“Yes, I did. Too much, I think.”
I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, so I asked for clarification.
“I found out why Keith dropped out of the deal and why Sizemore wouldn’t tell the police who bought the company.”
I gripped the phone tightly, relishing the moment of revelation.
“Keith was unhappy with the deal because the company had next to no customer base. The owner only had three customers and the financials and the records were all falsified. He took the company, which looked great on paper, and found out it was a bust.”
My jaw went tight and I just stood in place, frozen. That was not the answer I had wanted, though a part of me had feared this might be true. Cooking the books was always the best way to get an acquisition to go south. I tried to swallow, but my throat was amazingly dry.
“What else did you find?”
“I’m trying to find out what exactly was falsified, but it would appear that the company had no clients, which is an odd way to run a business.”
“Yes, it is,” I said truthfully. I had a two-fold problem at the moment. The first and most pressing issue was the fact that the former owner of Mops and Pups was standing right behind me, and had likely heard the entire conversation. If she had killed twice to keep this secret, the lawyer and I were both in trouble.
The second problem, which made me sick to my stomach, was the fact that she’d cooked the books at Mops and Pups. I had a terrible feeling that she’d done the same here. I’d just been crowing about my sales figures for Let it Slide, and now I found that the figures came from a woman who had falsified records at her last employment. I couldn’t understand why she had thrown her own money into my business, since the revenues were in actual money that I’d counted, but she had to have falsified some transactions before I arrived to add to the till.
The lawyer hung up, and I just stood there a moment. I left the phone in my hand, in case I would need it, but when I turned around it was already too late. Emily was facing me with a gun held low, to avoid detection from outsiders, but pointed right at me.
Chapter 10
I stood perfectly still with my phone in my hand. Fortunately for me, I had Land as my emergency number, and I pressed it with my thumb all while trying not to show that I was moving.
“You know,” she said. “You know now what happened.” The gun shook slightly in her hand as she spoke.
“I know. You made up a business and put money into it to make it look like it was profitable.”
Her eyes widened and her nostrils flared. I didn’t like the crazy look she was getting. “I had to. All of you people with your successful businesses. I had to be a winner too. I took some money and put it into the business. Just so it would look better.”
I cleared my throat and said a little too loudly. “There are ways to infuse cash into your business without making up sales. Loans, capitalization, all sorts of things.”
“That wouldn’t make me look successful. It would make me look like a loser, and I couldn’t bear that with the rest of you were all doing well while I struggled. You all made it look so easy.” Her voice quivered, and the gun hand shook some more. I was scared, not liking my odds of getting out of this situation.
“It wasn’t easy,” I said more quietly. “I lost my aunt to get a business. I would have rather had her than the food truck any day.”
The gun came up a bit, but it was still below the area where customers could see it. “You don’t look like it, opening your fourth truck and being married and all. I just had that business. Nothing else. I couldn’t bear to lose it.”
“Where did you get the cash?” I asked. “If you were worried about losing the business, why put your own money into it?”
She laughed, and it sounded like no laugh I’d heard before. “You don’t have all the answers, do you? Well, I put one over on you. All that time you were going up to see Professor Wallace, and I’d taken thousands from him to not say he’d seduced a student. What a joke. He was careless about talking behind closed doors but he was always a gentleman, enough to pay me in cash to stop my talk.”
Now the last pieces fit into place. She had not wanted to show the money in her business, because, like I had done, others would ask where she’d obtained it. The story that she fabricated a lie would not go over well with investors. She and Edward Keith knew each other because they’d run a scam on the professor. He must have been angry when he took Emily’s business and found it to be a joke.
That detail also explained why Professor Wallace had not been forthright about Emily. He could warn me, but not tell me more. The contract drawn up to extort money from him had likely had a non-disclosure clause, as so many such contracts did. If he’d spoken of Emily, he would have been opening the whole can of worms again. Of course, he wouldn’t want to do that. I’d been plagued by the question of why he wouldn’t tell me more, and now I knew.
The gun trembled in her hand, shaking so much that I was scared it would go off by accident. I wasn’t sure what to do now. I’d found out the truth, left an open line for Land to listen, and now my choices were either to stay and hope for the best, or try to run.
A customer came to the counter. She nodded, and I took his order for seven sliders and a drink. Emily filled it in no time, and I handed it over. As I did, he made an odd motion with his eyes to the floor. I was puzzled.
Before I could ask, he lobbed a device of some sort into the truck. I knew now that the motion had been to tell me to get down. Thick, choking smoke filled the truck in seconds. I made a movement to get out of the truck, but as I made my way to the door, Emily was there before me. She sat on the floor, her eyes flashing with fire. Her back rested against the door as she pointed the gun at me.
Voices surrounded the truck, but I wasn’t sure that anything could be done in the seconds before a bullet pierced me.
