Land smiled. “You’ve already set up two ways that you can continue to investigate while you’re waiting for Maggie Rachford to get back to you. So things are progressing.”
With a course of action mapped out, I felt it was time to put Andy to bed and enjoy some one-on-one time with my husband.
Chapter 8
The next morning, I decided to start with the emails to the Craigslist vendors. I knew enough to ask to see the product and to meet in public. I had no intention of being hurt by any of the people on there who were looking to commit a crime.
I worked on the books for the trucks, but there was no response. Before Land left for his shift, I put five empty canisters of baby formula out in the recycle bins. Since we lived in an apartment, we were not afforded any individual containers. Usually I didn’t think about such things, but at the moment, the matter would have been much easier with visual access to the canisters.
As it was, Land attached some device to one of the canisters. I didn’t know why he had access to GPS trackers, but he had them in his arsenal of weapons. I put a tracker button on one of the canisters and taped the label over it, so that it wasn’t patently obvious at first glance. The device would not be hidden if anyone were to study it carefully, but I was hoping that the canisters were merely collected and then sorted out later.
With those things done, I waited. I tried to call Gage on his cell phone, but the phone quickly went to voicemail. I suspected that he was busy with the police and the means of getting cyanide. He was likely to be in custody. Still, I was curious if his wife had learned anything about the business during her trysts with Rachford.
I went back to waiting. With the amount of spare time I’d had lately, I’d begun to think about going back to work. I knew that Land wasn’t in favor of it yet. I’d only been off for five weeks at this point, but I wanted to feel more connected to people again. When I went to the various food trucks at this point, I felt like a stranger or an absent boss. It was awkward in a way that I was not used to.
The phone rang, and I picked it up. One of the ads on Craigslist had decided to respond. I answered with a suggestion to meet at Government Square, not far from the food trucks. I knew that Sabine would watch Andy while I took the time to end this mystery.
We headed to the rendezvous. As expected, Sabine cooed over Andy and threatened not to give him back as I left to make the meeting. I sat at the agreed upon bench. I wasn’t sure exactly how this would work. The person behind the screen name would not be likely to bring a pallet of baby formula to a meeting. It would make a possible getaway nearly impossible. So I assumed that we would either head to an undisclosed location or the person would have the formula in a car or truck nearby.
I sat for nearly 45 minutes, waiting for someone to approach me. Nothing happened. I wasn’t sure why I was left sitting there. I knew that many posters on the site were flakes who didn’t show or didn’t have what they’d promised.
Still, I had hoped that I would bring an end to this case quickly. Even the thought of a threat against me was disconcerting. I emailed the person twice, hoping to get a response, but he or she did not reply. With a sigh, I gave up and went back to the food truck.
“How did it go?” Sabine asked, eyes wide with expectation. “Did things go as you hoped?”
“No one showed,” I responded. “Nothing at all. I waited 45 minutes, but it’s pretty obvious that I was shafted here.”
“Why?” she asked as she picked up a bottle and started feeding Andy.
“It could be that something else came up, but then I would think that they would have responded and let me know that we’d have to reschedule. I know there’s a huge market for the stuff, but you can’t go around making your customers angry.”
“Do you think you were recognized?” she asked. Andy finished the bottle and she put my baby on her shoulder and started patting his back.
“How? I can’t think that I’ve met anyone who fits the criteria.”
“I think that you actually have met that person, and they recognized you. They could have been far enough from the meeting spot that you didn’t see them, but they saw you.”
I nodded. It seemed like the most likely supposition. Whoever it was had seen me. I thought that I was alert enough to see anyone that I might recognize, but I had not seen anyone. The notion frustrated me.
“So what now?” Sabine asked. “How are you going to find these people if they know who you are?”
I thought about it for a moment. I needed someone who would not be recognized but who could be counted on to keep a level head and get to the bottom of this. Sabine would have been a possible choice, but with the wedding coming up, I knew that Danvers would not want anything to happen to her prior to the event.
Of the people who were invested in finding out the truth, most of them would be known to a person working either for Bargain Baby or the supplier. I thought that my mother might be willing to help, but she had not shown much interest in my investigations up to this point. She’d be more inclined to watch Andy than to stalk a killer.
Even so, I decided to give her a call. The worst she could do would be to say no. She answered on the second ring. They still had a landline and monitored it carefully for missed calls. “Mom, I have a favor to ask,” I started. “I need someone to email an address and ask to meet them for formula.”
“We can go to the store, dear, if you need more,” she interrupted. “Are things that tight with you not working?”
I took a deep breath and remembered that I was asking for a favor. “Money is fine. It’s for this case I’m working on.”
“The formula one? I thought they were selling the formula in stores? That’s why we went to Bargain Baby.”
“They’re selling the cheap stuff in the stores, but my question is what are they doing with the original formula, the goat’s milk formula?”
“So you want to try to see if you can buy the more expensive stuff online? Why do you need me?” she asked, sounding a bit more enthused about the matter.
