they’d once been either, and he was almost on it before he grasped its real nature. So shocked was he that his eyes had rolled up in his head and he had fallen down on the spot in a dead faint.
It wasn’t as if the old man had never seen a mummy before. Anyone who spent any time in these parched hills and valleys had come across them: shriveled, sun-blackened mice, rabbits, birds, even the occasional goat that had strayed from its herd and been lost. But a man? A withered, grinning mockery of a man still dressed in a few shreds of human clothing? It was the devil’s work, enough to make anyone swoon.
When he had come to, he had hurriedly untied the two old canvas feedbags from the burro’s back with shaking hands and had ridden the animal home to tell his wife, who had sent him to tell the priest, who had told the jefe.
That had been late yesterday afternoon, too late to do anything about it before dark. But this morning, Sandoval, old Nacho, and the burro had gone out into the hills to retrieve the body. They found it where Nacho said it was, in an arroyo at the base of a cliff, not more than a hundred meters from where the little girl’s skeleton had been found earlier (a bad omen, Sandoval thought at the time). Pepe, the junior of Sandoval’s two policemen, had come along to help with the lifting that would be necessary. But in the end, Sandoval had had to get it up onto the burro by himself. Young Pepe, although he offered to assist, looked so pale and faint-hearted that Sandoval hadn’t the heart to ask him. As for Nacho, once he’d pointed the thing out, he had crossed himself and retreated, refusing to come within ten meters of it. Sandoval wasn’t feeling at his most stout-hearted himself, but the remains were so light and so rigid that he had had no trouble getting them onto the animal without assistance.
He was much relieved that the smell (almost nonexistent) and the feel (like parchment) of the thing had been nowhere as bad as he’d expected. It was terrible to look at, all right, but then it wasn’t necessary for him to look very closely to set it on the burro’s back and quickly cover it with a tarpaulin, during which he did a great deal of squinting and eye-averting. Still, by the time he’d gotten the tarpaulin tied down, he could feel his stomach acting up.
As soon as he had assured himself that what Nacho had seen the previous day was truly a body, he had used his cell phone to alert old Bustamente, the district medico legista. Bustamente had immediately driven in from Tlacolula and was now waiting impatiently-almost avidly, Sandoval thought unkindly-in the cemetery, at the door of the two-room concrete-block building, one room of which served as municipal tool and equipment storage, and the other as the village mortuary. Once the body was in the windowless mortuary room and on the ancient, enameled- iron embalming table, Bustamente had taken charge of it, a responsibility Sandoval was all too happy to relinquish.
He had planned to remain there with the doctor, having steeled himself to do what he regarded as his duty. And indeed, he managed to last through the cutting away of the tattered clothing and even to assist in a gingerly fashion. But his resolution began to fade when the boots came off to reveal not the hide-like tissue that covered the rest of the body, but horrible, greasy skeleton feet: eaten-away bones held together by rotting ligaments. Still, Sandoval held his ground, despite the noises coming from his stomach.
Not for long, however. When the leathery skin proved too tough for Bustamente’s scalpels, the doctor had gone grumbling into the storage room and emerged with a pair of heavy-duty pruning shears. “Ha, these should do the job,” he said, clacking them together and advancing on the corpse. That had been too much for Sandoval, who fled.
He took the opportunity to walk the few blocks to his office in the municipal building to swallow a couple of spoonfuls of Pepto-Bismol and sit quietly with the shades down for twenty minutes to settle his stomach. It didn’t help much. Beyond even the revolting physical aspects that were bothering him, he just didn’t have a good feeling about this business. Maybe the corpse itself didn’t have a bad smell, but everything about it did.
He remained in the office as long as he could, long enough to swallow another dose of the Pepto-Bismol. The second one did calm some of the roiling that was going on inside him, but it did little for his frame of mind. He returned with sinking heart and dragging step to the mortuary as Bustamente was just straightening up from the body, from which the entire front wall had been removed, so that it was wide open, like a picture in a medical book. On Bustamente’s face was a look of pinched satisfaction that struck terror into Sandoval’s heart. God help him, he’d known this was going to be trouble.
