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she’d boarded her plane for Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.
    Cook County wasn’t different from any other large metropolitan area. People died. Thankfully most of them died naturally.
    But some did not. Some died because of gang violence, and sometimes they died in police custody or in jail. Some died because of domestic violence, and some were simply and pathetically in the wrong place at the wrong time—victims of random crime. Some died “suspiciously” or without apparent explanation.
    Despite the fact that she wasn’t in Chicago because she wanted to be, she wasn’t disturbed by her particular assignment here. While many people feared a medical examiner’s office as a frightening and gruesome place, Kat had always found that an autopsy—though invasive—was a service that man had come to do for man. It was an effort to let the dead speak for themselves, to seek justice, find a killer or, conversely, prove accidental death when no other human was at fault. Autopsy helped the living, too; some medical advances would have never come about without autopsies determining the cause of death. In medical school, she hadn’t started out feeling that she’d rather work with the dead than the living. It had been during her residency that she’d discovered she had a penchant for unspoken truths…and that, even when silent, the dead could sometimes tell their tales.
    The Texas Krewe—her unit of their section within the FBI—was supposed to investigate whatever couldn’t be answered by the evidence. Usuallyit wasn’t because of incompetence or because leads weren’t followed by the local police. They were called in when the leads themselves were unusual. Some people described those leads as paranormal.
    But in this instance…
    A diver had jumped the gun. He’d jumped the gun on an incredible discovery mainly because he was the scientist who’d been determined to find the wreck of the Jerry McGuen. He’d been looking for ancient Egyptian treasures lost along with the ship.
    And those treasures included a mummy.
    It just had to be a mummy! she thought, wincing as she conjured up an image of Brendan Fraser and his hit movie . And of course there was the mummy in The Unholy— the recent Hollywood remake of a 1940s film noir—had been that of an evil Egyptian priest who’d turned out to be real.
    “Sad beginning to this whole thing, huh?”
    Startled, Katya looked over at Dr. Alex McFarland, the M.E. who walked her down the corridors and past offices, vaults and autopsy rooms. He seemed a decent enough sort, cordial and receptive. Bald as a billiard ball and wearing spectacles, he reminded her of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew of Jim Henson’s Muppets fame, the epitome of what the general public expected a doctor or scientist to look like.
    “Very sad,” she agreed. The victim had been in his thirties, an expert on Egyptology and an expert diver. A young man with his life stretching out before him.
    And now that life was cut short.
    McFarland rolled his eyes. “Tragic…and almost no one’s talking about the boy’s death. Of course, the disappearance of the Jerry McGuen has been one of the great mysteries of Lake Michigan since she went down in the late-nineteenth century. There’s more coverage given to the discovery than to the poor boy’s death. And God help us all—the curse! But, then again, although Chicago is hardly considered to be one of the world’s great dive spots, the lakes hold a lot of wrecks where divers frequently go. I don’t dive myself, but we have many professional and recreational divers in the area. Many of them say he was being careless, that he took chances in his excitement and shouldn’t have been diving at seventy-five, eighty feet on his own.”
    “You should always dive with a buddy,” Kat said. “Sadly it’s often the divers—even expert divers—who go out on their own who wind up in autopsy. There are no guarantees in the deep.”
    “You dive?”
    “Yes,” she