“You can do whatever you need.” Chris didn’t look at Maylene as he spoke. “I can’t get anything else done until you take her out of here, and it’s not right her lying there like that. So ... just do it. Take her out of here.”

Byron unzipped the body bag. Then, with a silent apology to the woman he’d once expected to be part of his family, he and the tech gently moved her body into the bag. Leaving it still unzipped, Byron straightened and peeled off his now-bloody gloves.

Chris’ gaze dropped to Maylene’s body inside the still-open bag. Silently, he grabbed the biohazard bag and shoved it at the tech. Then the sheriff squatted down and zipped the bag, hiding Maylene’s corpse from sight. “Not right for her to be looking like that.”

“And it’s not right to contaminate the exterior of the pouch,” Byron retorted as he dropped the gloves in the biohazard bag, removed the coveralls, and carefully put them in the bag, too.

Chris crouched down, closed his eyes, and whispered something. Then he stood. “Come on. You need to get her up out of here.”

The look he spared for Byron was accusatory, and for a split moment, Byron wanted to snarl at him. It wasn’t that Byron didn’t feel for the dead. He did . He took care of them, treated them with more care than a lot of people knew in their lives, but he didn’t stand and weep. He couldn’t. Distance was as essential as the rest of an undertaker’s tools; without it, the job was impossible.

Some deaths got to him more than others; Maylene’s was one of them. She’d had an office at his family funeral home and a long-standing relationship with his father. She’d raised the only two women he’d ever loved. She was all but family—but that didn’t mean he was going to grieve here .

Silently and carefully, Byron and Chris carried Maylene to the cot Byron had left outside the door, and then they put her in the waiting hearse.