Daybreak, and the man's threat is now a fact.
He is in the backyard, slumped on a ratty brown sofa.
There is a rifle between his legs, an ammo clip at his feet and a hole in his head.
Shelley Pierce shines a light in the exit wound, illuminating a lacerated brain at the root of a deep, dark cavity.
At a distance he doesn't look dead. His eyes are closed and his countenance is intact.
The man's wife said he killed himself, and so far the signs say she's right.
Skull fragments propelled outward lay at crazy intervals yards apart on the cement deck, where red ants are making a meal of their chewy underside.
A snotty glob of brain tissue clings to his upper back like a juicy garden slug.
A bullet is embedded in the stucco above the man's head.
Slivers of bone, hair and tissue are wedged between the window and screen behind him.
Blood the color of black molasses, drying in the soft air, coats his left arm like a mourning band and seeps into his white tank top and shorts.
It has been only two hours now, but already flies are buzzing about the body.
So is Pierce, a county coroner investigator called in to determine the cause of death. This one, an apparent suicide, is case No. 5469. That is, the 5,469th death reported in Clark County this year. If 2004 is anything like 2003 (12,751 deaths) and 2002 (12,006), more than 7,000 others will be reported before the year is over.
"It averages out to about 35 deaths a day," Clark County Coroner Mike Murphy says.
No. 5469 occurred early on August 1, after a contentious Saturday evening precipitated an irrevocable Sunday morning. Money problems and marital discord rose up again to write the same old, same old: wife threatens to take child and leave, husband blows brains out.
"You think he put it in his mouth?" asks a Metro officer at the scene, referring to the wood-stock rifle of undetermined Asian origin leaning against the man's leg, barrel pointing north.
"I don't see nothin' under his chin," says Pierce, shining her light there again. "It's gotta be in the mouth."
Pierce gently squeezes the man's jaw and listens for crepitus, the grating sound of broken bones rubbing together. It cracks.
"Oh yeah, it's in his mouth. You can feel his jaw busted."
She is convinced now but wants a visual confirmation. Pierce opens his mouth with gloved hand.
"Oh yeah, his teeth are gone."
And with them his worries and torments: the stack of unpaid bills, the repossessed car, the wife who would take his child to Colorado. Gone in a muzzle flash, ejected through his crown by the good work of a 7.62 x 39 mm bullet.
Pierce pronounces him dead at 5:40 a.m., approximately an hour and 40 minutes after the man's wife called 911; 41 minutes after Pierce's phone rang at the coroner's office and she proclaimed, "We're goin' on a suicide."
She arrives on scene at 5:14 a.m. to find Metro—and the man's wife and young son sitting on the curb across the street with neighbors and a trauma intervention volunteer.
"I just heard a loud noise," his wife tells Pierce. "I didn't know what it was."
The two had been arguing all night, and the woman went to bed without a resolution. Her son, frightened by the conflict, joined her there. The man walked into and out of the bedroom throughout the night and into the morning, imparting veiled threats and guilt trips.
"He kissed me a couple times and said goodbye to me, my son and the pets."
He told her she'd never break his heart again, but received no response.
"I pretended like I was asleep," she said.
"Was he drinking?" Pierce asks.
"Oh, he drinks every night."
"Any recent suicide attempts?"
"No, not in years," she said. "He slit his wrists years ago," when she threatened to leave him once before.
On his final trip out of the bedroom, her son saw him carrying the khaki rifle case he kept in the closet.
Moments later they heard a shot. Running to the living room, they noticed the sliding glass door leading to the back yard was ajar. Turning on the outside light, they saw the empty rifle case laying on the ground. Just to the left and out of sight was a man whose life had become too difficult to bear, and whose death Pierce would duly note with a felt-tip marker on a white case board later that morning.
In the meantime, she had bone fragments and brain tissue to collect, a toe tag to apply and a mortuary to call to come collect the body.
The mortuary workers arrive with a gurney at 6:15. They drop a blue body bag on the ground, place a white sheet inside and lower the gurney to the ground. They maneuver his body into a supine position on the couch, grab him by the wrists and ankles, and lift.
The man's head lolls back and a gusher of blood pours out of his wound onto the white sheet.
"I'm just gonna take a quick picture of his face," says Pierce, snapping the last of several Polaroids she has taken of the scene. "Thank you."