“Because I’ve asked questions of a number of people about this case. I tried to buy some, but they didn’t show. I’m thinking that they recognized me.”
“And they won’t know who I am,” she finished. “I’ve always said you look more like your father, so that might work.”
I explained the situation to her, and she sent the email while we were still talking. “I’ll call you back if I hear something,” she told me, hanging up the phone. I worried a little about involving my mother in a case. She had a certain naiveté about people that could get her into trouble.
The phone rang in five minutes. “They’ve agreed to meet me, and I asked to meet them at Government Square. You don’t think that’s too obvious, do you?” she asked.
I had to wonder, thinking that two requests to meet in the same place on the same day might be a bit much, but my mother would be an unknown figure to them.
She agreed to come down and meet me at the truck.
Sabine was still watching Andy, so I decided to jump in and help. Truth be told, I missed my job and I enjoyed the half-hour of taking money and serving meals. Sabine kept grinning at me as we worked, which made me think that she was happy to have me back.
I was on the watch for my mother when Jax Danvers stepped in line. “What are you doing here? Motherhood and sleuthing aren’t enough for you?” he said.
“Just waiting for my mother, so I thought I’d help out. What can I get for you?” I replied, keeping my calm and resisting the urge to shove a hot dog in his face. I was still not in a good place about the wedding and Land’s lack of a role in it.
He placed a quick order. Sabine prepped it, and I handed it out the window. I didn’t charge him, even though I thought about submitting a bill for the all the free food he’d consumed over the years. Just a small reminder of how one-sided that relationship had been.
He mumbled a quick thanks. “Any new leads on that baby formula?” he asked. He tried
to make it sound trivial, even though I strongly suspected that it was at the heart of the case.
“Nothing yet,” I said, somewhat truthfully.
“We’re looking into the organized crime role in selling baby formula. Nothing yet, but it’s early days.”
Internally, I cursed my bad luck. Baird would not be happy to be investigated while I found out who was really behind it. I resolved to speed up my work.
Fortunately for me, my mother showed up at that moment, and the entire conversation changed. She was all about Andy and the truck and my health, leaving no time for questions about investigations and organized crime.
I gave her the talk about being safe and not going anywhere with the person who showed up to sell the formula. She smiled at me. “You’re becoming a mother. Just listen to you.”
I tried to ignore the comment, though I was secretly pleased. ‘Thanks. Just be careful. I don’t want to have to take care of Dad if something happens to you.”
She laughed and took her bag under her arm. “I’ve got mace, you know?”
I nodded, thinking of my mother as a street ninja.
“This will be fun,” she continued. I wasn’t sure where that adjective had come from. “I had wanted to be involved with investigations before we had you.”
This was news to me. I wondered why she was telling me this now, when so often in the past, I’d done investigations, including a few that included my parents. “Really?” I managed to ask.
“I took some classes in investigation, but then you came along and I stopped to have you. Things were different back then. Fewer women worked, and many stopped when their children were born.”
I gave her a smile. “Well, it’s never too late. You’d better go. I doubt that this dealer will wait around for you to be fashionably late.”
She checked her watch. “I’m off.”
I had set it up so that my mom’s phone would be on during the entire conversation, so I could hear what was being said. She was to be inquisitive without pushing too hard. I didn’t want the seller to be freaked out before we had the transaction completed.
Sure enough, in a few minutes, I heard my mother’s voice greet someone. When the man spoke, I recognized his voice immediately. It was obvious to me how this fit together.
My mom made the sale, and from what I could tell the formula came in Tupperware. She gave him the money, more than we agreed upon. The price was approximately what could be had in stores without taxes. I was worried that her largesse would scare him off, but he willingly accepted the cash and left.
My mother came back over to the food truck, carrying several large plastic containers, each with white powder in them, in a shopping bag. My plan was to use the formula, once I had it checked out by the lab I had used before. The transaction was complete, and now I knew who had killed Barb Yungbluth.
Chapter 9
Brianna Preston did not seem surprised to see me. “Maeve, you must be slipping. I haven’t heard that Tom Rachford’s murder has been solved yet. Has motherhood slowed you down?”
I pondered that question for a moment. Had Andy slowed down my mental process? I wasn’t sure.
“I have a good idea of the solution of part of the case, but this murder has me baffled,” I replied honestly. “I want to feel that they are linked somehow, but I can’t make that happen. I wanted to borrow your memory to see if you can tell me again who all was by Rachford that night. I can fill in part of it, but of course, I wasn’t expecting anything like that to happen at the gala.”
Brianna laughed. “I would think that you should expect that every time you go out of the house,” she said with a smile. “I’ve been over this with the police a few times, so I should be fairly fresh.”
I looked at her. “Interesting. The CCPD have not talked to me at all, beyond that initial discussion with Danvers the night of the murder,” I replied. I was puzzled by this. Usually Danvers wanted my opinion on a case, but he’d totally ignored me and my eyewitness account of the killing. I felt a cold wave up my spine as I thought about seeing Rachford’s blue face.
