more sheets, one around each thigh, and prepare to pull.

  She budges six inches.

  Again.

  Maybe three this time.

  What if we can’t move her? Will we need to remove the side of the house? Embarrassing for me but humiliating for the family. Maybe Jay’s idea of a Viking Funeral wasn’t such a bad idea. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Part II.

  Another mighty pull from the gang and her feet are in the hallway. Another break to regain composure. Another pause to toss garbage out of our way and clear a path.

  And she’s still facedown, leaving a trail of bloody drool from the tub across the bathroom floor.

  “We’ll get her moved into the living room where there’s more space,” I say, “and then we’ll turn her onto her back.”

  A fan, perched on a straight-back chair, blows lukewarm air into what had once been a living room, but now resembles a half-filled dumpster. An old tube-style television blares in the corner, entertaining the garbage. A house of despair. There are no functioning lights. All work is done by flashlight.

  How did she come to this—this immense body? This domestic disaster? Like a mountain of debt or a failing relationship whose apathy has overcome its passion, I suspect it didn’t happen overnight. This poor woman didn’t just wake up one day in a pigsty, look at herself in the mirror, and say, “I am really large and really depressed.” She was likely resigned to her fate of dying before her time, obese, lonely, and apathetic.

  My feelings for this poor soul before me are a mixture of pity and contempt; pity for a human being who had lived such a sad existence, and contempt for one who had let her health suffer to such an extent that, in death, she has endangered the backs and knees of those responders who happened to be on duty when she met her end.

  After much jostling, grunting, straining, sweating, and swearing, we manage to move our hapless cargo to what resembles the living room and flip her onto her back. She issues a guttural groan accompanied by a whiff of sulfurous air as the last of the final breath she ever took escapes into the room. By the yellowed beam of the fire department’s battle lantern, I perform my forensic examination. Her face is deeply purple and congested with blood that has settled where gravity has commanded it to. The woman’s eyes are swollen shut. I peel the lids back to reveal the whites of her eyes turned blood-red, hemorrhaged by gravity and the effects of early decomposition. Her teeth and tongue are caked with clotted blood, giving her a rather vampire-like appearance. Her chest is dotted with purple spots—small hemorrhages under the skin known as Tardieu spots. I palpate her head, feeling for depressions in her skull. Moving on to her neck, I check for signs of strangulation, marks on the neck or obvious crushing of the larynx. I find none. I check both hands for jewelry and photograph them. If the family were to claim that she was or wasn’t wearing a particular item of jewelry, we would have photographic evidence to support our written report.

  This is a job for our new device, the venerable Med Sled, a sort of extra-large toboggan for dead people composed of flexible plastic that, when secured with straps, envelops the body, compacting fat and distributing weight, making it much easier to move a heavy body down stairs and around ti
ght corners. My boss had bought the device with surplus funds the previous year, anticipating this sort of scenario.

  I place a sheet of blue plastic beneath the body before I secure it to the Med Sled—not just any sheet of plastic, but a heavy-duty sheet designed for those who exceed three hundred pounds. After wrapping the body with said plastic sheet, I secure the Med Sled around her, and suddenly she doesn’t seem so intimidating, simply becoming a giant plastic burrito, as innocuous as any piece of furniture. An added bonus to the Med Sled is the extra-long handles, allowing a person to keep his back straight while dragging the laden device.

  While I have been wrestling the device around the body, another volunteer firefighter has facilitated our exit by sawing the railing off the very small front porch—certainly preferable to removing an entire wall.

  From here, the firefighters slide the body out of the living room, down the filthy hallway from whence we came, off the deck, and onto the extra-wide gurney, rated to one thousand pounds, that they had placed to the side of the deck. They then push the laden gurney across the muddy front lawn, and, with a mighty shove, place her in the back of my van.

  Before leaving, I speak to her brother, who had called in the death. I confirm with him that she didn’t have a doctor and didn’t have any medical history and inform him that we will need to do an autopsy to determine a cause of death.

  With Lennie in the passenger’s seat, I drive to Kern Funeral Home. The coroner’s morgue is too small to accommodate a person of her size. Her anterior/posterior dimensions will not allow her to fit on a shelf and there is no way of lifting her safely from cot to autopsy table and back. Kern Funeral Home has what amounts to a ceiling-mounted crane that allows for easy transfer.

  The embalmer meets us at the funeral home and opens the garage door for us. We wheel the body in and help place her in the cooler, leaving her on the Med Sled for easy transfer later.

  Suicide

  The yellowed beam of my flashlight hits the semi-prone figure in the gravel, illuminating jeans, tennis shoes, a heavy parka, and a tangled mass of hair obscuring a face of indeterminate gender. A small, congealed mass of blood stains the gravel to the side of the face, accented by bloody bubbles. I train the flashlight to all points of the compass around the corpse, looking for additional evidence and familiarizing myself with the area. Drops of blood are visible in the gravel a few feet away, leading to the body. The gravel is disturbed. The soles of the tennis shoes are bloody. I start shooting photos. My breath fogs the lens.

  I’d gotten the call from the Sheriff’s office—a suicide at Mile Marker 280 at a roadside turn off. A suicide note had been found at a local laundromat. The deputy tells me that the handwriting matches scribbled notes found inside the decedent’s vehicle. The trip from my house had taken about an hour, from the bright lights of suburbia through the darkness, through the seemingly endless gentle curves of a two-lane road, flanked by grand old Douglas fir trees. Though my back ached as it always does when I’m in my seat too long, I hadn’t minded too much. I had my iTunes, my coffee, and the heater going full blast.

