Mondragon shook his head in disbelief. "How did you--?"
"Magic," Wolfe said, walking past the professor with a nod to the undergrads. "I assume the lady of the hour is in here?"
Wolfe disappeared into the tent and Carver followed. He slid down the dirt slope into the hole and crouched beside the other agent in front of the body.
"Fine piece of work," Wolfe said. "Whoever did this has some real talent. Look how well the skin is simultaneously aged and preserved. Someone put a lot of time into preparing this for us." He traced the line of the corpse's upper jaw with a pen before tapping the rope. "We already know from the testing that the blankets and rope are authentic, but I can imagine it was no small feat procuring them." Leaning forward, he used the cap end of the pen to push the teeth apart. "The molars aren't worn down well enough and the gums are in good condition, though you can tell an effort was made to file the teeth unevenly. All that accomplished was scraping away the enamel to expose the healthy pulp."
"You have training in archeology?"
"I watch the Discovery Channel."
Carver inspected the folded cadaver. There were no similarities between it and the remains of the girls Schwartz had butchered. And Wolfe seemed to be in his element, leading Carver to again wonder why they needed him.
"Why
am
I here?" Carver asked aloud.
Wolfe locked eyes with him through the shades. "You tell me."
Carver stared at Wolfe, unable to read his expression, until the uncomfortable silence was broken.
"I want to know what's going on here right now," Mondragon said. "Just how did you learn of our discovery and what would lead you to believe--?"
"That this isn't your prized four hundred year-old Sinagua mummy?"
"Stop interrupting me!" Mondragon snapped, his face flaring red.
"Do I have to show you the badge again?" Wolfe sighed.
"Where are the other bodies?" Carver asked.
"On the far side of the tent," Mondragon said.
"Why don't you show me."
"Yeah...sure."
The two left Wolfe to prod at the deceased and walked around the side of the tent to face the eternal desert. Carver immediately noticed the grid on the ground ahead. The sand was brushed away just enough to expose a lump of cloth. Farther along there was another, and about fifty yards beyond that, a figure crouched at the base of a fire-flowered ocotillo, working at the earth with its hands.
"My colleague has already discovered three more bundles," Mondragon said, "but I suppose you already knew that."
"We were aware of two."
As they approached, Carver saw that the figure was a woman. Long dark hair pulled into a ponytail, trailing down her back from beneath a faded ball cap. Red- and blue-checked flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled past the elbows. Dirt-brown jeans. She was so involved with her work that she didn't know they were right behind her until Mondragon cleared his throat.
"Emil, who the hell was landing a helicopter out here?" she said. Turning, she rose and shielded her eyes from the sun. "It nearly blew all the sand right back over--"
Her eyes met Carver's and he blinked in surprise.
"Ellie?"
II
Sinagua Ruins
36 Miles Northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona
"Pax?" she gasped, her eyes widening in surprise. "What in the world are you doing here?"
"I could ask you the same."
She bounded forward and hugged him. When she withdrew, she saw that she had covered his suit in dust and started to brush it off. "I'm so sorry."
"You two know each other?" Mondragon asked.
Elliot could only stare at the man standing before her. His eyes were worn, but otherwise he hadn't changed in the slightest.
"Oh my God, Pax. How long has it been?"
"Too long." He smiled. "You look amazing."
Elliot brushed unconsciously at the dirt on her shirt.
"So do you." She looked him up and down. "Wedding or funeral?"
"Hmm?"
"The last time I saw you in a suit was our senior prom. You said the only way you'd ever put one on again was for either your wedding or your funeral." But he had said
our
wedding, hadn't he? A lifetime ago when they had just been kids and the future and their dreams had been indistinguishable.
"Unfortunately, this one goes with the job," he said, producing his badge and flipping it open for her to see.
"FBI? Why would you be interested in...?" Her voice trailed off and she closed her eyes momentarily. "How did you figure it out?"
"The carbon dating results were flagged by our lab. You knew?"
"I had my suspicions," she said with a wan smile. "I was just really hoping I was wrong."
"Why didn't you share your concerns?" Mondragon asked. "How could you tell?"
"The hair," Elliot said. "It continues to grow even after death. I could tell the hair had been dyed by the roots. And there were a host of other details that weren't quite right." She hung her head. "I needed to look at the other bundles myself before saying anything. I had to be sure first. I
so
wanted this to be the discovery I've been searching for my entire career."
"I'm sorry," Carver said.
"What did the carbon dating show?"
"Since the dating is measured in half-lives, any recent sample barely registers, so the tests were only able to narrow the body to within the last ten years."
"Ten years? She's remarkably well aged. There's no way she could have been preserved so well by simple burial. And to be bundled in traditional Inca fashion? Someone would have had to go to great lengths to...That's why you're here."
Carver nodded. "Can you tell me how someone might have prepared the corpse to replicate the appearance of mummification?"
"I could tell right away that she had been smoked. She had an almost sweet smell to her."
"Smoked? Like meat?"
"It's a common method of mummification practiced for more than a thousand years. The body is suspended in a closed room over a tended fire, allowing the heat to melt the fats, which drain through the skin while the smoke dries it out."
"How long does that take?"
"There's no set recipe. A week, a month, maybe longer. It depends on a variety of factors including the desired condition of the remains and environmental factors like ambient humidity. Not only must this girl have been smoked for an 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, 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.