by Mary Malloy
Lizzie explained her connection to the corpse. “St. Pat’s College is borrowing a number of things from an Italian family for an exhibition that opens in September. This mummy was in an Egyptian sarcophagus and wasn’t actually supposed to be shipped here.” She was afraid he was going to ask her about export permits and human remains and was preparing her answers, but he quickly moved on.
“So the victim wasn’t shot here in Boston.”
“Definitely not.”
“Okay,” he said slowly, turning to Ross. “You’re the doctor here?”
Ross said that he was.
“Any idea on a time of death?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Not even to a decade or a century?”
“She has fillings in her teeth, so I assume she was killed in the twentieth century, but without more evidence I wouldn’t care to speculate as to a decade.”
The coroner arrived and the same information was exchanged again as the mummy was transferred to their gurney and taken away.
“Alrighty then,” the head detective said, closing the book in which he had been taking notes. “Let’s see what the coroner has to say.”
Chapter 28
Jackie insisted on coming home with Lizzie that evening to talk about the strange turn of events with the mummy.
“Who do you think it is?” she asked over and over again.
“How could I possibly know the answer to that?” Lizzie answered just as often.
Martin asked her if she should contact someone in the Gonzaga family to warn them in case the police contacted them.
“Oh my god! I should call Father O’Toole and warn him! He’s coming to see the collection tomorrow.” She dialed the personal number of the college president and when he answered she began to explain.
“What do you mean it was shipped accidentally?” was his first question. His voice was so controlled that Lizzie couldn’t tell if he was angry.
“The conservator and I removed the mummy from the sarcophagus because I didn’t think it was essential for the exhibit, and consequently I didn’t go through the process of getting the required paperwork to bring it here. He made a box to store it in and it was in a separate part of the room and never even had a shipping label put on it. But somehow it got sent anyway.” She longed to add, “It must be that idiot Justin Carrere, who I knew was going to be a problem the first day I met him!” Instead she waited silently for him to respond.
“And explain again why the police are involved?”
“Professor Haworth and I had been corresponding about the sarcophagus and I told him about the mummy. He came to see it, it seemed odd to him, and we decided to take it to the infirmary to x-ray it. That’s when we found that it wasn’t an ancient Egyptian, but a more modern person who had been shot in the head.”
“Do you have any idea who it is?”
“I’m sorry, father, but I don’t.”
“Can you please figure that out very quickly so that we can control this situation?” He hung up the phone before Lizzie had a chance to respond.
She looked at Martin and Jackie. “He wants me to identify the corpse.”
“Hold on a second,” Martin said. “You will recall that you have been in situations not unlike this before and were almost killed. If there’s a murder victim, then there is a murderer, and he might not be so happy that his well-concealed corpse has suddenly been discovered.”
“If he’s still alive,” Jackie added. “You need to figure out when the victim died.”
“Ross Wiley said that a forensic dentist might be able to say something about when and where her fillings were put in. I think I’ll call him.”
“And I think we should get John Haworth over here to help us,” Jackie added. “He’s the mummy specialist,” she said as an aside to Martin.
“This could be a mafia thing,” Martin said. “You have no idea what you are getting into.”
Lizzie put her hand up as a plea for silence. “Let me just think for a minute. Why would the mafia store a corpse in the Gonzaga house?”
“Hiding in plain sight?” Jackie offered.
Lizzie put her hand up again and shook her head. “No. If the books and movies are right, they want bodies to disappear.”
She had to put her hand up a third time as both her companions began to object. “I know, we can’t depend on novels and movies for factual information, but let me just continue to work through this.” She walked back and forth across the room and thought through her visit to the Gonzaga house from the day she arrived in Bologna. What had she heard about the mummy case?
“It must be Patrick,” she said. “Patrizio Gonzaga. He beat his nephew once for trying to open the sarcophagus, and he even told me that he went to Egypt, and studied the subject at the University.” She clapped her hands together and looked from Martin to Jackie and back. “I think he might actually have told me that he knew enough about mummies to make one!”
“That crazy old man?” Martin tried to rein in her enthusiasm. “Are you saying he’s a murderer?”
“Not necessarily,” Lizzie answered, saying the word so slowly that she hissed through the start of each syllable. Then she thought aloud, speaking as much to herself as to the others. “What if he just wanted to make a mummy as an experiment, wanted to see what it was like, and got hold of a corpse to try it.”
“How would he get the corpse of a murder victim?” Martin asked.
Lizzie stopped her pacing and turned to him again. “During the war!” she said. “He could easily have gotten a corpse during the war.”
“And where would he have made the mummy? You told me that there were a hundred people living in the house then, so it certainly wasn’t there.”
“That is a problem,” Lizzie said, starting to pace again. “And even the caves around the city were filled with people then, partisans, escaped prisoners, people fleeing bombs…”
“Would the coroner ever have given him an unclaimed body for such a grisly experiment?” Jackie asked.
