Maya Mound Mayhem (A Logan Dickerson Cozy Mystery Book 3) Page 8

I swiped my finger over my own iPhone, put in my password and searched in my contacts. Miss Vivee jumped and nearly dropped the phone when it started ringing.

  “Oh my Lord Jesus,” she said. “That scared the life out of me.”

  “I think I bypassed the need for the password,” I said taking the phone from Miss Vivee. I ran my finger across the green “Accept” circle on Riley’s phone call screen. “I called her phone. We’re in now.”

  Actually, I hoped we were in. My iPhone 6 wouldn’t let me do anything but answer without the password. I couldn’t check messages or anything else. Riley had an older phone and it wasn’t an iPhone. I tapped on Messages. It opened right up.

  “Good, but next time you have a bright idea,” Miss Vivee said, “try to make it one that the end result isn’t one that will send me to my grave.” She put one hand over her heart and fanned her face with the other.

  “Here, Miss Vivee,” I said. “Sit down.” I helped her sit in a metal chair near the table. I smiled down at her and then at the phone. “So let’s see what we got.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  We made it out of Riley’s trailer and had just closed the door on mine when she drove up. I watched out of the window as she jumped out of her car, ran inside and was back in her lime green VW Bug and gone again within a minute.

  “I think she discovered she’d forgotten her phone,” I said to Miss Vivee as I walked over and sat down at the table where they were seated. Miss Vivee smiled.

  “So did you find anything?” Mac asked.

  “Boy, did we find something,” Miss Vivee said her eyes beaming. “We discovered that I was dead on when I added her name to my suspect list.”

  “Really?” Mac said. “How so?”

  “It looks like her and Aaron Coulter were having an affair,” I said. “I think Bugs was alluding to that when he said she thought she’d be second in charge around here. That is if he was the other person up for grabs for my job.”

  “How did he know they were dating?” Mac asked.

  I hunched my shoulders. “Good question,” I said. “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask him.”

  “Lots of gitchy gitchy goo talk going on between those two,” Miss Vivee said steering us back to the conversation she wanted to have.

  “I think it’s called sex-text,” Mac offered.

  “Sexting,” I corrected. “And I don’t think it was quite what they call that. But her messages were full of ‘affection’ for him for a while.” I nodded in affirmation.

  “Yes. And then they fell out,” Miss Vivee said. “Got kind of ugly.” Miss Vivee nodded. “Seems she found out about Laura.”

  “Ahh, Laura,” Mac said and nodded along with Miss Vivee.

  I looked at them sideways. “Why do you two say ‘Laura’ like you know who she is?” I asked.

  “We do know who she is,” Miss Vivee frowned up her forehead like she was perturbed with me. “She’s Aaron Coulter’s girlfriend. Pretty thing. Smart too.”

  I rolled my eyes. She didn’t know her too well, it was easy to tell because she only called her by one name. Miss Vivee called everyone but family by two names.

  But she did know more than me. I hadn’t known her name.

  I knew exactly who she was, though. After my mother jarred my memory of Aaron Coulter, I remembered Laura from the car that chased us through the Panama Canal. And then from that day at the police station. Now, I didn’t think I would ever forget her again.

  But Miss Vivee knowing it . . .

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me,” she said. “I saw her at the police station the day they took you in for questioning.”

  “They didn’t take me in,” I said. “I went in voluntarily.” I took in a breath. “But how did you know that was her?” I eyed her. “We didn’t even know who the dead body was at that time. You didn’t question her, did you?”

  “No. I didn’t,” she said and lowered her eyes. She bit her bottom lip. “But Mac did.”

  “Mac!” I turned and looked at him. “You talked to that Laura woman? While you were at the police station?”

  He nodded. “She was so sad. She’d come in to report her boyfriend missing and we just took to her.” He looked at Miss Vivee. “Of course at the time we didn’t know that her troubles would have anything to do with yours. So I didn’t question her. We were just being nice.”

