I nodded. I wasn’t going to hit him up for news immediately regarding the report. I let him get started on the condiments before I broached the subject. “Did you look at those reports before you gave them to me?” I asked while I made the coffee for the day.
“I glanced at them,” he said, not even bothering to look up. “Why? Did you find something?”
I couldn’t tell if he was being real or trying to see what I’d noticed. I decided to play it straightforward with him. “I found a lot of information last night. That’s why I was asking about it.”
He nodded. “Care to elaborate?”
“Well first, during the time when my aunt was trying so desperately to get her permit straightened out, another corporation was able to secure no less than five permits for their food trucks. No other company managed to get a single one—they scored them all.”
“Sounds suspicious,” he added. Land could normally carry on a conversation while he cut the ingredients for the condiments. Yet today he was all business and no talking.
“So I started to research that company, and you’ll never guess what I found,” I said, trying to leave him an opening to let me know that he’d already discovered the same information.
However, he refused to play along. “Probably I won’t. This case is incredibly complex.”
I sighed. Perhaps I’d given Land too much credit for being two steps ahead of me in this matter. “The woman who was shot in the government square. She’s not a nice Slavic girl who just came to the US. She’s the CFO for the food truck company that we think bribed Linda Zoz. And of course, she had Linda’s family’s phone number on her phone. So she’s tied to the Zoz family somehow. What do you think of that?”
Land shrugged. At this point, I was pretty sure that he had to know more than he was saying. Even Land was more talkative than this. “I’m not sure. I’m sure you’ve got some ideas though,” he managed to say.
“I want to talk to that woman again—the one who said she was the sister.” I thought of that woman and wondered how she thought she could get away with such a deception. It had taken a lot of nerve, but she’d almost gotten away with it. I also remembered that she hadn’t provided me with a name for herself or her sister. I would have to get that from Danvers. I already knew that he’d be coming to see me soon. The email from last night would make him want to ask me why I was looking at random corporation websites during my evenings off.
My prediction came true before the morning rush had even started. Normally, Danvers waited until after the lunch rush to come and visit, but I guess that the email had shocked him as much as me.
“What the hell was that about last night?” he said without preamble. “Do you just randomly send people emails that will ruin their day?”
Land raised an eyebrow at that line. To an outsider, I guess that it did sound risqué, but there was nothing personal between us at this point. Once this case was over, I would hopefully not hear any more of Detective Danvers.
I felt my skin flush. I hadn’t expected a bouquet and balloons for finding out this piece of information, but I hadn’t expected to be attacked either. “It shouldn’t have been a surprise if you’d done your job right the first time.”
That comment set the tone for the rest of the conversation. His points were that I’d brought the so-called sister to him, not the other way around. I’d introduced her to Danvers as the sister of the murdered woman. She’d presented credentials and established her identity. My points were that obviously her credentials were faked, and the police should have caught the forgeries before giving her access to the body of the dead woman.
He only relented on a single point. He gave me a copy of the woman’s credentials. Copies had been made of everything she’d presented to the police. Danvers also gave me a copy of the ME”s report on the woman.
Danvers told me that he’d already sent a unit out to the hotel where the woman, whose name was Petra Dolgorukov, and learned that she’d checked out of the hotel yesterday. She hadn’t left a forwarding address and had indicated that she was going back to her homeland.
The worst revelation was that she’d disposed of her “sister’s” body before leaving. Cremation, of course. So the police had no way to re-examine the body based on the evidence that someone was trying to obstruct justice. I knew that I would be heading over to that hotel after my shift to learn more about Petra.
“So what have you learned about the real woman? Betty Montgomery? Why hasn’t her family stepped forward to report her missing?”
Danvers looked at his watch. “Probably because it’s just a little after 7 in the morning, and I just learned all this last night. We’re not storm troopers who burst into a family’s home at 3 a.m. without a damned good reason. Questioning them about a missing relative is not likely to be considered such a reason. I want to handle this with finesse.”
I nodded, remembering how I’d bungled the call to the one good number I had written down. After that, I knew that bluntness did not always work in an investigation. Sometimes subterfuge was required.
Chapter 10
And that’s just what I used when I headed to Petra Dolgorukov’s hotel after my shift. I pulled back my hair, put foundation over my freckles, and added some eyeliner to make me look a bit more exotic. Personally I thought I looked more stupid than anything, but I hoped it would be enough to fool the front desk.
The hotel was more than I expected. Since I obviously had little need to stay at a hotel in my hometown, I’d never been inside of the Citian Hotel, but I suspected that the room rates were not what a poor working girl from the former Soviet Union could afford. I knew that public servants like the police would not have put her up here either. They would have splurged on a Motel 8 or some other shoestring hostelry. So again, someone had footed the bill for Petra to stay here.
I walked to the front desk and cleared my throat. I had practiced mimicking Petra’s accent on the way over. I thought that it sounded decent. I wouldn’t fool a linguistic expert or any actor on television, but I was hoping that the front desk clerk would be neither.
