The Keepsake

by Tess Gerritsen

  “It means the broken bone had already started the process of healing when this woman died. She lived at least a few weeks after the injury.”

  Maura turned to the curator. “Where did this mummy come from?”

  Robinson’s glasses had slipped down his nose yet again, and he stared over the lenses as though hypnotized by what he saw glowing in the mummy’s leg.

  It was Dr. Pulcillo who answered the question, her voice barely a whisper. “It was in the museum basement. Nick—Dr. Robinson found it back in January.”

  “And how did the museum obtain it?”

  Pulcillo shook her head. “We don’t know.”

  “There must be records. Something in your files to indicate where she came from.”

  “There are none for her,” said Robinson, at last finding his voice. “The Crispin Museum is a hundred thirty years old, and many records are missing. We have no idea how long she was stored in the basement.”

  “How did you happen to find her?”

  Even in that air-conditioned room, sweat had broken out on Dr. Robinson’s pale face. “After I was hired three years ago, I began an inventory of the collection. That’s how I came across her. She was in an unlabeled crate.”

  “And that didn’t surprise you? To find something as rare as an Egyptian mummy in an unlabeled crate?”

  “But mummies aren’t all that rare. In the 1800s, you could buy one in Egypt for only five dollars, so American tourists brought them home by the hundreds. They turn up in attics and antiques stores. A freak show in Niagara Falls even claims they had King Ramses the First in their collection. So it’s not all that surprising that we’d find a mummy in our museum.”

  “Dr. Isles?” said the radiologist. “We’ve got the scout film. You might want to take a look at it.”

  Maura turned to the monitor. Displayed on the screen was a conventional X-ray like the films she hung on her own viewing box in the morgue. She did not need a radiologist to interpret what she saw there.

  “There’s not much doubt about it now,” said Dr. Brier.

  No. There’s no doubt whatsoever. That’s a bullet in the leg.

  Maura pulled out her cell phone.

  “Dr. Isles?” said Robinson. “Whom are you calling?”

  “I’m arranging for transport to the morgue,” she said. “Madam X is now a medical examiner’s case.”

  THREE

  “Is it just my imagination,” said Detective Barry Frost, “or do you and I catch all the weird ones?”

  Madam X was definitely one of the weird ones, thought Detective Jane Rizzoli as she drove past TV news vans and turned into the parking lot of the medical examiner’s building. It was only eight AM, and already the hyenas were yapping, ravenous for details of the ultimate cold case—a case that Jane had greeted with skeptical laughter when Maura had phoned last night. The sight of the news vans made Jane realize that maybe it was time to get serious, time to consider the possibility that this was not, after all, some elaborate practical joke being played on her by the singularly humorless medical examiner.

  She pulled into a parking space and sat eyeing the vans, wondering how many more cameras would be waiting out here when she and Frost came back out of the building.

  “At least this one shouldn’t smell bad,” Jane said.

  “But mummies can give you diseases, you know.”

  Jane turned to her partner, whose pale and boyish face looked genuinely worried. “What diseases?” she asked.

  “Since Alice has been away, I’ve been watching a lot of TV. Last night I saw this show on the Discovery Channel, about mummies that carry these spores.”

  “Ooh. Scary spores.”

  “It’s no joke,” he insisted. “They can make you sick.”

  “Geez, I hope Alice gets home soon. You’re getting overdosed on the Discovery Channel.”

  They stepped out of the car into cloying humidity that made Jane’s already unruly dark hair spring into frizzy waves. During her four years as a homicide detective, she had made this walk into the medical examiner’s building many times, slip-sliding across ice in January, dashing through rain in March, and slogging across pavement as hot as ash in August. These few dozen paces were familiar to her, as was the grim destination. She’d believed this walk would become easier over time, that one day she’d feel immune to any horrors the stainless-steel table might serve up. But since her daughter Regina’s birth a year ago, death held more terror for her than it ever had before. Motherhood didn’t make you stronger; it made you vulnerable and afraid of what death could steal from you.

