Land finished the paperwork with the permits and picked up my stack. I took a few minutes getting plates and glasses together before I started on the permits. The torte was chocolate with some sort of raspberry flavoring. I cut two slices of the torte for us, assuming that Land would want his own piece. His physique was such that he looked like he only ate protein and in small amounts, but I’d also seen him devour some very healthy portions of dessert. I poured the wine and deposited both food and wine in front of him.
He gave me a smile. “This is a family recipe. I’m hoping I can use it in the new truck. I’d like to have a dessert option on the menu. I know it’s more work, but I think I could do it.” While it was a big step for my business, I was always a bit surprised by how much Land wanted this to happen. I had enjoyed working with him. I’d learned a lot, and the thought of doing the work with someone who was less experienced made me anxious. Yet Land saw it as a step toward his dreams—a step toward autonomy.
I had to admit that the torte was delicious. I finished my slice in no time and gave some thought to a second piece before deciding against it. Land was watching my reaction, and I gave him my best approval smile. “It was delicious. I don’t know how you could stay in such good shape if that was in your house growing up.”
Land finished his piece as well and swallowed the last of his wine before starting back to the papers again. I went through the permits, but as I suspected, there was nothing in the paperwork to tell me anything about the truck, its profitability or the murder. The truck was in shape and up to par. There had been no delays in the processing of the permits.
Land finished reading the papers about the same time as I did. “What are you going to do?” he asked.
I took a deep breath. I knew what I wanted, but of course, big changes in a thriving business are always scary. “As soon as I get the financials—and if they check out—I’m going to make an offer on the truck. I’ll start at the price that Janelle purchased for it, or maybe a little less. The financials should show me how much money she had to put into fixing the truck up for the inspections, but I have a feeling that the family will want to unload the food truck as quickly as possible. They didn’t seem very enamored of it.” I thought back to the sneers that Mrs. Nolan had given me when talking about food service and the trucks.
He nodded. “Sounds like a plan to me. Want to hear about the latest from Danvers?”
Of course, he hadn’t really needed to ask me. Land knew that I wanted to hear all the details about the murder case, especially if it could relate to our purchase of the truck. I nodded.
“So, now that Janelle is out of the loop. Danvers is trying to use the photos he took of the various couriers and identify them so we can continue the surveillance. Otherwise, he’s wants you to reopen that truck with a foreigner who might have sympathies to other countries.”
“Shouldn’t he have been doing that already?” I asked, thinking that the couriers and their associates should have been identified long ago so that the leaders of the operation could be discovered.
“Yes, but Danvers was concerned about digging too deep and alerting the couriers to the fact that they were being watched. So he did nothing. Now he’s trying to play catch up since there’s no other way to find out what back-up plans were put into place. It’s standard bureaucracy. Try something until it’s clear that it won’t work, and then try something else.”
I thought about Sam again and wondered if he had been photographed by the police. In all likelihood, he had been. He’d been at Janelle’s truck arguing about something while she was under surveillance. So perhaps my piece of information was worth more than I originally thought.
“So the foreigner,” I asked, putting the word in air quotes, “would be you?”
He nodded. “It would work out especially well if you end up buying the food truck.”
I puzzled for a minute. “That would mean that we’d have to keep gyros on the menu, or the truck would be unrecognizable. It would be weird to have a logo that has nothing to do with the cuisine. How do you feel about that?”
Land shrugged. “It does put me in a corner in terms of the fare, but I know some good lamb recipes. I could add some of those so that gyros are only one aspect of the cuisine. My mother had this lamb stew recipe.” He started into a recipe that would have never let you know that he was also talking about moving into a truck where the last owner had been murdered, or pretending to be part of an espionage ring.
Obviously Land had been thinking about this for a long time. I knew that he had insisted that my aunt had promised him the food truck, but she had left it to me in her will. So I knew he’d been thinking about this since before she had passed away. Yet the circumstances were not what he would have wanted. He’d be a sitting duck for agents from a foreign country with a menu he hadn’t designed. It was less than optimal from his perspective.
I pulled out a pad of paper to start making a list. Land knew I was serious about this, since I only made lists for things I absolutely wanted to get done. “So what all do we need to do to make this happen?”
“The truck is currently evidence in a murder case, so there’s that. Danvers would have to get it released. That might take some doing. I mean, it could still have some physical evidence in it that the police missed the first time through.”
I stopped writing. It was going to be a very short list if I had to rely on the kindness of Detective Jax Danvers. Usually he was warning me to stay away from open police investigations, lest I run across something that he’s missed. I could just imagine what he’d tell me if I wanted to buy the evidence in an open murder case. “I’m guessing the fact that it was the locked room where Janelle was found is going to make it that much more difficult to get released.”
He nodded, but his expression did not look defeated. “Absolutely. It just depends on how bad they want to close this other case.”
I looked up at him. “Are you really thinking that a spy case would be more important than a murder?”
