FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES: The Complete Series (14 Books)

by Chloe Kendrick

  We actually opened the window 15 minutes early, and had served nearly two dozen customers by the time that Albert Ruschman stopped by. He was a short man dark hair and dark eyes. He looked like an ordinary businessman, wearing a gray suit and tie. I could understand the abbreviation that Carter had used to describe this man. He stopped up short when he saw me. He looked me in the eyes and said, “I don’t know anything, and if I did know anything, I certainly would never go to the police.”

  With that, he turned and hurried away. Land hurried after him, and I turned to get back to work.

  “What was that all about?” Thomas asked. He looked puzzled by the exchange.

  “I honestly don’t know. Last night he said that he’d talk to me, and today he freaks out as soon as he gets here. I’m not sure what’s going on.”

  Thomas asked a few more questions about the interchange, and then seemed to shrug it off. While Carter had always been excited about the opportunity to get involved in an amateur investigation, Thomas seemed as though he couldn’t care less.

  Land came back in five minutes or so—alone. “No chance. He wouldn’t say a word to me. Got into his car and drove off.”

  “So what next?” I asked, wondering where to go from here.

  “I already called Danvers. He’ll try to find out what Mr. Ruschman knows later today.” He gave me a kiss. “I’m going home and sleeping. I still have a long day ahead of me.”

  I nodded and gave him a hug for his trouble.

  Land had been right about one thing. Danvers was around at nine that morning. He didn’t wait until business was slow, but showed up as soon as he got into the office. He waited patiently for his turn, and then had the temerity to ask if Thomas could handle the truck for a few minutes before he asked to speak to me alone.

  I’d barely gotten out of the truck when Danvers said, “Land said that you’d called Ruschman last night. That he’s one of the people who passed the counterfeit bills.”

  “That’s right,” I said, trying to figure what he was getting at.

  “He’s gone,” Danvers replied almost cutting me off. We went to his home. He’s very obviously packed up and left. Clothes and toiletries are gone, and almost everything portable is missing too. He did leave three counterfeit twenties on the kitchen counter. They’re being run through the ringer at the lab at the moment. They just let me know that they only had two sets of fingerprints on them, Pohler and Ruschman.”

  “So that just proves my point,” I said. “Pohler was involved in this mess.”

  “I never said that he wasn’t, but I’m pretty sure that he wasn’t the brains behind it. We’re going through his records at the moment, and he’s pretty much anything but a brain. A two-year-old could figure out what he was doing.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, wondering about the accounting.

  “He was laundering the money for someone else. We’re still trying to track down the source of the funds, but it was simplistic at best. He took huge deposits with no corresponding sales, slapped it into the accounts and then drew out funds in cash. It looks like a huge piggy bank.”

  “Who did you get to do the accounting?” I asked, feeling a little put out that my father or I had not been asked.

  Danvers named off a firm that was well respected in Capital City. I begrudgingly assumed that they could do a competent job.

  “What else have you found out?”

  “Not much. The other people involved were much more savvy. The funds originated from and then were returned back into dummy accounts that were then transferred into off-shore accounts. The type of stuff you’d expect from big-time criminals.”

  “So what about the trucks? Do they even belong to Pohler?” I asked.

  Danvers shrugged. “In title, yes, they do, but the last four trucks were purchased after someone deposited a large sum of money into Pohler’s accounts hours before the purchase. So while he’s the owner, someone else definitely expected results.”

  I thought back to Mrs. Pohler wanting to sell the trucks. I wondered how this mysterious benefactor would feel about the sale of those vehicles. Would he expect a refund for his purchases or had the money been a gift that didn’t need to be returned? I knew that I’d have to ask Mrs. Pohler that question, which I could plausibly do within the context of buying a food truck.

  “Any other links to the people who passed those bills at the food truck?” I asked, thinking of Bernadette and her life cut short.

  “Not so far, but we don’t expect that we will find anything. All of that was done with cash for obvious reasons, and Pohler made no records of his cash transactions. He pulled out $100 or more on several occasions over the past month, and nothing was recorded for what he was using it for.”

  I thought about the counterfeit bills. Would anyone make Pohler actually pay for the bad money? That seemed to support Land’s idea that someone was behind the counterfeit ring, most likely someone we hadn’t met yet. I wondered who could be the person responsible, but nothing came to mind.

  Of the people that had been involved, we had record of three of them, one dead, one working for me, and one gone. There still remained two outstanding, the older woman and the mystery person. I began to worry for Thomas. The fates of the other two made me wonder how safe he was in my truck. He seemed much too close to the action for my tastes.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket and I took it out. Carter had texted me from the new food truck. “Found older woman” was all it said.

  Without alerting Detective Danvers to the idea that I was hot on his case, I excused myself, told Thomas that I’d be gone for a few minutes, and then sprinted to the new truck and the witness.