The photos, along with her detailed report, are pieces in the puzzle of the man's death to help the medical examiner determine a cause. This one is easy.
"That was a straight-up suicide," says Pierce, who will wait just the same for the medical examiner to fingerprint the man Monday morning. Coroner investigators will typically fingerprint (and weigh and measure) a body when it is brought into the facility.
People who kill themselves with a gun are the exception. The forensic pathologist will examine their hands (and lips) for gunpowder residue to prove it was a suicide. Absence of such evidence could indicate that someone else pulled the trigger—a homicide.
This one will be done as a precaution, Pierce says, "to make sure someone didn't do it with a different gun, then stick the (rifle) between his legs."
If the bullet had remained in the body, the doctor would conduct an autopsy to determine whether the caliber matched the weapon. Because it exited, the man will receive an external examination. After the medical examiner determines cause of death, the body will be released to a mortuary of the family's choosing.
The mortuary team places his body in the bag, wraps the sheet around him and zips up. They strap the body to the gurney, raise it off the ground and walk down the cement path at the side of the house to the street. They slide the gurney into the van, close the double rear doors and drive to the coroner's office, where the body will be waiting for Pierce.
In addition to a wife and son, case No. 5469, age 36, leaves behind a suicide note written on the back of a pay stub.
"I feel bad for his kid," Pierce says. "That's the sad thing, little 10-year-old. No matter what kind of parent you are, [the children] love you. They're gonna be lost without ya."
Lost and perhaps guilt-ridden.
"He didn't tell his mom" that he saw his father carrying the rifle out of the bedroom. "He probably didn't think that his dad was going to kill himself."
Pierce pulls into the office at 6:30 a.m. She'll weigh and measure the body, then store it in the cooler for Monday's exam. After that, she will write a report and start her weekend.
It looks like she'll be getting home at a decent hour.
Unlike the week before.
Thirty-three deaths occurred in Clark County between Saturday, July 24, and Monday, July 26. There were eight on Saturday, 14 on Sunday, 11 on Monday. Each day was marked by a multiple—a single scene with more than one death.
It broke down this way:
July 24: double traffic fatality; suicide; suspicious death; natural death; possible overdose; possible overdose; possible overdose.
July 25: natural; triple traffic; single traffic; fall-related accident; possible OD; possible OD; natural; natural; natural; natural; single traffic; natural.
July 26: natural; natural; possible OD; natural; natural; undetermined; possible OD; double homicide; natural; natural.
"That's not even that busy," says Sara Mildebrandt, senior coroner investigator. "It's just the types of deaths they were. Multiples are hard because one investigator is having to do all those reports [while tracking down next of kin] at the same time."
As usual, the number of natural deaths eclipsed all other types, but the high volume of traffic-related fatalities (seven, including five in one day) grabbed the headlines.
"Boom. Dead," is how coroner investigator Warren McLeod describes the details of the auto accident that killed a pair of siblings, age 7 months and 8 years old, at East Charleston and Nellis on July 24.
Colleagues dub Pierce the "fatal queen" because of the large number of deadly auto accidents she investigates and her enthusiasm for them.
"Shelley'll step over your cold, dead body to get to a fatal," Mildebrandt says, laughing.
Pierce doesn't deny it.
"Some people like homicides, some people like suicides," she says, adding it's a good thing she and McLeod, another fatal auto aficionado, don't work the same shift.
"We'd be beating each other up to get out the door."
Pierce, a 38-year-old mother of two teenage daughters, has worked the graveyard shift for three years and at the coroner's office for seven. She sits in a cubicle decorated in Jeff Gordon and monitors a battery of police and emergency scanners, coiled and ready to spring at the first death notification.
"If you have to die, do it on my watch," she has been heard to say.
Four people obliged her the night of July 25 and the morning of the 26th, all of them in car accidents, three of them all at once. By the time she finished writing her reports and tracking down next of kin, it was 3:30 p.m.—more than eight hours after her shift officially ended.
The back yard of a North Las Vegas home. A trailer in a hotel RV park. A bedroom in a northeast Las Vegas apartment.
A 77-year-old man. A 69-year-old man. A 48-year-old woman.
Dead. Dead. Dead.
All of apparent natural causes. "Apparent" because things aren't always as they appear.
