Free Bloodletting by Michael McBride Page A

inordinately long period of time, but I'd imagine you'll find she's been treated with natron, a combination of sodium carbonate decahydrate and sodium bicarbonate, or possibly a more advanced chemical, which would accelerate the process of dehydration while preserving the integrity of the skin."
    "But why would someone do something like that?" Mondragon asked. "Whoever did this worked extremely hard to create the illusion of ritualistic Inca burial, but that's all it is. An illusion. Surely someone with such obscure anthropological knowledge would know the first thing we'd do is send samples for carbon dating. And right there, the illusion would be shattered. So why not just bury the body as it was?"
    "Judging by the fact that they're hardly buried at all beneath mere inches of sand and the effort invested into their appearance, whoever did this wanted them to be found," Carver said.
    "But the carbon dating would only delay the process by a couple of days at best," Elliot said. "I mean, we're talking about someone potentially spending years meticulously tending to the corpse, and all that just to delay the inevitable by days? This person would have to be psychotic."
    The three stood in silence, the implications hanging between them.
    "So what happens now?" Elliot finally asked.
    "The FBI assumes authority over your dig, which is now a crime scene," Carver said. "We'll take formal statements from each of you and provide a thorough debriefing, but for now, I have to ask that you allow me to escort you back to the tent so we don't destroy any possible evidence."
    Elliot swiped away a tear with the back of her hand. She had been so close. She had traveled halfway around the world at no small expense. She had barely slept at all in days. And with those words, the adrenaline fled her veins, and abandoned her to a level of exhaustion that nearly dropped her to her knees. She was mentally numb. All she wanted now was to curl up in a bed and sleep until all of this was a distant memory and begin the arduous task of returning to Peru after another handful of days in transit.
    "You okay?" Carver asked, resting his hand on her shoulder.
    She could only nod and turn away to look back out across the desert, which had once held such promise and hope, but was now just a desolate infinity of sand and death.
    Worse, she could still sense that there were more bodies to be exhumed from the ground, which had yet to taste its fill.
     
     
    III
     
     
    The Evidence Response Team from the Phoenix office of the Bureau had arrived while Carver and Wolfe had been taking statements from the archeology group, and was now poring over the bodies with the crime scene specialists from the Phoenix Police Department in a cooperative effort to combine resources. Fortunately, even with all of the activity, the media had yet to catch wind of their findings. Roadblocks had been erected along the lone road, but wouldn't prove much of a deterrent to anyone curious enough to veer off into the flat desert. Four more impromptu tents had been raised near the first, one to serve as an informal command center, the others to cover the now exposed bundled corpses and protect the integrity of the scene against the rising wind. Yellow police tape snapped from where it had been strung between shrubs. Four ERT agents swept the surrounding area with ground-penetrating radar machines, probing the sand for the unmistakable signals of bodies buried beneath. As Carver watched, one of the men produced a small pink flag on a thin metal post and planted it at his feet. There were four more scattered around the tents.
    Nine bodies already.
    He ducked back into the original tent and walked to the far side of the widened pit to better see around the men and women from the various crime response and forensics units. They had neatly unwrapped the top blanket and the two layers beneath and had spread them out for a female agent who inspected them while another combed them for stray fibers,