MURDER IN THE SPOTLIGHT (Food Truck Mysteries Book 2)

by Chloe Kendrick

  I studied his face for a minute. “You’re certainly cynical. So you think I’m on the wrong path here?”

  He continued to study the paper. “Not necessarily. It could be that Tracy was just picked at random to be the fall guy—er, person—for these pranks or the person behind this could have a reason why Tracy was excluded. You could certainly look into that angle and find out what’s going on.”

  I gave him a big smile. “Well, we’re done with filming for the week, so it would be next week before I could find Tracy again—unless that is, you’d want to give me her address and phone number.”

  Danvers smacked his forehead with his hand. “Of course, now I see how I’m of use to you in this. It’s not a matter of sharing what you’ve learned with the police. It’s a matter of the police giving you the personal information on a suspect.”

  “You could deputize me, and let me get to work,” I suggested. Since he had technically asked for our help, I thought it a reasonable request.

  “That’s not happening,” Danvers replied. “I will give you the information you want, but I want to hear back from you on what happens in the interview. You might find out something that the police wouldn’t be able to get from a contestant on the show.”

  I thought about that. “Are you sure? I’m the competition, and you’re the police. You’re more likely to be impartial than I would be. Tracy might think that I’m trying to pin the crimes on her because I want to win the contest for myself.”

  Danvers looked at me with a new emotion that might have actually been respect. “Good point. You can still do the interview, but if you think I could have a different response, let me know, and I’ll try to follow up on it.”

  I said my good-byes and headed back out of the station, only getting lost once on the way out.

  Tracy Jones lived north of town in an area known for its ritzy homes. I was a bit surprised by the address. Food truck owners could earn a living at what they do, but it wasn’t likely to be so lucrative as to get rich. The address that Danvers gave me led to a McMansion in one of the nicer neighborhoods in that part of town. I let out a low whistle as I drove past several of the homes.

  I pulled into the driveway. The mailbox did have “Jones” on it, so I thought I must be in the right place. I parked the car, and headed to the front door, which was an elaborate affair with sidelights on both sides of the door.

  I rang the bell and waited, spending the time looking through the glass to the marble-floored entryway.

  Finally, a young boy came to the door and opened it. He looked at me and slammed the door in my face. At first I thought I had been rejected, but I heard him shout, “Mommy, someone’s at the door for you.”

  I heard some voices but I couldn’t distinguish what was said, and then Tracy came to the door. Tracy was nothing like me. She was a petite blonde woman who looked more like she should be on one of the beauty pageant shows than a reality show about food trucks. Her hair was flawlessly coifed, and she was wearing a blue dress that matched her eyes. She always looked perfect on the show. I just thought that she had an in with the make-up and wardrobe people. I doubted that I could remember the last time I wore a dress to answer the door to a stranger.

  Her face went through several different expressions before she settled on surprise. “Maeve, what are you doing here? Is something wrong?”

  I shook my head. “I’m kind of looking into all the problems the show has been having with the poison pen notes and the pranks. I was trying to talk to everyone about it and find out what I can.”

  Her brows knit together, making a thin arched line. I noticed that her forehead didn’t move, and I wondered if she’d had Botox injections on her face. “Nothing like that has happened to me. I thought I told you that at the show.”

  “You did, but I just wanted to make sure that I’d heard you correctly. It’s just that—” I let the sentence hang, hoping to get a reaction.

  “Well, sorry that you had to come all this way, but you heard correctly. Nothing like that has happened to me. Either no one hates me enough to write notes to me, or they all just think that I’m going to be out in the next round and don’t even need to bother with me.” In the background, I could still hear a few voices, but I couldn’t place any of them. One sounded familiar, but I couldn’t put a face with it.

  “That’s just odd. I mean…” Again, I let the sentence hang, but this time she took the bait.

  “What’s so odd about it? The pranks have only been done on a few people. Not everyone is hated like you and some of the others.”

  I widened my eyes for effect. “Well, that’s just it. Everyone else has either received a note or had things stolen or taken—or both. Everyone except you. Why do you think that is?”

  I watched her face closely. I wanted to see if she would betray some emotion or give a tell that would allow me to figure out what was going on with this situation. But her face was stone. No emotion, no tells, nothing. Botox ruined another possible confession.

  “Well, I guess you’d better find this person and ask them, because I don’t have the slightest idea.” She shut the door in my face.

  I walked back to my car, wondering what to do now. I hadn’t gotten a single good answer out of Tracy. Not even a real denial, just the slam of a door.

  I started the car and began the drive back to my place. I analyzed my next steps as I drove. For starters, I was going to review the security tapes for the studio, if they would let me, and see if I could find who had peed in our box of pots and pans. There had to be footage of the main hallway somewhere, if it hadn’t been removed or overwritten already. That would solve the mystery if I could see who was on tape. It seemed like a risky maneuver on the part of the prankster. There would be no logical way to explain why you were at the studio with your drawers around your ankles, taking a whiz in a box.

