I pulled the message board out from behind the sink and stopped. Someone had written the word “help” across the board in large, scrawling letters. Alone in the food truck and still imagining the scenes I’d witnessed on the video feed, I was freaked out. On top of that, Carter had yet to show up, which made me concerned that he could be the person in trouble.
Although I had vowed not to call Land before we talked about the identity of the potential victim later today, I dialed his number. He wouldn’t make me feel stupid or uncertain, and he’d be the first to my defense.
He picked up on the first ring. “This better be good.”
“Trust me, it is. Carter’s not here yet. I’m all alone in the food truck, and the message board says ‘help’ on it. I’m a little freaked to be here alone, thinking that someone wrote help on the board.” I hadn’t realized the depth of my feelings of fright and insecurity until I started talking. Too many things had happened in the food truck lately for me to feel comfortable alone, parked on a city street at 5am.
“Be there in ten,” he said, and hung up.
I pushed the phone into my pocket and then pushed the board back to where I’d found it. I knew that I couldn’t bear the next ten minutes staring at that sign. It would have made me feel vulnerable every time I came into the food truck.
True to his word, Land was there in less than ten minutes. He knocked in the pattern he does to let me know that it’s him. I opened the door and practically threw myself into his arms.
“I like the greeting, but I could still use some sleep,” he said. He’d dressed in jeans and tight-fitting t-shirt. The comfort in his arms almost made me forget why I’d called. “So what’s up with this board?” he asked, bringing back all the memories to me.
I pulled out the board and showed him the writing. “I found this when I came in today. Carter usually writes the board each day when he comes in. It was fine yesterday morning, which means something happened last night. Someone else was in the food truck and wrote this on the message board.”
He squinted at the board, not moving at all. He stayed that way for several minutes before he stood up again. “Well, you’re right. It’s recent. The writing is a bit smudged. Did you do that?”
I shook my head. The text had appeared to be rubbed in a few places, but I hadn’t brushed the board up against the sink when I pulled it out. “It was like that when I found it.”
Land looked at the board again. “And you found it behind the sink? Is that where it normally goes?” He pulled out his camera and took a few quick shots of the board. I wished I’d thought of that. I could have sent Land the photos and not disturbed what sleep he’d end up getting today.
I explained that Carter had a habit of leaving the board wherever in the food truck. The space wasn’t all that large, and frankly, it took all of two seconds to look around and find it again.
“So someone wrote ‘help’ on it and then pushed it behind the sink. That seems odd.” He took a few steps away from me and began to look under the cabinets and around the prep area. I couldn’t discern whether he saw anything or not.
I did see what he was getting at though. “If you were truly in danger, then you’d leave the sign out. Is that what you’re implying?”
He nodded. “Who writes a message and then hides the sign? It’s like making a rescue fire and not lighting it, or loading the flare gun and not firing.”
“So what are you saying? It’s a hoax?” I was annoyed. I hated the fact that I’d been freaked out by the incident. I hated more that I’d woken up Land for a prank.
“A hoax to upset you, perhaps – or Carter? Where is he, by the way?” Land looked around again, as though he were just noticing that the new cook was missing.
I shrugged and then checked my phone. Carter had texted me twenty minutes ago, saying that he’d be here by 6:15, which is almost was. I was feeling more stupid by the moment. No one had needed help, and Carter was fine.
“He’s running late. He’ll be here in a few minutes,” I replied, feeling a bit sheepish. “So now who broke into the food truck? The truck is getting to be a major thoroughfare, and it’s supposed to be secured.”
“Did you turn on the video feed last night?” Land asked. It seemed a harmless question, but I could see the tension in his arms and neck as he asked. Was he worried that I’d look at the feed and learn about his sister?
“No, no such luck. I did lock the doors last night though. It should have been secured.”
Land looked around. “Nothing’s been taken that I can see. You said the cash reserve was fine, so no money was stolen. So we’re just supposed to think that someone randomly needed help while they broke in here by themselves to do nothing.”
“Maybe the robbers came back?” I asked, trying to come up with an explanation. The situation was getting weirder by the moment.
“Right, because thieves would immediately ask for help from the people who own the truck. You’re just skittish at the moment. You’ll be fine in a few minutes, and you’ll have some better ideas on what might have happened.” He stepped closer to me. I could feel the heat radiate off of him as he moved into my space. I looked up at him and smiled.
He moved in and kissed me. The press of his lips against mine helped me forget the last few days inside the food truck and how worried I’d felt just twenty minutes ago. Now I felt foolish for my concerns.
The door opened, and before we could break apart, Carter had stepped into the food truck. “Don’t let me stop you,” he said as he bustled around the prep area and began the food prep. I hadn’t gotten very far, so he was definitely behind schedule.
Carter noticed the message sign and frowned. Before either of us could speak, he wiped it clean. “You seem to be doing quite well for yourself.” He gave me a big grin.
While Carter had spent his first six months working here certain that Detective Danvers was hot for me, he had quickly switched teams to root for me and Land. It was nice to have a private cheering squad.