Felicia Borla, Rod Heriford and Hank Missig are dispatched to the respective scenes to find out. They fan out with one primary goal (to determine cause and manner of death) and two ancillary ones (to identify the body and notify next of kin).
"Cause of death is the medical reason someone ceases life. Manner is the method by which they died," Murphy says.
There are five manners of death—homicide, suicide, accident, natural and undetermined—and "hundreds of causes of death," Murphy says.
Coroner investigators assume the worst first.
"Our philosophy here," says Danny Daniels, a coroner investigator, "is every death is a homicide until we get there and decide it isn't."
"You have no idea until you walk in there," Mildebrandt says. "It can turn ugly so fast. [A natural death] could turn into a homicide, and unless we are paying attention, nobody else would know the difference."
Attention to detail is a must.
"When you go to a natural death with the mind-set that it's a natural death," Daniels says, "that's all you're gonna see."
Not the injury or defensive wounds that are inconsistent with a natural death.
Not the pill discrepancy during the medication count that could add up to a suicide by overdose.
"You only have one chance to get it right," Les Elliot says. "You can't go back and do it again; the evidence is gone."
"When you do that 20th or 30th natural in a row, it would be easy not to be anal," Daniels says. "But the first time you aren't, you'll miss something."
And in this field, that is tantamount to sacrilege. Coroner investigators see themselves as the voice of the dead.
"This office speaks for absolutely no one but the decedent," Murphy says.
Investigators receive a general account of the death over the phone from police officers, who get the details from family members or witnesses at the scene.
They gather information from the same sources about the decedent's medical history, the position of the body when it was discovered, the time it was found and the circumstances surrounding the death, then turn to the corpse. This is the moment of truth, when the story the body tells confirms or disputes the one being told to the investigator.
"Here, let me show you what I do and why," says Missig, a former New York City detective. He kneels next to the 48-year-old female, case No. 5416, and gently squeezes her head for signs of a skull fracture. He will hear crackling if there is head trauma. He hears nothing.
He opens her eyelids and folds back her lips. He is looking for signs of strangulation called petechia, tiny red dots that appear in the eyeballs and the gums and are caused by the release of blood from a capillary. He finds nothing.
He feels her neck structure. Normal. He examines her hands and fingers. No defensive wounds or skin under the nails. He rolls her over to look for bullet holes or stab wounds. She is unmarked.
She does have two conspicuous scoops on the right side of her belly and a vertical line stretching from the pubic bone up past her stomach. Her husband tells Missig it is from an operation to repair a rip in the esophagus. Doctors had to make an incision and move her stomach to reattach the esophagus.
Missig, 58, attributes the blood seeping from her nose and mouth and drying on her face to gastrointestinal bleeding from an esophagul rupture.
"Nothing suspicious," he would say later.
Across town, in a sweltering RV at a hotel trailer court, Heriford is reaching the same conclusion about case No. 5225.
"Doesn't look like foul play," he says. Money and jewelry are strewn on the floor, the man is exhibiting none of the signs of strangulation or head trauma and his lividity pattern (pooled in his lower back and buttocks) is consistent with his position—face-up on a flat surface.
Lividity patterns (the settling of blood at the lowest point of the body) can tell an investigator a lot about a scene. A person found on his back but showing lividity in his chest may indicate the decedent has been moved—perhaps murdered in one location and transported to another.
That clearly is not the case here.
"The only thing that bothers me is I can't find his wallet," says Heriford, 59, a former Colorado sheriff who makes his words count, and the fewer the better. He is broad-shouldered and crew-cut, speaks with a Western drawl and is forever in brushed Wranglers and cowboy boots.
The wallet could be anywhere. The RV is a mess. Heriford, his shirt drenched and clinging to his skin, says that isn't necessarily a sign of a struggle.
"It's a sign that this guy is a bad housekeeper."
Was it a natural death?
"The way it looks to me."
Heart attack?
"Probably."
Heriford doesn't put much stock in the cryptic information that the man had been acting "weird" in the days before he died.
"I do that every day."
He thinks the man probably died in his sleep about 18 hours before.
"He's starting to decompose," Heriford says, noting skin slippage due to the oppressive heat of the cramped RV. "In two days, he'd be totally black and twice that big."