  The other thing that I wanted to do was try to find out when and where our truck had been breached. We kept the truck in a secured lot. So the times when someone could have come in and removed a single spice were limited. We didn’t drive the truck to the studio, like some of the other truck owners did. We kept it in the lot until it was time for us to prep and serve.

  That meant there were very few times when the truck was unoccupied. I thought that we could probably narrow down the timeframe to a fairly small window, allowing us to find out who was available and in the vicinity at the time. That, too, would allow us to determine who could have done it.

  I decided to head back to the studio to see if I could look at the surveillance tapes. The show was done for the week, and I had no idea if the producers would be around or not. I figured that today was my best shot, given that we’d just finished an episode. Today was also a down day for the truck, meaning that tomorrow I’d be tied to feeding others until around 2pm.

  I pulled into the parking lot and headed for the producers’ offices. I stopped cold in the hallway outside of their offices. I heard voices that I didn’t recognize. I moved a little closer, thinking that anything being said by the producers might be helpful in figuring out who was behind the pranks. I still had lingering doubts that someone who worked for the show might be behind the pranks. Drama on set always improved ratings, and nothing starts drama like pitting everyone against the others and then lobbing accusations about.

  As I moved closer, I could hear Jim Jackson, one of the producers, say, “I can’t let you do that. I think this has gone on long enough. We need to end it before something bad happens.”

  I couldn’t hear the other person. Their voice was muffled. I thought it was a woman, but it may have been a man. Without getting into the office, I had no way of telling for sure.

  “No,” Jim said. “No more.”

  I decided to see who the other person was. I had a valid request to make, and I thought that seeing who was in the room would be a bonus. I knocked on the door, and reached for the knob, but the door was locked.

  Jim came to the door in a few seconds, unlocke
d the door and opened it. “Maeve, what are you doing here?”

  I pushed past him and sat down in one of the chairs facing his desk. The room was empty of other people. So much for my first plan. I still had no idea who the other person was, though I very much expected that this conversation was tied to the nasty notes and pranks. “Sorry, I thought you had someone in here with you,” I said, trying to play dumb.

  He shook his head “No, I was just editing some of the footage for the newest episode. You might have heard the audio from that.”

  I decided to play along. Since I was about to ask a favor of him, I didn’t want to make him mad by telling him that I knew that the daily tapes were usually viewed without sound first. Not to mention the fact that I’d recognized the producer’s voice, who definitely would not be appearing in any episode of the show.

  He watched me carefully, but I just smiled at him. Finally, he asked, “What can I do for you?”

  I went into my spiel about wanting to catch the person who was responsible for peeing on our pots and pans. I told Jim that if he’d let me review the tapes that perhaps we could have a scene where I confronted the person responsible, which would lead to great ratings for the drama associated with such a scene. I made it sound like advertisers and viewers would eat that up, which sadly, was probably the truth.

  I must have made a good pitch, because he hit the button on the intercom system and got a secretary into his office in a few seconds. He explained the situation, and she motioned for me to follow her.

  The secretary took me to a small room with a television, DVD player and a chair. “I’ll go get you the security footage. I’ll be pulling just the one camera’s view for the day in question. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She left me in the room, closing the door behind me. I thought about exploring the area to see if I could find the person who had been talking to Jim, but I also knew I had to be back here before the secretary returned with the DVDs. I sat patiently in the room, playing with my phone. I’d gone through my emails and was playing a mindless game app when she appeared with some DVDs.

  “I burned these for you. This should be everything. The security firm that set this system up sends us the security footage after one week. It’s just a series of digital files that are maintained on our server. We hold on to them for three more weeks, and then remove them to make room for the new footage.” She popped the first DVD into the player and grabbed the remote. A few clicks later, I was watching the view from the camera nearest to where the pots and pans had been left on set.

  True to her word, the secretary had given me almost the entire day’s worth of video. I started fast forwarding through the DVD, since the pots and pans had not even put in an appearance yet. I finished the first DVD and put the second one into the player. I was about 20 minutes into the second disk when the power went out. The room was pitch-black, and an eerie silence fell over the entire area.

  Since the room I was in was used for viewing video, there were no windows or light sources in the room except for the overhead lighting. I stumbled across the room and felt my way to the door. I opened it and was greeted by the glow of the vaguely green emergency lights that lit the hallway. I walked down the hall, trying my best to remember the path that the secretary had used earlier. I made a few wrong turns but finally came back to the producers’ offices. Jim Jackson was standing in the hall with his hands on his hips. He did not look pleased.

  “What the hell is going on? Have you seen Louise?” he asked. “Louise? Where are you?” he shouted.

  I assumed that Louise was the secretary. “No, I came looking for someone to find out what happened. I don’t know where she is. What exactly is going on here?”

  Jim Jackson mumbled something and stormed off. I decided to follow him, thinking that I didn’t particularly want to be alone in a darkened building with a prankster on the loose. That was not my idea of a good time. I followed Jim down another long hallway, one I had not been down before. He stopped at a particular door and pulled out a set of keys to unlock it. He pushed the door open. Again this room had no windows or other light sources, so it was near pitch-black inside.