Lizzie thought about this for a moment. “He certainly had good contacts at the University, and they have a big anatomical collection, but beyond that, I don’t know.” She rotated on her heel and looked at Jackie. “That would mean that this wasn’t during the war, but either before or after.”
“Which seems more likely?”
“Af-ter,” she said, again dividing her words into their separate components as she thought and talked at the same time. “After the war. He went to Egypt with his mother after the war, and that’s when he got interested in mummies.”
There was a knock at the door and Martin went to answer it, returning a few minutes later with one of the two detectives who had come to claim the corpse at the campus clinic. He was accompanied by a woman he introduced as Ann Crandall, another homicide detective. Ann asked a few questions of everyone in the room and then requested a private audience with Lizzie.
As she shook Lizzie’s hand, Ann explained that she frequently was part of investigations where the victim was a young woman, especially if there were extraordinary circumstances. “Mummification definitely counts as an extraordinary circumstance,” she said. “From what I’ve heard so far, this is probably not going to be a high priority for my department, as it seems likely that the crime was committed outside our jurisdiction. But until we are certain of that, I want to get the investigation started.”
“Of course,” Lizzie said, nodding.
“Do you have any idea who she is?”
The detective looked steadily at Lizzie, holding her gaze until Lizzie looked away, thinking that this must be a very effective way to either catch guilty people in lies, or make innocent people feel guilty.
She looked down at her hands, then up to meet Ann’s steady gaze. “I don’t know who she is.”
“Do you have a hunch?”<
br />
“No. Not even the slightest notion of who she might be.”
Ann made a quick note on the pad she carried. “Do you know who killed her?”
Again Lizzie said no. Even if she thought that Patrizio might have mummified the corpse, she couldn’t imagine him shooting a woman in the head. Her thought must have made some small change in the movement of her eyes or hands, or some alteration in her expression, because Ann seemed to sense that she might actually know something that could be important but was hesitant to share it.
“What is it?” she asked softly, then waited silently for Lizzie to answer.
“I don’t want to say anything that will make you suspicious of a person who is probably innocent of all wrongdoing,” Lizzie said.
“Tell me what you are thinking and I’ll tell you if it is relevant,” Ann said.
“I have an idea of who might have mummified her, but I don’t necessarily think that should make him a suspect in her death.”
“Why would he mummify her if he didn’t kill her?”
“As an experiment.”
“And how would he get her body for such an experiment?”
“From the coroner, or from the University of Bologna’s anatomy lab—which might have been given her corpse if she were unidentified and unclaimed.”
“When would this have been?” Ann asked.
Lizzie answered that she suspected it had happened in the 1950s or 60s.
“I believe you said that you found this mummy in a private house?” Ann continued.
Lizzie nodded and Ann asked her for the details. As she gave the detective information to contact Cosimo Gonzaga, Lizzie realized that she had better call him immediately so that he would know what was happening when the Italian police began banging on his door.
When Ann left, Lizzie did just that. She knew she would catch Cosimo in the middle of the night, but had such a feeling of urgency about the situation that she dialed directly to his personal number without hesitating.
“Salve,” came the answer, in a voice that indicated he had been waked from sleeping.
“Cosimo,” Lizzie said urgently. “A situation has developed here that you need to know about.”
“Who is this?” he demanded.
“It’s Lizzie Manning,” she answered. “I’m calling from Boston.”
He began to sound both more awake and more civil. “Lizzie,” he said, “how can I help you? Has something happened in the shipping of the collection?”
“Yes, but be assured that nothing is damaged. Unexpectedly, the mummy was sent here.”
“The mummy?” He was clearly confused. “You weren’t expecting it?”
“No. For several reasons I decided to leave it behind. It required a special license and there were other complications that I didn’t want to deal with. Carmine made a case to store it in while the sarcophagus was traveling, and by accident it was shipped here.”
“Beppe…” he started.
Later she would love to surrender Justin to his uncle for punishment, but knew this was not the time.
“The mummy is not an ancient Egyptian,” she said quickly, before he could ask about his nephew. She explained everything that had happened as concisely as she could, cringing as she admitted that she had allowed the mummy to be x-rayed without his permission. “I’m afraid that you will be contacted about this by the police,” she said, concluding her speech. There was a long silence and then he spoke angrily in Italian and hung up the phone. The only word she had recognized was the name of his uncle, Patrizio.
Chapter 29
The coroner confirmed what they already expected. The victim was a woman in her thirties, shot in the head with a small caliber bullet.
“The bullet was homemade,” Ann Crandall explained to Lizzie. “Our lab says a mixture of metals formed in a mold.”
“Could it have been left over from World War II?” Lizzie asked.
“I don’t know, but I have people checking on it.”
“What about the fillings? Were you able to give her a date from them?”
The detective opened her notebook. “Apparently this woman had her first fillings in Germany in the 1930s.” She glanced up at Lizzie. “The forensic dentist gave me an earful about ‘amalgam wars,’ when a German scientist began to sound the alarm about mercury poisoning from fillings and the composition of the materials in the amalgam changed. There is also some acrylic bonding material in her mouth that is recognizable as work pioneered in Switzerland in the late 40s or early 50s.”