Missig, returning to the office to write his report, says the woman "was probably in the chute to die."
With myriad medical problems (uncontrollable diabetes in particular), "she could have possibly lived another year or two or five, but it's not likely."
Borla's case, No. 5173, is a garden-variety, mowing-the-lawn-in-the-middle-of-the-afternoon heart attack. The man's wife found him unresponsive in the back yard and called paramedics.
Adhesive combo pads, used to conduct electricity from the defibrillator, are still attached to the man's chest when Borla removes the white sheet covering his body. His fingers are clutched in a palsied grip and his face is an angry purple.
"It's the heart trying to push blood up to save the brain," she says.
Borla snaps on gloves and runs efficiently through the routine, taking photos, checking for petechia and examining the lividity pattern, searching pockets and removing keys, and looking for other telltale signs on the body. Everything tells her it is a natural death.
She has one final responsibility to the body.
"Out of kindness, the toe tag is usually the last thing I put on," she says. "There's such a stigma to it. The toe tag is like the ultimate ending [for the family]. The toe tag is the last thing they're seeing. I've had familes be perfectly OK with a person dying until they see the toe tag."
Inside, Borla begins the tedious pill count at the kitchen table while the man's family, including his wife of 49 years, gathers in the living room to try to comfort each other and process the shock of his sudden death.
Framed family photos occupy space on a petrified coffee table: He is young in one picture, standing with his wife, and old in another, making a funny face at his infant granddaughter—now crawling at the feet of her family on the hardwood floor.
"He sure did love his grandkids," his widow says, suppressing sobs.
Outside, an ice-cream truck wends its way up the weary street, plying young ears with its Pavlovian call, today a tinny "Frere Jaques." It is easy to imagine kids up and down the block tugging at their mothers for loose change and dashing out the door for a good spot in line—oblivious to the man in the back yard staring unblinkingly at the sun, a man who just hours before was as alive as they are.
Coroner investigators dread death notifications. Nearly all of them say the "cold knock"—that appearance on a relative's doorstep, often in the middle of the night, to deliver a terrible message—is the most difficult part of the job.
"I've had people close the door in my face. I've had someone say (at 8:30 p.m.), 'It's too late, come back in the morning.' I had someone tell me, 'Good, I'm glad.' You have no clue what you're going to get," Meredith Archer says.
"They're awoken from a sleep and it's absolutely terrrible," Pierce says.
"You're the messenger of the worst news anyone can possibly get," Heriford says.
"My tongue felt this big [making his first death notification]," says Daniels, holding his hands shoulder-width apart.
"You're like the grim reaper," says Elliot, a part-time investigator who divides his time between Las Vegas and Overton.
Coroner investigators can briefly conceal their identity when they make a death notification—their only distinguishing characteristics are a badge and vehicle that say CORONER—but Elliot doesn't have the luxury of anonymity.
When he makes a notification in Overton, a small town where everyone knows his face and what he does for a living, they know immediately why he is there.
Investigators here go to some lengths to diminish the shock of a notification. Some will park their county vehicle down the street or around the corner from a relative's home, others will shield their badges when the door opens.
"Sometimes you misjudge where the house is gonna be and you end up right in front with people outside," Pierce says. "Nothing you can do then."
Once the family allows the investigator inside, Mildebrandt says, it's vital to get right to the point.
"There's no easy way to tell someone that somebody died. You have to just kind of say it. You have to tell them right off the bat because the only thing they're going to hear at that point is they died.
"You have to get that initial [notification] out so they understand they're not coming back, and then you can explain to them what happened and here's what we need to do next."
Mildebrandt makes sure her T's are crossed and her I's dotted before she arrives. If she is breaking the news in the middle of the night, she always brings law enforcement with her for safety.
"I don't want to be shot through the door because, trust me, if it's 3 in the morning, I'm not going to open the door for anyone but the police."
After the door opens, Mildebrandt will ask the next of kin their name and if they know the person in question.
"That's the opening line, because I want to make sure I'm at the right house. Not every address we get is a good address."
If they answer yes, she'll divulge the reason for the visit ("There's been an accident," "There's been a shooting") without revealing there has been a death.
Those establishing questions and the police presence will get her in the door. She asks them then to sit down ("so I don't have anybody fainting"), identifies herself and breaks the news. After that, she asks if they have any medical conditions and if they've taken their medication that day.
