Paranormal Mystery Boxset Books 1-3: Legends of Treasure

by Lois D. Brown

In the front office, an airy mountain scent from an aerosol can had greeted Maria’s nose. However, despite the Lysol-clean appearance of the examination room, the smell of decaying bodies hung in the air like smog in a polluted city. Dr. Butler pulled out a jar of Vicks vapor rub, dipped her finger into it, and smeared it under her nose.

  “Want some?” she asked.

  Pete and Maria both took her up on the offer.

  Next, Dr. Butler briskly strode to an oversized large metallic door, opening it with a key. A blast of cold air from the walk-in freezer made goose bumps spring up on Maria’s arms and neck.

  “He was already embalmed for the funeral,” said Dr. Butler, as she wheeled a gurney into the room, “but I like to keep bodies in the freezer anyway. I think it just makes them fresher, don’t you?”

  Pete murmured something about a freezer being for popsicles. Maria said nothing but focused on her abdominal breathing techniques to lower her anxiety levels that were shooting through the roof. She had thought they were going to just be looking at photographs. If she had known the actual body was going to be here, she would have come more mentally prepared.

  Dr. Butler pushed the body right next to Pete and Maria. “I was excited when Emily Hayward kindly agreed to let me have him back for one last examination before burying him. I wanted to show you both something.”

  Maria could think of about a million other things that would make her more excited than getting to examine a dead body one more time.

  “The good news is that the mayor didn’t suffer long. The bullet killed him quickly. Unfortunately, since there wasn’t much of a struggle, there was no foreign DNA present anywhere on his body or clothing. Forensics got back to me with their report earlier this afternoon. I know you were hoping for some definite evidence on the body itself, but I’m afraid I don’t have that to give you, Chief.”

  Maria didn’t try hiding her disappointment.

  “On the other hand,” continued Dr. Butler, “forensics did say there were multiple instances of foreign DNA on items in his vehicle, all from the same individual.”

  Maria’s eyebrows rose. She had a guess at whose DNA it might be.

  “DNA from hair samples were found on the front passenger seat as well as DNA saliva on the rim of an empty bottle of juice.” Dr. Butler fiddled with the corner of the white sheet that covered the mayor’s body.

  It made Maria even more nervous. “Any identification of the DNA?”

  “Not yet. We wanted to take some samples from any possible . . . what do you call them? ‘People of interest?’”

  Pulling out a sample bag full of Whitney’s hair, Maria said, “I already have this sample for you. How long do you think it would take to see if it’s a match to the foreign DNA in the vehicle?”

  Dr. Butler took the bag. “I’ll drive this over to the lab myself. I bet if I push them, they could have the results back by Monday. Quick enough?”

  “Perfect.”

  Pete looked at Maria inquisitively. “Whose hair is that?”

  Maria hadn’t had time to bring Pete up to speed with everything that was going on. While she’d been busy with the murder case, Pete had taken over the day-to-day police tasks that needed to be done. And he’d done a great job of it too. Beth had been right about him. He must have been feeling just a little intimidated by her at first.

  “I got the samples when I was having dinner with the Thatchers last night,” Maria said quietly enough so Dr. Butler didn’t hear. “They invited me and Rod Thorton to their home. I have some ‘iffy’ evidence that Whitney Thatcher may have something to do with the mayor’s death.”

  Pete’s mouth dropped open. Maria figured he was angry she hadn’t told him about Whitney sooner.

  “You had dinner with Rod Thorton?” Pete folded his arms across his chest.

  Maria might as well have slapped him. He looked so hurt.

  “Yes. It was a good opportunity to get a sample of Whitney’s hair.” Maria pointed to the sample bag to prove her point.

  “Was it like a date?” Pete planted his feet and stared at her.

  “I guess. No, not really. What’s the big deal?”

  Dr. Butler interrupted the conversation, thankfully. “I need to check on something in the other room. Before I go, however, I wanted to show you one interesting thing on the body. Go ahead and see if you can find it for yourself.” With that she pulled the sheet that was covering Mayor Hayward’s stiff, naked body and walked out of the room.