He shrugged. “It’s possible. Part of it would depend on which agency would take the lead. The CIA would definitely be more interested in the spies as would the FBI. They’ve made deals with murderers to get information on another case of greater importance to them.”
I just sat there trying to imagine Land’s background that would include dealings with the FBI and the CIA. To me, he would always be this incredible chef, but I knew that he had a past—one that he refused to talk about personally. He would share details about the type of work he’d done, as he was doing now, but he would never breathe a word about how he’d been involved.
“If the murder was related to the spy case,” he continued, “definitely. You’re talking one person against the fate of a country or a city or a building. You don’t know what they have planned, so it’s not possible to put a death count on it. It could pose a major threat. Janelle’s murder is just one person, and she was part of the group who was involved in the major threat.”
I tried to understand what he was saying, but in my world, murder was the worst thing a person could do. One person or hundreds, it was still murder, and the killer needed to be brought to justice. Maybe that’s why I had such a need to help out on these investigations. I liked to see things put right and for justice to be served. I liked the thought that I was so civic minded, but I also knew a part of me wanted to show up Detective Danvers as well, since he was trying to keep me out of this matter.
“So what are our chances of getting the truck any time in the near future?” I asked.
Land shrugged. “When I work with the department, it’s always through Danvers. I have no idea what the rest of those department heads and supervisors would say about releasing a key piece of evidence to a civilian before they could bring a case to trial.”
I sighed. He was right about that. The defendant would not be able to examine all the evidence if Land had been cooking gyros in it for six months. “Either way, we need to solve this murder. If it
’s not related to what Janelle was doing, then we need to solve it so that they’ll release the truck. Otherwise, we need to get them to release the truck so that it can work as a meeting place for the couriers.”
Land looked at me for a long moment. “So is this really going to happen?” he asked. “The truck?”
“Absolutely. I wouldn’t have started a list if I didn’t think it would,” I said with a smile. “But let me ask you a question. What do you know about Morocco?” I thought again about Janelle’s mother and the photos on the table.
Land’s eyes went wide. “Where exactly did that come from?” he asked. His tone was suddenly wary.
“I think that Janelle’s mother might be of Moroccan extract. She had a very beautiful exotic look to her, and I recognized the Moroccan flag in some of the photos in the house. I wondered if that might be the foreign country that Danvers was talking about.”
Land gave a long, low whistle. “The country in question is actually Algeria, which has had a running feud with Morocco for ages. Right now, you can’t even cross the border from one to the other. They’re having some squabble about the Western Sahara, as if you should fight about tons of sand.”
“So that’s a possibility?” I asked, feeling quite proud of myself. Who knew that college level geography classes could come in so handy?
Land moved his hand back and forth. “Maybe, but if it is true, then we have some serious issues. A Moroccan would never leak information to Algeria. If this is the case, then I’m thinking we might have a double-cross on our hands.”
I tried to follow his line of thinking, but he was making leaps of logic miles ahead of where I was. “So you think that if Janelle was passing information to Algeria, then she could have been falsifying it so that it would be worthless? That’s a hell of a motive for murder.”
Land agreed. She’d been playing a deadly game of espionage with people who were fighting with her and her family. It could easily have turned deadly…and we would be walking into the middle of that situation.
Chapter 7
We soon had our answer about buying Janelle’s food truck. Carter, Land and I were all working on the food truck the next day. Carter kept eyeing the both of us, since we seemed to both be aware of some piece of information that he didn’t know. While he knew my ambitions for a second food truck, I didn’t want to tell Carter about the possible purchase of Janelle’s truck. He had told me a story about how he knew Janelle, but frankly I was skeptical. Janelle had no need of another worker on the truck. She couldn’t possibly have been pulling in enough cash to hire someone else, though it would be like her to try to steal away good help.
I also didn’t want him to find out about the espionage angle. It was bad enough that I was involved with what might be a deadly case of international intelligence, but there was absolutely no reason to involve Carter too. While he was nearly the same age as me, he seemed to have gotten stuck in the sophomoric college guy mode. I wondered if he was just that way, or if having to take on the issues related to his family had made him try to fiercely hold on to his youth by acting less mature.
Even though I didn’t want to share all the information I knew, I wanted to keep Carter on the truck. He was doing a good job, and I knew that the pool of qualified candidates who would work for what I could pay was very small. I would just have to keep an eye on him and make sure that he wasn’t part of the plotting.
As usual, Detective Danvers showed up at the truck shortly after the lunch rush died down. He’d grown accustomed to stopping by at a slow time, when we were more focused on cleaning up and preparing for the next day rather than serving customers. It gave him time to talk to us without too many interruptions or prying customers.
“What’s the word?” Land asked as soon as Danvers stepped up to the window. He moved closer to the window, which left Carter cleaning alone. The younger man kept his eyes on the three of us as he moved around the kitchen area, performing the daily tasks.
