Bones of the Lost

he devote sufficient energy to finding her killer?
    Yes, he would, I admitted to myself. Druggie hooker or not, the kid turned up dead on Skinny’s patch, and he would look upon it as a personal challenge.
    Then why so anxious?
    Katy? My abandoned vehicle and purse? The goddamn blisters?
    Whatever.
    I crossed to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. Took a look in the mirror. Assessed the face looking back.
    Intense green eyes. Weary, but determined. A few starbust wrinkles at the corners, well earned. Chin and lids holding firm. Dark blond hair yanked into a pony, not having a good one.
    “Right, then. Peruvian dogs.”
    The image in the glass mouthed the same words. Nodded the same nod.
    I bunched and tossed my hand towel and headed out.
    While the new MCME facility is immense, the same is not true of my office. Were a realtor to advertise it for rental, she’d use descriptors like “cozy” and “snug.” My desk takes up most of the space. File cabinets, coat tree. If Larabee steps in, it’s crowded. If the visitor is Slidell, forget about breathing.
    I’m good with the square footage. It’s mine. No one encroaches. Mostly I use it for writing reports or examining files. Like the one lying on my blotter.
    I sat down and opened the cover. On top was a form requesting an anthropology consult. I skimmed the contents.
    Case number. Morgue number. Police incident number. Investigating officer, agency. Larabee was the requesting pathologist.
    I skipped to the Summary of Known Facts. The brief, hand-scrawled paragraph contained nothing I hadn’t heard from Slidell. Suspicion of smuggled antiquities, objects confiscated at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. Dominick Rockett.
    I moved on to Description of Specimens. The items in question were identified as mummy bundles. Four in number. Peruvian in origin. Possibly Inca. Likely obtained from a cemetery.
    My eyes dropped to the final section: Expertise Requested. The boxes beside “Exhumation,” “Biological Profile,” and “Trauma Analysis” had been left unchecked. Beside the category “Other” were six scribbled words:
Analysis and written report. Human remains?
    I set the form aside and thumbed through the stack of paper-clipped photos.
    In the first three, the bundles lay side by side, wrappings intact.Though desiccated and discolored with age, each seemed in pretty good shape. Fair enough. The Peruvian desert would have provided a reasonably dry environment, a burial context kind to preservation.
    The next several photos showed one of the bundles partially unwrapped. I could see what appeared to be a shriveled dog’s head, eyelids closed, fur still covering one flattened ear.
    I dug back to my grad-school days, to a course on South American archaeology. And came up with little beyond the basics. Fifteenth century. The Andes Mountains. Machu Pichu. The Quechua language. Inti, the sun god.
    I lined up the photos. Stared. A gaggle of brain cells coughed up an article I’d read maybe five years earlier.
National Geographic?
The Chiribaya, a pre-Inca population living in the Osmore River valley, some five hundred miles southeast of Lima. The Chiribaya had interred their dogs along with their dead.
    I booted my laptop, opened Google, and entered a few key words. Peru. Canines. Mummies.
    Yep. The Chiribaya buried their dogs between the graves of their dearly departed. Some with blankets and food for the long journey onward.
    Now I understood my involvement in the case. I was to make sure there were no human bones caught up in those bundles.
    According to the case board, the dogs were here. I could walk across the hall and unpack them.
    I didn’t.
    My thoughts kept drifting back to the hit-and-run victim, now under Larabee’s scalpel.
    My gaze fell on the photo closest to me, on a slash of white visible below the rolled gum of the unwrapped dog. A tooth. Perfect after centuries.
    Unlike the teeth of our young Jane Doe.
    I reclipped the photos and closed the file.
    Sat a moment.
    Reopened the file.
    Checked a name.
    Picked up and dialed the phone.

“ UNITED STATES IMMIGRATION and customs enforcement. How may I direct your call?”
    I asked for Luther Dew, the agent working the mummified-dog case.
    ICE does not offer music to callers placed on hold. Bored and agitated, my mind started playing What Songs Would Suit? Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man”? Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America”? Merle Haggard’s “Movin’ On”?
    A