  Pete gagged.

  So did Maria, but for a different reason.

  She’d seen lots of bodies after an autopsy. However, she’d never seen a corpse on a gurney with its eyes open, waving to her like he was in the Rose Bowl parade.

  Her heart fell. The ghosts were back.

  Just like at the mayor’s viewing, Maria hadn’t had time to prepare emotionally. Her vision blurred, and her equilibrium stopped working. She felt as if she were walking on a tightrope and was about to fall to her death from one hundred feet in the air. She couldn’t force spit down her throat.

  Blinking several times to clear her vision, Maria kept her eyes on Pete’s face, which looked about as pale as the mayor’s. “So-o-o, was it a d-date?” Pete stuttered.

  “Huh?” asked Maria. “Oh, the other night. Dinner. Rod.” Only words tumbled from her mouth. Complete sentences were too hard to form. All of her energy was being poured into trying not to see the ghost of Mayor Hayward.

  Pete stumbled on his words too. The body was affecting him as well. “Rod’s a p-playboy. Trust me. Every woman in town has a crush on him. My sister tells me everything. I’m just worried about you.” Talking seemed to help him get his composure back.

  While Pete rambled about Rod Thorton’s many faults, several more ghosts appeared in the room. One brushed past Pete. Its mouth was open, as if in a constant state of screaming, but it had no tongue. It had been severed, just like the fingers of the ghost standing next to it.

  Maria wanted to scream at them to leave her alone, but she knew Pete wouldn’t understand.

  “You’re too good for Rod, anyway. He’s a lawyer and those people have such low morals,” Pete concluded.

  On the opposite side of the ghosts with mangled bodies appeared Maria’s Aztec ghost. He stood aloof, watching her with a fierce gaze. She had to make them all go away. If Dr. Roberts thought talking to them would help, she was willing. She’d tried it once in the bathroom and it had seemed effective . . . kind of. The problem was Pete was here and he’d think she was crazy if she started talking to thin air. She’d have to make him think she was talking to him.

  “Why did you come here?” Maria asked the Aztec ghost.

  Pete, of course, thought the question was directed at him. “Because you asked me to. And it’s my job.”

  The Aztec pointed at Maria with his finger. He had come to see her.

  “There must be another reason you came?” As she spoke, Maria glanced from her Aztec ghost back to Pete. She couldn’t let Pete know she was talking to anyone else but him.

  This time Maria’s ghost pointed at the mayor.

  Pete exhaled slowly and inched away from the mayor’s body. “You’re right. I’m here for another reason. I might as well tell you now. Maria, I know we work together, but I don’t see that’s any reason to not get to know each other on a more . . . personal basis. I’d like to know who you are. What you like to do. I’ve been trying to make some time to see you, but you’ve not been free. I wanted to come here to ask if you’d like to have dinner with me tonight.”

  Work together. Personal basis. Dinner. Maria only heard random phrases of what Pete was saying. Her attention was elsewhere. The other ghosts in the room had evaporated, leaving only the dead mayor, who still waved his hand back and forth, and the Aztec ghost. Oh, and Pete.

  “What is your name? Your full name?” Again, she looked at Pete but tilted her head toward the ghost in his large, feathery headdress and loin cloth.

  Bewildered, Pete peered at h
er. “What does that have to do with dinner?”

  Moving next to Pete’s side, the Aztec ghost forced his mouth to open. A low, guttural sound came out that resembled more of a dying animal wail than a name.

  “Peter Ester Richins.” Pete was clearly embarrassed.

  “Could you say that again?” asked Maria.

  This time the ghost forced his mouth to move with his fingers. It was as if he hadn’t spoken in hundreds of years. Maria listened closely and heard an “a,” as in apple, along with a “c” followed by something that sounded like “lawn.”

  “If you think my name is funny just say so,” Pete fumed. “You don’t need to make me say it again. I was named after my grandmother because my mother never had a girl baby. If you have issues with it, blame her.” His face had been a rainbow of colors in the last few minutes. It had gone from gray, to white, to pink and now crimson red.

  “Acalan?”

