A THIEF OF ANY MAN (Food Truck Mysteries Book 6)

by Chloe Kendrick

  This time the cameras caught a person in the food truck. I sat up straight with the remote gripped tightly in my hand. We both watched in silence. Land had been right. Sure enough, the woman stepped to the register, opened it, and pulled out a few bills and some coins. Nothing too much, and nothing that would cause immediate alarm.

  She turned and faced the camera. I had never seen her before. She was not a guard, and I hadn’t seen her collect a vehicle when I arrived or left the lot.

  I looked to Land. “Do you know her?”

  He shook his head. “New to me.”

  We watched as the woman turned again and started to make her way out of the truck. She stopped as the shadows moved across the screen again. I couldn’t see what was stopping her, but I wondered if she’d been apprehended by a guard.

  However, in the next second, I knew that wasn’t true. Two hands, unattached to a body from the viewing angle we had, reached up and began to strangle the woman. The hands grasped her by the neck and squeezed. I’d never seen anyone actually killed. I knew that most crimes did not have an eyewitness, which meant that circumstantial evidence has to solve the crimes. I’d seen people in the moments after death, and after they’d been found dead, but I was watching the live-action murder of this woman.

  Land wasn’t speaking. I couldn’t believe that he didn’t seem to have a reaction at this viewing. I knew that I’d be having nightmares for ages.

  After what seemed like an age, but I knew was only a few minutes, the hands moved back, and the woman’s body fell limply to the floor. Even though the feed did not have any audio, I heard the sound of her body hitting the floor in my head. I shivered at the noise.

  Land pried the remote from my hands and rewound it enough to watch the woman crumple to the floor.

  Chapter 3

  After watching the video feed for a second time, he threw me my cellphone, which had been sitting on the coffee table. “Call 911. Tell them what you just saw. I’ve got a call to make too.”

  I did what he said. I knew the steps to reporting a violent crime to the police, but I’d been flummoxed by the images of what I’d witnessed. Land’s instructions revitalized me. I called the number and explained to the operator that I’d just witnessed a murder in progress. She had a lot of questions to ask before letting me go. I couldn’t seem to get her to understand that I was not physically present at the crime but had been watching it on a video feed. I hung up and sank back on the sofa, moving in closer to Land.

  I tried half-heartedly to listen in on Land’s call, but I could learn little of the conversation, besides that he’d called Detective Jax Danvers, one of Capital City’s homicide detectives, about the murder. Danvers had made a point of not coming to Dogs on the Roll once Land and I had announced that we were dating. Suddenly, he was too busy to get a cup of coffee or a dog on the house. I had noticed the absence, but there was really nothing I could do about the situation. I wasn’t his friend. I was just a woman who had a knack for getting involved in murder cases. Danvers and I had kissed once during an early case, but he’d made the point clear to me that he considered the incident a mistake. His words.

  I hung up before Land did, and I got the indication that we’d be meeting Danvers and a CSI team at the food truck as soon as we could get there. I threw on some different clothes while Land was finishing up the phone call, and I was ready to go by the time he hung up.

  We didn’t say much in the car. There were no words for me to explain how I was feeling, and Land was not one to share emotions easily. I was sure that he’d seen similar things before, but he wouldn’t tell me what they were or when they’d occurred. I just knew enough to understand that Land and Danvers had worked together in some military capacity before they got out and went into very different careers. Given his calm under pressure, I suspected that he had been in some very tight places in his early career, but to me, he was a chef and boyfriend. Those vague, earlier days didn’t have a major impact on our relationship.

  The police were already waiting at the scene when we arrived. Apparently the security guard was missing again tonight, and the police had bolt-cutters ready to snip the eight-foot wall. It seemed odd to me that the lot’s own guard would be absent in what was likely the most eventful time. We waited as they cut through the chain link fence and entered the lot. I pointed the way to our food truck, which wasn’t hard to find since its name was emblazoned on its side.

  I unlocked the door, not wanting to repeat the destruction of the fence on my truck. I’d already composed myself enough to realize that a crime scene in the food truck would likely mean that we’d be out of commission for a week, if not more. I didn’t want to witness any physical damage to the food truck as well. My expenses were going to be high enough if I didn’t have a steady income flowing in.

  I wasn’t sure what I was expecting when I flung open the door. The video had been graphic in the extreme. The body had fallen to the floor after the two hands had squeezed the life out of the woman. However, when I looked into the truck, nothing was there. No hands, no woman, no corpse. The prep area looked the same as it had when I’d left the lot around 4pm.

  I stepped back, feeling a little sick to my stomach, and let the police do their job.

  Land had a quizzical expression on his face. He knew me well enough to know that I would have given away the existence of the body via my expression. Yet I hadn’t done so, and he wanted to know why.

  “She’s not there,” I whispered to him. “I didn’t see any trace of a body anywhere.”

  “You didn’t have much of a chance to look around,” he countered, but honestly, a food truck is not a three-bedroom apartment. There’s the work area and kitchen and the area up front where I sat to drive. Granted, I hadn’t given the place a good onceover, but at the same time, unless the woman’s corpse had been stuffed into a cabinet, she was not there.

