The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

about the corpse. And they discovered that she was not an old woman when she died, but a girl of only about sixteen. A girl who had suffered from a crooked spine. A girl who was murdered. She was stabbed beneath the collarbone, and a band was tightened around her neck until she strangled. Then she was placed facedown in the bog, where she lay for centuries. Until those two peat cutters found her and revealed her to the world.”
    “Centuries?”
    Vandenbrink nodded. “Carbon fourteen dating tells us she’s two thousand years old. When Jesus walked the earth, that poor girl may already have been lying in her grave.”
    “Even after two centuries, they could tell how she died?” said Frost.
    “She was that well preserved, from her hair to the cloth around her neck. Oh, there was damage done to her body, but it had been inflicted far more recently, when she was dredged up with the peat. Enough of her was left intact to form a portrait of who she was. And how she must have suffered. That’s the miracle of bogs, Detective. They give us a window back in time. Hundreds of these bodies have been found in Holland and Denmark, Ireland and England. Each one is a time traveler, an unfortunate ambassador of sorts, sent to us from people who left no written records. Except for the cruelties they carved into their victims.”
    “But this woman”—Jane nodded at the body on the table—
    “she’s obviously not two thousand years old.”
    “Yet her state of preservation is every bit as exquisite. Look, you can even see the ridges on her soles and her finger pads. And see how her skin is dark, like leather? Yet her features clearly tell us she’s Caucasian.” He looked at Maura. “I completely concur with your opinion, Dr. Isles.”
    Frost said, “So you’re telling us this body was preserved in the same way as that girl in the Netherlands?”
    Vandenbrink nodded. “What you have here is a modern bog body.”
    “That’s why I called Dr. Vandenbrink,” said Maura. “He’s been studying bog bodies for decades.”
    “Unlike Egyptian mummification techniques,” said Vandenbrink, “there’s no written record of how to make a bog body. This is a completely natural and accidental process that we don’t entirely understand.”
    “Then how would the killer know how to do it?” Jane asked.
    “Within the bog body community, there’s been quite a bit of discussion about just this topic.”
    Jane gave a surprised laugh. “You have a community?”
    “Of course. We have our own meetings, our own cocktail parties. A great deal of what we discuss is purely speculative. But we do have some hard science to back up the theories. We know, for instance, that there are several characteristics about bogs that contribute to corpse preservation. They’re highly acidic, they’re oxygen-poor, and they contain layers of sphagnum moss. These factors help arrest decomposition and preserve soft tissues. They darken the skin to the color you see in this body here. If allowed to steep for centuries, eventually this corpse’s bones will dissolve, leaving only the preserved flesh, leathery and completely flexible.”
    “Is it the moss that does it?” asked Frost.
    “It’s a vital part of the process. There’s a chemical reaction between bacteria and the polysaccharides found in sphagnum moss. Sphagnum binds bacterial cells so they can’t degrade organic materials. If you bind the bacteria, you can arrest decomposition. The whole process happens in an acidic soup that contains dead moss and tannins and holocellulose. In other words, bog water.”
    “And that’s it? Just stick the body in bog water, and you’re done?”
    “It’s a little more exacting than that. There’ve been several experiments using piglet cadavers in Ireland and the UK. These were buried in various peat bogs, then exhumed months later for study. Since pigs are biochemically similar to us, we can assume the results would be the same for humans.”
    “And they turned into bog pigs?”
    “If the conditions were just right. First, the pigs had to be completely submerged or they would decompose. Second, they had to be placed into the bog immediately after death. If you let the corpse sit exposed for just a few hours before you submerged it, it would go on to decompose anyway.”
    Frost and Jane looked at each other. “So our perp couldn’t waste any time once he killed her,” said Jane.
    Vandenbrink nodded. “She had to be submerged soon after death.