Maura made the first cut. This was not the usual confident slice into flesh. Instead, she used the tweezers to delicately lift the band of linen so that her blade slit through successive layers of fabric, strip by strip. “It’s peeling away quite easily,” she said.

Dr. Pulcillo frowned. “This isn’t traditional. Normally the bandages would be doused in molten resin. In the 1830s, when they unwrapped mummies, they sometimes had to pry the bandages off.”

“What was the point of the resin, anyway?” asked Frost.

“To make the wrappings stick together. It gave them rigidity, like making a papier-mâché container to protect the contents.”

“I’m already through the final layer,” Maura said. “There’s no resin adhering to any of this.”

Jane craned forward to catch a glimpse of what lay under the wrapping. “That’s her skin? It looks like old leather.”

“Dried skin is precisely what leather is, Detective Rizzoli,” said Robinson. “In a way.”

Maura reached for the scissors and gingerly snipped away the strips, exposing a larger patch of skin. It looked like brown parchment wrapped around bones. She glanced, once again, at the X-ray, and swung a magnifier over the calf. “I can’t find any entry hole in the skin.”

“So the wound’s not postmortem,” said Jane.

“It goes along with what we see on that X-ray. That foreign body was probably introduced while she was still alive. She lived long enough for the fractured bone to start mending. For the wound to close over.”

“How long would that take?”

“A few weeks. Perhaps a month.”

“Someone would have to care for her during that time, right? She’d have to be fed and sheltered.”

Maura nodded. “This makes the manner of death all the more difficult to determine.”