"We've had to call paramedics quite often," Mildebrandt says. "Blood pressure goes up, I've had people faint, I've notified a lady that was nine months pregnant and brought the paramedics with me. I didn't even wait to call them ... and they took her to the hospital right away, because her blood pressure rose, and now I'm concerned for her and the baby. You have to think about those things ahead of time. You really worry about the people you have to tell. They have to survive."
Empathy is essential.
"It might be the third death notification that one of our staffers has done that day, but it's the first one that family got—and maybe the first one they've ever gotten," Murphy says.
Worst are the child deaths.
"The mother and father have lost the important thing in their life," says James Traupel, 28, a part-time coroner investigator. "We can't do anything for that child, but we can do something for them. To be there at the worst moment in their life is gratifying."
Identifying the body falls between determing cause of death and notifying next of kin in the coroner's threefold mission. It isn't always easy. Transience and decomposition can hinder an investigator's ability to make an identification and bring closure to a missing person's family.
Investigators use dental records, fingerprints, DNA, X-rays, conspicuous body markings (such as tattoos), and serial numbers on prosthetic limbs, defibrillators and dentures to help them identify a body. Now they have one more tool: the computer.
So far, 16 bodies have been identified since the Clark County Coroner's Office started placing digital photographs of unidentified dead, about 170 in all, on the county website November 1, 2003.
The site, which also contains pertinent information about the bodies and catalogues them by decade, is thought to be the first of its kind, and its function is a boon to a staff whose size remains mostly static while its workload only increases. That it exists at all is due mostly to the efforts of the investigative staff, which learned to use digital photo imagery, soften images and create colors to make the photos palatable for mass consumption.
As an example, Murphy cites Eighth Street John Doe, a murder victim identified on the site through his unusual pattern of tattooed line drawings—and nothing else.
"If you looked at the original [identification] photos, you couldn't see the tattoos. All you saw was this mass of decomposition. What our people were able to do was blow that photograph up, colorize the skin one color and weave the artwork, so that when you looked at the picture you saw the art work of the tattoo, and you were not offended by, nor did you see, the decomposed skin."
Murphy says the site had about 300,000 hits in its first three months, then approximately half a million in the 30 days following his brief appearance on On The Record With Greta Van Susteren.
"In talking with one of the family members, they said to me, 'You will never know, and I hope you never know, what it's like to not know where one of your family members is.' They equated it to the concept that somewhere in the world there's somebody that supposedly looks like you.
"And they said, 'You'll be walking down the street, and you'll see someone and you'll think it's them, and you'll go to call out and you'll realize it's not them.' We have these cases where somebody certainly is looking, and so it's this idea of marrying that information [of photos and text] that we can bring closure."
The popularity of CSI and other reality and dramatic shows depicting the profession has bestowed a standing on the coroner investigator unheard of before, and resulted in an influx of career inquiries all out of proportion to the number of opportunities available.
"This is the job of the century," Missig says.
There are 11 full-time and 15 part-time investigators at the Clark County Coroner's Office. Starting pay is about $39,000 a year. Turnover is slow.
"Almost nil," Murphy says. "I would have thought that it would have been just the opposite. When I came through the door [three years ago], I thought people would work here a couple of years and go, 'I've had enough.'"
When a new class is announced for the Clark County Coroner Reserve Investigators Program, a nine-month academy typically held once a year (if the budget allows), it isn't unusual for as many as 100 people to apply for as few as 12 spots.
The program requires three months of classroom study and six months of field work with a coroner investigator—all for the privilege of working for free as a reserve investigator when the academy ends. Reserve investigators can apply for a part-time position if one should open. Most coroner investigators come through the academy and have no illusions about the job.
Those influenced by the Hollywood depiction (glamorous, decidedly sanitized) to examine a career in forensic investigation are often brought to their senses by their senses.
"They'll do a ride-along, maybe get on a good decomp and go, 'Whoa! Maybe not.' Or when you have to do body exams, they're like, 'I really have to touch him?' It weeds people out," says Archer, a 34-year-old mother of four.
"They don't realize exactly what is involved," Traupel says. "They're not prepared for the sights, the smells, the range of emotions in dealing with familes. How can they be? What other experience in life is gonna prepare you for something like this?"