  The ghost bobbed his head up and down.

  Pete threw up his hands in frustration. “What is that supposed to mean? Is that some code word for dorky?”

  “What?” For the first time in the last few minutes, Maria actually listened to Pete. “What’s dorky?”

  “My name.” He looked livid. “You think my name is dorky.”

  “Why is Pete dorky?”

  At that moment, Dr. Butler entered the room, saving Maria from anymore of Pete’s drama. “Did you find it?”

  Pete and Maria looked at each other, and then both answered together, “Find what?”

  “On the body.” Dr. Butler motioned to the corpse. “Did you find the marking?”

  Maria had completely forgotten that the coroner had asked them to do that. She reddened around the ears. “I . . . I kind of forgot.”

  Shaking her head, Dr. Butler said, “Ah, well, it was difficult for me to see at first anyway. Here, let me point it out.” She scooted some of the mayor’s hair out of the way. Behind the man’s ear, next to his hairline, was a tattoo. It was small, and Maria could hardly make it out.

  Dr. Butler pulled an object out of nearby drawer. “It’s really quite detailed if you look closely at it. Here.”

  Maria took the magnifying glass the doctor offered and placed it next to the ink drawing.

  Peter gasped. “Isn’t that—?”

  Maria made her own quiet exclamation of surprise. “It is.”

  On the mayor’s white, almost translucent skin was the picture the archaeologist Ryker Jephson had so meticulously explained to Maria and Pete in the cave. It was the drawing of a reptile with its mouth wide open, and next to it was a double circle with four holes and a plus sign in the middle.

  There was no mistake. It was drawn onto the man’s skin clear as day.

  Cave of Gold.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  What the crafty Aztecs would do . . . is dig a tunnel leading to the treasure trove and then flood the entrance by damning a stream and creating a lake. And to make sure no one gave away the hiding place, everyone who’d had a hand in the project would be killed. Ergo, the ghosts that haunt the area.

  RANGE MAGAZINE. “MONTEZUMA’S REVENGE” BY RICHARD MENZIES, FALL ISSUE 1998.

  Maria’s first assumption was that whoever killed the mayor had branded him with the glyph, like serial killers do to their victims on police television dramas. While she supposed that did happen in real life on rare occasions, she’d never come across it before.

  Dr. Butler’s next statement shattered that hypothesis. “It’s an old tattoo. He’s had it since he was a teenager. He got it before it was the ‘in’ thing to cover oneself with strange markings like they do nowadays. I must admit, if people had my job and saw what bodies looked like after the skin loses its elasticity, there would undoubtedly be fewer tattoos.”

  Pete self-consciously rubbed the colorful picture of a rose he sported on his forearm.

  “Why do you think it’s there?” Maria asked Dr. Butler.

  “I have no idea. I was going to ask you the very same question,” answered Dr. Butler.

  “I don’t have any idea.” Maria glanced at Pete. “I think I need another visit to the cave.”

  Functioning completely on fumes, Maria hiked out to the cave, arriving there two hours after her visit to the coroner’s office. She needed answers about the mayor’s tattoo and about Acalan, the Aztec ghost she kept seeing. She hoped Ryker might shed some light on both subjects.

  Unfortunately, he too was baffled by the tattoo on the back of the mayor’s neck. Maria had snapped a photograph of it to show him.

  “So you’ve never heard of a group or guild or some kind of society with tattoos like that?” Maria asked.

  The excavation crew had finished dinner and some, along with Ryker, were warming themselves around the campfire. Maria had laid her sleeping bag on the ground next to the blaze and was snuggled up inside of it.

  “No,” said Ryker. “I haven’t, but I’m not as familiar with modern Indian lore as I should be. There is someone here, however, who might know more.” Ryker put both hands around his mouth and shouted at a group playing cards by the electric lanterns. “Jim, can you come over here for a minute?”

  Turning back to Maria, Ryker said, “Jim is a freelance consultant whom I often bring on digs like these. He has no degree in archaeology that I know of, but he’s an expert on Native Americans, both modern and historical. He’s saved my hide several times.”