Was this related somehow to the wedding and Danvers’ decision not to ask Land to be the best man? Was he really that spiteful?
“Well, you must have pissed them off royally,” Brianna said. “They’ve been here two or three times.”
“So what did they want?” I asked, wanting to know if I’d missed any angle on this case.
“Mostly, they wanted to see if I could remember when Tom got the drink that had the poison in it and who stood around him at that time.”
The police must be assuming that the drink was poisoned once it had been served. I recalled the experiment that Land had performed on trying to get a person to take a particular drink. It had not been successful. So the police were convinced that the killer had slid the poison into the drink after the waiter had given it to Rachford.
“So what do you remember?” I asked. I wondered if the other men had been queried in the same manner. “Did they seem particularly interested in any part of the evening?”
Brianna sighed and closed her eyes, as if to remember it. “They wanted to know about the time after he accepted his last drink,” she replied.
“When was that?”
Her eyes remained closed. “About five minutes before he went down. He’d been nursing a glass of champagne, and somebody shook his arm. He spilled the little he had in the first glass and a waiter brought him a new glass.”
I thought of the possibilities. The person who bumped his arm would likely be the person who had dosed his new drink. Poison would have been conspicuous in a half-empty glass and would have been less noticeable in a full glass. The bitter taste would have put him off the dregs. He would likely have given it back and picked up another glass instead.
“Who bumped his arm?” I asked, wanting a big reveal.
“That’s just it. I don’t know. You know how it is at parties. Everyone is milling around and ten people could bump you. That’s how it was that night. If someone had bumped your arm, would you have been easily able to tell who?”
I thought of that crowd, which had mainly been older men congratulating each other. The cuckolded husband of Tom’s lover was there, along with the man who was involved with Tom’s wife. The motives were plentiful in an arena where everyone seemed to be involved with everyone else.
I tried to remember the moments before Rachford was poisoned. To be honest, I had just been thrilled to be out for a night, with a possible small investigation into formula tampering. I hadn’t been expecting anything more than a talk with Rachford—certainly not his untimely death in front of my eyes. I hadn’t noticed his drinks until he began to turn blue.
“So the police have asked you a few times about who bumped his arm? What else?”
Brianna cleared her throat. “Mostly about who was standing near him during the time of the poisoning? I’ve already told you the names of the men I saw. Edward Howard and Noel Winston and Francis Gage.”
“I’ve talked to Winston and Gage, but not Howard. Is there any chance that he could be the person behind this?” I asked.
Brianna’s eyes sparkled for a moment. “If we’re going to gossip, fine, but it’s not for public consumption. Edward Howard is as gay as they come. If I’m only certain of one thing in this case, it’s that he was not sleeping with anyone else’s wife.”
I pondered that. So he was left out of the romantic merry-go-round. But had he been involved in a business deal or a scam that had gone awry? While romantic peccadillos seemed to be the main point here, I couldn’t rule out other motives.
“It looks like I might have struck a nerve,” she said, looking at me.
“I’m just wondering if all this focus on the liaisons might be throwing us on the main track. Did you ever hear of any business dealings between these men?”
She shook her head. “No, but then again, why would I? They were all involved in the retail business, and I run an upscale art gallery. We don�
�t have a lot in common, business-wise.”
I had to agree there. I would never have made any contacts with them in a normal setting, because food services and retail didn’t go together often. Mostly, business groups stayed together.
“Do you have contact information for him?” I asked.
“I’ll do you one better,” she said. “I’ll ask him to come over. He’s always one to chat about other people in the business community.”
Within minutes she’d made the call and Edward Howard was on his way to the art gallery.
He arrived within record time and graciously shook my hand. “For a long time, I’ve wanted to seek you out and learn more about you. The newspapers only give a brief sketch of what happened in the cases you’ve been involved with. I’m sure there’s so much more to the stories than what I’ve heard.” He gave a sideways glance to Brianna, who had been involved in one such case. The families had opted to keep Carter’s young family out of the limelight. I wasn’t going to sell Carter out for the sake of a new case.
I did share with him some information about older cases I’d been involved with over the past six years. I couldn’t believe how many murders I’d solved and how many lives I’d changed. I felt good about things. Even if nothing came of the current case, I would be able to be happy about the good I’d done in the world.
“So what do you want to know, dear?” he said, once I’d shared a sufficient amount of information with him. “I imagine you want to know what the police asked me?”
“That would be a good starting point,” I agreed.
“Well, to be honest, I have no idea who bumped Tom Rachford’s arm. I’m not sure that anyone did at all. He tended to be a sloppy drunk, and it could just as easily have been him. I saw him slosh a drink before—though, miraculously, it always seemed to be on a woman he was interested in.”
FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES: The Complete Series (14 Books) Page 167