The bright aseptic room smelled of Pine-Sol and bleach and overripe Camembert. A white-bearded man lay on a stainless-steel examination table, his face angled toward the skylight and the cold, cloudless morning. An investigator read from his clipboard: 61-year-old white male discharged from a Detroit hospital last night was found at home, shirtless, in a wheelchair, a .38-caliber handgun in his right hand. On his chest was a burn that appeared to be an exact match of the gun’s barrel. Carl Schmidt, the medical examiner, wiped the contact wound with a wet sponge.

“If we’re lucky, it exited,” he said.

Two technicians hefted the body onto its side.

“And . . . let’s look at the other side.”

The skin was mottled where the blood had begun to settle, but his back had no open wounds.

“We’re going to have to extract the bullet.” Schmidt paused. “Next.”

He had seven more bodies to inspect. By his account, it had been a typical night. Schmidt and his team — a pathology fellow, a medical student and three autopsy technicians — moved over to examine two pedestrian fatalities struck down when a vehicle jumped a curb. Schmidt felt around their skulls for fractures. Another man with a history of cardiovascular disease had been found at the bottom of a stairwell; and an elderly woman, her body bag marked “decomp,” had lain alone for several days, undiscovered. The most perplexing case was a 27-year-old woman who was found dead in a city park with a USB phone-charging cable tied around her arm, the victim of an overdose. “She was out shooting drugs in a park on a Saturday night with a frost warning?” Schmidt asked, a roundabout way of suggesting she might have overdosed before being dumped outside. Though she was unidentified, she had one thing in common with the other bodies: The exact time of death was unknown and practically unknowable.