  Jim approached the fire, his hands shoved into his pockets, a beanie cap on his head, and hiking boots that looked so old they may have been ancient artifacts themselves. He was older than the other members of the crew. The wrinkle lines in Jim’s face were evidence he was pushing at least fifty.

  “Hey, Jim,” said Ryker. “I was just telling my good friend Maria here about the time you saved me thousands of dollars.”

  He shrugged. “You paid me to do it. I get a job done.”

  “Thousands, huh? What happened?” The warmth from Maria’s sleeping bag soothed her tense muscles after the last hectic forty-eight hours.

  “I was doing a project for the Arizona state government. They were building a power plant and had hired me to do an archaeological sweep of the land. They didn’t want to start building and then have to stop the project because of some unknown Native American burial ground they might disturb. That happens all the time in the four corners area. They were paying me a lot of money to ensure them the land had a clean bill of health, so to speak.”

  Jim squatted down in front of the fire. His eyes were darker than even Maria’s, and his hair was jet black.

  “I spent weeks scouring the site and didn’t find a single trace of Native American presence. I was about to give the contractor the go-ahead, when I had the thought to hire Jim to come out and confirm my conclusion. He came out and walked around with a handful of neon orange flags. The project site was big, fifteen acres or so. Every so often Jim would stick one of those flags in the ground and then keep on moving.”

  Jim had little reaction to what Ryker was saying. Maria found the quiet man intriguing.

  “He spent most of the day on site,” continued Ryker. “When he got back, he told me I should dig under the flags. I did as I was told. Sure enough, I found Native American remains under eleven of the fifteen flags he’d placed. It was unbelievable.”

  During the entire story, Jim hadn’t moved a muscle. His eyes hadn’t even seemed to blink. There was a stillness to him that was disconcerting.

  “How’d you do it?” asked Maria. “What’s your secret, Jim?”

  “No secret.” Jim picked up a twig off the dirt and threw it into the fire. “I just know.”

  Ryker handed Jim the picture of the mayor’s tattoo along with a flashlight so he could see it better. “Have you ever seen others with a tattoo like this?”

  Jim studied it a minute. “The symbols are Aztec. But, I’ve never seen them used by Native Mob or any other Native American gang I know of. I can’t help you.”

  “It’s okay
.” Maria knew it had been a shot in the dark. “I figured it didn’t hurt to ask.” She was about to thank them and hole up in her sleeping bag when she realized this Jim fellow might know something about this Acalan ghost that kept visiting her. He did seem to know an awful lot. But to talk about it in front of Ryker was humiliating. Then again, this wasn’t about her former professor. This was about getting answers. For her and for Rod.

  “Jim, have you seen any strange people around here? And by strange I mean they’re dressed like Aztecs and shimmer?”

  Ryker laughed.

  Jim didn’t.

  “What if I told you I have a friend,” said Maria, “who says there are ghosts in this area and in the Three Lakes area as well. What would you tell him? That he’s crazy?”

  “Not at all.” Jim kicked at the dirt. “The spirits of those with jobs still on earth often stay close to the place where they took their last breath.”

  Ryker grew quiet.

  “Is it possible one of these ghosts could actually have a name?” Maria knew she must sound insane to her former professor, but she didn’t care. This was for her. For Rod. And for the two Aztec ghosts that haunted them.

  “A name like what?” Jim asked.

  “Acalan.”

  Jim scratched his head. “That is an Aztec name. It means canoe. It was quite popular—five hundred years ago.”

  Maria had heard enough. Her decapitated ghosts may not be real, but she was realizing there was a strong possibility that Acalan was. Rod needed to talk to Jim. It’d probably go a long way toward helping Rod feel like he wasn’t completely crazy either.

  “Hey,” Maria said, “if either of you guys are interested, I’m going to Three Lakes tomorrow with Rod Thorton. His uncle owns the place. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you came along. There’s supposed to be an Aztec water trap petroglyph nearby.”

  “I’d love to come,” answered Ryker. “How about you, Jim?”

  “Sure.” His face remained expressionless but not in a mean way. It was more matter-of-fact.