It’s the job that lives on death.

Coroners answer on average five calls a day for murders, suicides, drug overdoses and fatal mishaps in Victoria.

And for the three women who make up the full-time staff at B.C. Coroner’s Service Victoria headquarters, the toughest part of the job is the paperwork.

“The paperwork is the downside of it,” says Rose Stanton, chief regional coroner.

Unlike in TV shows such as CSI, coroners don’t lurk in morgues or test labs. Coroners in Victoria instead lurk in a small but tidy office on Tolmie Avenue.

Barb McLintock’s on-call shift lasts 48 hours. She’s attached to her pager and ready to dash out if it beeps. Today, McLintock might see five death scenes.

Whether the pager beeps or a call comes in, McLintock has questions to prepare herself for the task. A call to the police or paramedics at the scene reveals whether this is a simple died-of-natural-causes call or a more complicated situation.

With more than five years and in excess of 900 cases under her belt, McLintock says mental preparation isn’t necessary anymore before heading to investigate a death. Chances are the death was natural, though perhaps sudden: A man in his 80s whose heart gave out.

Sometimes it’s a lot more traumatic. Drug addicts with needles still stuck in their arms. Teenagers hanging from the rafters. The twisted, jumbled wreckage of a car crash. Burn victims. Children.

“No amount of mental prep can prepare you (for those),” Stanton says.

First, McLintock looks around, makes a mental note of the scene. She’s brought her digital camera and a scene bag full of plastic containers and tools for collecting samples.

McLintock asks questions from whoever arrived first. Has the body or any objects been moved? Has the toilet been flushed? (Stanton: “We hate it when people flush the toilet. There’s good evidence there.”)

McLintock snaps photos of the area and some close-ups of the body, partly for identification purposes.

Depending on the circumstances, she slips on her double set of gloves and checks the body for stab wounds, broken bones, bruising, track marks, swelling and decomposition in a head-to-toe examination. She takes notes.

She checks for algor, livor and rigor on the corpse: temperature, pooled blood and stiffness. These help give an idea of time of death, but they’re not always accurate. In some cases, the person has been dead for days and is quickly decomposing.

In many cases, McLintock is in and out in 45 minutes. The more complicated deaths take upwards of an hour and a half. Then, McLintock heads back to the office to tackle that dreaded paperwork.

Part of the coroner’s job is making recommendations, requiring research into the latest practices and trends, as well as researching new or changed laws in other provinces or countries. Coroners’ recommendations can lead to changes in legislation in B.C.

As a journalist with the Province newspaper in Vancouver, McLintock’s job crossed paths with coroners often. Layoffs from the paper in 2003 resulted in a job search.

“Either you decide you don’t like what you do, or you don’t know why you’re doing it, or you become quite obsessive,” McLintock observed of coroners. “No two days are alike and no two cases are alike.”

Stanton’s background is an unlikely mix of social work and animal care. In 1998 she noticed an “odd ad” in the newspaper for a coroner’s job. She cut it out and to this day still has that ad.

“I had a few crises thinking ‘What have I done?’” Stanton recalls of those early days in the job.

She laughs as she explains her equipment at the time consisted of a broken Polaroid camera and a pager. One time, McLintock forgot her scene bag and resorted to using plastic food-containers from her kitchen to collect samples.

Stanton’s first case happened to be a particularly traumatizing one that stirs her senses to this day.

“My very first death scene was a suicide,” Stanton says. A woman had slashed her wrists while in the bathtub and bled to death. The woman wasn’t found for two days.

“I remember the smell of the blood. It has kind of an iron smell. I had to close my eyes now and then to take it in, in small amounts. It was a very difficult way to enter the world and I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’”

Today, she wouldn’t change it for anything.

“I always felt privileged to be with people at the worst time in their lives. That, consistently, is the most amazing part of this job.”

For a couple of women with extremely serious jobs, Stanton and McLintock are refreshingly lighthearted. It’s clear they enjoy the ups and downs of being a coroner.

“I’ve really never had trouble with dead bodies,” McLintock says, “(although) I’m not particularly keen on maggots.”

Stanton is glad she’s never had to rub Vicks under her nose to mask the smell of a death.

“Its an incredible privilege to do this job because we get a very intimate view into people’s lives,” Stanton says.

The work of investigating deaths has its rewards.

“Our jobs have meaning,” Stanton says. “I think we perform a very important public service.”

ecardone@vicnews.com