If there is — if there’s a treating doctor with a chart in front of him showing a documented cardiac complaint under active follow-up — the office can decline jurisdiction and release the body to the family.

The San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office handles something on the order of four thousand reported deaths a year.

The investigator who took the call at 12:20 that Sunday morning spent eleven minutes on it.

Margaret has never blamed him.

She has thought about him a great deal and she has never blamed him.

He did exactly what the system asked him to do with the information he was given, and the information he was given had been assembled over fourteen months by a man who understood precisely how the system worked.