Dead Guilty

serial killer to me. Not that I’ve had any experi ence with serial killers, but the last two killers seemed to be looking for something. I’m kind of thinking it may be Steven Mayberry. And he, Chris Edwards and Raymond Waller were involved in something.’’ She shook her head. ‘‘But none of them have any criminal record that we know about, and as far as I know, they were all decent, hard-working guys.’’
Diane nodded. Not a bad analysis, she thought. ‘‘Fortunately, the who and why are Chief Garnett and Sheriff Braden’s problem. We just uncover the evidence.’’
Neva looked at the tangle of rope. ‘‘What are you doing here?’’
‘‘I’m trying to figure out what kind of knot was tied in the rope.’’
‘‘You can do that?’’
‘‘So far, no. But that hasn’t stopped me. I’ll leave it alone for a while. Maybe something will come to me if I get my mind off of it.’’
    Diane faxed her initial report on the analysis of the skeletons to Sheriff Braden, letting him know that photographs and copies of the report would arrive by messenger in the afternoon. By the time all that was taken care of, she was starved. She brought tomato soup in a Styrofoam cup and a chef salad back to her museum office. As she sipped the soup and ate her salad, her gaze rested on envelopes containing the mummy’s X-rays sitting in her in-box. It made her smile. Diane was getting into the mummy thing like the rest of her staff. She quickly finished her lunch, disposed of the remains and sat down at the light table.
    She selected the X-rays showing the thorax—the midsection—of the mummy. As was her custom, she started by examining the pelvis. It was a male pelvis. That was no surprise. The innominates, the large flat hip bones, showed signs of thinning. It looked as though he had suffered inflammation of his ischial tuberosities—the site of several muscle attachments as well as the place where he sat.
    However, it was the mummy’s lumbar vertebrae that were the most interesting. She pulled out two other X-rays, a side and back view, from the envelope. He also suffered from vertebral scoliosis, and on the margins of the body of his lumbar vertebrae there was a significant degree of lipping.
    Interesting. While the condition of Red Doe’s lum bar vertebrae was caused by excessive arching of her back, the mummy’s condition was caused by a pro longed position in the opposite direction. The mummy, whoever he was, had spent long periods bending over in a seated position.
    Diane stared at the X-rays, but saw the mummy and tried to visualize the person. What came to mind was a small Egyptian statue she had seen—a scribe in a cross-legged seated position. The kind of inflammation in the ischium was also called weaver’s bottom, be cause of the prolonged sitting in front of a loom that weavers had to endure. Could the mummy have been a scribe? Or maybe he was some artisan, like a jewelry maker, who was seated over his work for hours a day. She liked both of those possibilities.
    Diane examined the remainder of the X-rays and found more evidence of arthritis, but no other condi tions. Perhaps when they discovered when he had lived, her observations would have more meaning.
    Andie brought in more mail for Diane to go through.
‘‘Probably more requests for mummy tissue,’’ said Andie. ‘‘Want me to go ahead and deal with it?’’
‘‘Please.’’ Diane handed them off to Andie.
‘‘You’ve been looking at the X-rays. What did you find?’’ Andie pulled up a chair and sat with her elbows on the desk and her chin in her hands.
Diane went into detail about all of the conditions and her speculation about what they meant. ‘‘We should get even more information from the CT scan.’’
‘‘This is so cool. Do you think he could be a pha raoh? Maybe one with a hobby?’’
‘‘I hope not. We’ll have to give him back to the Egyptian government if that turns out to be the case. They like to keep their heads of state.’’
‘‘Oh, I never thought of that. Well, scribe is good. Maybe he was an architect. Did they spend more time drawing up plans or building stuff?’’
‘‘I have no idea. You’ll have to look to Jonas and Kendel for details of Egyptian life. I’m going to have Neva draw his face from the data we get from the CT scan.’’
‘‘Okay, now, that is really neat. This is as much fun as when they were assembling the Albertosaurus .’’
Diane nodded. ‘‘It is, isn’t