The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

her?”
    Even in that air-conditioned room, sweat had broken out on Dr. Robinson’s pale face. “After I was hired three years ago, I began an inventory of the collection. That’s how I came across her. She was in an unlabeled crate.”
    “And that didn’t surprise you? To find something as rare as an Egyptian mummy in an unlabeled crate?”
    “But mummies
aren’t
all that rare. In the 1800s, you could buy one in Egypt for only five dollars, so American tourists brought them home by the hundreds. They turn up in attics and antiques stores. A freak show in Niagara Falls even claims they had King Ramses the First in their collection. So it’s not all that surprising that we’d find a mummy in our museum.”
    “Dr. Isles?” said the radiologist. “We’ve got the scout film. You might want to take a look at it.”
    Maura turned to the monitor. Displayed on the screen was a conventional X-ray like the films she hung on her own viewing box in the morgue. She did not need a radiologist to interpret what she saw there.
    “There’s not much doubt about it now,” said Dr. Brier.
    No. There’s no doubt whatsoever. That’s a bullet in the leg.
    Maura pulled out her cell phone.
    “Dr. Isles?” said Robinson. “Whom are you calling?”
    “I’m arranging for transport to the morgue,” she said. “Madam X is now a medical examiner’s case.”

THREE
     
    “Is it just my imagination,” said Detective Barry Frost, “or do you and I catch all the weird ones?”
    Madam X was definitely one of the weird ones, thought Detective Jane Rizzoli as she drove past TV news vans and turned into the parking lot of the medical examiner’s building. It was only eight AM , and already the hyenas were yapping, ravenous for details of the ultimate cold case—a case that Jane had greeted with skeptical laughter when Maura had phoned last night. The sight of the news vans made Jane realize that maybe it was time to get serious, time to consider the possibility that this was not, after all, some elaborate practical joke being played on her by the singularly humorless medical examiner.
    She pulled into a parking space and sat eyeing the vans, wondering how many more cameras would be waiting out here when she and Frost came back out of the building.
    “At least this one shouldn’t smell bad,” Jane said.
    “But mummies can give you diseases, you know.”
    Jane turned to her partner, whose pale and boyish face looked genuinely worried. “What diseases?” she asked.
    “Since Alice has been away, I’ve been watching a lot of TV. Last night I saw this show on the Discovery Channel, about mummies that carry these spores.”
    “Ooh. Scary spores.”
    “It’s no joke,” he insisted. “They can make you sick.”
    “Geez, I hope Alice gets home soon. You’re getting overdosed on the Discovery Channel.”
    They stepped out of the car into cloying humidity that made Jane’s already unruly dark hair spring into frizzy waves. During her four years as a homicide detective, she had made this walk into the medical examiner’s building many times, slip-sliding across ice in January, dashing through rain in March, and slogging across pavement as hot as ash in August. These few dozen paces were familiar to her, as was the grim destination. She’d believed this walk would become easier over time, that one day she’d feel immune to any horrors the stainless-steel table might serve up. But since her daughter Regina’s birth a year ago, death held more terror for her than it ever had before. Motherhood didn’t make you stronger; it made you vulnerable and afraid of what death could steal from you.
    Today, though, the subject waiting in the morgue inspired fascination, not horror. When Jane stepped into the autopsy suite anteroom, she crossed straight to the window, eager for her first glimpse of the subject on the table.
    Madam X
was what
The Boston Globe
had called the mummy, a catchy moniker that conjured up a vision of sultry beauty, a Cleopatra with dark eyes. Jane saw a dried-out husk wrapped in rags.
    “She looks like a human tamale,” said Jane.
    “Who’s the girl?” asked Frost, staring through the window.
    There were two people in the room whom Jane did not recognize. The man was tall and gangly, professorial glasses perched on his nose. The young woman was a petite brunette wearing blue jeans beneath an autopsy gown. “Those must be the museum archaeologists. They were both going to be here.”
    “
She’s
an