Land started to say something and stopped. He had the documentation of the message board and its cryptic word. The original wouldn’t persuade the police or anyone else that we hadn’t done it ourselves.
Carter checked his watch. “What are you doing here? You didn’t call him in because I was late, did you?” He showed some worry over his last sentence, likely concerned that he would lose his job.
“We had a little problem. It’s been resolved,” I said truthfully.
Land just nodded, kissed me, and left. “I’ll talk to you when I get back,” he said on the way out.
I wasn’t at all surprised that he hadn’t mentioned his sister or the rendezvous at the food truck. Our time together had been short. He was tired. Carter showed up. However, I wondered if he planned to keep this a secret. Could his sister be the one who needed help? It couldn’t have been the strangling victim, since Carter had used the board the day after we saw her fall to the floor in the food truck.
My day went quickly after that. I tried to focus on the job and the sales, but I had to correct my change a few times. I was more distracted than I should have been. I hated that I distrusted my own safety in the food truck. I’d never had a second thought about the security of working there at night or in the early mornings, but after seeing that video feed, I’d been jumpy about spending any length of time there alone.
Finally, Land drove up in Basque in the Sun. I left Carter to clean up and headed over to the other food truck. The brisk walk across Government Square helped clear my head. The day was cold, but there were still people milling about the benches and art.
I was hoping that Land would open up about his sister. I had more questions than answers now, and I hated the feeling. I wanted to solve at least parts of this case as fast as possible. There were simply too many distractions in this case. I needed to focus on just the parts of it that were related to the murder.
Land stopped his prep work as I entered. He came over and gave me a kiss, a long
, sensuous one that made me forget all the problems for the moment. When we broke off, he took a long look at me. “I found out some information,” he said simply.
“What?” I asked, hoping for a full disclosure, but not sure what I’d get.
“I think I have a name for the woman who was strangled.” He didn’t elaborate. I suspected that he’d found out something from his sister about the woman. It would make sense that the victim would have a tie to the secured lot somehow, since she would have had to get inside to be stealing from the truck.
I waited until I thought I was going to burst. “Well, what is it?”
“Emma Creech. She has a vehicle in the lot. It hasn’t been moved in two days, which is pretty rare, supposedly. No sign of her in the vehicle, and I sniffed around, literally, and didn’t smell anything. So if she’d dead, she’d not at the lot.”
He said the words with finality, as if to steer my interest away from his sister. The fewer questions I asked, the better, apparently. “How did you get all this?” I asked. Even if I wasn’t going to push him to spill everything, I still had to play the part. He had to be convinced that I was satisfied with the answers he was supplying. Suspicious Maeve would ask a million questions, so I had to make it look good. I knew he’d tell me in his own time, so I didn’t sweat it much.
“The security guard at the lot. I got a few stills from the video feed. I tried to make images where the hands weren’t around her neck. Then I just asked some people if they knew her.”
I nodded. “It explains how she was able to get into the truck so easily. So do you think that she’s the same woman who took the money from us? Or are we dealing with multiple issues here?”
Land shrugged. “Not sure. I’d start with the assumption that she’s both until we find out something that proves otherwise. I mean, how many people go through our truck in a night?”
How many indeed, I wondered.
A quick Google, and I’d found the address for Emma Creech. It wasn’t far from my new apartment, so I decided to swing by on the way home. I set up the cameras before I left the food truck. I’d also made sure to tell Land that I was doing so. He’d have to find another place for his late night meetings.
I drove by Emma’s house twice before I found it. The home was set back from the road. It was an older home with plenty of acreage around it. Capital City didn’t have many places like that anymore, so I suspected that Emma had lived here for a long time. I also knew that it would take a certain amount of money in taxes and insurance to maintain it. Capital City was going through an expansion. They’d made cuts in the police and social programs to pay for the new infrastructure on the outskirts of town.
Suspecting that no one was home, I walked to the front door and knocked. The sound reverberated through the home, but I didn’t hear any sounds in response. No pets and certainly no people answered. I walked around to the back of the house, but there was nothing to see. The doors were shut and locked. Since I was dating Land and was a respectable business owner, I didn’t want to push the goodwill of the police department by breaking into the home. So I had to make do with looking through the windows.
I walked around slowly and tried to see any signs of a person, either living or dead, but there was nothing to see. The room with the desk and computers, which I assumed was the office, looked like someone had torn it apart, but it could also be a sign of bad organizational skills too.
I took my time, walking the land. I wanted to see if there were any signs of the turf being disturbed. Granted, I didn’t inspect every inch of the property, but there was a good certainty that no one had dug a grave on the acreage.
In all honesty, there was little chance that Emma Creech would be dead here. The distance from the secured lot to her home was too far and too open. The murderer would not risk a chance of being seen – or worse yet, being pulled over. The disappearance was predicated on having a quick way of disposing of the body. Dead bodies weren’t easy to move, and dragging one across the parking lot would have been obvious to anyone driving by – or anyone policing the lot.