As I pondered what to do, the door to the truck flew open. Emily half-fell as she turned around, but Detective Danvers had her by the neck and, with a sharp snap, I heard her arm break as something hard came down on it. Emily’s screams filled my ears before I could scramble out of the truck over the counter.
***
It took several days for the smoke to metaphorically clear. Emily had been happy to tell her story once she’d been caught. She implicated Sizemore in a number of small infractions, enough to push him out of Capital City. Emily was offered life without parole, and she accepted it, even though the state hadn’t had the death penalty for nearly a decade.
The bad news for me was that my last minute suspicions had been correct. Emily had been adding to the till each day, ringing up a few fake sales to boost business and make herself seem like a successful entrepreneur. Even at my best, I was unable to come up with what transactions had been faked, so I was left with the money, but also with a truck of questionable profitability. Professor Wallace agreed to meet with me in a few weeks to determine what to do. He said that he had some ideas for helping get past this.
I knew I would still meet with the professor, but I wasn’t sure that I would need his advice on the matter. Let it Slide had become a celebrity truck overnight. The new stories ran about a murderer who had been caught on the truck, and I had several interviews about the case.
Detective Danvers was true to his word. He made small mention of his progress in this case and pointed to me as the person who had solved it. The stance put his promotion in jeopardy for a possibly long time, but it put a ring on Sabine’s finger. She was now convinced that he wanted her and not just a wife for the promotion.
The couple had not set a date yet, but their happiness seemed genuine. Land kept asking if I would fit into a bridesmaid’s dress in a few months, but I reminded him that he would be the first to know about any new little businesspeople on the horizon.
DOWN FOR THE COUNT
Chapter 1
Professor Wallace sat in the wingback chair in our apartment, holding a cup of tea. “I was most impressed w
ith your actions on your last case,” he said, taking a moment for another sip. Wallace had been my professor at business school a few years back, and sort of a mentor when I attended business school for my graduate degree. I was glad that he was taking some time to see how I’d used his teachings to build a viable business.
“Thank you. Your help was invaluable,” I replied. I had made coffee for me. I didn’t mind tea, but Land had me hooked on his own blend of coffee beans. It was dark-roasted and delicious—and his secret. Even though we were happily married, he had yet to tell me the recipe. I wasn’t sure why he was holding out, but he said he was keeping it for a special occasion.
Wallace cleared his throat before speaking again. Twice. I knew from experience that that meant he trying to get the nerve to tell me something or to ask for a favor, but in this case, I wasn’t sure what his request would be. Maybe he wanted me to come in for a lecture at my alma mater, or maybe he just wanted me to grade some papers. I had no clue.
He cleared his throat for a third time, and now he had me worried. I hadn’t had a three throat-clearing request ever. It must be a doozy.
“Well, I came here today asking for a favor,” he started.
I think I’ve mentioned before that many years ago, I too tried to solve a mystery, but I was not as successful as you.”
I nodded. He had mentioned it twice in passing when we’d spoken in the past. He’d followed my own interactions with crime and the police, and had expressed his admiration for my success.
“Well, I was hoping that you would help me. It’s been stuck in the back of my memory for a long time, and it’s like a tickle at the back of the throat. It stays there, and from time to time that event reminds me that I failed. I don’t like that feeling, and I would dearly love to remedy it before I retire.” His expression looked like a grimace, like he had a pebble in his shoe.
Whatever I had been thinking he was going to say, this request for help with an investigation was not what I expected. My first reaction was to politely refuse. The murder cases and investigations that I’d been involved with up to this point had been because the killings had personally affected me, my friends, or my business. They were private crimes, things that made me want to act.
Now Professor Wallace was asking me almost to serve as a private detective and look into a mystery that was years old.
I had enough to do at the moment. We had four food trucks on the street and only staff enough for three. . The reaction to the most recent truck had been extremely positive, and I didn’t want to lose the momentum by having to shut down to find the needed staff. So I was personally picking up the slack, doing multiple shifts a day so that we could remain open
Before I could politely let the professor down, he spoke again. “I know how busy you are, so I would be willing to pay you for your time.”
I smiled. “Thanks, but I’m really not looking to make any money on the side. I just need to concentrate on my business.”
He patted the first of three leather binders he had sitting beside him. The first two were relatively thin, but the third was thick. “I wasn’t going to pay in cash. I think that would be demeaning for us.”
It was easy for him to say that, I thought. He was asking for favors. Now it sounded like he wanted free favors.
“I have something better,” he continued. “Something that I think you need right now.” He picked up one of the leather-covered books and placed it on his lap.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What’s in the binder?” I was a little exasperated that he was playing coy with the situation. I appreciated directness in my business dealings, not melodrama.
“Two things. The first binder contains the name and contact information for a woman who needs a job. She’s a chef who can’t find a job, and if she doesn’t find something soon, she will be deported. She loved the idea of the food truck and wants to interview for the job. I have her resumé, along with several letters of reference, here.”