“Excuse me,” I said meekly, “my sister was just here. She thinks she left an important paper in her room. She asked if I could perhaps look in the room and see if she did leave it?” I made the last sentence into a question so that I could sound appropriately timid.
The clerk asked for her name. His fingers flew across the keys, and he looked up at me. “She was in Room 121. The room’s been cleaned since then, but there’s no one in it at the moment. I can send a bellman up with you, if you’d like to look around.”
I nodded. I cursed inside, because I’d really hoped for a bit more free rein in the room than this would allow me, but it was better than nothing. A rather attractive bellman, who was about my age, nodded at me, and then led me to the elevators. The door had barely closed when he said, “You’re Maeve Kinkaid. I don’t know what you think you’re pulling here, but we went to college together. We had Business Econ together.”
I groaned. I did remember him. His name was Robby or Richie or something that didn’t sound quite grown-up. He had belonged to the same fraternity as a guy I’d dated for about two months. I don’t think that I would have recognized him if he hadn’t said hello to me first. “Yeah, so I bet you’re wondering why I need to look in this room.”
He nodded. “The thought did kind of cross my mind, yeah. It’s not every day that your college classmates want to bust into an unoccupied hotel room and snoop around.”
I gave him a brief rundown of why I was here. I’d no more than finished when he began to laugh. “Geez, if you didn’t want to tell me the truth, you could have just told me that it wasn’t my business. That has to be the most fantastic story I’d ever heard. You don’t need to run a food truck. You should be writing thriller novels.”
The bell rang, and we got off the elevator. Robby or Richie pointed to a door. He opened the door for me. He stood in the doorway as I did a quick sweep of the room
. There was nothing in the room that spoke of any resident. I wasn’t sure what I had hoped to find here, but at first glance, I wasn’t going to find any traces of evidence here.
I decided to do a better search. I started with the closet and scoured every inch. There was nothing there. I looked under the bed, in every drawer and in the television cabinet. I walked out to the balcony, but found nothing there except a view of the government square. I could see the location for our truck and approximately where Betty Montgomery had been shot. I doubted this room had been used by the sniper, but just the thought gave me a shiver down my spine.
I finally went into the bathroom. I figured not much would be there, since the room had been cleaned, but I needed to know for myself that I’d tried everything. I remembered the scene from Psycho where the detective had found something under the rim of the toilet.
Sure enough, when I looked under the seat, a small piece of paper was affixed to the rim. I smiled as I peeled it off. Old movies were the best. I was taking no chance, so I slid the scrap inside my bra. I figured that it was safe there, given my recent history.
I put a suitably despondent look on my face and headed back out to the door. “Nothing. My sister is going to be so disappointed.” I sighed dramatically for effect.
He smiled at me. Robby or Richie allowed me to pass by him, and he closed the door behind him. “The staff is pretty good about keeping the rooms spotless.”
I just gave him my best wan smile. “They did a good job. I’m just sorry that I won’t be more help to my family.”
“So if I wanted to see you sometime, where would I go?”
I told him that I worked shifts at Dogs on the Roll. He didn’t ask any questions about that particular fact, so I headed out to go home.
On the way into my apartment, I grabbed the mail and threw it on the table. I was anxious to see what I’d discovered.
The worst thing about my discovery was that I could never show that it had anything to do with the investigation. Any policeman would ask how I knew that it belonged to Petra. The short answer was that unless it was signed by her, I wouldn’t know at all.
I took out the paper and read it. The print was very small, but it said, “s web.” While I hadn’t expected Petra to have left me a full written explanation of what was going on, I had expected that she would at least make sense. This was just garbage. Still it was the only garbage I had that belonged to Petra, so I slid it into an envelope and put it on dining room table.
I realized that I hadn’t opened the mail in several days, which meant that I had bills to pay. I started slitting open the envelopes with a knife and sorting them into bills and junk. I stopped dead when I came to a letter that didn’t fall into either category. It carried a handwritten address and return address. It was from Mariel.
I slit the envelope and pulled out what appeared to be Linda’s last letter to her sister. Mariel was definitely right about one thing. It was an odd letter. The words were interspersed with numbers and in some cases letters had been replaced with numbers that closely resembled the letter. So “Mariel” became “Mar131.” The letter had been typewritten so each word was plainly visible. There had been no mistakes in her choices.
I took the time to read through the letter twice; however, it offered nothing which would help me figure out what was going on. I was frustrated. I had been certain that Linda’s letter would bring a solution to the crime. She had obviously known that she was in danger. Why would she not reach out to someone and share the problem? Why just accept that your life would be terminated without trying to shout the motive from the rooftops? I had no doubt that I would never go down without a huge fight. I was actually starting to enjoy my life after all those years of school.
I tried to use some fast code breaking tricks to see if there was a hidden message in the letter. I gave up with a sigh and thought about my next steps. I’d come to a dead end with Petra. The police would do a better job with a manhunt than I could ever hope to do.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to investigate Linda’s death in detail. The women involved with that case all seemed to end up with no head. Even if I wanted to reach out to Andy Zoz, I didn’t have the remaining digits. Again the police had the upper hand with this matter.