“I don’t suppose they can identify her from dental records,” Lizzie said.
Ann shook her head. “We have sent a copy of what we have to Interpol, but the agent I spoke to there says that pre-war records from Germany are very sketchy, and unless we can give them some idea of who the woman is they don’t really have a good place to start.” She once again gave Lizzie the detective’s gaze. “Do you want to tell me anything more about the man you think might have mummified the victim?”
It sounded so strange to be calling the mummy “the victim.” Lizzie had previously thought of it as an artifact. She had actually picked it up and moved it around both in Bologna and Boston. It had been so easy to disconnect herself from the notion of the mummy as a corpse, a “victim.” And what about Patrizio? He was such a pathetic old man, and from things she had read about him in Maggie’s correspondence he had always been a follower rather than a leader. Would he have had the imagination to mummify a corpse on his own?
“I’m hesitant to speak about any of this,” Lizzie said. “I don’t think that my opinion is relevant, and I don’t want to cast suspicion on someone merely because he is eccentric.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry I mentioned this to you, because I really don’t know anything about what happened to this women… the victim.”
Ann spared her the look, but spoke intensely. “I think that your instincts on this might be very helpful. They might help me get closer to the facts.” She looked up again to catch Lizzie’s eye. “And just because you give me a name doesn’t mean that man gets arrested and charged with a crime. He might be a link, though, to whoever killed this poor woman.” Another pause. “Even if she died a long ago time ago and far away she deserves our time and consideration.”
“You’re good at this,” Lizzie said admiringly. “You make me want to tell you, even against my own judgment.”
“Well, until Mr. Cosimo Gonzaga arrives from Italy this evening, you’re all I have.”
The room seemed to darken and Lizzie groaned. “Oh no. Cosimo is on his way here?”
The morning had been awful, trying to explain to Father O’Toole, Jim Kelliher, the cardinal and the Italian Consulate that the corpse of a murder victim had inadvertently been shipped to Boston to be part of her exhibit. They had been confused, angry, self-important and judgmental. Cosimo would be much, much worse. He had always had a slick patina of stylish niceness in Lizzie’s company in Bologna, but she had a feeling that under that could be a dark, dark interior.
“Oh no,” she said again.
Ann Crandall waited. “Are you going to tell me something?” she asked finally.
“No,” Lizzie said emphatically. “I am going to see what Cosimo Gonzaga has to say about it first.” She did not think she was under any obligation to answer the detective’s questions. She wasn’t a suspect in the case, but she could see that Ann was surprised by her sudden change of heart. She rose abruptly and went to the door.
“I’m sorry I need to meet with students in a few minutes,” she said.
Ann gave her the detective’s look, shook hands and left the room.
It was very hard to concentrate for the rest of the day on everything that still needed to be done on the exhibit. The designer and fabricators were busy building the cases and mounts and she wanted to be there whenever anyone was handling the collec
tion. Jimmy and Roscoe had been faithful to their word and she heard no mention of the mummy as she worked with them and the museum staff.
John Haworth came in at the end of the day and was not so circumspect. “I did a quick glance under the microscope at the linen and resin samples I took from the mummy, and compared them to the data bases on those materials,” he said, talking as he came into the room. “You won’t be surprised to learn that they are Italian manufactures. The resin is the same stuff they use on violin bows, a pine sap, and chemically not at all similar to the bitumen found in the Egyptian desert. It’s hard to put a date to it, but the linen is consistent with what got produced on twentieth-century industrial looms.”
Lizzie took him aside and whispered to him what she had learned from Detective Ann Crandall. “Keep this quiet, John,” she said earnestly. “All I need is for this to show up on someone’s Facebook page and it will be all over the Internet.”
“And you don’t think that would create more interest in your exhibit when it opens?”
“I don’t want that kind of interest, and the mummy is not going to be on exhibit anyway.” She put her hand to her face and massaged her temple with her fingertips. “Gad,” she said. “Father O’Toole is going to freak out when Cosimo Gonzaga gets here, which should be any minute now.”
She went back to her work: alligator, check, it had traveled safely, been beautifully restored by Carmine Moreale and would be one of the first things visitors would see when they came into the exhibit. Dell’Arca angel, check. Lizzie resisted putting her hand on the smooth marble of the carving as she checked it against her list. She had been rigorous in her instructions with her interns and everyone else involved in the process that nothing was to be touched with bare hands. Latex gloves were required for everything. She looked at the narwhal tusk and its fabulous stand, at the jars of bugs and reptiles, the books and prints, the Marquesan club, the Madonna painting by Guido Reni. The collection was wonderful, the exhibit would be the highlight of her career, a fitting way to celebrate the college’s centennial. A scandal over the mummified corpse of a murder victim being included in the collection would now probably overwhelm every other story about it. The only question was when the story would become public.