  “But we don’t know her last name,” Miss Vivee said and narrowed her eyes. “I need to put her on my suspect list.”

  “Oh,” Mac said and looked cautiously at Miss Vivee. “I neglected to tell you that I discovered her last name.”

  “No!” Miss Vivee said with alarm in her voice. She was so dramatic. You would have thought he’d left chicken frying on a stove back in Yasamee. She started digging in her purse and came up with her notebook and one of her No. 2 pencils. “What is it, Mac? I can’t believe you’d forget to tell me something like that. She’s a prime suspect.”

  “Yes. I know, dear,” he said. “A woman scorned and all. I do apologize. But at the time I had no idea we’d need it.” He waited until Miss Vivee was poised to take down his information before he divulged it. “It’s Tyler. Laura Tyler.”

  She scribbled for a long minute and I wondered what else she was writing. Talking to police detectives, murder victim’s girlfriends. What else had she and Mac been up to that I didn’t know?”

  “One of those two are probably the killer,” Miss Vivee said and looked up at me. “Riley Sinclair or Laura Tyler.” She tightened up her lips and took in a noisy breath through her nostrils. “Maybe even both of them together.”

  “You already had Riley on your list,” I said. “And I might add, it had nothing to do with her having a relationship with Aaron.”

  “Yes, I did. But this makes triple the reason she should be on it. I put her on because of her association with Diwali, and because she was jealous of you,” Miss Vivee said. “At that time I had no idea that she knew Aaron.” She paused and looked at me. “I had no idea the dead person was Aaron. I just sensed that she was capable of murder.”

  “Miss Vivee,” I said shaking my head. “You think everyone is capable of murder.”

  “Well however it went down, you should be happy. Because I’m thinking that now you just might get off scot-free.”

  How it went down? I shook my head. Where does she get the language she uses?

  “I’d get off anyway,” I said raising my eyebrows and nodding with confidence. “Because I didn’t do anything.”

  “There was a time when we weren’t too sure about that, wasn’t it Mac?”

  I turned and looked at Mac.

  Did he think I was a killer, too?

  “I never thought that,” Mac said and smiled at me. “And neither did Vivee.”

  “Speak for yourself,” she said as she stuffed her notebook back into her purse and stood up. “Time to head back to the hotel. We’ve got to put our heads together and see how we can figure out which one of them did it. But first, I need my beauty rest.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  So we Googled Aaron Coulter.

  I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of doing that before.

  Breaking into Riley’s trailer only left more questions. We still didn’t know why Aaron Coulter had been at the site. Or what he thought about Maya in Georgia. Answers to those questions, Miss Vivee thought might just lead us to his killer.

  Miss Vivee’s beauty treatment that she rushed back to the hotel the night before to commence ended at the crack of dawn. Once she was up she woke everyone else, too. Mac and I didn’t look so pretty. But we set right to work anyway.

  Maybe a Google search, we hoped, would reveal archaeologist Aaron Coulter’s stance on the Maya in Georgia. We all agreed that it was important that we find out anything we could to see what this dead man was all about. But more importantly, why someone would kill him and did it have anything to do with me or me being picked as the lead on the dig.

  We’d gone back to the diner
for breakfast and then went to the Track Rock Gap to do our digging – of a different kind.

  There wasn’t a lot of people at the site and my trailer had a table we could all sit around, the hotel room didn’t. Once we got there I pulled out my laptop and we gathered around. Miss Vivee pulled her chair close to mine, and was practically one with me as she leaned in and watched as I started my Internet search.

  I hadn’t thought his was a common name, but the LinkedIn link that popped up first indicated there were eighteen professionals named Aaron Coulter. But it wasn’t hard to find the one that we wanted. The very next link was about him. “Aaron Coulter – Archaeologist.”

  Miss Vivee, before I could, pressed her finger on the touch screen and took us to the entry.