  “Hold the door,” he barked at me.

  I held the door and waited. Within a few seconds the lights were back on.

  “Some jackass flipped off the circuit breaker. I’m tired of these pranks,” he said as he sailed by me. I hurried to follow him as he headed down the hallway again. The halls looked incredibly different with the lights on, and I wasn’t sure I would have been able to find my way back to the producer’s office without assistance. A few heads popped up over the walls of the cubicles, but we didn’t stop to talk to anyone.

  When we arrived at his office, I headed back down the other hallway to the viewing room. I stepped inside the room and immediately noticed that the DVDs were gone. I looked around on the tiled floor, thinking that perhaps I’d knocked them to the floor when I was traipsing around in the dark. However, they were nowhere to be found. Either Louise or the prankster had removed them from the room while I was gone.

  Of course, this meant another trip to the producer’s office. I found Jim on the phone and waited for him to finish.

  “Someone took the surveillance videos while we were fixing the lights,” I explained. “Would it be too much to ask Louise to burn another set for me?”

  He nodded and paged the secretary on the intercom again. The woman took her sweet time about getting here this time around. I stood outside the office for several minutes waiting. I explained the situation to her when I saw her. She nodded and headed off to repeat her earlier task for me.

  She returned in a matter of minutes. She wasn’t carrying any DVDs which did not look promising to me. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said as she approached. “The video files are gone.”

  “Gone? What happened to them?” I asked, already knowing the answer. Someone, presumably the prankster, had turned out the lights in the studio, taken the DVDs and then erased the files before Louise could get back to them and burn another set. Or perhaps they had been deleted prior to the power outage. Either way, the files were gone and so were my answers.

  The prankster had been close enough to the room where I was to handle the situation. While I wasn’t any closer to finding out who had perpetrated the pranks, I did know that it had to involve someone from the studio. I added in the conversation I’d overheard in Jim’s office, and I had evidence of the studio’s complicity in this matter. I felt good that I had ruled out the contestants, meaning that I might be able to trust them with news about the pranks.

  I left the building and called Danvers to tell him about the latest events in the saga. His phone went right to voicemail, which was about the way my day had been going. I left a message and headed for home.

  Chapter 6

  I made it home, cooked some dinner, and sat down to make a timeline of the events before the most recent challenge. At least no one could to do a mind dump and erase my memories. I could control at least that much of the process. I was feeling frustrated that every time I got close to an answer, someone was a step ahead of me, removing the clues. For a paranoid moment, I wondered if Land or Danvers might be involved, since I’d shared my plans with them. However, I soon let that go, since I knew that Land had no connections to the studio. The producers had run a background check on all of us to ensure that we didn’t have any relatives or close friends at the studio that would provide us with information on the contests or selection criteria. Danvers was not really a likely suspect, since he didn’t know my exact schedule or times.

  I drew up a timeline for the day in question. I blocked out the times that the food truck was in the secured lot. I highly doubted that the prankster could have managed to break into the lot, and it seemed unlikely that an amateur could get over that fence or through the gates.

  So essentially it left the time period in which we had taken the truck to the studio, left it there while we were given our challenge and then from t
he time we went to our location until we closed up and drove the truck back to the lot.

  The timeframe was much easier than I expected. I knew that I’d not left the truck once we left the studio. That only allowed the time when we went inside the studio for someone to steal the cilantro. As I had suspected, the prankster had not gone from location to location, taking things from guarded trucks. He or she had gone to the studio with the rest of us, taken a minute to sneak outside and take the ingredients. Our truck is locked, but we’d learned the hard way that the security system on the truck itself was shoddy. It would be simple to steal from multiple trucks if they were all parked in the same lot.

  Having narrowed it down in that way, I knew that I’d have to investigate further to find out who had left the studio while we were filming. I could recall some people, but I didn’t have them all. I figured that Land would know who had stood next to him, and he would be able to fill in the holes in the chart. With a narrowed down list, I could start asking some questions.

  The next morning came early at my house. I was up and out the door before 4:30 a.m. I made it to the lot, picked up the food truck, and had it to our location on Elm Street in a matter of minutes. Land and I always text each other to let the other know when the truck has been picked up. It saves time since no one is hunting for the truck in the wrong location. Typically, I was the one receiving the texts most days, a fact that I ascribed to being a woman; therefore, I needed more time for prep before I could appear in public. I wasn’t sure that Land believed me, but he also didn’t seem to care. So I let things stand.

  I started my prep work and waited for him to appear. It figured that the one day I wanted to talk about clues and a timeline, he was slower in arriving. He showed up just after 5 a.m. and got to work on the day’s condiments. He was chopping avocados and pickles when I broached the subject with him.

  “Do you remember if anyone left the studio the day before yesterday when we found out about the challenge?” I asked. I explained to him how I’d drawn up the timeline of events and the only time we could have been robbed was during the studio time.