Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries Boxed Set: Books 1-3 (The Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries) by Haven Heather

Author:Haven, Heather [Haven, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2015-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Pardon my Enchilada

The trip into San Miguel de Allende was uneventful, if you can call following one police car and being tailed by another uneventful. Tex drove while I contacted Mom using the laptop. While bumping along the back roads of San Miguel, I was “chatting” with my mother who was dealing with commuter traffic on the outskirts of Mexico City. I still can’t get used to wireless computers. They don’t strike me as feasible; I don’t care what Richard says.

When I told Mom about Estaban’s request for the return of the necklace, she promised to let me know what Señor Lopez’s take on it was. I decided, for the moment, to keep my fears about the ceramic knife to myself. I needed to work out a few things first. We left off that we’d touch base in a few hours. I checked the battery. Not bad. I had seven hours and forty-one minutes left.

Once I broke off connection with Mom, I began to search the desktop for an icon named Aztec, when I realized it wasn’t the word Richard had given me. After a cursory look, I saw the word Toltec in the upper right hand of the screen, and the summer of my Latin American studies came rushing back to me.

The Toltecs were precursors to the Aztecs by about one thousand years. We don’t have much of their art, save their language, because the Aztecs systematically decimated the people and their culture in their quest to take over Mexico back in the 1200s. I knew Mira couldn’t get enough of this part of Mexican history. She devoured every book she could get on the subject.

I clicked on the icon and got an eyeful. Richard had been thorough. He’d attached pictures of the scant amount of Toltec artifacts scattered through museums across the world and coupled them with similar artifacts from the cave.

He also included a couple of scientific articles, focusing on two thinly glazed, three-foot high black panther statues mentioned throughout Toltec literature. The thrust of both articles was on whether or not the pieces actually existed. Well, they did, boys and girls, ‘cause I seen ‘em.

Once it was known about the panthers and the rest of the stash, shock waves would pound the world of anthropology. How would even the hint of these findings strike the Curator at the Museo de Antropologia in Mexico City, a place to which Mom was now blithely on her way?

I felt a knot in my stomach and hoped Lila wasn’t making a mistake by showing him the necklace. Curators are known to be highly competitive and sometimes unscrupulous when it comes to obtaining works for their museum. The scandal the Getty Museum in Los Angeles had undergone regarding antiquities flashed into my mind. What if the necklace was genuine, as we suspected? Would Mom be forced to turn it over to Señor Lopez then and there? That wouldn’t be right unless true ownership was established first. I reconnected with the sat phone and sent a fast warning to Mom to be careful.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.