Morgan - Blood beneath my feet: the journey of a southern death investigator

BLOOD
BENEATH
MY FEET

THE JOURNEY
OF A SOUTHERN
DEATH
INVESTIGATOR

BY
JOSEPH SCOTT MORGAN

Blood Beneath My Feet 2012 by Joseph Scott Morgan

Images 2012 by Joseph Scott Morgan

Design by Sean Tejaratchi

A Feral House Original Paperback

All rights reserved.

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feralhouse.com

Feral House

1240 W. Sims Way Suite 124

Port Townsend, WA 98368

This work is dedicated to my precious wife,

Kimberley H. Morgan.

Thank you for being tough enough to pry me loose

and tender enough to love me when the faces appear

in both my waking hours and in my dreams.

You are NOT a death investigator,

you are my husband and a father.

Death has taken enough from you

turn loose, it will all be okay.

Kim Morgan, October 2004

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die.

Thats how the world is going to end.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

THE ASPHALT GLISTENED beneath my headlights. It had been raining for several days, but in this toilet there is never enough water to flush it clean. I was on my way to another traffic fatality. How many was this? Twenty-one years on the job times a non-specific factor of stupidity, plus human frailty, minus sympathy, divided by dumb luck, equals who cares.

Impervious. Thats me. Nothing manages to surprise me any longer. I am not saying that I have seen it all. You never see it all. I have just seen more than enough. By the time I had pulled my vehicle onto the interstate in downtown Atlanta on that predawn morning in 2004, I figured I had been parlaying with death for far too long.

Fragmented skulls and maggot-infested bodies no longer affected me. Apathy was now a warm, protective blanket I wrapped myself in. I no longer pitied or even gave pause to those who grieved. My job was simply to exist from day to day in a haze of competence. I had ceased being a real death investigator, anyway. Once I had lived to answer the questions others didnt have the desire or the intestinal fortitude to delve into. Now I just didnt give a shit. Our medical examiner had relegated the investigative staff to the role of clerks. Our opinions no longer mattered to either the ME or the forensic pathologist we served. We were just box-checkers splattered with blood.

In most large cities the job of investigating deaths ultimately rests with a medical examiner and death investigators like me. Though there are numerous support personnel, forensic pathologists sit at the top of that pecking order, above even the ME. As a death investigator, I was the one to go over a death scene and provide written assessments, as well as sometimes assist in autopsies back at the morgue. Id been assessing Deaths handiwork for decades. Now I just wanted out.

Smoke and flashing lights were refracted in the tiny prisms of rain droplets on my windshield. With the flash of each wig-wag strobe light from the police and fire vehicles, Death was telling me, Youre one step closer, boy.

I had felt for some time an awareness of my own flesh in decay. Whenever I stared down at another finished human being, I now saw my own face. I never allowed terror to grip me, fighting instead only to observe, but each shift I worked had become my own personal deathwatch. There was no longer a question of if but simply when. Because Death, my closest companion, was always waiting nearby.

As a younger man, I had stood over lifeless bodies and arrogantly thought, How could you do this to yourself? Or Boy, you were stupid. Or Better you than me. I had wanted this job. Perhaps Id thought that the world would view me as somebody, an official medicolegal death investigator who was worthy of accolades due to all the important work I so carefully and sensitively performed. Because I valued life and respected death. But only a fool believes Death cares what we think or do.

The same actors appear at every death scene, only wearing different bodies. The young police officers were milling about, absorbing how the older officers were conducting the investigation. The firefighters and EMTs were rolling hoses and writing reportsthere was no one to save. Witnesses were sitting in their cars, still in the disbelief stage, and maybe wondering why all this didnt look like it does on TV. And of course Death was center stage, in what was left of a charred young man wedged inside his burned-out pickup truck. He had driven himself into the side of the overpass abutment; someone else would figure out why.

Death is like the slobbering drunk at the office Christmas party. You hope he doesnt see you, but then he does and makes a beeline for you, throwing his arm around your shoulder and blowing his foul breath in your face. He tells you his sickening story and youve heard it before. It may feel pointless to listen, but its not so easy to get away. Enduring each retelling again and again had become too much for me. For over twenty years I had been the Reapers first audience and interpreter, recounting his tale in fine detail to anyone who wanted to hear it. But it had become my own eventual death that appeared in every repeated interpretation.

When a death investigator arrives at a death scene, looks become palpable. I felt everyones eyes on me as I closed my car door, tucked my notepad under my arm. The cops and firefighters may think they know what I have seen, but even they dont want to know everything. The older ones whisper to the younger ones, who probably wonder to themselves what kind of person could want to do what I do every daycome face to face with the dead. Im sure they all have their ideas about me, and the older ones carry around stories of the things they have seen me do that they could not bear to watch, the places Ive had to go that make them thank God they dont have my job. Their platitudes chase me: Man, I dont know how you do it! Whatever theyre paying you, it aint enough.

There are a few who envy me. They want to know what they have to do to get my job, to be who I am. Its only death, how hard can it be? Here, I silently reply, take it all. Every festering remnant of the people no one cared about in life, much less in death; all the broken children who will never know that I had grieved for them. Take it all. Just leave me my car keys so I can go home permanently. Someone else can listen to the bullshit Death loves to spew. He never shuts up.

Investigators hate rain. It washes away everything that is key, everything that may help you: blood, semen, hair, fingerprints, gunshot residue. Given enough time, water destroys it all. Death prays for rain. With the water, his chances of having a bountiful harvest increase exponentially. Slick roads, drownings, rainy-day blueswater is one of Deaths favorite toys.