wanted to go to him but knew he was in good hands with the sweetheart Manriquez.
After a long enough pause to show Zach that there wasn’t anything more important to him than this, George stood and put out his hand to help Zach up. Then he led us all down a corridor to the autopsy room.
They could never get the smell out of a room like this, a combination of disinfectant and old diaper, like a government-run day care center. On a plastic gurney rested the body of Jessica Robertson covered with a sheet. It was all purposefully clinical, like Manriquez had said, no shadowy corners, no instruments suggestive of cutting flesh, no background music. Zach was placed on one side of the gurney flanked by me and an autopsy assistant burly enough to catch him if he dropped. George stood on the other side. Max and Coleman hung back.
With a final glance at Zach for permission, George drew the sheet from the top of Jessica’s head so Zach could see her dried hair and a bit of dark brown flesh on her forehead. When Zach appeared to be able to take that much, George drew the sheet down to just below her chin.
I had my head tilted enough to see Zach out of the corner of my eye but felt more than saw the tremor that passed through him like a private earthquake. There was a single soft groan. Other than that he was incredibly composed, worked through his own thoughts and memories without sharing. Then he lifted his index finger and delicately stroked the shriveled brown lobe of her left ear, still preserved over the years by the mummification process. He stroked her ear the way you would a thing that was terribly fragile but too amazingly beautiful not to touch. He couldn’t see the side of her head where the other ear had been cut away. Then he pulled his hand away and the medical examiner pulled the sheet back up.
“I won’t see her again,” Zach said.
“No,” agreed George, whether he understood or not. He looked at the assistant, who apparently had been given prior instructions, and then paused until Zach was led out to the waiting area. I was so proud of him.
Even with the weight of the corpse still in the room, we all breathed a little deeper.
As Max and Coleman came closer to the gurney, George said, “I moved here from Miami about ten years ago looking for a change of scene. Too many immigrants washing up on the beaches, I said. All that happened was I went from Haitian floaters to Mexican mummies. With the summer heat I’ve got a whole refrigerated truck out back full of unidentifieds that they picked up off the desert.”
But then he went on with his job as he pulled the sheet off with less ceremony than before, this time all the way off the corpse. The body was in the fetal position as it had been when first placed in the car. The head was positioned where it would have been in life, though it was no longer attached to the torso. “This mummification happens quite a lot, naturally formed in the desert where the humidity is so low. You know, like the other body in the car.” He was referring to the prostitute who must have frequented truck-stop parking lots, who Floyd had dismissed as a lot lizard, his first victim.
“I didn’t have much time to look at the other one,” I said. “Was it the same MO as the others?”
“I concentrated on this one first. All I can tell you is that the other corpse has both its ears. I can give you a better report when I’ve done the autopsy on the other.”
I asked, “What about the body found in Lynch’s truck? Are there any similarities of cause and manner of death?”
“Like I said, Jessica Robertson’s body seems to have been naturally mummified. The one in Lynch’s truck had some help. It’s all in my report.”
Coleman and Max nodded. “Help me out, Doc,” I said. “I’m trying to catch up.”
Manriquez didn’t seem to mind at all, and started in eagerly, “He used something called Natron. It’s commercially available, a mixture of four kinds of sodium: carbonate, bicarbonate, chloride, and sulfate. You pack it in and around the body so it dehydrates and makes it inhospitable to the bacteria that would usually decompose the tissues. Plus he removed the organs, which accelerated the process. All