  Today, though, the subject waiting in the morgue inspired fascination, not horror. When Jane stepped into the autopsy suite anteroom, she crossed straight to the window, eager for her first glimpse of the subject on the table.

  Madam X was what The Boston Globe had called the mummy, a catchy moniker that conjured up a vision of sultry beauty, a Cleopatra with dark eyes. Jane saw a dried-out husk wrapped in rags.

  “She looks like a human tamale,” said Jane.

  “Who’s the girl?” asked Frost, staring through the window.

  There were two people in the room whom Jane did not recognize. The man was tall and gangly, professorial glasses perched on his nose. The young woman was a petite brunette wearing blue jeans beneath an autopsy gown. “Those must be the museum archaeologists. They were both going to be here.”

  “She’s an archaeologist? Wow.”

  Jane gave him an annoyed jab with her elbow. “Alice leaves town for a few weeks, and you forget you’re a married man.”

  “I just never pictured an archaeologist looking as hot as her.”

  They pulled on shoe covers and autopsy gowns and pushed into the lab.

  “Hey, Doc,” said Jane. “Is this really one for us?”

  Maura turned from the light box, and her gaze, as usual, was dead serious. While the other pathologists might crack jokes or toss out ironic comments over the autopsy table, it was rare to hear Maura so much as laugh in the presence of the dead. “We’re about to find out.” She introduced the pair Jane had seen through the window. “This is the curator, Dr. Nicholas Robinson. And his colleague, Dr. Josephine Pulcillo.”

  “You’re both with the Crispin Museum?” asked Jane.

  “And they’re very unhappy about what I’m planning to do here,” said Maura.

  “It’s destructive,” said Robinson. “There has to be some other way to get this information besides cutting her open.”

  “That’s why I wanted you to be here, Dr. Robinson,” said Maura. “To help me minimize the damage. The last thing I want to do is destroy an antiquity.”

  “I thought the CT scan last night clearly showed a bullet,” said Jane.

  “Those are the X-rays we shot this morning,” said Maura, pointing to the light box. “What do you think?”

  Jane approached the display and studied the films clipped there. Glowing within the right calf was what certainly looked to her like a bullet. “Yeah, I can see why this might’ve freaked you out last night.”

  “I did not freak out.”

  Jane laughed. “You were as close to it as I’ve ever heard you.”

  “I admit, I was damn shocked when I saw it. We all were.” Maura pointed to the bones of the right lower leg. “Notice how the fibula’s been fractured, presumably by this projectile.”

  “You said it happened while she was still alive?”

  “You can see early callus formation. This bone was in the process of healing when she died.”

  “But her wrappings are two thousand years old,” said Dr. Robinson. “We’ve confirmed it.”

  Jane stared hard at the X-ray, struggling to come up with a logical explanation for what they were looking at. “Maybe this isn’t a bullet. Maybe it’s some sort of ancient metal thingie. A spear tip or something.”

  “That is not a spear tip, Jane,” said Maura. “It’s a bullet.”

  “Then dig it out. Prove it to me.”

&
nbsp; “And if I do?”

  “Then we have a hell of a mind bender, don’t we? I mean, what are the possible explanations here?”

  “You know what Alice said when I called her about it last night?” Frost said. “‘Time travel.’ That was the first thing she thought.”

  Jane laughed. “Since when did Alice go woo-woo on you?”

  “It’s theoretically possible, you know, to travel back in time,” he said. “Bring a gun back to ancient Egypt.”

  Maura cut in impatiently: “Can we stick to real possibilities here?”

  Jane frowned at the bright chunk of metal that looked like so many she had seen before glowing in countless X-rays of lifeless limbs and shattered skulls. “I’m having trouble coming up with any of those,” she said. “So why don’t you just cut her open and see what that metal thing is? Maybe these archaeologists are right. Maybe you’re jumping to conclusions, Doc.”

  Robinson said, “As curator, it’s my duty to protect her and not let her be mindlessly ripped apart. Can you at least limit the damage to the relevant area?”

  Maura nodded. “That’s a reasonable approach.” She moved to the table. “Let’s turn her over. If there’s an entrance wound, it will be in the right calf.”

