O'Riley extended his arms, monster fashion. 'You know. A mummy.'
Nick shrugged at Catherine. 'A mummy.'
She smirked at him. 'Come on, daddy-o. . . .'
The cluster of construction workers split and made room for them to pass.
The rusted hulk of the former trailer looked as though God had reached down and pulled out a fistful of its guts. Through the hole, beneath what was left of the floor, something vaguely human stared upward with dark eye sockets in what looked like a brown leather head.
'Anybody gone in there?' she asked.
The construction workers shook their heads; some stepped backward.
She set down her field kit and turned to O'Riley. Sweat ran down his face in long rivulets, his color starting to match that of his grotesque sports coat. 'You wanna fill me in, Sergeant?'
'The crew came in at four-thirty. Trying to get ahead, work when it was cooler, so they could knock off at noon.'
Catherine nodded. It was a common practice in a desert community where the afternoon heat index would probably top 130 degrees.
'They'd only been at it about an hour or so when they found the mummy,' O'Riley said, waving toward the trailer.
'Okay, get a couple of uniforms to cordon off the area.'
O'Riley nodded.
'We want to make sure that he's the only one.'
Frowning, O'Riley said, 'The only one?'
Pulling out her camera and checking it, Catherine said, 'A lot of stuff's been dumped here over the years, Sarge. Let's make sure there's only been one body discarded.'
Nick, at her side, said, 'You think we got Gacy's backyard here?'
'Could be. Can't rule it out.'
O'Riley called to the uniforms and they tossed their coffee cups into a barrel and plodded toward him.
'Oh,' she said, lightly, 'and you might as well send the construction workers home. We're going to be here most of the day.'
Nodding, O'Riley spoke briefly to the uniforms, then talked to the foreman, and slowly the scene turned from a still life into a moving picture. The workers dispersed, their dusty pickups driving off in every direction as the patrolmen strung yellow crime-scene tape around the junk-infested lot.
'Times like this,' Nick said, as the yellow-and-black boundary took form, 'I wish I'd invested in the company that makes crime-scene tape.'
'It's right in there with the smiley face,' she agreed.
Catherine stepped into blue coveralls, from her suitcaselike field kit, and zipped them up; she was all for gathering evidence, just not on her clothes. She put on a yellow hard hat, the fitted band feeling cool around her head, for a few seconds anyway.
While Nick and the others searched the surrounding area, Catherine took photos of the trailer. She started with wide shots and slowly moved in closer and closer to the leathery corpse. By the time she was ready to move inside the wreck, with the body, Nick had returned and the cops were back to standing around.
'Anything?' she asked as she reloaded the camera and set it on the hood of the Tahoe.
'No,' Nick said. 'Our 'mummy' has the place to himself.'
'Okay, I'm going in.' She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and picked up her camera again.
'Careful.'
Catherine tossed him a look.
'I'm just saying, Cath, it's rusty metal, unstable . . .'
'I've had my tetanus shot.'
Entering through a huge bitelike hole in the trailer's skin, she picked her way through the rubble, slipped through the gash in the floor and slid down next to the body, half of it now exposed to the sunlight pouring in through the wide tear in the roof. The ground felt cooler in the pools of shadow beneath the trailer. She noticed hardly any smell from the cadaver and, judging from the condition of the skin, he'd been dead for quite a long time.
'White male,' she said, snapping the first of half a dozen photos.
Outside, Nick repeated her words as he wrote them in his notebook.
Finishing the photos, she set the camera to one side. The body had been laid to rest on top of a piece of sheet metal, probably a slab of the trashed trailer's skin, and slid in under the dilapidated derelict. Though the killer had hidden the body well, he'd also managed to protect it so that instead of rotting, the corpse had mummified in the dry Nevada air.
They did indeed have a mummy of sorts.
Moving carefully, Catherine examined the body from skull to ox-blood loafers. The eyes and soft tissue were gone, leaving empty sockets, and the skin had contracted around the bone, resembling discolored beef jerky. Shocks of salt-and-pepper hair remained and the teeth were still intact.
The clothes had held up surprisingly well, though the narrow-lapeled suit had probably faded from popularity well before this poor guy ended up buried in it. She checked the victim's coat pockets as best she could and found nothing. She could tell, even through the clothes, that some of the man's organs had survived. Shrunk, but survived. It wasn't that unusual in a case like this. Moving down, she went through the corpse's pants pockets.
'No wallet,' she called.
Nick repeated her words.
In the front left pocket she found a handful of change and counted it quickly. 'Two-fifteen in change, the newest coin a nineteen-eighty-four quarter.' She put the coins in an evidence bag, sealed it, and set it to one side.
Again, Nick repeated what she had said.
She looked at the victim's hands and said, 'He'll never play the piano again.'
'What?'
Shaking her head, she said, 'The killer hacked off the victim's fingertips at the first knuckle.'
'Trying to make it harder to ID the guy if anybody ever found the body,' Nick said.
'Yeah, looks like he used pruning shears or something. Pretty clean amputations, but there's a gold ring that got left behind.'
Picking up the camera, she snapped off several quick shots of the mummy's hands showing the shrunken, blackened stubs of the fingers, and the gold ring. She set down the camera and, lifting the mummy's right hand carefully, she easily slid the band off the ring finger.
'Gold ring,' she repeated, 'with an 'F' inlaid in diamonds.'
'Interesting,' Nick said, then he repeated her description.
'It would not seem to be a robbery, yes,' Catherine said, as she pulled an evidence bag from her pocket, put the ring inside and sealed it.
'Cause of death?' Nick called.
'Not sure-nothing visible in the front.'
Gingerly, she eased the corpse onto its left side and looked at the sheet metal underneath the body, but saw no sign of bugs or any other scavengers. That would disappoint Grissom, who did love his creepy crawlies. The suit seemed to be stained darker on the back and, moving slowly toward the head, Catherine found what she was looking for.
'Two entry wounds,' she announced. 'Base of the skull, looks like a pro.'
'Firearm?'
'Firearm is my call.'
'Anything else?'
She didn't want there to be anything else. The heat now pressed down on her from above. Any relief brought on by the cooler soil down here had evaporated and sweat rolled down her back, her arms, and her face.
But she forced herself to stay focused on the job at hand. Then, just to the left of the mummy's head, something caught her attention, something black poking out of the dirt. She at first thought it was one of Grissom's
