"FUNCTIONAL" isn't much of a compliment, but it's the most sympathetic term you can apply to the school of buildings that might as well be called Econo-Modern. Every city has its share of these massive monuments to the rectilinear; towering obelisks made from poured concrete, often ringed by blighted plazas of "public space," they seem to exist in the half-light of a permanent February dusk. It's easy to assume that nothing unusual will ever happen in one of these places. Amateur paranoids might even suspect that they're nothing but stage flats, a city-sized Potemkin village that exists only to convey an illusory sense of its own activity.

Baltimore has plenty of functional buildings, one of which houses the office of the chief medical examiner. If you watched any of the first three seasons of Homicide, which were shot on location at the OCME, you probably have a good sense of the building's boxy exterior and the clinical, flourescent corridors inside. What you didn't see is the morbid tableau that greets you when the elevator opens onto the fourth floor.

Neatly arranged in a glass vitrine on the wall are the following items: the scorched shoes of a man struck by lightning; an assortment of nooses used in successful suicides; the syringes and pipes responsible for fatal ODs; a yellowing patch of tattoed skin from a Hell's Angel's corpse that identifies him as a member of the gang's extra-hardcore "1 percenter" caste. What's more: the pacifier of a crib-death baby, the paraphenalia recovered from an autoerotic asphyxiation, and a jury-rigged sweatband-and-battery contraption used in a suicide by electrocution. A separate case houses some two dozen life-sized wax reproductions of various gunshot wounds.

What few visitors the OCME attracts don't come here to gawk at this macabre wonder cabinet. Forensics enthusiasts, they'll more likely be found studying the calligraphed credo that hangs on the opposite wall, which reads: "I will bear in mind always that I am a truth-seeker." The strange truth they seek resides in a small glass-walled gallery at the other end of the hallway, which houses the Nutshell Miniatures of Death (aka "the dollhouses of death"), nineteen scale dioramas, each of which uses doll-scaled props to recreate scenes of violent crimes that stumped investigators. Seeing these exhibits for the first time, you might be grossed out, intrigued, or dumbfounded. You might think to call them daft, or eerie, or inexplicably odd. But functional?

JERRY DZIECICHOWICZ, chief administrator of the OCME and de facto curator of the Nutshell exhibit, is my Virgil through the dollies' inferno. He leads me past mounted abstracts of published papers with titles like "Fatal Hot Coffee Scald of the Larynx" and "Suicide Using a Compound Bow and Arrow." He looks at me a little funny when I doubtfully ask him if these are, you know, for real?

In a room whose sole furnishing, save a table and chairs, is a wall-length shelf full of forensic journals, Jerry begins by telling me how the Nutshells were built some sixty-odd years ago by a Captain Frances Glessner Lee (her friends in the New Hampshire State Police made her an honorary member of the force). Lee was born the heiress to the International Harvester fortune. As a young woman in Chicago, she displayed an aptitude for model building: Her scale replica of Chicago's Symphony Hall was so exact that it was displayed in that building's entry for many years. After the death of her husband, she turned her attention and her fortune to her other lifelong passion: crime. In 1931, a time well before pathology was recognized as a science, she donated over a quarter of a million dollars to establish a legal medicine program at Harvard, the first in the United States.

Not long after, Captain Lee retreated to a trailer behind her New Hampshire home. Fusing her interests in models and crime, she began producing the nutshells as an education aid for detectives and pathologists. Though poor circulation kept her confined to a wheelchair, she patiently manufactured the dioramas over the course of the next decade. The scenarios she depicted were rendered in a 1':1" scale, and were all based on particularly challenging cases related to her by friends in the law enforcement community. Lee envisioned the Nutshells as diagnostic tools, and put them to this use in yearly forensic seminars, lavish affairs at the Ritz where members of her Harvard Associates in Police Science dined off an $8,000 set of china. Following Lee's death in 1962, the seminars were discontinued and the Nutshells put into storage. There they remained for two decades, until the members of HAPS, now disaffiliated from Harvard, found them a new home in Baltimore. The twice-yearly HAPS seminars have moved from the Ritz to a local steakhouse, and in 1988 the models, damaged by neglect, were treated to a year-long restoration by a team of art-conservation experts.

As Jerry relates this history, he enthusiastically digresses into tangents about topics like powder burns or lividity -- the staining left when blood settles to the bottom of a corpse. But when it comes time to visit the Nutshells, he adopts a yogic solemnity. "Pay attention to the smallest of details," he advises me. "The ones that get overlooked will make or break your explanations." Each Nutshell contains the clues necessary to solve the case, and the solution to one of the cases, he tells me, hinges on a bullet the size of a pinhead.  "Remember -- the truth is there, but you really have to look for it."