B.C.'S TOP CORONER HAS DA VINCI OVERTONES

Tuesday afternoon was dank and bleak, sodden with a foretaste of winter
rains -- an altogether awful day to die.

Not that there are good days to die. And not that it matters here in the
morgue at Vancouver General Hospital, where the clientele are beyond caring
about the ruthless efficiency of the decor. There are no windows. No warmth
from the stark fluorescent lights, the stainless steel, the red concrete
floor, the drip of drains, the instruments that cut, collect and expose the
last secrets of a life lived.

Most of the dead have names. Out of 18 years of habit, Larry Campbell,
B.C.'s chief coroner, checks the board posted beside the giant cooler.
Details and case numbers are written in erasable marker in a kind of
corner's shorthand.

A recent arrival is listed "U/K Male." Unknown male.

There could be any number of reasons for this. Maybe he went for a walk
without his wallet and never came home. Maybe he had no home. Maybe the
only people who give a damn are in this room.

He rests for the moment on a gurney, zipped into a white plastic body bag.
He will be photographed, finger-printed and autopsied. If necessary, clues
from his clothing or from dental x-rays will be run down.

Eventually, he may be wheeled under a video camera affixed to the morgue
ceiling while a friend or relative is led into a smaller, warmer, less
intimidating place where death can be viewed on a television screen. Or the
fingerprints will register on a police computer.

He will not leave this earth an Unknown Male, or Campbell and the 37 others
in the provincial corner's service, will have failed in their duty to the
dead.

"I refuse to accept that anybody in our society is a throw- away," he says.

There is an edge to his voice. The words could as easily have come from
CBC's new television series, Da Vinci's Inquest, about a fictional
Vancouver coroner with an appetite for chaos, a taste for alcohol and a
relentless, redeeming, respect for the dead.

There is some of 50-year-old Campbell in the fictional Dominic Da Vinci.
How much is open to debate, but enough for Campbell to have co-written two
of the scripts and to have vetted most of the others.

But this is a real morgue. Larry Campbell, once a member of the RCMP drug
squad, patrols the constituency of the dead. He speaks for them. He met his
wife, pathologist Enid Edwards, over an autopsy table. "Sort of like a bad
vampire book," she says, laughing. The dead have much to offer.

They can advise the living how to stay that way a little longer. They point
to the structural flaws in society, be they drugs or poverty, an unsafe
workplace or a badly engineered stretch of highway.

A question unanswered in death is an unlearned lesson. Of these, an unknown
name is the most fundamental of failures.

"These are the people I think we're really working for. They have nobody.
Those who die lonely and without a whole lot of people looking out for
them," he says.

"The very least we can do in death is make sure their death is
investigated, the same as anybody else's. That they're identified and they
have a proper burial."

There are myths about coroners: that they are all doctors, that they
perform autopsies, that they spend their days solving murders.

Ombudsman for the dead is a more apt description. In B.C., unlike many
jurisdictions, no medical degree is required.

Campbell, who was appointed to a three-year term as chief coroner in 1996,
supervises 20 coroners in eight provincial districts and about 20 part-time
"fee for service" coroners in every region of the province.

They are tied to their pagers. Campbell, who attended thousands of death
scenes since joining the coroner's service in 1981, now plays a largely
administrative role, although he pulls on-call duty some 20 or 30 days a
year, and presides at at least one inquest annually.

In B.C., a coroner is summoned 10,000 times a year, virtually any time a
person dies "suddenly and unexpectedly" of mysterious illness, accident,
suicide, murder or "unfair means."

Says Campbell: "It doesn't matter to me whether you're 90 years old, or
you're two years old. If [death] is sudden and unexpected, I'm going to
investigate it, and I'm going to investigate it until I find out what the
cause of death was."

About 30 or 40 inquests are called each year: in all cases where prison
inmates die in custody, where witnesses won't co-operate, where there are
issues to which coroners want to draw attention.

These range from the tragic consequences of the brake failure of a tractor
trailer in North Vancouver, the murder-suicide of nine family members in
Vernon by an estranged husband, a child's death by malnutrition.

Coroners offer more than 2,000 recommendations a year, aimed at finding
"reasonable and practical" ways to prevent similar deaths. A coroner can't
force compliance, but Campbell estimates 75 per cent of the recommendations
are followed.