  Chapter 9

  By the time I got to Taco Inferno, I was out of breath. I’d run the entire way, and even though I was still in my 20s, I couldn’t maintain that pace for long. I took a few seconds to catch my breath on the side of the truck when I saw Mrs. Pohler standing there. She was talking amiably with Carter, and nothing seemed to be wrong. What was wrong with this picture?

  I would never have classified this woman as a grandmotherly type, though if she had adult children, it was entirely possible. So much artifice was used in keeping her young that I was sure she would have resented the title that Carter gave her.

  I approached the pair of them. Carter cleared his throat. “This is the owner of the truck, Maeve Kinkaid. Maeve, I see you got my text.” He gave me a wink that was both obvious and conspiratorial.

  I nodded. “We’ve met briefly,” I explained, as I extended a hand to the woman.

  Carter looked at me. “Mrs. Pohler was telling me that she didn’t know the bills were phony. Her husband just gave her money to buy some food on the two occasions, and it turned out they were bad.”

  “I get so tired of Indian food,” she began. “I wanted something else. My husband gave me the bills. I don’t usually carry cash, but he didn’t want me to use a credit card so the other food vendors would have proof that his wife ate at the other trucks. I had no idea that the money was fake. Where would Ryan get that at anyway?”

  “He didn’t have any printing equipment?” Carter asked, before I could speak. “Ink, printers, lots of thick paper.”

  She shook her head. “We have two daughters, and a three-bedroom house. There’s not any space that isn’t taken up by people or business. I’d know if there were any printers installed in the house.”

  “What about the books? Did you take care of the finances or did he?” I asked. She certainly had to know something about the finances of the household and the business. It was 2016 and everyone needed to know their financial outlook.

  “No, I never did any of that. Ryan took care of everything.”

  I was beginning to smell a lie. It was incredibly easy for her to blame Ryan for everything that had gone wrong. He was dead, murdered, and he couldn’t defend himself from any claims made against him. It would be incredibly hard to prove that he hadn’t been behind the currency problems and the
other issues since he wasn’t here to answer questions. Perhaps he’d merely been killed so that others could use him as a scapegoat. Crimes had been committed for stranger reasons than that.

  “So you can’t tell me where you got the deposits that paid for the new trucks every so many months?” I asked, wanting to put a crack in that façade. I hadn’t liked her when her truck was on Elm Street, and this interaction was making me like her less.

  Her face blanched for a moment, before her composure came back. “What money?”

  “As I said, the money that was deposited in your account prior to each purchase. The police have already found it.”

  She tried to stammer out an answer and then stopped. She took a deep breath while I waited, and then she began again. “Those trucks were ours, and I don’t appreciate you acting like we got them illegally. We paid for them.”

  I could see the wheels in her mind working. If the trucks were purchased by someone else, even an anonymous person, they could potentially belong to that person—or worse yet, they could be confiscated by the police if the matter was related in any way to drugs. In either case, she’d be without the windfall from her husband’s death.

  “How?”

  My one-word question threw her worse than much of what I’d said already. Her eyes grew wide and had large drops in the corners, as if she might cry. I waited for an answer, but got nothing for nearly a minute.

  “I don’t know. I told you that.” Her tone was getting peevish, and I knew I didn’t have much more time to ask questions. In the very near future, I’d have to turn her over to Detective Danvers, and I would never hear what she had to say—unless she confessed to the killings.

  “Did your husband have any business partners?” I asked. I still wondered if some cartel or person was behind the quick succession of trucks that he’d bought.

  “Not that I know of. He had business partners in various ventures, but nothing in the food truck business.”

  I already knew her response to any questions about the trucks or the business. So I skipped the possible connection to the people who had sold Ryan Pohler the cheap, moldy food. She would deny any knowledge.

  “So how did you know Bernadette?” I asked, changing gears entirely.

  “Bernadette was a dear friend. I used to babysit for her when she was much younger.”

  I studied the woman and readjusted her age. If Bernadette was near 30, then Mrs. Pohler would have to be in her mid-forties. Perhaps ignorance was bliss, and she was living the high life since she knew nothing.

  “Did you know that your husband was blackmailing her into passing phony money?” I made the question pointed to see her response.

  “He’d never do anything like that,” she said with certainty, even though I knew it to be true. She certainly had an idealized vision of her husband. I wondered if I overlooked the bad in Land, and if he had a hidden side that would crop up some day?

  “She told me so. She said that he forced her to pass the bills or he’d expose her secrets.”

  She winced a little as I spoke. I wondered if she’d thought of something that corroborated my facts. “What secrets?” she asked finally. “I knew everything there was to know about her. She was an open book.”

  “That’s not what she told me. She said that your husband had found out some information on her and was using it against her. She didn’t tell me what it was, and I didn’t ask. I thought that if it was bad enough that she would commit a felony, then she wasn’t likely to freely share it with everyone.”

  “That’s just not true. If she told you all that, then why would she be killed?” The woman put her hands on her hips and glared at me.

  “That’s a good question, but I don’t have an answer to that yet. I think when I find out why she was killed, I’ll know who did it.”

