FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES: The Complete Series (14 Books)

by Chloe Kendrick

  I thought he was going to have to carry me to the door, but I managed on my own two feet. I sat in the car for a long time before I drove home. I stumbled through the front door and managed to land on the bed.

  When I awoke from my nap, I began to think about the will again. The question on my mind was whom did the incident with the fake will serve? My brain was trying to force all the facts into some kind of pattern, but everything seemed too random to be connected. The will mainly helped Land and his interests. He was the one who would receive the food truck and the resulting income. I lost money on the deal. No one else really gained from the change. Most of the other bequests had stayed the same. However, Land had followed along with my investigation into the matter. Was he just looking for a way to stymie the questions, or was he legitimately only interested in the correct will being probated? It was hard to say. He held so much in check behind that macho exterior that I couldn’t read his true opinions about most things. Sometimes he seemed like he genuinely liked my aunt—and me. At other times, he only seemed interested in getting away from me at all costs.

  The murders were another matter. Someone had killed Fred Samples and the health inspector. Those murders both seemed tied to the food truck, or me particularly, but I couldn’t see how. Fred had a competing food truck, and the health inspector had held up my aunt’s permit for some reason.

  I sighed. Maybe it was the concussion still at work, but it all felt so foggy. I suspected that I was still missing several parts of the puzzle that I was trying to solve. I wished I could find the other parts, but not at the expense of more people dying. I wasn’t sure what could possibly be so momentous in the food services industry that could possibly account for the deaths of two people.

  I had deliberately put off any thoughts of my aunt’s death. The thought that someone may have killed my aunt, which led to my inheritance, and then tried to take it away from me, made no sense at all. Either they didn’t want her to have it, or they didn’t want either of us to have it. If that was the case, then I was back to Land again as a suspect. Much as I didn’t like him as a person, I couldn’t imagine him in the role of murderer.

  With that disappointing lack of a solution, I decided to crash for the evening. It was only 8:30 p.m., but I had to be at the truck at my normal time tomorrow. The events of the last few days had left me worn out and I wanted to be fresh on my first day back.

  Land was surprised to see me that morning. I’d picked up the truck and been at our new location a good 45 minutes before he arrived. I’d counted the money and had begun my preparations when he opened the door. I don’t know if he expected something different, but given the handwriting analyst’s testimony, I felt that it was best to continue things as they had been.

  After a long pause, he said, “The will was a forgery then?”

  I nodded. I was impressed with his mental acuity. He’d puzzled through the situation and come up with the only answer that made sense. I wondered what he thought of the killings. Maybe he’d come to some quick conclusions that I’d missed. I thought about asking him, but wondered if I would get a straight answer out of him.

  I told Land about the handwriting analysis expert and his conclusions. He just nodded his head as I spoke. Without a word, he began to do his morning prep work, leaving me standing in the middle of the truck. No reaction—nothing. I knew how he felt, but I had hoped for some conversation with him, primarily to see if he had any notion of where the fake will could have come from.

  The shift went quickly, and then we cleaned up. Land had probably only said three words to me in that entire time. I drove the truck back to the lot and went home. I knew that the police had warned me about meddling in an open police investigation, but no one could claim that my aunt’s death was an open investigation. The case had been closed and my aunt’s body had been released for burial. I could look into that matter without conflicting with the police. They had no interest in my aunt.

  The issue bothered me. If the killer had wanted me to have the truck, then my aunt had died because of me. The thought of my playing any part in her death sickened me. I wanted that doubt removed from my mind. I wasn’t sure how to resolve the issue, but I knew that my natural curiosity would help me learn more.

  I decided to start with papers. After all the violence and action I’d seen over the past few days, I wanted something that seemed entirely non-threatening. I’d had enough of headless corpses to last me a lifetime.

  I started with my parents’ house again. They’d received the majority of Alice’s personal possessions, and they’d just incorporated many of those items into their home. I began with the books, taking each one off of the shelves and fanning it to look for papers. Of course, nothing else was there. I’d found the only item in the books, and after all my work the will had turned out to be a fake. It seemed like such a random way to get a will introduced into the case.

  Next, I went downstairs. My mother followed behind me, drinking a cup of coffee without offering me one. “What exactly are you doing again?” she asked as she watched me cut open the top of a taped box.

  “Looking for anything that could provide me with a reason why someone would want to kill Alice or why someone is after the food truck. Something is going on, and I have no idea what it is. I need more facts.” I was sweating by the time I opened the third box and started scanning the contents.

  “What makes you think that it’s going to be in here?” my mother asked, leaning back in an old recliner that still sat in the basement. “No one has been down here in months. I’d think that if someone really wanted the papers, they would have come after them.”

  I thought back to the forged will. Someone had been in my parents’ house, and I wasn’t sure what they’d taken, if anything. We certainly hadn’t noticed that someone had come into the house and stuck the will in a book. So they could have easily looked elsewhere for any papers they were interested in. We would never have known.

