I left Oklahoma City with a powerful sense of sorrow, as I thought of the murders I dealt with in Kentucky and the mass fatalities I'd seen in Waco and Oklahoma City. It all seemed part of a terrible cycle of violence, especially since most investigators believe that the Oklahoma bombing was at least partially an act of revenge against the federal agents who had laid siege to the Branch Davidians at Waco. My work had given me a painfully close look at the kind of people who tried to force people and governments to accept their values by violence-and an even closer look at the shattered lives they leave in their wake.

8. WorldTradeCenter

WHEN THE bus let me off in front of the morgue in New York City, I was struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu. I had first come here on September 23, 2001, in response to the attack on the World Trade Center, so that I could help identify the thousands upon thousands of human remains that the disaster had caused. I had worked a relentless schedule of twelve-hour shifts for thirty straight days until, finally, my tour of duty ended and I went home. Now it was November 18, and I was back for my second tour. I felt as though I had never left.

I showed my pass to the police officer, and he waved me past the barricade, toward the huge tent city that had sprung up on Manhattan 's Lower East Side, beside the city's central morgue and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). Here, morgue workers examined the bodies and body parts that had been extracted from the rubble, identifying some, analyzing the rest, and storing the unidentified remains so that, hopefully, one day they could be returned to their grieving families. The people working here were law enforcement specialists, evidence technicians, forensic medical scientists, and full-time OCME personnel, as well as volunteers from all over the United States-but they were also New York beat cops, detectives, SWAT team members, and police clerks, pressed into service to handle a volume of death and destruction that the city had never known and that involved many of their own fallen comrades.

I headed down the street, ignoring the refrigerator trucks in which the newly arrived body bags were stored and the tents where people handed out food and toiletries and sweatshirts. I thought only of how I could reach the morgue in time to relieve the workers who had been working nonstop for the past twelve hours. Then I noticed the ambulance with its flashing lights and the two dozen police officers who had just come out of the morgue to greet it. The police stood silently as the ambulance doors opened and a flag-draped body bag emerged. On command, every officer snapped to attention, saluting as paramedics lifted the bag onto a stainless steel gurney.

I went to stand among them, feeling the comfort of their presence, my right hand over my heart in a civilian salute. NYPD Sergeant Mark Giffen stepped over to the gurney, the silence broken only by the endless city traffic that rushed up First Avenue behind us. He folded the flag, handed it to Captain Marilyn Skaekel, and added his salute to the rest. “At ease,” she said finally. Six of the police officers, each wearing hospital scrubs, sprang into action, pulling back the tent flaps that covered the morgue's entrance, wheeling the gurney inside, and opening the bag so that Amy Zelson Mundorff, the forensic anthropologist who ran the day shift, could begin to examine its contents.

I hurried on past the morgue to the small yellow-and-white supply tent-crammed to overflowing with scrubs, plastic gowns, and latex gloves-and suited up like the rest. In less than five minutes, I was back in the morgue, where autopsy tables and portable carts full of medical instruments lined the walls. However, the initial examination was already complete, and a morgue worker was hand-delivering the contents of the body bag to the x-ray technician.

Mark Grogan, a young Irish cop with flaming red hair, looked up from the clipboard, on which he'd been taking notes as the forensic pathologist dictated his findings. Mark rose to his feet immediately, throwing his arms around my shoulders in a long tight hug. He never said a word, but I knew he knew. So did the others. We had worked together for every night of that first long month and we had become true comrades in arms. Soon after I'd left that first tour of duty, Mark had called me at home, and through uncontrollable tears I'd told him that my father had died of cancer just hours before his call. Dr. Reuben Craig had been my hero, my fishing partner, my mentor, my rock, my dad. And now he was gone.

Mark released me from his hug and I took a long grateful look at the other members of my triage team as they prepared to start the night shift. It's hard enough facing a death that comes after a long, lingering illness-but at least you have time to say good-bye. When death happens suddenly, violently, on a grand scale, there's an extra sense of outrage, an anger at the senseless loss that unites not only the survivors, but also those of us who deal with the victims. It was this bond that had kept me going on my first assignment to New York, and it was this bond that I was seeking once again.

Amy and I completed the routine business of a daily shift change, and I took my place in front of the next body bag, my hands already feeling through the torn flesh. I realized that something very important had changed. Before, despite my sympathy for those who'd lost their loved ones, I'd been able to keep some measure of the scientific detachment that had served me so well at the countless death investigations I had handled over the past ten years. Now, the loss of my father had opened something new in my heart, a grief that echoed the public mourning around me, an agony that flowed straight into my hands. As the night-shift workers gathered around me, ready to begin another night of processing the dead, I thought perhaps that they, too, could sense the difference.

Like everyone else in America that morning, I woke on September 11 with no idea of how profoundly that day would affect my life. The night before, I'd gotten a call about some skeletal remains discovered in an isolated wooded area out by Bowling Green, Kentucky -remains that the coroner thought might be those of a fifteen-year-old girl who had been missing for two weeks. Halfway to the scene, I idly flipped on the radio, and what I heard sounded more like a disaster movie than real life. As the hysterical announcer explained that an airplane had slammed into Tower 1 of the World Trade Center, I cranked up the volume, unable to believe my ears. Then I heard about Tower 2.

I wanted to turn the van around and go home, where I could watch this horrifying event on television and wait for the call from the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT), a national volunteer operation I had joined about three years before. Whenever there's a disaster that goes beyond the resources of a local area, DMORT mobilizes mortuary workers and death investigators from around the country to help pitch in. They'd called me in to help with other mass-fatality incidents and I couldn't go, so I desperately wanted to be in the first wave of response to this shocking event-to do something, anything, that might counteract the helpless rage that was suddenly welling up inside me.

But all I could do was keep driving. Like every other rescue worker in America, I was anxious to spring into action and help wherever I could, but I knew that the isolated Kentucky crime scene was in a valley beyond the reach of cell phones. DMORT would surely be trying to reach me-and when they couldn't, I knew they'd go on to the next name on their list.