The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel Read Online Free PDF

ripped apart. Can you at least limit the damage to the relevant area?”
    Maura nodded. “That’s a reasonable approach.” She moved to the table. “Let’s turn her over. If there’s an entrance wound, it will be in the right calf.”
    “It’s best if we work together,” said Robinson. He went to the head, and Pulcillo moved to the feet. “We need to support the whole body and not put strain on any part of her. So if four of us could pitch in?”
    Maura slipped gloved hands beneath the shoulders and said, “Detective Frost, could you support the hips?”
    Frost hesitated, eyeing the stained linen wrappings. “Shouldn’t we put on masks or something?”
    “We’re just turning her over,” said Maura.
    “I’ve heard they carry diseases. You breathe in these spores and you get pneumonia.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Jane. She snapped on gloves and stepped up to the table. Sliding her hands beneath the mummy’s hips, she said: “I’m ready.”
    “Okay, lift,” said Robinson. “Now rotate her. That’s it…”
    “Wow, she hardly weighs anything,” said Jane.
    “A living human body’s mostly water. Remove the organs, dry out the carcass, and you end up with just a fraction of its former weight. She probably weighs only around fifty pounds, wrappings and all.”
    “Kind of like beef jerky, huh?”
    “That’s exactly what she is. Human jerky. Now let’s ease her down. Gently.”
    “You know, I wasn’t kidding about the spores,” said Frost. “I saw this show.”
    “Are you talking about the King Tut curse?” said Maura.
    “Yeah,” said Frost. “
That’s
what I’m talking about! All those people who died after they went into his tomb. They breathed in some kind of spores and got sick.”
    “Aspergillus,” said Robinson. “When Howard Carter’s team disturbed the tomb, they probably breathed in spores that had collected inside over the centuries. Some of them came down with fatal cases of aspergillus pneumonia.”
    “So Frost isn’t just bullshitting?” said Jane. “There really was a mummy’s curse?”
    Annoyance flashed in Robinson’s eyes. “Of course there was no curse. Yes, a few people died, but after what Carter and his team did to poor Tutankhamen, maybe there
should
have been a curse.”
    “What did they do to him?” asked Jane.
    “They brutalized him. They sliced him open, broke his bones, and essentially tore him apart in the search for jewels and amulets. They cut him up in pieces to get him out of the coffin, pulling off his arms and legs. They severed his head. It wasn’t science. It was desecration.” He looked down at Madam X, and Jane saw admiration, even affection in his gaze. “We don’t want the same thing to happen to her.”
    “The last thing I want to do is mangle her,” said Maura. “So let’s unwrap her just enough to find out what we’re dealing with here.”
    “You probably won’t be able to just unwrap her,” said Robinson. “If the inner strips were soaked in resin, as per tradition, they’ll be stuck together as solid as glue.”
    Maura turned to the X-ray for one more look, then reached for a scalpel and tweezers. Jane had watched Maura slice other bodies, but never before had she seen her hesitate so long, her blade hovering over the calf as though afraid to make the first cut. What they were about to do would forever damage Madam X, and Drs. Robinson and Pulcillo both were watching with outright disapproval in their eyes.
    Maura made the first cut. This was not the usual confident slice into flesh. Instead, she used the tweezers to delicately lift the band of linen so that her blade slit through successive layers of fabric, strip by strip. “It’s peeling away quite easily,” she said.
    Dr. Pulcillo frowned. “This isn’t traditional. Normally the bandages would be doused in molten resin. In the 1830s, when they unwrapped mummies, they sometimes had to pry the bandages off.”
    “What was the point of the resin,