  The only thing saving these papers was the fact that they’d been stored in sealed boxes. The boxes had no markings on the outside describing the contents. For all the intruders knew, these were artifacts of my parents’ lives. The shipping tape had not been cut or removed. The color and style were the same as the other boxes, so I knew that it hadn’t been replaced.

  I was sad to think that the compilation of Alice’s whole life had been stuffed into so few boxes. She’d never been the type to be constrained. While my parents vehemently denied it, I had suspected that Alice had been involved in a same sex relationship after my Uncle Ralph passed away. Her friend Shirley had begun appearing at family events during the third year after Ralph’s death and had continued to participate in family events until Shirley’s death a few months before Alice’s own passing. In retrospect, the timing of their deaths seemed odd. At the time, one friend had suggested that Alice died of a broken heart, but I would never have put that suggestion to my mother. Now the circumstances looked far more sinister.

  Now that I was in this mode of questioning everyone’s death, I wondered what Shirley had died of. I asked my mother.

  “How should I know, dear? It wasn’t as if Alice announced it. One day her friend was here and the next she wasn’t, so it had to be somewhat sudden. You need to stop seeing murder victims everywhere. It’s not healthy,” she said as she propped her feet up in the recliner and sipped her coffee again.

  “What was Shirley’s last name?” I asked. If my parents hadn’t cared about Shirley’s death, then I would find out for myself. I wondered if the timing had been merely coincidental or if there had been something about Shirley’s death that had led to Alice’s own demise—and my concussion.

  My mother shrugged. “Ask your father. Maybe he remembers.” That was typical of my mother’s apathy on the subject.

  I went through another box, which brought up a trove of photos of the two women smiling for the camera, but no documentation of any kind. If I’d found these photos elsewhere, I would have thought the tw
o women were involved, but I kept my mouth shut to my mother. While she tended to be progressive about orientation, she had a very black and white view on the subject. She considered someone to be either gay or straight, and once you were one, you couldn’t change your mind, according to my mother. So Alice would always be associated with Ralph and Shirley would just be a friend.

  I found a box of papers that looked interesting. There were a number of photos of what appeared to be the food truck. The logo wasn’t there and parts of the outside were rather beaten up, but the general shape and form of the vehicle resembled the truck I’d driven to the lot this afternoon. It merely looked like it had been in need of care and repair. I wondered what she’d seen in the truck that had appealed to her so much.

  There were also numerous papers regarding the start-up of the business. I found my aunt’s notes from the health inspector. The papers regarding the purchase of the truck were included. I leaned back on my haunches and rested as I scanned the documents. I had to wipe away sweat from my forehead twice to keep it from running into my eyes as I read.

  One document was a layout of the truck and its kitchen. The sketches showed the refrigeration units, the cutting surfaces and sinks. The overall document would have been helpful when I’d started working on the truck. I was forever pulling open a door, only to find something I hadn’t even known existed.

  The gist of the documents was that Alice had bought the food truck from a police auction. The truck had been impounded for some reason and then sold at auction to make money for the local police. Probably to buy Detective Danvers some more new ties, I thought sarcastically.

  Alice had never been one to have a big estate. She wasn’t destitute, but she certainly wasn’t the type to buy big-ticket items for cash either. I wasn’t sure where she’d procured the money to do so, but she’d managed to outbid someone else for the truck. If I was to believe the document, she’d paid cash. A lot of cash.

  “Mom, where would Alice have gotten $30,000 in cash?” I asked. “Did someone die and leave her money or give her some cash?” No one in our family paid cash for anything if they could help it. I knew that my parents would have been unable to raise that much cash, and I could barely raise $30.

  My mother’s brow furrowed. “Not that I know, dear. She had a bit of savings; I know that. But that was maybe $10,000 at most. You could ask your father. He’s the executor of the will. He’d know if anyone would.”

  I nodded. I’d found one question in the story of the food truck that needed investigation. I also wanted to find out more about Shirley and her life. Maybe Shirley had given Alice the money for the truck.

  The rest of the boxes yielded nothing, so I called it a day. I was hot, sticky and tired and I wanted nothing more than a shower and a nap.

  Chapter 7

  I called Land the next morning, professing to be ill. I was actually fine, but after all that had happened, I needed a rest. My father had agreed to meet with me for an hour to look into the source of Alice’s funds for the truck. However, he’d dictated the ridiculous hour of 9 a.m., knowing I had to work, but I opted to make time for the meeting rather than try to change it.

  We met for coffee at the Starbucks closest to my house. While I didn’t think that their coffee was nearly as good as the coffee at Dogs on the Roll, it was decadent to have someone else serve me for a change. I just sat in my chair while they brought me steaming drinks and pastries. No one screamed at me for creamer or relish. It was refreshing.

  He pulled out a pad of paper and some documents from his bag. In his desire to be a hipster, my father had grown a goatee and carried a bag rather than a briefcase. I wasn’t bothered, but I did find it amusing at times. I would never say that to him, but my mother has made comments behind his back. She felt that their counterculture days were long behind them.

