“Don’t complain about sleep deprivation to the mother of three kids. Battaglia’s letting you run with this? You know you love it.”

“If you can cover my back down here, Ryan’s Internet sting might heat up tomorrow. We’ve got three people on trial and a holiday weekend. The young and the restless are bound to start celebrating the rites of spring.” Our numbers always went up in warm weather.

“Do I get to make command decisions?” she said, smiling.

“You even get to suck up to McKinney, if you’re in the mood.”

I reached for the ringing phone but Laura came in and grabbed it. She greeted all of us and told me Chapman was on the line.

“I’m just setting things up with Sarah. I’ll be on my way.”

“That’s not why I’m calling. Dr. K. isn’t even back from a domestic up in Chelsea. What do I need to seize someone’s passport?”

“What you don’t have yet, in this case: probable cause. Why, has Pierre Thibodaux packed up his bags already?” I had worried that the soon-to-be ex-director would have no reason to stay in town, but figured that there would be a period of transition until his successor was named.

“I just called Ms. Drexler to see when I could pick up a list of all the employees, and get a guided tour of the other Egyptian coffins from Timothy Gaylord, who left us so abruptly yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, he’s leaving the country tonight.”

“Business or displeasure?”

“A rather special assignment, down in Chile. He’s going to the mummy congress.”

The morgue attendant at the loading dock on East Thirtieth Street was pushing an empty gurney through the entrance that Mike Chapman was holding open for him. I slammed the cab door behind me and squinted because of the bright sunlight. It was unusual to hear singing at the mouth of this gray tunnel where the night’s dead were brought in to tell their stories to the medical examiners.

“See the pyramids along the Nile…,” Mike crooned softly, a more doo-wop version than Jo Stafford had recorded in 1956. Mike rested his arm against the opening, for me to pass under, pointing me out to the waiting ambulance driver as he got to the coda of the song, “she belongs tome. ”

“I’ll bite. What’s the mummy congress?”

“The Fourth World Congress on Mummy Studies. Now, that has got to be a totally happening group of scientists, don’t you think? You might be able to find some guest speakers for McKinney’s killer camp.”

The DA’s office held an annual retreat that served as a training session on investigating and prosecuting homicide cases for the senior members of the trial division. It was Pat McKinney’s pet project, and he spent the better part of each year lining up the quirkiest experts and the worst lodging that a convention could promise.

“This is the real deal?”

“Ms. Drexler ranks it just below a papal consistory. Every three years, a lively group of paleopathologists and Egyptologists gather together for a serious study of issues related to mummies, old and new. They deliver papers, study techniques, compare hieroglyphics, walk like Egyptians. That kind of stuff.”

“Serious subjects?”

“DNA in mummies, human sacrifices at high altitudes in the Andes, parasites that inhabit mummified corpses.”

“Can’t Gaylord skip a session? Pick it up on satellite? Alan Dershowitz does CNN interviews from the nude beach on Martha’s Vineyard; I’m sure we can hook something up for this guy.”

“He’s delivering the keynote this weekend-‘Ethical Considerations in Studying the Ancient Dead.’ Apparently, he’s got the most serious credentials in the field. Drexler says it’s a big issue in museum work. Things that were tolerated fifty and a hundred years ago, digging up sacred graves and messing with the spirits, are taboo now.”

“Why Chile?”

“A stretch of road called the Atacama, about the most lifeless desert in the world.”

“You knew that?” It must have been a battleground once.

“Never heard of it. Miss Efficiency is my lifeline to the mummy man. There’s a little city in northern Chile called Arica, close to the desert. That one I know. Peru ceded it to Chile after the War of the Pacific. Treaty of Ancón, 1883.”

“You know about wars I wasn’t even aware were fought.”

“What I didn’t know is that it has the distinction of being so dry in the Atacama that the long-term preservation of the human body is practically guaranteed. Mummy heaven. Probably more of them there than in the entire Nile valley.”

“Is Gaylord going there because of what he knows, or what he wants to learn?”

“Seems obvious to me that he wouldn’t need to keep that appointment if he’s our killer. Whoever wrapped up Ms. Grooten must have already completed the course. Can we stop him, just to be sure?” Mike asked.

“On what basis? We haven’t got a thing. Any sign that he’s not coming back?”

“Eve Drexler says it’s business as usual come Tuesday.”

“I’m more concerned about Pierre Thibodaux.”

“She’s boxing up his entire office now to send off with him. Wanther DNA? Betcha there’ll be tearstains all over his belongings. I think Eve would like to follow Pierre home to Paris.”

By the time we reached Dr. Kestenbaum’s office, he had arrived from the scene of the Chelsea stabbing and was changing out of his clothes into the scrubs he would wear in the autopsy room for the rest of the day.

“So what do you two know about poison?”

“Start at the top of the page, doc. We’re beginners.”

“Katrina Grooten died of arsenic poisoning. I’ve submitted all the tissue and hair samples for toxicology and mitochondrial DNA analysis, but those results take quite a while, as you know.”

“You were just guessing yesterday. But now you’re sure?”

“Some very gross indications, Alex. Mee’s lines on her fingernails were rather telltale, the minute I saw her hands.”

“What are they?”

“White lines running straight across her nails, suggesting toxic levels of arsenic in the body. That strong, pungent odor you smelled when the coffin lid was opened. Remember when I asked you if it reminded you of anything and you told me it was pungent? Garlic, I thought. The alopecia I observed, hair coming out of her scalp and her eyelids-all those things are consistent with high levels of arsenic intake. I’ll have the complete report typed up by the beginning of the week, but those were my initial observations before we even started to cut.”

“D’you ever see a body preserved like that, doc?”

“Never. Not naturally. Nothing was done surgically to keep it intact, I’ve confirmed that.”

“So we’ve gotta figure out whether the killer knew what he was doing when he hid the body, or whether it was an accident of the climate conditions where he hid it, right?”

“I’ll tell you this, Mike. When I get the tox results back, I think we’ll see that Ms. Grooten’s murderer did nothing to disguise the fact that she was overdosed with arsenic.”

“What do you mean?”

“That he didn’t expect her to be found for six months, if ever-”

“Or a year later, a continent away-”

“Even better for him. It’s not like he was giving it to Grooten in small, subtle doses. I think he was figuring she’d be long out of the way, undiscovered and decayed before anyone realized what had happened.”

“Isn’t arsenic in our drinking water?”

“It would take one thirsty broad to put out her lights this way, Coop. You gotta call my mother. She’ll be so proud of the way my education is paying off in this investigation. Day one, I come across an Incorruptible. Now I can add all the things I know Albertus Magnus-Saint Albert the Great-was good for. He was the first guy to produce arsenic in a free form. Right, doc?”

“Exactly. It’s been a popular way of poisoning people since the Middle Ages, in fact and in fiction. At one time it was such an available means of killing that the Brits referred to it as ‘inheritance powder.’ Best way to do in the family member who controlled the purse strings.