THE CASE OF THE INCA MAID

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

It was murder, all right. not much doubt about that anymore. Not after the CT-scan boys at Johns Hopkins got through with the cadaver. Severe blow to the skull with a blunt instrument. Massive internal bleeding. Maybe drugged first. Victim was a female Native American. Probably 12 to 14 years old. Well dressed: had a fancy alpaca dress, striped, and a nice shawl. Silver pin. In pretty good health--"Best set of teeth I've seen in a long time," says Elliot Fishman, a Hopkins doc--until she turned up dead, of course. Been cold for a while when they found her--500 years, give or take.

Really cold. In a glacier most of that time. Good thing too. Without the deep freeze, she'd have disintegrated long ago. Now she's on display in a cooler in Washington, courtesy of the National Geographic Society. It helped pay for the expedition that found her, high up in the Peruvian Andes. The body screamed "human sacrifice" from the start. Earthen tomb. Religious offerings--statuettes, coca leaves, corn. Typical sacrifice MO for the Inca, which is what she was. The location fits too: a volcano called Ampato. The Inca worshipped it as a god. Funny thing is, it was Ampato's eruption in 1995 that melted the glacier. Almost as if the god wanted to come clean about its guilty past.

But that's for the priests and philosophers. I don't know, maybe this kid didn't die in vain. See, the Inca are still pretty mysterious. And the girl--they call her Juanita--has plenty to tell the historians. About how the Inca lived. How they dressed. The crazy things they believed in. And all that ice preserved her tissues. If there's any intact DNA, the molecular-biology boys will have a field day. She's important, all right. So important that some Peruvian scientists didn't want to lend her out. Thought traveling to the States might damage the evidence. Lucky for science, it didn't.

--By Michael D. Lemonick