“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 hom
e.
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.
“I’ll be right over,” he said and hung up.
Now that I’d told the truth, I thought I should be rewarded for the gesture. Instead, I was getting a visit from Jax Danvers who had, during another visit, kissed me and later told me that it was all a mistake. This didn’t seem like much of an incentive for me. I compared Sam’s kiss to Danvers’ kiss. The lip lock with the detective was more what I was missing in my life. Sam’s kiss had been more about getting it right—technique—where Danvers’ had shown me passion, which is probably why I still dwelled on it instead of letting the matter go.
He was knocking at my door in 15 minutes. I let him in, and he plopped down on my sofa. He reeked of cigarette smoke with a hint of beer on him. Since I knew that he didn’t smoke, he must have come from a bar. I was slightly resentful that he was out having laughs with his friends while I was doing police work. But I gave myself some solace that he might be drowning his sorrows from a lack of leads in this case.
He picked up the small stack of photos and began flipping through them, far too fast for me to talk about any of them. He threw them back down on the table. “Not much to go on here,” he said with a very snide tone.
I shrugged. “I could have made up some spies for you, but you wouldn’t have appreciated that either.”
He grunted. “So what you got here?”
I took up the photos as if I were giving a presentation. With each one I gave the information about how I knew them and their likelihood of being involved. Mrs. Moroney was an older woman, probably in her early 60s, who came to our truck three to four days a week for coffee at 6:45 a.m. sharp. I had always assumed that she worked in one of the nearby office buildings. She had taken her lunch at Holding Out for a Gyro on two occasions and had talked to Janelle each time. Considering that I knew her name and all about her family, that wasn’t a surprise. She had even told me about the fare at Holding Out for a Gyro and gave it a three-star review.
The second person of interest was Jonathan Latimer, a young businessman who thought he was a gift to all single women. I knew this, because he had come every day for the first two weeks I’d worked at the food truck, trying to get my phone number. I’d refused him all ten times, and he gave up after that. I wasn’t the least bit surprised that he was likely giving Janelle the same treatment. While I would have dearly loved to pin the crime on him, I knew his motivations, and none of them were espionage.
The third person was Henry, an older man who lived downtown. He’d lived in the suburbs his entire adult life with his wife, and when she died, he sold the family home and moved into a loft downtown. He didn’t want to be reminded of her presence every time he sat down to watch TV or eat dinner. So he made a radical change, hoping it would make it easier to live without her. He’d bought a basset hound—that loved to sniff around the trashcans on the square—so he wouldn’t be quite so lonely.
I knew all this, because he’d told me—in detail. I knew every moment of his life before the move and most of the moments afterward. He was lonely, and since he didn’t like to eat alone, he came to the truck at off times, order large amounts of food and talked. Mostly I listened and cooked. I didn’t mind, and I always felt that off-hours crowds made a place look more popular than it might’ve actually been. And truth be told, I liked the romantic edge to the story. Maybe I was a closet romantic.
The last person was Sam. I gave Danvers most of what I had on him. I told him about the realty firm and his father and such. Danvers kept giving me odd looks, as if he wanted to say something. I just ignored him as I finished my spiel.
“Does Sam come to your truck and tell you all his problems too?” Danvers asked. “You’re worse than a bartender.”
I shook my head. “I met him socially and then saw him with Janelle.” I left out the part where I wanted to follow up this lead, but Sam had vigorously ignored my attempts to discuss food trucks and Janelle.
“You went out with him. Lord, you had dinner with a major suspect in an espionage case. Where do you meet these jokers?”
I shrugged. “My mother set us up, to be honest about it. She thought that I wasn’t meeting enough nice men, and she’s right.”
Danvers just rolled his eyes. “Well, she didn’t find one here. He’s the only one who doesn’t have a very plausible reason to be at the Nolan food truck. He was there once, and that’s it. So we’ll be starting with him. I’ll make sure to tell him that you said hello.”
Danvers had angered me, and I decided, then and there, that I would not be telling him about the connection to Janelle I’d seen at the Nolan house. Let them get a search warrant and find that piece of evidence out for themselves.
“Please don’t. I don’t want him to know that I pointed the finger at him.” I was sincere in my tone, and it stopped Danvers in his tracks.
“You like this guy? Great,” he walked to the door. “You aren’t much for the police, but you’re fine with criminal masterminds. Don’t worry. I won’t share the fact that you gave us his name and the fact that he was talking to a known carrier of state secrets.”
It was true that I didn’t want Sam to know, but not for the reasons that Danvers thought. I wanted to keep this channel of communications open so that I might learn more about why Sam had been at Janelle’s truck. It was one of the few leads I had, and if he thought that I’d turned him into the police, I’d have to explain my part in solving other crimes. It would not bode well for finding out anything more from him if he really was involved in this.
However, my mind kept bouncing back to the comment about not being much for the police. Is that what Danvers thought—that I didn’t like policemen? Had he dumped me unceremoniously because he had thought I was going to give him the old heave-ho? I knew men like that. At the first sign of skittishness on the part of their date, they dumped the woman first, so they could maintain a record of “never being dumped,” as if that was a category in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Danvers didn’t wait for me to answer him, which was good because I was deep in my own thought processes. He walked out the door with a small head nod, and I sat down and looked at the photos again. He had been right about one thing. Sam was the only one of those people without a good re
ason to be downtown during the day. I wasn’t sure what that meant.
I waited about an hour to call Land to see if he’d recognized anyone that I’d missed. I had every reason to doubt that he’d add much to the conversation. He kept to himself during work hours, preparing and serving the hot dogs and side dishes. So he might recognize a few faces, but I doubted that he knew much about them personally. That didn’t mean that he didn’t attract business. There were a number of women, young and old, who came by to ogle him. Either he didn’t notice, or more likely, didn’t care.
His voicemail picked up, and I left a quick message telling him the people I’d seen and recognized from the photos. I didn’t ask him to call back, and he didn’t that night.
I showed up at the truck the next morning expecting Land to have been out doing more surveillance, but he texted me early to tell me that he’d picked up the food truck. I drove downtown and parked in my usual garage spot. Land was busy preparing condiments when I arrived, and he barely looked up.
Even so, I could see that he wasn’t tired. I was a bit confused as to why he hadn’t answered my call the evening before if he’d been home and resting.
But of course, being Land, he didn’t even mention that when he greeted me. “How are you today?” he asked instead.
That was almost a conversation for him, and so I decided to play along. “Not bad,” I answered, keeping an eye on him. “How are you doing?”
He just nodded instead of an answer, but it was clear that he was rested and feeling better than he had been before. I took his friendliness toward me as an indication that he appreciated the consideration I’d given him when he was so tired.
“I tried to call you last night,” I added, thinking I might get a response out of him.
“Yeah, I was out. What did you want?” He continued cutting up the condiments as he usually did.
FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES: The Complete Series (14 Books) Page 49