“Where is she?”

Mike’s back was to the truck, and he pumped his thumb over his shoulder. “Up the ramp. Resting comfortably in the care of Tri-State Transit.”

“Never unloaded?”

“Nope. Routine is they start hauling the goods off the truck as soon as they drive into the yard. Most of the items are packed inside wooden crates, labeled and ready for overseas shipping. Truckers set them down on the ground, and then they’re winched over into containers that get loaded onto the freighters for transport. Whole place looks like my Lionel train set on steroids.”

I looked around at the endless rows of giant boxes, towering over us and stretching in every direction as far as I could see.

“Once they’re out of the truck, security has the dogs smell around them, incoming and outgoing. Looking for drugs or dead bodies. Back in the nineties, there were an embarrassing number of incidents out here. Wise guys were using the yard as a wide-open warehouse for cocaine storage and a staging area for shipping nose candy everywhere in Europe you could imagine.”

“Jersey police? Port Authority cops?”

“Not involved yet. That’s why the square-badges. Shippers worked out a compromise that the owners of these lots would hire their own patrols. Only call in the cops when they got a crime.”

“I think I’m getting what they call mixed signals here. Thibodaux believes there’s a corpse in the sarcophagus that doesn’t belong there. That’s why I called you to meet us out here. Isn’t there a crime in this?”

“Lucky Pierre might be right. But the mopes who found Cleo have seen too many mummy movies. Curse of the Pharaohs and all that crap. They cracked open the crate, but then the lid was so heavy they could barely move it. Took four of them to lift it just a couple of inches-expecting to find a stash of white powder-but one guy sees a head sticking through some dangling pieces of linen instead. Dropped the stone so fast I’m surprised it didn’t splinter into a million pieces.”