The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

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