  Land moaned. “This is not going to end well. Danvers is going to be seriously pissed.”

  As if by cue, Detective Danvers stepped out of the food truck and marched over to us. He barely nodded at me, facing Land and talking directly to him.

  “There’s a charge that can be leveled for filing a false police report, getting a police crew out here for nothing. Capital City is on a cost-cutting kick. We’ll have to answer questions about this call.” The look on his face was one of pure annoyance. His mouth was pursed, with his lips drawn thin. A vein on his neck was pulsing like a salsa beat. I wondered how much of this emotion was from being called out on a weeknight vs. having to put up with me on another investigation. I didn’t want to be vain, but I did wonder about his real feelings towards me.

  I didn’t say a word, in part because he had his back turned to me. Land was more patient than I was anyway, so it worked better to have him talk. “We watched the video feed for the food truck tonight, hoping to find out who was stealing small sums of money from the register each night. When we got near to the real time feed, we witnessed a strangling. As I told you, two disembodied hands wrapped around a woman’s throat and tightened until the woman went down. We didn’t see who the hands belonged to, and we’ve never seen the victim before either. So we can’t do much for identification. However, we can provide you with the feed so that you can see for yourself.”

  Danvers grunted. “I’m going to want to see that – tonight. Now. Just as soon as we get done here I’m going to see for myself. Then I’ll decide about charges.”

  I muttered something under my breath about good deeds being punished, but I was still being ignored.

  Danvers asked, “The security guard is gone. Do you know anything about that?” The question was pointed, but I chalked it up to Danvers’ bad mood.

  Land shook his head. “I’ll look into it. I don’t like the idea of a guard not being here. It leaves our trucks vulnerable.”

  Danvers walked off to the food truck again. He was gone about ten minutes. Land and I exchanged glances, but there wasn’t much more to say. We both had a ton o
f questions, but we knew that those would have to wait until we didn’t have a police escort, as some thoughts and suggestions would involve us conducting our own investigation into the entire mystery.

  When he returned, he looked from one of us to the other. “Which of you drove?” he asked. “I’m riding with you so you don’t have any chance to mess with the video feed.”

  I noticed that he was carrying a pair of latex gloves in his left hand. “Are those…?” I asked.

  “They were on the floor in the food truck. Sanitary latex gloves in a food prep area are not a sign of a crime being committed. Now, not having sanitary gloves in a food prep area would be a sign of a crime, but that’s not my area.” He smirked at his own joke, but my eyes were riveted to the gloves. The opaque white of the gloves might have made the hands look free floating, I thought. If the person was dressed in darker clothes, it would look like the hands did not belong to a person.

  Land held up his car keys, and Danvers followed us to the car. He made Danvers sit in the backseat, which was none too comfy in a sports car. We drove back to my apartment in silence and headed inside to watch the video.

  All during the drive back, I had been concerned. What if I’d been wrong? What if the crime wasn’t really there? I kept trying to remind myself that I hadn’t been alone. Land had seen the woman fall to the ground too, and he had forced us both to watch it more than once. There was little doubt of what we’d seen. We were not mistaken. Someone had beat us to the food truck and moved the body.

  So why would someone take the time to clean up a crime scene and remove a body? The obvious answer was that if the person belonging to the hands had not known of the video feed, this would be a perfect crime. No victim, no suspicions of a murder taking place. The only clue would be a missing person. If I had noticed a pair of gloves on the floor, I would have thought that Carter had left them, and he would think the same of me. I doubted that it would even bear a mention. Everything was normal – except for the video feed.

  As soon as we got inside my apartment, I cued up the TV. My hands were shaking as I started to fast-forward through the feed. I got to the 9pm mark and slowed the feed down. Just when I thought that perhaps I had imagined the entire thing, the woman appeared, followed shortly after that by the hands. All three of us watched in silence as the woman crumpled to the floor. Danvers played it twice more, and I left the room, excusing myself for the restroom. I couldn’t bear to see a murder replayed like a football penalty. My nerves were shot.

  When I returned, Danvers had the remote in his hand. He was moving it back and forth in his hand like a baton. “I was just telling Land here that it looks like your victim lived.” Danvers raised his hands and gave us air quotes for the word “victim.”

  “I can understand why you’d think that the woman had died, but it takes a lot of effort to manually strangle someone. A ridiculous amount of upper body strength and willpower. It’s impossible to judge how much pressure was being put on her neck from the video. The camera angle makes it hard to tell. So while you thought that the woman died, it’s more likely that she passed out, woke up later, and left. It’s the easiest solution, and the most likely.” He smiled at us as if he were schooling two children in basic homicide. He neglected the fact that we hadn’t seen her leave, but I knew that he’d have a pat answer for that and any other question I might put to him.

  “But there’s no video of her getting up,” I reminded him anyway.

  “There’s no video of anyone getting up. If the victim was really dead, the feed should show the killer removing the body, shouldn’t it?”

  He was right. I’d missed the implication that the feed should have shown what happened to the body. I’d been too upset to follow through.

