It’s night when we get a call for “police assistance.” This can be anything from a cop needing a Band-Aid to a perp claiming a boo-boo to somebody with their leg cut off. This type of call is a wild card.

We drive through street after street of Russian storefronts in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn and arrive at the address, where we’re greeted by an array of police officers, some with grim faces, some with amused ones. Our EMS lieutenant, Stuart, is also there, but there seems to be no haste in his expression.

“What gives?” says Bronson.

Nobody’s saying anything, which means something, but I’m not sure what. We go inside. I sniff the air. No foul odor. I listen. No sounds.

“Whaddaya got?” I ask Lieutenant Stuart He says nothing, but leads me upstairs. The house is a two-story brick, modern (for the 1950s), attached on both sides, with white ironwork fencing, a plastic awning over the front porch, and a garage underneath. All the surrounding houses are exactly the same. The whole neighborhood looks like it was slapped together in a week by the same builder.

Inside, we climb the carpeted stairs. It’s dark in the bedroom, the lights out for some reason, and Lieutenant Stuart shines a flashlight over to four cops standing near the louvered door of a walk-in closet. Those four are in turn shining their lights down on a garbage bag.

It’s the clear kind, normally used for recycling. Inside it’s red and brown and foggy. Something liquid, or liquefying – the remains of a body. But still none of the odor of a decaying body I’d expect.

“Looks like Santa forgot his sack,” one cop chuckles. His name is Officer Taylor.

I hand out latex gloves all around. Taylor snaps on a pair and prepares to cut the bag.

“Why not just take him to the morgue like that?” I suggest. “Why make a mess?”

But the cops have to investigate a body where it’s found. Two detectives come through the door in plainclothes – turtlenecks and chinos – which leave no question that they’re detectives.

We make sure not to disturb anything in the room, since right on the detectives’ heels come two officers from Evidence Collection. They start picking at the wall-to-wall carpet with tweezers.

Taylor slices the bag open with a Swiss army knife, and we all recoil. The stench is putrescence mixed with something floral and sugary, like industrial cleaning fluid.

“Holy Jesus…” Taylor says.

The body’s been cut up into chunks and decorated with an assortment of pastel-colored hockey-puck shaped air-fresheners.

“Why would someone put air-fresheners…?” I say.

“Maybe they thought it would mask the odor,” says Bronson, from the hallway.

The detectives look at him like he’s crazy. So do I.

“They didn’t exactly succeed,” I say, through muffled mouth and nose.

I wish the detectives good luck in identifying the corpse. In comparison, my job is easy. “I guess we’re here to pronounce death,” I say. “But I mean, your Aunt Martha could do that.”

The detectives are not amused.

I check my watch. “Okay then. One-thirty-five a.m.”

“Two weeks ago,” Bronson adds.

There’s nowhere to place my stethoscope to check for lung sounds on the bag, since the lungs have been cut up with the rest of the body. I mark “obvious death” on my chart and leave it at that.

Luckily this is not a public scene, so we don’t have to transport the body to the morgue ourselves. The medical examiner’s office will do that. I imagine they’ll place the plastic bag into a body bag and then place that onto a stretcher and wheel it outside. It strikes me how municipal workers are privy to things the rest of the public never sees.

“If the public knew half the things we know,” Bronson says, “I don’t think they’d sleep too well at night.”

“Murders happen all the time,” Taylor agrees. “But they happen for a reason.”

“Think of every unnatural death we’ve been on,” Bronson says to me. “The victims are always involved in foul play.”

I think about it. It’s still unnerving.

“They don’t make the news because they don’t affect John Q. Citizen,” Taylor says. “Face it: unless you double-cross the Russian mob, chances are you won’t get hacked to pieces and stuffed in a garbage bag with a bunch of air-fresheners.” I stare at him. “And that’s supposed to make me sleep better tonight?”

But I think I may sleep okay after all. Unlike other corpses I’ve seen, this one has no face to haunt me.

Ms. Klopsis is an emergency medical technician for the FDNY. This column details her observations and experiences on the job. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of patients.