That left the death of Betty Montgomery. I remembered the discussion with Danvers, and I took the ME’s report from the bag. I started reading through the details of the shooting. At first nothing much jumped out at me. The crime had been witnessed by at least a dozen people. I wasn’t sure how much new information could be gleaned from a report that hadn’t included what had been witnessed by the policemen on site and the witnesses.
Yet about 20 pages into the report, I ran across something that I couldn’t explain. The tox screen showed that Montgomery had been drinking heavily and had ingested an opiate. I thought back to the scene and thought that perhaps she’d been walking strangely, quickly and with concentration. That could be explained by the fact that she was drunk and stoned, but what had caused her to be that way?
I thought about restaurants and bars around the government square. There were a few that served alcohol, but in my experience, not many of the patrons, who had to return to their desk jobs at 1 p.m., would be drinking.
Still that left the opiates. I knew that bars and restaurants did not serve those, but I wondered where she’d gotten them. The effects with alcohol could be dangerous. I wondered if Betty had been drugged by someone else, or if she’d tried to steel her nerves with something extra to get through whatever she was going to talk to me about.
I would have to ask Danvers if they’d found any bottles of medications at Betty’s home to indicate that this might have been her own choice. That would tell me if someone else had been aware of Betty’s intentions. If they’d drugged her, someone had not wanted her to talk to me. By slowing her down, they gave the sniper a better and easier target in the square. They had employed a similar trick by giving me the money at the bank so I would stand still.
I was shocked by a knock at the door. I quickly took the letter, the envelope with the scrap and the autopsy report, and slipped them all into my new hiding place, behind a loose piece of drywall in the kitchen. Some would call it landlord negligence; I called it a poor man’s safe.
I looked through the peephole. The bellman from the hotel was at the door. Richie or Robby, who had recognized me this afternoon.
Before I answered the door, I grabbed my can of mace. I knew that he wanted something and while I wasn’t sure if it was romantic or nefarious, I wasn’t really in the mood for either.
I opened the door to him. “Hi, what are you doing here?” I asked, loud enough to be heard by the neighbors.
He gave me a smile. If I didn’t suspect him of wanting to behead me, I might have found it charming. “I enjoyed talking to you today. I thought maybe we could catch up. Have you talked to Travis lately?”
Travis had been the name of the guy I’d dated in college who knew this creep. I wasn’t sure why he thought I would keep track of someone I’d dated briefly years before. “Nah. How did you find me?” I asked.
He moved a bit closer to me. “I looked you up in the book, and thought I’d stop by.”
My grip on the can tightened. I wasn’t listed in the book. I already had the food truck when I’d gotten my own place and landline. As a single woman, I’d put my address as the food truck, right smack in the middle of the secure lot. This guy should have been staring at my truck through an eight-foot high fence.
I rubbed the back of my neck and smiled. “That’s nice, but I’m not up for company tonight.”
He reached out a hand to place on my shoulder. “I can help with that tension,” he said. His fingers pressed against my muscles. I could feel the tension in my neck, and I relaxed for a second.
Before I knew what had happened, he’d grasped my throat with that hand, stepped inside of the door, and kicked it closed. His other hand went for the can of mace as I finally realized that he’
d recognized my reticence for what it really was—suspicion.
He pushed me further into the room, so that I would have longer to run to escape. His grip on my neck was tightening, and I knew that this would not be a drawn-out affair. I was to be killed quickly and efficiently, the kind Petra had called a “good death.” I wouldn’t have a chance to learn anything about the crimes or why I was a target.
I started to grow angry. I was about to die from some guy whose name I couldn’t even remember. He had my hand pinned between us. I glanced down enough to notice that the nozzle pointed towards him.
I pressed my finger on the spray button and let off a long spritz of mace to his crotch. The concoction I had contained a strong dose of pepper spray and cayenne. The effect was almost immediate. He felt the searing through the cloth and jumped back to keep from getting more.
Now that his grip on my arm was loosened, I wrenched it free and brought it up to his face where I sprayed him to a count of ten. The screech he made rang through the room. I had no mercy. He would have killed me without thinking about it. I would mace him until he wanted to die.
One of the nice things about a small apartment is that some things are left out on the counter because they’re simply too big to fit in the tiny cabinets. That was the story of my wrought iron skillet, which had been a gift from a friend who thought that giving a food truck owner a gift of cookware was funny.
No one would be calling it funny now. I grabbed the skillet and swung it with both hands like a bat. I connected solidly with his head, and he crumpled like a piece of paper.
I grabbed my phone out of my bag and dialed Danvers’ number. It went to voicemail, and I wasn’t sure if that was indicative of our relationship at the moment or if he really wasn’t available. In either case, I dialed Land within seconds of leaving a message for Danvers. Land was available, and he agreed to come over immediately to help with this problem.
FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES: The Complete Series (14 Books) Page 38