  “Learning a little bit of technology, huh?”

  “I know a lot more than you think,” she said and leaned in close to try and read what was written about him. She kept squinting and pressing into me trying to get closer to the screen.

  “Where are your glasses?” I asked.

  “Don’t need them,” she said and leaned back in her chair. “You can read me what it says,”

  “This is just his personnel website,” I said.

  “Pretty arrogant,” Mac said. He’d gotten up from his seat and was standing behind me. “Did a whole website about himself?”

  I chuckled. “A lot of people do that nowadays,” I said. But it doesn’t look like it’s been updated for a long while.”

  “He must have lost interest in himself,” Miss Vivee said.

  “Here’s another link,” I said. “Oh. Okay. It says here that he was a visiting professor over at the University of North Georgia.” I clicked on the link.

  “That’s a military school,” Mac said.

  “Looks like they have classes for regular students, too,” I said looking at the school’s website, the landing page for the link. “Maybe that’s why he was in Georgia,” I looked at them. “Maybe it had nothing to do with me.” I skimmed over their home page. “Okay, let me see.” I let my eyes scan the page. “Where’s the link for department he would have taught in?”

  “What department would that be?” Miss Vivee asked.

  “Well,” I said concentrating on the screen. “Most schools don’t have an archaeology department. They have an anthropology . . . Here it is,” I said. I’d found under the tab for the list of colleges within the university a link for the College of Arts & Letters, and under that there was the department of History, Anthropology, & Philosophy. I clicked on it and found a link for Faculty & Staff and there he was. A picture of Aaron Coulter smiling at me.

  I shook off his stare and read the info about him. “Looks he started around 2014.” I looked up at them. “That’s around the same time we left Belize,” I said. “Do you think he came here because of what my mother and I found?” I knew they didn’t know the answer, but that thought worried me.

  “I thought he found you in Panama?” Mac said.

  “He did,” I said. “But we had just left Georgia when we went to Panama and I don’t know how long he had been on our trail.” I shook my head. “Maybe he’d been after us – me – all that time.” My gaze drifted off, “I wonder did he know that we . . .”

  “What’s that, Missy?” Miss Vivee said. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” I said and shook off the thought. “I was just thinking out loud.”

  “So,” I said and focused back on the screen. “Looks like he probably taught in undergrad Anthropology there. Here’s a picture of him.” I turned the computer around so they could see it.

  “Not a bad looking man,” Mac commented.

  “He’s an ugly looking man to me,” Miss Vivee said. “Anyone that tries to hurt my girl, can’t look like anything but the devil.” She nodded her head and smiled at me.

  Aww. Maybe she does care about me.

  Then I saw a link right under his devil-look-alike picture that gave me pause. I clicked the mouse on it and it took me to the University’s Papers and Publications page. It was the school’s journal for undergraduate research published by the University Press of North George.

  “Oh my goodness,” I said. “He wrote a scholarly article on Maya Occupation in Georgia,” I said. I looked at them, my eyes wide. I had to consciously close my mouth because it was hanging open. “I’ve never seen, or heard of, this paper before.”

  “When was it published?” Mac asked.

  I looked at the date and back up at Mac. “Yesterday,” I said suddenly confused.

  “Posthumously,” he said.

  “Yeah. But do they know he’s dead? The police wasn’t telling anyone. We only know because Bay told me that it was him.”

  “What was his stance on the issue?” Mac asked.

  “I don’t know, I said and clicked to open the article. Only an abstract came up. My eyes scurried over the paragraph and when I got to the end I had to stop and catch my breath.

  “What?” Miss Vivee said to me. “What did it say?”

  “It says that his paper would prove that the Maya are responsible for the ruins at Track Rock Gap.”

  “Oh my,” Miss Vivee said and started digging down in her purse. “There sure are a lot of murder suspects on my list.” She licked her lips. “I have to make sure I have everyone.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Like who, Miss Vivee,” I asked.

