This story was produced in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering guns in America. Subscribe to The Trace's newsletter.

Tiffany Brown was on the second day of a much-needed vacation when her work phone rang around 10 p.m. It was a colleague from the coroner’s office, where she’d worked for a decade. There’d been a shooting on the Las Vegas Strip, and they needed her at a hospital where they were sending victims.

The single mother left her two sons, who were 11 and 14, sleeping in their beds and rushed to a nearby hospital. Part of her job as a senior investigator was to examine the bodies of the dead and then notify next of kin.

When Tiffany pulled up to University Medical Center, she found that wounded people were arriving in ambulances, Ubers, the back of a pickup truck. Their flesh was shredded. The floor was sticky with blood.

Before she could do anything, Tiffany was called by a different colleague, who asked her to report to the scene of the shooting, where 58 people had been killed and 422 more injured when a man fired into a crowd of festival-goers from his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort. It was the deadliest shooting in modern American history.

When Tiffany arrived, the concert-goers were gone. But everything else was exactly as it had been when the crowd fled. Crumpled-up bills sat on the bar, tucked under sweating beer bottles. Meat smoldered on grills. Cell phones lay abandoned, lighting up as worried people tried to reach their friends and family. A strong wind blew hundreds of red plastic cups in a great tide, from one side of the fenced-in area to the other and then back again.

And the bodies. Twenty-four lay inside the fence, seven more just outside, where they had dragged themselves or been carried. Tiffany and a small group of homicide detectives started their work outside the fence. It was technically Tiffany’s job to roll the bodies over during her exams, but she remembers that the detectives were generous on that day, helping her with the work even though their shoes were soon covered in blood. Tiffany looked for identification, documented injuries, took photographs, moved on to the next body.

Once she’d examined all the bodies in the field, Tiffany had to look over the last body—the shooter’s. She remembers taking the elevator to the hotel room and passing the room-service cart he’d rigged with a hidden camera. She remembers him splayed in his hotel room, an arsenal of 23 rifles and a revolver scattered throughout the suite. She remembers walking over to the still blown-out window and looking down at the site of the massacre.

Over the following weeks, Tiffany and her colleagues lived deep in the aftermath of this tragedy. They were experts in death, which surrounded them every day at work. But this shooting was so vast, so horrible, that even they found themselves broken.