FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES: The Complete Series (14 Books)

by Chloe Kendrick

  On the second floor were the bedrooms. I found the master bedroom—and more than I anticipated. A woman’s body lay on the floor. I did a quick check. Taking her pulse, I could tell that she was still alive and breathing, which was good. There was some blood on the side of her head, so it was apparent that someone had rendered her unconscious and then gone to meet me, presumably the unknown woman. I didn’t know the woman’s motives, but as long as Mariel was alive, there was a chance I could find out those answers.

  I grabbed my phone and dialed 911. I explained the situation, saying that I’d come into the house through a window after hearing a woman’s moan. It seemed plausible if not true. No one could conclusively deny it, not even Mariel.

  They promised to send someone out immediately. I walked back down to the first floor and unlocked the front door. I stood on the porch until the first responders arrived. I pointed them to the bedroom and told them what I’d found. They nodded and headed off with a gurney and medical bags.

  I had barely turned around when another car pulled up. Even though I didn’t recognize the car, I knew the driver well. Detective Jax Danvers, who was looking rather peeved, stopped the car in front of the house and got out.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked without any introduction. “I told you that we couldn’t get a warrant.”

  “I thought I heard someone moaning upstairs so I got in and found a woman knocked unconscious. It’s a good thing that I got here when I did. There was a lot of blood, and I don’t know how bad off she is.” I tried to present myself as a girl scout helping others, though I knew he wouldn’t buy it. I was content that he couldn’t prove I was lying.

  Danvers rolled his eyes. I was pretty sure that the gesture was not a professional one. “I’ll just bet that’s how it went down.”

  I shrugged. “I heard a moan and investigated. But now that the door is open, and it looks like a crime was committed, you can look around, right?” I thought that he would at least be pleased with the ability to learn why Mariel hadn’t shown up.

  He laughed. “Yes, I can look around. You can go home and make hot dogs.” He gave me a little push to the stairs leading down to the sidewalk as he entered the house.

  I didn’t like Danvers’ response, but I had little else to do except for following his command. I wasn’t going to get a look at the crime scene; that much was clear. So I had no plans for the rest of the day. I wasn’t sure how badly Mariel was hurt, but I figured that the police would want to get a statement from her before they allowed me to talk to her as well. So they’d have a better grasp of what was going on.

  I thought about just leaving things now. My wish had been for the police to investigate the murder of Linda Zoz, and now it was likely they would. Her sister had been rendered unconscious on her way to meet with me to discuss Linda. Another woman who came to meet me at the food truck had been shot by a sniper. That should be enough to get the police interested. Linda’s death would not be swept under the rug as part of another investigation.

  However, I had my doubts. Danvers had already made it clear that the woman’s shooting could not be conclusively linked to Mariel’s disappearance. As a result, they might assume that all three events were separate incidents. It would just be an awful week for Mariel in their eyes.

  So just to be on the safe side, I headed to the mall, selected one of the few remaining public phones, and dialed the only full number left on my arm.

  A voice answered. The man was cold and distant. It was not a voice I’d like to hear in a dark alley. “What do you want?” he asked, wasting no time on pleasantries.

  “She’s dead,” I said, spitting out the only thing I could think of on short notice. “Hit today.”

  The man laughed. “Don’t call me to tell me that. I saw it on TV already. I told you to only call during emergencies.” He hung up, and I stood there with the receiver in my hand.

  I cursed myself that I didn’t think of a better opening line. It had been effective, but the phone call had been over almost before it began. The man knew what I was talking about and didn’t need me to tell him. I had no idea how I could have kept him on the line, but I wished I’d come up with something better.

  So what was I left with? A dead woman on the square, a concussed woman on the floor of her home and a man who already knew that the first woman was dead. Great clues for a murder mystery, I thought, but it doesn’t make any kind of pattern for me. It definitely spelled out that Linda’s murder was not committed as part of the trial that had just ended. This was something entirely different, and I feared it was only just beginning.

  Chapter 5

  When I got home that night, I scrubbed down my arm with soap and water. The numbers came off slowly, but I kept at it until my arm was nice and red. I had no desire to go to work again and have Danvers question me about the numbers. I would have to tell him what I’d done, if Land hadn’t already, and admit that I’d taken the woman’s phone for a few minutes to check her phone calls. I’m sure they would figure it out when my fingerprints were on the phone, but until then, I wanted to learn as much as I could from the numbers.

  As I washed, I noticed the third number. It started with 101-. This afternoon, I had just blindly copied what I’d seen, but now I was thinking more rationally about it. This couldn’t be a phone number. None of the telephone prefixes are 101. So the mystery woman had stored something other than phone numbers in her log. I didn’t know what. At this point, I had more questions than answers.

  I was curious why she did this. It would have been easier to add these numbers to the contacts, but then they would want additional information. In the phone log of calls made, people were less likely to scrutinize the information. They would be looking for completed calls and talk times. A call to this prefix would be a bad call, and it would just be recorded once. Enough for someone to find it if they were looking for it, but not immediately noticed as important.