My eyes widened. Professor Wallace certainly knew how to sweeten the pot. He had found the one thing I needed more than money at the moment. Finding a chef who could run the fourth truck would be worth any time that I could spend on looking into the matter for him. He had my interest now.
The search for a new member of the food truck team had been slow. Most applicants were either chefs with limited experience in serving, or who thought serving was beneath them, or servers who didn’t know how to boil water. Add in the fact that food trucks seemed to fall fairly far down the food chain in terms of prestige, and we had a very small pool of applicants who even looked reasonable.
“When could she start?” I asked cautiously, not wanting to get my hopes up too far. Even so, my question sounded eager.
“Immediately. Tomorrow would be ideal for her. The less time that she’s without employment, the better.”
I was practically salivating, thinking of my pillows and a good night’s sleep without the worry of how we were going to make it through another week. Everyone had jumped in to help, but I knew their time was limited. Carter had children to tend to, and Sabine wanted to start planning her wedding. That left Land and me with all the responsibility.
“I’m interested. What’s the other thing you mentioned? You said two things.” I felt a bit greedy, but at the same time, if item number two was half as helpful as the first, then I’d be willing to take on the case.
“The other thing is a comprehensive analysis of the hours that you’re open and the likely sales at those times. I used what I knew and got some details from your sister-in-law to make up the charts.”
Sabine had recently run the food trucks while Land and I were on our honeymoon, so she'd easily had access to the daily sales for the business. I just didn’t known that she had passed that information on to Professor Wallace. Given that I’d spoken highly of the man, she probably had not worried about offering some preliminary sales information to him.
“Why charts?” I asked, finally.
“I’ve tweaked the hours for the food trucks so that you can maintain the same level of sales with fewer hours. I assumed that you and your husband would want to start a family at some point in the near future, and this would allow you more time with the child and each other. Likewise, if the chef does not work out, then even so you’d be working fewer hours than you do now.” He smiled benevolently at me. Now I had to wonder if Sabine had shared that piece of family information too, or whether he had just reached a logical conclusion about a newly married couple.
I flushed for a second, which was not a great look for me combined with my red hair and freckles. Land and I had started to try for a family. We were still in the early days, but we had talked about how we’d be able to handle our work shifts with a child. It would certainly mean some changes for us. If the analysis was correct, I would be able to work fewer hours and still make an identical revenue. That would be an ideal situation.
“Okay, so I’m interested,” I said finally. “What’s the catch?”
“Nothing,” he said with a smile. “I’ll give you the name of the cook after I tell you my story, and then I’ll give you the analysis after you’ve solved the case or documented 50 hours on it. Does that seem fair?”
I had to admit that it did. The name of the cook would allow me the time to focus on finding out more about this case, and the 50 hours would be far less than what I would have worked without a cook.
“I need to run this by my husband,” I explained, “but I think you have a deal.”
“Call him now,” Wallace said, which seemed like a rush, given that, from his description, the case had sat untouched for more than three decades.
I excused myself and went into my office. Land would be finishing up his shift at this point, and I smiled, thinking that the shift times could get shorter if the professor was correct in his assessment of the profitability and hours worked.
Land answered, and I explained the situation to him in a nutshell. “I’d do it just for a cook,” he said
after hearing the entire story. “It sounds relatively safe. The crimes happened years ago, so the trail will be cold. You could spend 50 hours just trying to track these people down. I don’t see much chance for any personal danger here.”
I agreed with him. I hung up and went back out to my guest.
“I can tell from your face that the answer is yes,” he said, picking up the other binder. “I’ve accumulated pieces of information over the years about the case, and I have a full file here—as much as I managed to ever learn.”
He handed the binder over to me, and I flipped through it. The resumé was in the folder, but the last name and contact information had been whited out. “Just to ensure that you listen to the entire story before you get your first payment,” he said with a smile. “I’m quite serious about this proposal.”
I nodded. While I wouldn’t do that, I could see some people taking the first payment with no intention of following through.
I skimmed the rest of the binder. The materials were all sheathed in plastic sleeves. Some of the newspaper articles dated back almost 30 years ago. I was surprised to see the age of the pieces; apparently Wallace had been following this story from the start, and I was curious why the disappearance had touched him so.
Even so, just as Land had indicated, the trail was likely to be ice cold after so many years. I wondered what would happen if the criminal in the case was long gone, possibly disappeared or dead. Would I be able to prove anything—or would I just be able to give my impression based on the facts at hand?
“Why don’t you tell me the facts as you know them?” I asked, thinking it would be easier than me reading the materials now while he sat and stared at me over a cup of tea.
“Very well,” he said, clearing his throat once more. “In the summer of 1984, I was teaching a business class. Most of the summer classes are fairly small, given that most people are either taking them to make up lost credits from the previous year or taking them to try to shave a semester or two off of their matriculation.”
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