“Well?” he said gruffly.
“This man has been murdered,” Bustamente pronounced, relishing every word and speaking as if he were on the stand, somberly addressing the court as an expert witness. It was something the old fellow couldn’t have had the opportunity to say very often in his long tenure.
“Murdered,” Sandoval repeated hollowly from the depths of his chest. It was exactly what he’d been praying not to hear. What had he done to deserve this? How could this be happening to him again? It was incredible: only two murders in the last half-century, and both of them during the one-year tenure of Flaviano Sandoval, whose stomach fluttered at the idea of looking at a corpse. It was unbelievable, unfair, not to be borne.
However, once more he steeled himself to face the matter head-on, as the responsibilities of his position demanded. “What makes you think he was murdered?” He could hardly get the words out.
Bustamente bridled. “I don”t think, I know.” He crooked a bony finger at the police chief. “Come over here,” he commanded and led him to the sink. “Look at this.” When Sandoval realized he was looking at a man’s chest just sitting there in the sink like a slab of raw-hide, his insides started gurgling again.
Wordlessly, Bustamente stuck his finger into a dark hole not far from the middle of the slab. “You see?”
“From a bullet?” Sandoval asked. If he squeezed his eyelids together, leaving just a slit, he could see it without really seeing it.
“Without question.” He removed his finger. “You see how the borders of the perforation appear to have been eroded or eaten away? So that the hole is ‘cratered,’ as we might say?”
“Yes,” said Sandoval queasily, although all he could make out through his squint was a roundish hole with blackened edges. There was no denying, though, that it was the right size for a bullet hole. He had shot enough rabbits to know as much.
“This eroded area is what we refer to as an ‘abrasion collar,’ ” Bustamente continued, in the manner of a teacher talking to a not-too-bright pupil. “It is the result of scraping from the rotating motion of the bullet as it penetrates the skin. Being unique to gunshot wounds, it leaves no doubt as to the source of the penetration. Judging from the size of the hole, I would guess the bullet was. 32 caliber, but I leave that to the experts.”
“I see. And it would have killed him?”
Bustamente uttered a croaking, incredulous laugh. “Certainly, it would have killed him. Imagine if it had happened to you.” To illustrate, he jabbed a bony forefinger into Sandoval’s chest at about the same spot. “It would have exploded your heart, devastated it.”
“Ah,” said Sandoval, whose heart was, in fact, feeling more than a little devastated. Murder. Tumult. Inconvenience. The State Procuraduria de Justicia taking over his office, taking over the whole municipal building, all four rooms of it. The policia ministerial giving him orders, making clear their contempt for him, swaggering and bullying their way through the village. Detectives… judges…
It was only what he’d expected, he thought with a resigned sigh. Expect the worst, his stern, cheerless father had counseled him on many an occasion, and you will get what you expect. Only it will be worse. Sandoval had quoted it to one or two people and they had laughed. But his father hadn’t meant it as a joke, and the message had sunk in.
“And if by a miracle that were not enough,” continued Bustamente, “the fall would have finished the job.”
“He had a fall too?”
“A long one. There are many broken ribs. Was he perhaps found at the foot of a cliff or mountain, a height of some kind?”
“Yes.”
Bustamente was pleased. “You see?”
Sandoval heaved a forlorn sigh. “This means I will have to report the matter to the policia ministerial, doesn’t it?” he said glumly, already knowing the answer.
“The sooner the better, I would say. I would not waste any time. They don’t like delays.”
“And what happens to the body? Do you take it away with you?”
“Not me!” exclaimed Bustamente. “”I submit my own report. That’s the end of my responsibility.”
“So what do I do with him? We can’t just leave him here.”
