There are two orderlies working in the forensic morgue of the provincial hospital - former criminal-recidivist Pal Palych Shishko and former detective Nikolay Ivanovich Kedrov. They are completely different, do not like each other, but in public they communicate in an emphatically formal manner. The only thing they have in common is work. One day, a young investigator, senior lieutenant Dmitriy Saikin, appears at the morgue. The management considers him a failure and pins the most hopeless cases on him. But everything changes when Saikin witnesses how Kedrov and Shishko, in a few sentences, destroy the expert's conclusions and not only establish the exact place, time and method of the murder, but also describe in detail the appearance of the killer, naming his name at the end. And the laurels are given to Saikin. Thus begins a strange collaboration between the orderlies and the investigator, solving one murder after another.