  Of course, I didn’t have the full number, thanks to Land, so I had no way of determining what the full number represented. It was too short to be a bank account number or a social security number, but there were millions of other organizations that used seven digit numbers, which were used because that number of digits could be easily remembered.

  I sighed and looked at the numbers again. I had no idea about other number, the one that had appeared in the middle. It might be a phone number, or it could represent something else. I just didn’t know—and I wouldn’t know without the rest of the digits. For all the work, I hadn’t gotten much out of the phone numbers.

  Without going to Danvers and asking, there would never be another way for me to find out what the rest of the digits were. Even if I asked nicely, I doubted that he would give them to me. For some reason, he was treating this case differently than he had our previous investigations. This time around he was protective of any information and leads and kept me at arm’s length. I wondered what he knew that I didn’t that had caused him to change like this. I did know that I didn’t like it at all. I much preferred to be on the inside of the investigation to being the outsider. I wasn’t sure at all how I felt about the personal angle of being cut out from his thoughts.

  I ordered some Thai food for dinner and watched some television before going to bed that night. I’d done enough for one day.

  I woke up early the next morning, and I was the first one at the food truck. I had the truck in its normal berth on Elm Street by 5 a.m. Land showed up about 20 minutes later. He looked at me suspiciously, but I just shrugged and continued my prep work.

  I waited for him to say something about yesterday, but he chose not to. I let it go until about 10 minutes before we were supposed to open. “What gives with you and snipers?” I asked, deciding that blunt was best with Land. He wasted no time with niceties when asking me a question, so I presumed that he would prefer the same in return.

  Land looked a little surprised by the question, but he was very calm when he replied, “Nothing. I just know abo
ut guns and people who use them.”

  “How?” I asked, deciding to keep this up. It was beginning to feel like the third degree, but I was curious, and we hadn’t opened the window to business yet, so we had the time.

  “There were times in my past where I had to know about guns and the people who use them. You’ve worked here eight months, and this is the first you’ve wanted to know about my life. It’s not because you have any desire to know me; you just want to know my background to satisfy your curiosity. I’m not impressed.” He turned his back on me and continued his prep work.

  That stopped me. First, because I knew I was going to get nowhere with him. He had already blocked my questions twice with statements that were incredibly vague. So I had no hope of getting more out of him. Secondly, I winced, thinking that he was right. He knew about me. He knew my family and about my college years and my degree. In fairness, I’d shared all of those things with him, willingly. He listened, nodded, and very rarely asked questions about things in my life.

  However, he hadn’t shared much with me at all. Even in the times where he could have told me more, like when he’d cooked Basque food for the truck, he chose not to expound on the story so that I could know him better. He didn’t explain where he’d come up with the dishes or who in his family had taught him to cook. Land was one big mystery, and I knew that I’d have to crack that puzzle as well in order to solve this case.

  For now, I just decided to let it drop. Pushing it would only end up with us in a fight, and then my chances to learn more later would be severely reduced. Land went back to cutting up pickles and onions, while I started a second pot of coffee.

  I was just getting ready to put up the window when he asked. “So what happened yesterday?”

  I explained what I’d done at Mariel Mills’ house and how Danvers had run me off afterward. I also shared what I’d done about the phone number and the realization that the third number could not be a phone number.

  “I noticed that when I wrote them down for you. Any thoughts on what that could be? You didn’t tell me where you got those numbers, but I bet I can guess,” Land said as he faced me. “You took a few minutes to get to Danvers yesterday, and you had her purse. It’s not a far reach to figure out what you were doing.”

  “No ideas on what it could be, but yes, I got them from the dead woman’s phone. They’re the last three numbers listed in her phone log for outgoing calls. I thought it could help us.”

  Land snickered. “The first guy was a lot of help. You didn’t even get a name out of him. You don’t even have full numbers for the other two.”

  “I’ll admit that it wasn’t a well thought out plan, but he knew about the murder. So that tells me that he’s involved in this somehow.” My mind went back to the conversation, but I could glean nothing more from it.

  Land walked up to where I was. He took the window and heaved it up. He made it look simple to my usual struggle. “That’s a pretty big leap. He could have just seen it on the news and known about it. Or it could be a joke. Her wallet was missing. Did you take that?”

  I stared at him. I might look at evidence in a murder investigation, but I didn’t take it and hide it from the police. Land must have a pretty low opinion of my character to ask. “No, I didn’t. There was no wallet in the purse.”

  He looked out over the square. “What does that suggest to you?”

  I thought about the question. I didn’t always carry my wallet. In my backpack, I only carried a license and credit card. However, if I was dressed like the dead woman had been, then I would have had a wallet with everything in it. “That she deliberately didn’t want to have any identification on her. Something about her was shady, so she didn’t want people to know about her.”

  Land nodded, but just barely. “Exactly. And it also suggested that she was doing something that she knew might get her killed. If she was going to walk away from this, she would have felt better about having identification on her.”

  “Do you think she came here to kill me rather than talk to me?”