  Land sighed. “In either case, the feed should have shown what happened, and didn’t. That would point to a cover-up, which is not what typically happens with an assault from which the victim walks away.”

  Danvers barked out a short laugh. It definitely was not an amused one. “So your argument is that, since nothing was shown, it must be a case of foul play. Otherwise we would have seen something in the video feed.”

  Land shrugged. “It’s true. The victim here would have had to stand up, which would imply that she would be seen immediately. There’s no way to get to the camera without being seen by it. The other person in the food truck had the opportunity to maneuver around and disable the camera somehow until the body could be removed.”

  “And then they moved the camera back into position?” Danvers asked. “Because we checked the angle, and it should have caught anyone leaving through the door.”

  I furrowed my brow. “That’s not how I had it set up. The main focus should have been the register. That’s where the money was.”

  Danvers shook his head. “So your killer would have had to readjust the camera and then come out of the truck through the front – after taking the time to remove the body and stash it somewhere else. I’m sure he stopped and had a Starbucks too – all in a few minutes before we showed up.”

  I doubted highly that the woman had come back, after being strangled like that, to move the cameras, but if the police were going to go with the easiest theory, then we would have to investigate on our own.

  Danvers talked to Land for a few more minutes and left. Land gave me a curious gaze. “You’re not going to argue about the walking dead?”

  “No, not tonight. Danvers is dead set on not believing us – even after watching that video. If he doesn’t believe that, then he won’t listen to anything I have to say.” I took a deep breath and tried to get the images out of my mind. I was still haunted by what I’d seen. The number of times I’d seen the killing had made it an indelible memory.

  Land raised an eye. “I’d agree with that. He’s pretty set on not working a murder case with us.”

  I sighed. “Because of me?” I asked, feeling sorry for the detective.

  Land burst out into laughter. “We think highly of ourselves, don’t we? Not in the way that you’re thinking,” he replied after he got the laughter under control. “Danvers is in a bit of hot water with the brass because you keep beating him to the punch on the homicides you’re involved in. It’s definitely not because he’s harboring some deep, dark, romantic feelings for you.”

  “But–” I started.

  “Look, Danvers and I spoke just after the first time you and I kissed. I didn’t want to step on any toes. I’m not friends with him, and I don’t trust him any farther than we could toss each other, but I respect him professionally, and I didn’t want there to be any hard feelings. Danvers made it perfectly clear that kissing you had been a mistake, and one that he was not likely to repeat.” Land looked like he might burst out into peals of laughter again. I wasn’t amused, but I knew that he was doing this in part to get my thoughts off the murder. Getting my temper flared up would change the subject effectively.

  I was still not amused. I didn’t understand why Danvers had been so against that kiss once it was over. It seemed like he would have known beforehand that it would not be a good idea. Now I just had the urge to show him up again and solve this case. We’d have a lot more leeway to investigate a crime that the police didn’t think happened, and it would look all the worse for Detective Danvers and the Capital City police when we found out who murdered that lady.

  “So now we’re going to find out who this woman was, right?” Land asked. “I can tell from the set of your jaw that you’re determined to show up Danvers again. Is that really such a great idea?’

  “There’s nothing to show up, remember? We saw an attack, but no murder. So he has nothing to worry about.”

  Land shook his head as if he didn’t agree. “Even if he’s right, that the woman got up and left, there’s still the matter of assault. Danvers could claim that the crime is an open investigation for assault and try to keep us away from the case.”

  “But he won’t, will he?” I asked. I was already mapping out a list of things
to do which would help us answer some questions.

  “Unlikely. If he was going to take this seriously, then he would have impounded the truck. Since he didn’t, I think he’s calling this matter closed.”

  That stopped me cold for a moment. While things were better than ever for the food truck business, the thought of days with no income would hurt. We needed both trucks running on a regular basis to make a profit. So while I might not have any threats to my person, I would have to watch my step so that I wasn’t without an income.

  Despite the late night and the multiple viewings of the food truck the previous evening, I was twenty-five minutes earlier than Carter the next day. While the previous evening felt like a dream at times, the hole in the chain-link fence at the secured parking lot reminded me of the night’s reality when I returned that morning. I still drove through the gate and parked the car. No one could have told from my demeanor or routine that we’d seen a woman strangled in the food truck last night. The lot was serene looking in the early morning light. The first orange rays of light rose over the maples, and I could see outline of the downtown skyline in the distance.

  Bryson, the morning guard, was on duty, and I waved as I drove out of the lot. I wondered again where the evening guard had gone. The day guard wore a dark blue uniform, which had not been the woman’s attire. So it was unlikely that we’d seen the guard killed. So where does a guard go when not doing his or her job? I indelicately wondered about bathroom breaks on the job, but the length of time she’d been gone suggested other reasons for her disappearance. Perhaps the night guard had something to do with the crimes?

  I drove to Elm Street, parked, and started setting up. I counted the money twice, but there was no cash missing. Either the strangled woman was the thief who had been killed before she stole the money, or multiple people were visiting the truck on a nightly basis. I leaned towards the former, since the lot really was supposed to be secure.