Seeing Dead People and Writing Realistic Fiction

My college experience wasn't the usual sort. No keggers, fraternity parties, football tailgate parties or bunches of hookups with co-eds for me. I looked at a lot of dead people and watched more than a few buildings burn, though.

My first year, I started shooting pictures at accidents and fire scenes. I'd take a few shots then call in to a local radio station and they would put me on the air to report the story. I was seventeen. I saw my first headless corpse after responding to the scene of a mid-air collision between two private planes. The propeller of one sliced through the canopy, and the pilot's head, of the other. He ended up... well, no need to go there. But for a teenager it was pretty eye-opening, as you might imagine.

By nineteen, I was working for a TV station as a camera guy and reporter. We called me a "one-man band" because I would do an interview from behind the camera then, later, do a stand-up and report the story. One night, on call, a friend of mine and I met a couple girls at a Pizza Hut and went back to my apartment for a drink. They both had curfew so they took off and we went back to Pizza Hut to see if we could score again. Half an hour later, I got a call on the radio of a head-on crash outside town. On the way, something told me it was the two girls we hung out with. It was. They both were killed. I had to ID them for the Highway Patrol, then shoot the accident for the news the next night.

Shortly after I turned twenty-one, I was a cop doing crime scene photography. One of my victims had been shot nine times and left in an open field for three days in one-hundred degree temperatures. At the scene of an armed robbery at a little mom and pop gas station, the bad guys shot a teenager to death. As we were trying to work the scene, the owner came up and asked how long before we finished, he was losing business and wanted to get the station open again. A couple of years later, I walked up on a car that burst into flames after a crash. Noting the grisly and hard to miss odor (John Sandford, in one of his Lucas Davenport novels, compares it to roast pork. He's obviously been there.), I looked a little more closely at the lump of something in the front seat and realized it was actually two somethings, fused together from the inferno.

Even when I'd enough of being a cop and went back to TV, the corpses were waiting. In the early days there wasn't quite the same concern about protecting crime and other death scenes that there is now. I walked up on quite a few surprises. While dating an assistant district attorney, I drove her to the scene of a DUI accident where we found the head of one driver in the back seat of his car. We continued on to dinner afterward.

I didn't take notes. Didn't save any of the photos I shot. I have no written record of anything from my years as a deputy sheriff or, indeed, the first half of my reporting career. Yet I can still describe the position of the dead pilot, body arched, shoulders fused flat to the ground, the bodies of the two girls at that long-ago fatal crash, and the surprise on the face of the head in the back seat. I can see the fetal curl of the fifteen year old raped and killed in a Forest Preserve on his way home from bowling and the expressions on the faces of a group of parents outside a drive-in restaurant waiting to hear if their children were among the victims found shot to death in a cooler.

The challenge for me isn't to create realistic fiction. It's to tone my memories down enough so they're believeable. Oh, and to be able to sleep after going back there.