  Land turned to look at me and furrowed his brow. “She didn’t have a weapon on her. People were around. So no, she wasn’t here to kill you. I’m thinking more that she was going to sell you a story about the health inspector’s murder so you would feel the need to drop the case. Then whatever was going on would be safe from prying eyes.”

  “So she was going to lie to me?” Overall, lies seemed like a better option to me than death, but I wondered why I was worth the trouble of impersonating someone. I had no official authority to do anything in regards to Linda Zoz’s death. I had thought perhaps that she was coming to tell me the truth, but I hadn’t even considered the opposite.

  “To get you to stop asking questions, obviously. You were the only one who was interested in the health inspector’s death as a separate crime. As of yesterday, the verdict was in and the case was closed. Now it’s likely to be reopened because of your questions.”

  I bit my lip. “It’s a little ironic that the woman who wanted the questions to end was killed and her death led to the other case being reopened.”

  Land snorted. “That’s great, but this is not a time for humor. You need to be careful. Someone thinks you’re dangerous.”

  I had to agree. If nothing else, I had created a new interest in the murder of Linda Zoz, and at least one person would not be happy about that.

  True to habit, Danvers stopped by after the lunch rush. Part of me wanted to believe that he came to see me, but usually he just talked business. It was getting harder to indulge that fantasy. He cleared his throat and looked at me. “How are you today?”

  I gave him a small smile, just to show that I could play along and not ask about the kiss. “Just fine. I got a good night’s sleep,” I added to let him know that I could do this type of work as well.

  “I just thought I’d stop by and give you an update on Mariel Mills. After all, you two are such good friends that you just drop by her house unannounced to talk.” Those last words had an edge to them, and I knew that he was annoyed with my interference on this case. It was very clear that he didn’t want me involved in this matter. It was hard to present Linda Zoz’s murder as a closed case for the press when the people around her are in danger. However, if pressed, I’m sure that he’d admit that I had saved him a lot of paperwork by getting into the house. Now her home was a crime scene, and Danvers had access to anything and everything in the house.

  “How is she?” I asked. “Feeling better?” I didn’t ask what I really wanted to know. Did she know who had done this to her, and what did she know about her sister’s death?

  Danvers gave a small wave to Land. “How are you today, Land? Did you hear about your boss’ exploits yesterday?” The wording of the question made me realize that Danvers was needling Land for working for me. It was bad enough that he hadn’t properly asked me out, but now he was actually using me as an insult. I was annoyed in return.

  Land nodded. “She was just telling me all about it.” I recognized the strained tone in his voice. Even if I didn’t know the details of his life, I could recognize his moods. This was not a good one. According to Land, my aunt had promised to leave him the food truck in her will. The fact that she’d left it to me instead had caused a lot of ruffled feathers between us in the beginning of our relationship. We’d recently talked about a second truck, and when I did purchase it, Land would be the sole operator of that food truck. In the meantime, we both knew that he didn’t like working for me. I was too young, in his opinion, and too inexperienced. He felt that as the senior person on the truck, he should have had more power in the relationship.

  Danvers turned to answer me again. “She was out most of the night. The doctors called this morning, and she is conscious now. The short version of the story is that she doesn’t remember anything about what happened. She was at the house, heard a noise, went to investigate and woke up in the hospital. So we have no idea who was behind the assault, but it’s a good g
uess that it’s the same person who shot our victim.”

  “Is she feeling okay? I might go visit my friend today,” I offered helpfully. I still knew that she had wanted to talk to me. For some reason, the woman who had been shot had played a role in stopping that from happening.

  That could mean one of two things. It could mean that the woman saw the meeting as a time where she could talk to me without arousing suspicions, if I thought she was Mariel. So Mariel had to be sidetracked so the other woman could go. I wondered about what she had to say that was so important that she’d taken the effort to disable Mariel so she could meet me instead. After all, I run a food truck. Anyone can buy a hot dog and talk to me. It only takes a few dollars and a stomach.

  The other option was that Mariel had to be replaced because she knew something that these people didn’t want her to tell. This seemed more problematic, because frankly, they’d left her alive. If they didn’t want her to say something that she knew, then Mariel’s life was in danger. Now that she was in the hospital, I was only a bouquet and quick trip away from finding out what she was going to tell me about her sister.

  So I was left with two options that didn’t make much sense to me. Neither of them offered a concrete case for what had happened. Each of the choices had serious problems with it. I hoped that talking to Mariel would point me to the correct option. Otherwise, I’d be following both at once, which would leave me overworked in the investigation. I was prone to taking the wrong path in an investigation, and for some reason, I didn’t feel like I had that kind of time now.

  As I came out of my thoughts, I noticed that Danvers was watching me. I didn’t care. Apparently all three of us had our secrets, and I would keep mine as long as they kept theirs. Three could play this game.

  “She can accept visitors, but there’s an armed guard outside the door too. Use my name, and they’ll let you in to see her.” He didn’t say a word about my thoughts or what was I thinking. He should know from earlier encounters that I was developing a plan.