  Deputy Wright sits in his SUV on the street, out of the cold, illuminated by the bluish glow of his mobile data terminal, his engine idling. Deputy Scott, who has parked his car just ahead of my green van in the turnout, hands me the ID he has found in the dead person’s car. The dead person is Linda Torelli, aged fifty-four years, from Arlington, Washington.

  Jim’s Towing’s wrecker idles on the roadway. It seems to me a bit premature, considering I’ve just arrived on scene to investigate Linda’s death, and the driver is intent on impounding her car. Life moves on, and very quickly.

  I put my camera back in its yellow kit and retrieve my gurney from the van. After positioning it parallel to the body, I unfold the white plastic sheet and place it beside the body in preparation for rolling her onto it.

  With blue-gloved hands, I grasp the dead woman’s right arm, already stiffened from rigor mortis. I flip her onto her back. Steam rises from her mouth as the last of her body heat escapes. I shine my flashlight around again. A firearm is revealed. Underneath the rigored body is a black semi-automatic pistol, a .22 caliber. I shine my flashlight on her bloodied face and then to the photo of the driver’s license found in the car. It’s a match. I had thought at first that my victim was a man. She is a rather unfortunate-looking woman.

  Deputy Scott shines his beam down on the gaping, bloody mouth and then at the blood-fouled firearm.

  “Shot herself in the mouth, didn’t she?”

  “Don’t know yet,” I say.

  Her sweatshirt is stained crimson down the entire front. I pull it upwards, towards her chin, to examine for underlying injuries. Just above her left breast is a dime-sized hole, still seeping blood. About two inches above that, another.

  “Shot twice,” I say.

  Deputy Scott groans. “That’s a problem.”

  While it is entirely possible for a person to shoot herself twice in the act of suicide, it is a little unusual and cause for some further investigation.

  “Do you want me to hold off?” I say.

  “Yeah. Let me get ahold of the on-call,” says Deputy Scott. He goes back to his car to call the on-call detective.

  Deputy Wright saunters over. “What’s with the bubbles coming out of her mouth?” he asks.

  “Well,” I say. “Looks like she got herself in the lung at first. That explains the bubbles—air mixed with blood. The bottoms of her shoes have blood on them, so she must have walked a few paces with blood streaming down her legs and onto her shoes. Then she fired again and hit her heart—the fatal shot.”

  “Wow,” says Deputy Wright. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Deputy Scott walks back over. “I’m getting the go-ahead. Detective doesn’t want to come out. Clear case of suicide.”

  I continue my examination to include her hands, stiffened and blood-caked. I turn her pockets inside out—no papers or money to return to the next of kin.

  After placing an ankle tag on the body, I wrap her in the plastic and place her on the gurney. After placing her in the van, I back out and, on cue, the tow truck backs in.

  Once I’m on the way back to the morgue, I phone our forensic pathologist for a consultation. I can’t imagine much would be gained by an autopsy, but, given the unusual circumstances, I’d like his opinion.

  “I can feel the round through the skin on her back,” I say. The bullet had just enough momentum to traverse the distance of her chest cavity, but not quite enough to penetrate the skin of her back and exit.

  My plan is to take X-rays from two different angles to determine the trajectory of the bullet as sort of a virtual autopsy.

  The pathologist agrees. “You can use a scalpel to remove the bullet from underneath her skin. That’s not considered practicing medicine without a license.”

  When I arrive at the morgue, I unwrap the body and am able to better see her under the bright, glaring fluorescent lights. I turn her to her side and make an incision just above the bullet. I then squeeze the deformed round out and plop it into a specimen cup. It makes a metallic rattle. Monday, I will transfer the bullet to the Sheriff’s Office. There it will remain for eternity, only to reappear if the family calls the death into question.

  Unused evidence and unclaimed urns—kept in the musty back rooms and storage cabinets of funeral homes, sheriff’s offices, and medical examiner’s headquarters, unlikely to ever again see the light of day, but impossible to dispose of. Who would have use for a bullet used in the commission of a suicide? And who would come to claim an urn after it sits, unclaimed, for five years? The mortal, finely crushed remains of a loner, encased in a dusty, temporary urn, reposing silently on a shelf, will likely never be claimed by a family member. But what if someone does?

  Unique Families

  I find it rather inconceivable that a man could fail to realize that his wife is dead…for three days.

  I’d gotten the call early one morning from
the Anacortes Police. An officer was on scene with a confirmed DOA. A fifty-six-year-old woman had been found dead in bed, her little dog snoozing beside her. Her husband had told the officer that he had last seen his wife—alive presumably—the previous night, though I knew better than to presume.

  When he found her, he had started CPR on her and continued until paramedics arrived. They had quickly determined that the woman was beyond help and elected not to continue efforts.

  I asked the officer if the dead woman had been ill, if she took any medications, or if she had a physician. The answer was no to all three of the questions, putting it into the category of a jurisdictional death—one that required further investigation, up to and possibly including an autopsy. The husband had mentioned something about alcohol and sleeping pills, so I assigned a case number and made arrangements for the body to be removed.

  As I had care of our infant daughter, I wasn’t able to respond to the scene, so I requested a funeral home on a rotational basis to make the removal.

  Hawthorne Funeral Home sent their van out to the house and brought the body into their facility, where I’d scheduled an autopsy to take place the next morning.

  When the pathologist and his assistant arrive, I begin to unzip the body bag to reveal the green face of a woman who has clearly been dead for more than just overnight. Dark fluid dribbles from her half-gaping mouth. As the zipper continues southward, the picture gets even more interesting. The woman’s chest, bared, with a T-shirt pushed upwards, is crisscrossed with the lurid arboreal pattern of marbling, dark discolorations that follow the distribution of the veins, indicative of decomposition. The skin on her sternum is sloughing off where her husband had attempted CPR. The skin on both arms is also sloughing. This woman has been dead for at least two days.