  He cleared his throat in his best business voice and looked into my eyes. “I don’t like what you’re doing here, you know that.” I wondered if he spoke to his clients like this or just his daughter. I wanted to know which part of what I was doing he objected to. Was it the investigation of Aunt Alice’s death, the manner in which the truck was obtained, or the will or—? I had too many irons in the fire to decipher vague pronouncements.

  I nodded and made sure to reply in the same. “I totally understand. I wouldn’t be doing this except for the fact that people keep dying, and the only thing they have in common is the food truck. I want to learn more about how Alice got the truck, where it came from. The first peculiarity I ran into was the fact that she’d bought it at a police auction for cash when she didn’t have that much money available to her.”

  My dad looked down at the papers. “You’re right about that. She didn’t have $30,000 at the time that she purchased the truck. Not in savings and not in investments. Even if she had that much of value, she did nothing to liquidate her assets to gather that much in cash. Besides, it would be extremely foolhardy to collect that much cash on the off chance that you might end up buying a used food vehicle at an auction. I have to wonder if she had some advance knowledge that the truck would be there and that it would go for approximately that much money.”

  “I noticed that someone else was trying to outbid her. Did she get rooked on the sale?” I had to wonder if she’d gotten a bad deal. Was that the real scam involved here

  My father shook his head. “The other bidder dropped out after a while, if I remember correctly, but the price she paid was still below market value. So I don’t think there was anything wrong with the transaction from that standpoint. She just didn’t have that kind of money to be spending though.”

  I took a deep sip of my coffee and swallowed. Not bad, though I still preferred our coffee to theirs. I took a bite of my muffin and waited for my dad to continue. He didn’t. After a moment, I asked, “Do you have an explanation?”

  He shook his head. “None. There’s an influx of cash into her account in the month before the auction. Three transactions for $9,000 each. No explanation. They were completed at an ATM, so no questions from the teller. It’s probably been too long to ask the banks to review the ATM cameras, and that’s even if you could get a subpoena to get them to review them in the first place. They don’t give away private information because you ask nicely. The totals kept this entire deposit under the radar in terms of the federal government. This is the way that drug dealers and terrorists do things. It’s not how nice suburban people operate. This is way too slick to be coincidence or just a friendly loan. There’s no note or IOU for the loan in Alice’s papers. It seems to be just a pure gift with no explanation at all.”

  “Nothing?” I popped another piece of the muffin in my mouth and wondered if Dogs on the Roll should offer breakfast foods rather than hot dogs in the mornings. I wasn’t sure at this point. I’d ask Land about it. I also wondered where I could get someone to give me a $30,000 gift. Such a huge amount of money would be so helpful, but the Kinkaid family had no rich relatives or buried treasure. We had to work for our money.

  “No. I have the papers on the truck, if you’re interested. The vehicle has a rather colorful history.” My dad handed me some papers that had seen better days. They looked like someone had set a coffee cup on them, and the edges were curled as well.

  I started reading the pages. The truck had been used as a getaway vehicle for a number of high-end heists in the city. The truck itself hadn’t been involved, but the owner’s nephew had scouted out likely locations using the truck as a blind. The police only got suspicious when the food truck was seen in multiple spots around town, always the same truck near different crime scenes. As I knew, a truck tended to stay in the same part of town, or even on the same street, so that it can be found by its loyal customers. A truck that moved constantly would be practically begging for walk-by business only. Regular customers were what kept a food business afloat. That was not a great business model, and most people would have avoided the moves at all cost.

  I read through the papers, but my fa
ther was right. Nothing in the files showed any reason why Alice would want to run a food truck, but the invoice from the police auction was there along with her signature—a scrawl I knew rather well after all this time. Besides, she had driven the truck for months afterward, so she was most certainly aware of having purchased it; the sale couldn’t have been made in her name behind her back. She left it to me in her will, knowing that it had been a gift and not an investment or a loan. Why hadn’t she bothered to share the secrets of its purchase with me?

  “Okay, so what does all this tell us?” I asked after I finished reading the papers. I had a few questions I wanted answered after this discussion, but nothing in these papers helped me answer the questions I had already.

  My dad cleared his throat again. “That’s why I wanted to meet you out rather than at home. Your mom adored her sister, but frankly, if I were looking at this file without knowing the people involved, I’d be thinking that the person who did this was a crook. I don’t like thinking that about Alice. I liked her, but this whole deal is shady from beginning to end. Just the cash transactions by themselves would be enough to raise a red flag. It raises so many questions.”

  He was right. Mom would have had a fit if she’d heard him say that. She had loved Alice dearly, and nothing bad could be said about her. Calling her the front woman for a criminal operation would be grounds for divorce.

  “Any ideas about how she could have heard about this truck?” I asked, thinking that someone else might have given her a tip on the truck.

  My dad shook his head. “Nothing. Of course, if this was shady, it’s not as if someone’s going to send her a formal letter to spell out the details. It would have been done in person or via a private cellphone or some other method that did not leave a trail a mile wide behind her. So I know nothing about who else could have been involved.”