The Paramedics
Detective Wilfredo Cruz was hoping that whatever happened at the crime scene, someone from his unit would have secured it. The death was caused by choking with a belt so nothing from the scene should be molested until he got there. It was simple procedure in his eyes.
Before the first hour was up Cruz would have arrived at the crime scene to find a novice team of paramedics had taken the dead person. A very dead person. A person that was made to stay dead after the belt was removed from around his neck. A person who got the life choked the fuck out of him. For a last ride to a nearby emergency room.
There at the emergency room, they were told that the hospital policy accepted patients who were at least clinging to life. They were turned away and the flustered paramedics would mill over that decision and that policy. They would then decide to drive to the next hospital a little further downtown, hoping they had a different set of policies.
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They assumed that their passenger had to be accepted by someone in the medical business. There just had to be a vacancy in the hotel for the dead.
The paramedics assumed they were doing the right thing by taking the body to the hospital. They assumed their job was to transport the hollow, and give passage to expiration. They needed an address so that they could send the bill. They assumed that everyone at the crime scene trusted them to do their job, but as in everything else, assumption was a mother fucker to the most egregious mistakes.
The second hospital turned them away and they had nowhere else to go. They've gotten tentative approval by the uniforms at the crime scene to remove the body because the police assumed the paramedics knew the procedures. There was no doubt that if the paramedic crew hadn't removed the cadaver, the police wouldn't have allowed it to be touched by anyone else.
With tails between their legs, the paramedic crew had to return the body back to the street. Back to the crime scene. They had to take the body back and place it where it was strangled on the bed. Back to where everyone else were combing the room for dirt, lint, hair and fiber. Uniforms fighting time so that all the evidence would stay relevant. The lab techs were to dust surfaces in the room that seemed to be undisturbed and apart from the body.
Cruz exploded. “Where the fuck is the body?”
© 2017 Frank Atanacio