  “Why don’t you just let the police solve this? You had nothing to with my husband while he was alive, so why now when he’s dead?”

  “He made it my business when he started passing bad money at my truck. I got involved with the police investigation of that matter which led me to this case. He started it, not me.” The words sounded childish, but I didn’t care. This woman was trying to blame me for her husband’s faults, and I wasn’t in the mood for it.

  The interview had devolved to this level, so I finished with one last question. “Do you know who your husband used for investigations?” Danvers had not mentioned finding the PI who had uncovered Thomas’ past, so I wanted to find out more from her if I could.

  “Jack Reilly. Why? You’re not saying that you think he’s involved in this, are you? He’s a family friend.” She looked angry at the question and ready for a fight.

  “No, just wanting to find someone to work with on hiring new people. It’s hard to find good help.”

  She laughed. “Tell me about it. Some of the people we worked with were terrible. If they come to you looking for work, avoid them.”

  On that note, I left. I wasn’t going to listen to her badmouth Thomas. Given that her husband had underpaid them and blackmailed them into felonious acts, I thought that her assessment was likely skewed in the wrong direction. I was pleased that she had given me a plausible story to use with the private investigator when I went to see him.

  Chapter 10

  Carter had been overly efficient. When I returned to Taco Inferno after my shift at Dogs on a Roll, he’d already called the police and left a message for Detective Danvers about Mrs. Pohler’s involvement in the case. “There’s still one more person. We’ve found four people, but there were five twenties that first day. I might come and work with you at the truck one day so that we can see if they show up.”

  Carter shook his head. “We haven’t had any in three days. He—or she—isn’t coming to the truck anymore. They might be going somewhere else, or they could have shut things down to keep a low profile now that Pohler was killed.”

  I nodded. I still had a nagging suspicion that the fifth person would be the one that cracked open the case. They’d avoided Carter’s system of recognizing bills and had gotten away with it. So why would they just stop? They were just so mysterious that I latched onto them as the criminal behind all of these activities.

  Having finished up for the day and wanting to learn more, I decided to head over to Jack Reilly’s office. I wanted to find out about how his information was used by Pohler.

  Fortunately, his office was only a few blocks from the new food truck, so I decided to walk over. The office was on the upper floors of a boutique. The ground floor had a cute little dress shop, and part of me was tempted to stop and shop. They didn’t have bridal gowns, so I decided to skip it and save for the more expensive one that I’d had my eye on.

  The stairs to the upper floor were dirty, and little had been done to make the steps look inviting. The minimalist appearance would likely have appealed to Pohler, since he was apparently the king of cheap. The door to the PI’s office was at the top of the landing, and I knocked before entering.

  The office was one large room with an empty desk for a secretary. Beyond that, a large man sat at a desk in the corner, talking on the phone. He motioned for me to sit on a couch that had seen better days to wait for him.

  I tried to listen in on his phone call, but he talked in a very soft voice that didn’t allow for eavesdropping. I checked my phone to see if I had any messages, but nothing was there. Instead, I looked at the stock market articles and read about changes that the Fed might be making in the near future.

  Finally, he got off the phone and turned to look at me. “What can I do you for?” he asked. He was large and unkempt, smelling vaguely of cigarette smoke and booze.

  I gave him the quick explanation that I’d developed on the way over. I needed to hire a new person to replace Sabine, and several people who had previously worked at Pohler’s food trucks had applied. His widow had indicated that Ryan typically ran background checks on new employees, and I wanted to know if he’d kept those, and if he could share
them with me. I used “Ryan” more than once in my story to let him know what good friends we were.

  The ruse wasn’t working until I pulled out a checkbook from my back pocket. “How much would it cost me to look at these?” I asked, trying my best to appear naïve and unworldly.

  He made a clucking noise with his tongue. Realistically, I knew that he would be getting a second payment for work already completed if he did this, which meant that it was all profit. No businessperson would pass this up. However, apparently we were going to play a game to negotiate the price. “That really isn’t how things work in the investigating business. Work is done for a single client, and it’s somewhat confidential.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t mean to sound callous, but I figured since Pohler was dead, some of that confidentiality would be null and void. And I’m ready to pay well to have the information.”

  The last sentence caught his attention.

  He stopped what he was doing and looked at me. “How much?”

  “What’s the going price for used information?” I asked. I was a bit nervous about naming a price, because I knew I’d lowball any offer I made. It was just in my nature.

  He shrugged. “A hundred? I can take the old lady out with that.”

  I nodded and took out the cash I’d pocketed from the day’s take. I had suspected that I would need to pay off someone to get information in this case. The main actors in it were not cooperating at all.

  I handed it over to him. He ran a counterfeit pen over it, and when nothing happened, he turned back to his computer. In a few seconds, the printer was whirring and pages were coming out. He actually stood and handed me the pages.

  I started flipping through them and I got to the pages on Bernadette. The investigation was brief and apparently done mostly on the Internet. She had been a porn actress at one point and the pages included a few photos of her work. I was guessing that they were stills from movies.