For removing the charred bodies of a family of six from the wreckage of an airplane on Christmas day.
For picking up body parts strewn hundreds of yards down the freeway—and deeming it a successful trawl just for the hand by which to make an ID.
For finding out that some people have to shoot themselves twice.
For unzipping a body bag, as Daniels once did, and finding your ex-fiancee—the one whose name is still tattooed on your shoulder.
"You're scarred by what you see, because once you see it," says Dawn Sweetan, "it's always there."
Like the man thrown from his motorcycle and severed by a light pole after his back tire hit a curb at 65 miles per hour.
"In a morbid sense," Sweetan says, "it was incredible for me to see that kind of destruction and what can happen to a human body. It was a clean cut."
Like the homeless man who slashed his throat with disposable razor blades inside a Downtown casino, then collapsed and died in the middle of Main Street.
Mildebrandt watched the whole episode, from first slice to last step, on the hotel's surveillance tape. She would often wonder how people ended up in the positions they're found, and here she had a rare glimpse.
"It's incredible to see something like that on film," she says. "You think, 'Wow, this is so cool to see that happen.' And at the same time, people are looking at you like you're a little strange, but we're looking at the puzzle. It's part of that puzzle where we can say, 'This is how he got to this place.'"
If ever a job can be said to stink, this is the one.
"People ask you all the time, 'How do you get used to it?' I don't think you actually do," Archer says. "Just when you think you've seen it all and smelled it all ..."
Along comes a guy who has been decomposing in his apartment for six weeks.
"He was, for lack of a better word, soup. When you start moving him you kick up all those fumes, and you'll see every cop go flying out the door."
Archer says that level of putrefaction can also impede a good forensic exam.
"You might miss a [bullet] hole."
Investigators have devised ways to neutralize the smell, from wearing respirators to taking shallow mouth breaths. Most just suck it up and wait for olfactory shutdown, whereby the nasal passages acclimitize to the intrusion and deaden.
"I see these [police] detectives take the Vicks and rub it all over, and I have to laugh at them," Mildebrandt says. "I look at them and say, 'What are you doing?' 'I don't wanna smell it'. And I say, 'OK, you've just put an oily substance in your nasal passages that does what? Opens your nasal passages even more.
"So now not only is the oil going to attract the smell even more, now it's stuck to the nasal passages, which are then going to open up all the way down your throat, so not only are you gonna smell it, you're gonna taste it the rest of the night'."
Where there is decomposition there is sometimes maggots, the insect spawn of blow flies, feasting at a putrid trough.
Maggots—which hatch from eggs laid on a decomposing corpse—were Borla's personal Everest.
"When [bodies] get really decomposed, you can have thousands of them, and they are all scurrying around. You can hear 'em; they're moving as you're doing your examination, they're coming out of places and around under your gloves and moving [over them].
"They get on you, too, and it's one of those things where you gotta just kind of ..."
Borla lets the thought drop, then recalls her maggot epiphany with Dr. Sheldon Green, the county's retired medical examiner, who could allegedly conduct autopsies without gloves and have lunch at the same time.
"When I was first learning autopsies," she says, "he made me take my glove off and hold maggots for a few seconds in my hand. He said, 'You're alive, they don't like you. Go ahead, drop 'em.' After that, all my fear went into probably that moment, and I haven't had a problem with them. It's spiders I don't like."
"They're very efficient little guys," Daniels says of maggots.
And also beneficial. Medical examiners can determine a decedent's time of death and perhaps solve a crime by the size and generations of dead specimens around the body.
No two deaths are alike, and no two coroners either. They come from all walks of life and find camaraderie on a common ground most people would rather not tread.
Many of them enjoy the challenge of putting together the pieces of a dead man's puzzle, others the satisfaction of helping to solve a crime.
Some simply have an affinity for it.
"I was the type of guy who slowed down for car accidents," Daniels says. "I don't know what it was about death. It interested me. I never thought it was gross."
"Most people will look at us and say we're a little off. But what would be off because we enjoy what we do?" Mildebrandt asks. "I think everybody should enjoy what they do."
And they seem to more than most.
"You'll hear a lot of laughing and joking at the office," Heriford says. "It's not out of disrespect. We're not trying to make fun of anyone. It's just a release. You can't walk around like you're in a morgue all the time."