  “It’s best if we work together,” said Robinson. He went to the head, and Pulcillo moved to the feet. “We need to support the whole body and not put strain on any part of her. So if four of us could pitch in?”

  Maura slipped gloved hands beneath the shoulders and said, “Detective Frost, could you support the hips?”

  Frost hesitated, eyeing the stained linen wrappings. “Shouldn’t we put on masks or something?”

  “We’re just turning her over,” said Maura.

  “I’ve heard they carry diseases. You breathe in these spores and you get pneumonia.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Jane. She snapped on gloves and stepped up to the table. Sliding her hands beneath the mummy’s hips, she said: “I’m ready.”

  “Okay, lift,” said Robinson. “Now rotate her. That’s it…”

  “Wow, she hardly weighs anything,” said Jane.

  “A living human body’s mostly water. Remove the organs, dry out the carcass, and you end up with just a fraction of its former weight. She probably weighs only around fifty pounds, wrappings and all.”

  “Kind of like beef jerky, huh?”

  “That’s exactly what she is. Human jerky. Now let’s ease her down. Gently.”

  “You know, I wasn’t kidding about the spores,” said Frost. “I saw this show.”

  “Are you talking about the King Tut curse?” said Maura.

  “Yeah,” said Frost. “That’s what I’m talking about! All those people who died after they went into his tomb. They breathed in some kind of spores and got sick.”

  “Aspergillus,” said Robinson. “When Howard Carter’s team disturbed the tomb, they probably breathed in spores that had collected inside over the centuries. Some of them came down with fatal cases of aspergillus pneumonia.”

  “So Frost isn’t just bullshitting?” said Jane. “There really was a mummy’s curse?”

  Annoyance flashed in Robinson’s eyes. “Of course there was no curse. Yes, a few people died, but after what Carter and his team did to poor Tutankhamen, maybe there should have been a curse.”

  “What did they do to him?” asked Jane.

  “They brutalized him. They sliced him open, broke his bones, and essentially tore him apart in the search for jewels and amulets. They cut him up in pieces to get him out of the coffin, pulling off his arms and legs. They severed his head. It wasn’t science. It was desecration.” He looked down at Madam X, and Jane saw admiration, even affection in his gaze. “We don’t want the same thing to happen to her.”

  “The last thing I want to do is mangle her,” said Maura. “So let’s unwrap her just enough to find out what we’re dealing with here.”

  “You probably won’t be able to just unwrap her,” said Robinson. “If the inner strips were soaked in resin, as per tradition, they’ll be stuck together as solid as glue.”

  Maura turned to the X-ray for one more look, then reached for a scalpel and tweezers. Jane had watched Maura slice other bodies, but never before had she seen her hesitate so long, her blade hovering over the calf as though afraid to make the first cut. What they were about to do would forever damage Madam X, and Drs. Robinson and Pulcillo both were watching with outright disapproval in their eyes.

  Maura made the first cut. This was not the usual confident slice into flesh. Instead, she used the tweezers to delicately lift the band of linen so that her blade slit through successive layers of fabric, strip by strip. “It’s peeling away quite easily,” she said.

  Dr. Pulcillo frowned. “This isn’t traditional. Normally the bandages would be doused in molten resin. In the 1830s, when they unwrapped mummies, they sometimes had to pry the bandages off.”

  “What was the point of the resin, anyway?” asked Frost.

  “To make the wrappings stick together. It gave them rigidity, like making a papier-mâché container to protect the contents.”

  “I’m already through the final layer,” Maura said. “There’s no resin adhering to any of this.”

  Jane craned forward to catch a glimpse of what lay under the wrapping. “That’s her skin? It looks like old leather.”

  “Dried skin is precisely what leather is, Detective Rizzoli,” said Robinson. “In a way.”

  Maura reached for the scissors and gingerly snipped away the strips, exposing a larger patch of skin. It looked like brown parchment wrapped around bones. She glanced, once again, at the X-ray, and swung a magnifier over the calf. “I can’t find any entry hole in the skin.”

