Free Bloodletting by Michael McBride Page B

which she peeled away with forceps and placed in separate plastic bags. The rope lay unraveled between them. Several artifacts had been bundled with the corpse and now rested in a plastic evidence case. There was a small clay jar with an opening barely large enough to accommodate the insertion of two fingers, painted with straight dark lines and cracked by age, and two small obsidian figurines, one a bat, the other a long-snouted mammal they assumed to be a tapir. The body itself was curled on a plastic tarp, still in fetal position; to straighten it they would have to break all of its appendages. Samples of the soil and skin had confirmed staggeringly high levels of carbonate, bicarbonate, and other hypo-osmotic sodium salts. Small amounts of ash had been gleaned from the epidermis. Analysis of the carbon structure revealed the body had been smoked over mesquite wood. As the shriveled digits were useless for ascertaining reasonable fingerprints, photographs had been taken from every possible angle and casts of the teeth and face were nearly dry. Soon enough they would be able to identify her, but Carver was already short on patience.
    "So what do we know?" Carver asked.
    "Female. Approximately twenty-eight to thirty-two years of age," Special Agent Manning said. She was in her mid-thirties with shoulder length auburn hair and the hunched, slender body of a scavenger bird from too much time peering through a microscope. "Orthodontic alignment and lack of appreciable decay of the teeth suggest reasonable financial well being. The thick, dense cortex of the bones is indicative of someone accustomed to physical exertion, without the wear-and-tear damage associated with manual labor. There are no fractures or visible scarring to indicate trauma, but there is minor scoring to the right antecubital fossa possibly from intravenous drug use or catheterization."
    Carver flinched. "Is it possible she was exsanguinated prior to death?"
    "Too soon to tell, but bleeding her through her arm would be about the slowest possible way to do so."
    "So we have a mid- to upper-class, early-thirties female with good teeth who likes to work out. That doesn't narrow our field much."
    "But people notice when someone like that goes missing. This wasn't an indigent. She's in our missing persons database, I assure you. It's only a matter of time before we have a positive ID."
    "Any signs of elevated ammonia content in the skin or abraded fingertips consistent with a struggle against long-term confinement?"
    "The process of curing the flesh would have altered the chemical composition of the skin even if the liquefied fats hadn't, and all of her nails and fingertips are intact."
    "Why the removal of the organs?"
    "That's what you do to mummies."
    "But aren't they kept around in canopic jars or something?"
    "In Egyptian ritualistic mummification."
    Carver made a mental note to ask Ellie what the Inca did with their excised viscera and carefully slid down into the widened pit, conscious not to kick a single grain of dirt onto the body. From behind he could clearly see the knobs of the spinous processes and scapulae pressing through the tight tan flesh and the ribs through ragged-edged tears where the rope had peeled away the skin. He took his personal cell phone from his pocket and leaned over the body, toggling the camera function and directing the aperture at the mummy's face.
    Even from so close, he couldn't distinguish the difference in hair color near the scalp Ellie had appreciated. He snapped several images from the front and side and climbed back out of the dig.
    "Let me know if you find anything interesting," Carver said, heading back out of the tent to leave the experts to their task.
    The wind had risen even more, throwing sand into the air and pelting the canvas. Carver stood in the lee on the northern side of the tent and speed-dialed number seven on his phone.
    "'Lo," a drowsy voice answered. Regardless of the time of day, Marshall Dolan always