Maya Mound Mayhem (A Logan Dickerson Cozy Mystery Book 3) (9 page)

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.