I could tell from Danvers’ face that the plan to get the truck had not worked out. I didn’t speak though. I would let the police officer tell Land that his dream was postponed a little longer. “Sorry, no. They won’t let us have a crime scene to sell to a suspect. The lieutenant is having the truck scrubbed again to see if there was anything that might have been overlooked in the first examination. Then they’ll talk again, but I wouldn’t hold out hope.”
“How long will that take?” Land asked, impatiently. He was scrubbing the counter at the window with far more force than was needed. We wouldn’t have to worry about passing any inspections if he kept this up.
“Hard to tell. It could be a day or a week or a month. It depends on when they get to it. There’s a backlog right now at the forensics lab of about a week. Then it depends on if they find something. The best scenario is that they don’t find a thing, and the truck gets through the process quickly. If they find something new, then it could be weeks for them to analyze it and determine what it is and then look for more again. Forensics is like that. It’s slow but thorough.”
“So you’re back to looking at photos of the surveillance until then?” Land put muscle behind his scrubbing.
Danvers said, “Yeah, that’s all we have at the moment. We’ve been using facial recognition software from the state. It’s been helping to speed up the process, but we haven’t gotten any hits yet.”
I gave Danvers a big smile. “You should let Land and me take a look at the photos. We’re here every day. If people are going to be coming to Government Square, then we might recognize them. We’ve been here a while.”
Danvers stared at me. “You’d like a chance to show me up, wouldn’t you? I just wonder what you know about this matter that I don’t.”
You bet I would, I thought. I noticed that he hadn’t said no. He’d just expressed his frustration at not getting results. “Just offering to help. If you don’t want my help, that’s fine too. I have some hot dogs to sell.”
There had been a time when I would have jumped all over a chance to check out the surveillance photos for a spy operation, but maybe because I’d been involved with so many murders, I was more blasé about the opportunity now. I was also more than a little nervous about getting involved in a case that was above my level of expertise. I could handle myself against a single person who was killing with a personal motive. I wasn’t sure how I could take on an entire organization of people who were willing to kill.
I knew that Detective Danvers would include us in the investigation somehow. We’d been the first people to the scene of the murder. Finders, keepers? Did that even apply to police investigations?
Danvers was studying me, but he apparently got no answers from me. “I’ll drop some by before you leave today. Two sets: one for you and one for Land. You have my cell in case you see someone you know.”
I had a good idea that I would see someone my mother wanted to set me up with.
True to his word, Danvers sent out a patrolman with two thick packets of photos. He’d even gone to the lengths of writing our names on each one. I recognized his handwriting and thought he must be desperate if he was actually printing and labeling for us. I stuffed the envelope into my backpack and handed the other to Land, who threw it on the back counter. His mood had not improved since he’d learned that the sale had been postponed again. I could understand his impatience, even if I couldn’t do anything about it.
Carter eyed the two envelopes but didn’t say a word. I hadn’t really talked about our role in solving any murder cases when I’d hired Carter. The situation had developed out of circumstance, and I realized that at any time, we could go years without seeing another dead body. In their entire lives, my parents had never seen a corpse that wasn’t in the funeral home. Several of my college cohorts would never see anyone die. So I felt that it would be wrong to point out this aspect of the job to Carter when it might not ever happen again. Beyond that, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about someone who wanted this job for the adrenaline
rush of seeing people murdered. This wasn’t a video game. It was real life, and there were consequences to murder here.
So I left the truck at two without a word to Carter as to why we were being given photos to look at. I did my usual after-work errands: the bank and the secured lot for the food truck. Then I went home.
While I wouldn’t have admitted it to Land, I wanted to see some spies. I still had the vision of James Bond in my mind of what they looked like. Dapper, tall, good-looking and wearing a fitted tuxedo—the sort of man you saw in the movies.
I was disappointed from the first photo. It was a photo of an older woman wearing sensible shoes and a woolen skirt. I started a pile of photos for people I didn’t recognize. The first 20 photos all went into that stack. I hadn’t recognized a soul until Sam’s photo came up.
He was talking to Janelle in the photo, and the discussion looked heated. Both had fingers pointing and mouths open. He looked like a prime suspect to me; however, I just put him aside for the moment.
I wasn’t sure what to do with the photo of Sam. If I lied outright to the police, they’d likely never ask me to help again with an investigation. It was one thing to hold back a piece of information that they hadn’t specifically asked for, or not to share a conclusion I’d made based on the evidence. However, they’d asked me to identify people in the photographs, and I knew one of them. Still, I doubted that my mother would appreciate my turning in her friend’s son in to the police.
I decided to postpone any decisions until I completed my task. I might know another 20 people, or I might know only Sam. I took my time, avoiding the issue as long as I could. In the end, I had four people’s photos set aside.
I called Danvers on his cell phone. He picked up on the first ring. “Yeah, you got something?” he asked without preamble.
“Not much, but maybe,” I replied truthfully. In the end, my mother’s old adages about honesty had won the day. I might want to beat Danvers to the solution, but cheating wasn’t going to get me there. I would have to do it the old-fashioned way of more work and more brainpower.
THE REAL GYRO (Food Truck Mysteries Book 4) Page 6