Still, bad stuff happens: assisted by venality, stupidity, tragedy,
naivete, any number of forces inhabiting the chasm between reality and a
perfect world. "It's really hard," says the coroner, "to bring those two
together."

It is this void, with all its "rich dramatic territory", that drew
television producer Chris Haddock to the ideal of a flawed, crusading
coroner. For 10 years, his creative offices in the Downtown Eastside have
overlooked Victory Square and the waterfront, the flip side of picture
postcard Vancouver.

That and his growing friendship with Campbell made the series almost
inevitable. "And his name is Dominic Da Vinci," Haddock pronounced to a
skeptical Campbell. "OK," snapped the coroner, "but it better be good."

Campbell's fear was a remake of the awful American series Quincy. Or worse,
as an ex-Mountie, a Due South-version, that reduced the coroner's service
to a comedic stereotype.

What Haddock delivered was some of what he sees outside his office window.
Stories written with heavy dramatic licence from newspaper headlines and
coroner's reports. Some of what makes Campbell angry or passionate. The
black humour of the morgue. The things that can still make a coroner cry.

"Larry has compassion. That's really evident from knowing him. And he
doesn't take shit from anybody."

Running through the first three episodes of the show was the story of a
flop house predator who raped and murdered women by force-feeding them
alcohol. The story was loosely based on Gilbert Paul Jordan, a Vancouver
barber, eventually convicted of manslaughter.

Campbell was among the coroner's team that found, with police, a pattern
among the apparently random alcohol deaths of at least 10 women, most of
them rootless, vulnerable aboriginal women.

In another bleakly ambivalent episode, Da Vinci calls an inquest after a
television reporter broadcasts the story of an anonymous woman who may have
been smothered with a plastic bag in a case of assisted suicide. Da Vinci
narrowly avoids citing the reporter with contempt for refusing to reveal
her source.

Five years earlier, Campbell called an inquest into the similar death of an
unidentified AIDS patient whose story was told in a column in The Province
newspaper. Unlike the fictional Da Vinci, Campbell bulled ahead, charging
two senior newspaper editors and a Province columnist with contempt of
court for refusing to divulge the source. The charges were quashed on
appeal.

Ah yes, Campbell recalls, "the Unknown female." He hates unknowns.

The line between fiction and reality blurs. Outside producer Haddock's
offices, as he readies another season of scripts, emergency sirens wail.
"Somebody's dropped," he says. "There's a lot of that going around."

He and his friend the coroner, the real coroner, share a common belief that
the time has come for a limited experiment in decriminalization, where
morphine can be administered to heroin addicts in a controlled setting.
"Nothing else has worked," says Haddock. By October, the number of drug
deaths in the city this year stood at an unprecedented 303.

Campbell says there isn't much will or sympathy for bold measures as long
as politicians can pretend the epidemic of injectable drug deaths is
largely contained in one poor neighborhood on the western fringe of the
country.

He is torn between two extremes: respecting the privacy of such addicts,
and shoving the crisis into the public face. He'd like to think the
real-fiction of Da Vinci's Inquest achieves both.

It is the day before "Mardi Gras," when the welfare cheques arrive.
Campbell looks through a rain-washed car window at the faces of pinched,
hungry addicts, clustered in alleys and doorways. "Everybody's lookin'," he
sighs.

From his own annual report, he knows the number of illicit drug deaths will
double the day after welfare Wednesday -- more bodies to be taken down the
elevator and wheeled along a red concrete floor to the morgue.

The morgue, at the end of the day, is just a place where people work.
Comics are pinned to the bulletin board. With the last body sewn up, a
technician hoses down floor and table, whistling. Taped to a wall are
autographed pictures of the likes of Gillian Anderson of the X-Files, the
stars of The Sentinel and Da Vinci's Inquest -- thanking the morgue crew
for allowing them to film in such a splendidly atmospheric place.

There is nothing ghoulish here. What is awful or morbid or tragic, happens
elsewhere, in every unexpected death and unlearned lesson. Here is where
they care enough to ask, Why?

It's like the old joke about the pathologist, says Enid Edwards. "He has
all the answers, but he finds them out too late."

And so it is that the chief coroner, at least a few times in a harried
week, makes it home in time for dinner with his wife, the pathologist and
hospital administrator. Over a meal that he will cook and she will clean
up, they will talk about their day with an honesty that would put many
people under the table.

It's not about death, of course. It's about life.