  “So the wound’s not postmortem,” said Jane.

  “It goes along with what we see on that X-ray. That foreign body was probably introduced while she was still alive. She lived long enough for the fractured bone to start mending. For the wound to close over.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “A few weeks. Perhaps a month.”

  “Someone would have to care for her during that time, right? She’d have to be fed and sheltered.”

  Maura nodded. “This makes the manner of death all the more difficult to determine.”

  Robinson asked, “Manner of death? What do you mean?”

  “In other words,” said Jane, “we’re wondering if she was murdered.”

  “Let’s settle the most pressing issue first.” Maura reached for the knife. Mummification had toughened the tissues to the consistency of leather, and the blade did not cut easily into the withered flesh.

  Glancing across the table, Jane saw Dr. Pulcillo’s lips tighten, as though to stifle a protest. But as much as she might object to the procedure, the woman could not look away. They all leaned in, even spore-phobic Frost, their attention glued to that exposed patch of leg as Maura picked up forceps and plunged the tips into the incision. It took only seconds of digging around in the shriveled flesh before the teeth of the forceps clamped down on the prize. Maura dropped it onto a steel tray, and it gave a metallic clang.

  Dr. Pulcillo sucked in a sharp breath. This was no spear tip, no broken bit of knife blade.

  Maura finally stated the obvious. “I think we can now safely say that Madam X is not two thousand years old.”

  FOUR

  “I don’t understand,” Dr. Pulcillo murmured. “The linen was analyzed. The carbon dating confirmed the age.”

  “But that’s a bullet,” said Jane, pointing to the tray. “A twenty-two. Your analysis was all screwed up.”

  “It’s a well-respected lab! They were certain about the date.”

  “You could both be right,” said Robinson quietly.

  “Yeah?” Jane looked at him. “I’d like to know how.”

  He took a deep breath and stepped back from the table, as though needing the space to think. “I see it come up for sale from time to time. I don’t know how much
of it is genuine, but I’m sure there are caches of the real thing out there on the antiquities market.”

  “What?”

  “Mummy wrappings. They’re easier to find than the bodies themselves. I’ve seen them on eBay.”

  Jane gave a startled laugh. “You can go online and buy mummy wrappings?”

  “There was once a thriving international trade in mummies. They were ground up and used as medicines. Carted off to England for fertilizer. Wealthy tourists brought them home and held unwrapping parties. You’d invite your friends over to watch while you peeled away the linen. Since amulets and jewels were often among the wrappings, it was sort of like a treasure hunt, uncovering little trinkets for your guests.”

  “That was entertainment?” said Frost. “Unwrapping a corpse?”

  “It was done in some of the finest Victorian homes,” Robinson said. “It goes to show you how little regard they had for the dead of Egypt. And when they’d finish unwrapping the corpse, it would be disposed of or burned. But the wrappings were often kept as souvenirs. That’s why you still find stashes of them for sale.”

  “So these wrappings could be ancient,” said Frost, “even if the body isn’t.”

  “It would explain the carbon fourteen dating. But as for Madam X herself…” Robinson shook his head in bewilderment.

  “We still can’t prove this was homicide,” said Frost. “You can’t convict someone based on a gunshot wound that was already healing.”

  “I kind of doubt she volunteered for mummification,” said Jane.

  “Actually,” said Robinson, “it’s possible that she did.”

  Everyone turned to stare at the curator, who looked perfectly serious.

  “Volunteer to have her brains and organs ripped out?” said Jane. “No, thanks.”

  “Some people have bequeathed their bodies for precisely that purpose.”

  “Hey, I saw that show, too,” said Frost. “Another one on Discovery Channel. Some archaeologist actually mummified a guy.”

  Jane stared down at the wrapped cadaver. She imagined being encased in layer after layer of smothering bandages. Being bound in a linen straitjacket for a thousand, two thousand years, until a day when some curious archaeologist would decide to strip away the cloth and reveal her shriveled remains. Not dust to dust, but flesh to leather. She swallowed. “Why would anyone volunteer for that?”