  “You for one,” she said before she opened up her memo pad. “Steven McHutchinson is number two.” She flipped through the pages until she came to her list. “Thought I didn’t know his name, didn’t you?”

  I laughed.

  “Riley Sinclair.”

  “She made it on the night we broke into her trailer.” I said.

  “Yes, because she’s in bed with that Diwali Wilson.”

  “In bed with him?” I crinkled up my face.

  “Cahoots. Colluding. Conspiring. Collaborating. You like those words better? Take your pick of ‘em. But that’s why she’s going on the list. And so is her little boyfriend, Diwali Wilson.”

  “Aaron Coulter was her boyfriend,” I reminded her.

  “Laura was his girlfriend. Riley was just a thing on the side.”

  “Laura’s a pretty popular name,” I said. “Bugs’ girlfriend is named Laura.”

  “I wish I had a reason to put him on my list,” she said. “And if he’s got a girlfriend why is he always flirting with you?”

  “He’s only joking around when he does that,” I said.

  She wasn’t paying attention to me, she was studying her list.

  “Now that we have more suspects.” I said. “Can my name come off the list?”

  “No. And while I’m checking over it we’re adding that mouse-man, Clive Armsgoode.”

  I laughed. “He does look like a mouse, doesn’t he?” I said.

  “With a moustache,” she said.

  I stopped laughing. That’s exactly what I had said. I was thinking the same things as Miss Vivee

  That couldn’t be good.

  “That must have been why Aaron was at the ruins,” Mac said. “He was getting material for his article.”

  “He would have had to already have it,” Miss Vivee said. “The article had to have been written and submitted before he died or else they couldn’t have published it.”

  “Then why was he there?” I said. “And how was he my competition if he believed the same thing I do?” I shook my head. “It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, I didn’t come right out and voice my opinion on Maya in Georgia when they interviewed me, I don’t think. But I’m sure he must’ve. It takes a while to gather enough evidence to publish an article that proves something that people have been speculating about for a thousand years. He had to have felt like that when he first came down here.”

  “Sounds fishy to me,” Miss Vivee said.

  “Me too, Miss Vivee,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  We went to the University of North Georgia to see wh
at we could find out about Aaron and his article on Maya living in the United States. I wasn’t so sure how that was going to work out. But knowing Miss Vivee she’d find a way to get information about him. But before we could we ran into Bugs. I had parked the car at the Visitor’s Lot and we were walking, at a snail’s pace, over to the library.

  “Well if it isn’t the Mod Squad,” he said when he saw us.

  He shook Mac’s hand and gave Miss Vivee a squeeze on her shoulders.

  He fell into walking with us.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “You go to school in Athens.”

  “I do, but since I’m so far from school, I sometimes come down here and use the computer lab over at the library.”

  I nodded.

  “And I know that I couldn’t use the equipment at the dig site for my stuff,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “That wouldn’t be right.” I smiled. “I’m glad you realize that.” I looked at him. “And that’s where we’re headed. To the library,” I said.

  “Why are you going over there? I’m sure it’s okay for you to use your own equipment.” he said.

  “Came to get some information on Aaron Coulter.”

  He stopped walking. “Aaron Coulter?”

  “Yeah.” I stopped walking and turned to look back at him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you know him?” Miss Vivee asked. She had stopped too. I guess she’d seen the look on Bugs’ face

  I tugged on his arm and started him moving again. At the rate we were moving we’d never make it to the library.

  “Did you know him,” I asked the question again. He hadn’t answered Miss Vivee.

  “Everyone around here that had any interest in archaeology knew of him.” He hunched his shoulders. “Even with me just coming up here to use the computers, I’d heard of him. But he’s not on campus. I heard he left a few weeks ago. Hasn’t come back.”

  “That’s because he’s dead.”

  “What?” He stopped walking again. “How do you know that?”

  “His were the bones I found.”