Chapter 5
I figured that if the police weren’t going to help, I would have to do things myself. In business school, professors talked about leveraging available resources. I’d decided that what I really needed was a cadaver dog to find a dead body.
However, since Jax Danvers was highly unlikely to provide me with a dog because I’d seen a woman strangled in my food truck, I decided that I had to look at the people I knew in order to find something similar and yet suitable.
I needed a dog, well-trained and with a good nose. I spent some time trying to Google cadaver dogs, but the fact was that the only places that advertised wanted to make the family pet into a body-sniffer. I remembered a girl from my econ class who had nattered on about her dogs, bloodhounds. She’d had floppy-eared dogs on her backpack and her notebooks. I’d wondered if her resumes had dogs on them as well, but it seemed impolite to ask. Another quick search reminded me that bloodhounds were the best dogs for what I wanted.
I called a guy from grad school who had contacted me twice recently. There was some reunion event that the school was putting on, and in a moment of weakness, he’d roped me onto a committee.
If they were encouraging networking, I saw this as the appropriate opportunity to get a lead on the dogs I needed. Shawn answered on the second ring. “Maeve, what’s up? Certainly you’re not going to volunteer for more work, are you?” he asked, laughing at his own joke.
I laughed, thinking about how little work they’d actually get from me on this event. We chatted for a few minutes before I jumped into what I needed. Of course, I didn’t share with him that I needed a classmate’s phone number so I could get her dog-obsessed butt down to the secured lot and find a dead woman. There are limits to most social interactions. I just made the request for her contact information. We had been friendly in school, and perhaps she would agree to work with me on my committee.
If you’re doing something for someone else, they’ll almost always agree to give you what you want. In this case, he also offered me the addresses of any other fellow students I might consider for the committee. I thanked him and told him I’d get back with him.
Now that I had the phone number, I had to think of a way to get the woman interested in coming to a parking lot after work to find a dead body. That situation presented some difficulty. There’s just not a script in business school for asking someone to help you find a corpse. At times, I wished that they’d offered me a class in how to get people to work for your private crime scene investigations, but I doubted that many of my professors had run across the number of dead bodies that I had.
The task turned out to be remarkably easy. Gina had actually seen some of my exploits on the TV news, and she was thrilled to be catching up with me. She asked a million questions about my life, the food truck business, and what I was working on now. I explained briefly that I thought someone had been murdered in the food truck, but we couldn’t find the body.
“Hercules would be thrilled to help!” she exclaimed before I could even finish my final sentence. I presumed that Hercules was her bloodhound, so I asked a bit more about the dog. She’d done some work with him on smell training, giving him activities to find things outside or inside. She went on for probably twenty minutes about her dog before I could route the topic back to the food truck.
Gina wasn’t doing anything at the moment, so we agreed to meet at the secured lot in twenty minutes. No time like the present. When I arrived, she was already waiting in her car with a large beast. He had long floppy ears and a silky brown coat. He tried to jump up on me, but Gina pulled him back. We all got into my car and drove into the lot.
Land’s sister was working at the gate, but I had to pretend that I didn’t know who she was. I wondered if the sister knew me, either as Land’s employer and partner or as his romantic interest. I’d have to ask Land that question sometime.
We drove into the lot, and
I parked next to the food truck. For the sake of appearances, we left Hercules in the car for the moment. I spent about five minutes showing Gina around the food truck with explanations of the process of cooking and selling hot dogs. She had some insightful questions about the finances, and I was suitably impressed with her ideas on some marketing plans.
I had to say that in the daily grind of making a business work and keeping corpses out of the food truck, I’d missed discussions like this. I almost hated to get back to my other business after talking about the finances and marketing.
We went back to the car. While inside, Gina had told me that Hercules would walk around as long as he could maintain visual contact. That pretty much encompassed all of the secured parking lot. There was no traffic at this time of the evening, so he could roam free. She thought it best to make it look like an accident, rather than two women looking for dead bodies. Although, I knew that Danvers would never believe that my friend’s bloodhound had accidently stumbled over the corpse – especially when it turned out to be the body of the woman from the video feed.
Gina and I talked for a few more minutes while Hercules sniffed the ground around the food truck. For the first few minutes, he seemed like he was only interested in finding some French fries from a neighboring truck, but then he took off towards one corner of the lot at a trot. We followed the dog through the rows of cars until he stopped at a black Toyota Corolla. He threw his paws up on the back bumper, which promptly set off the car alarm.
Hercules was right about one thing though. The sedan stank. I wasn’t sure I could pick out the odor of a dead body from that of any number of other noxious pollutants, but he had definitely hit on something here.
Gina pulled down on the leash, and Hercules stood on the asphalt, waiting for further instructions. He had apparently been so heavy that the bumper bounced up when he stepped off the car. I heard the latch of the trunk pop, and the lid slowly rose.
FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES: The Complete Series (14 Books) Page 76