FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES: The Complete Series (14 Books)

by Chloe Kendrick

  Carter and Aaron were packing up their things, and I offered to help them out by carrying some of the boxes out to their car. I wanted to see if Carter said anything else about the headlight being out, and I wanted to ensure that Danvers was not really following me. I was getting a little paranoid in my desire to protect Carter and Aaron.

  I carried the boxes into the parking garage and stopped. Off to one side, and partially hidden by a car, was a pair of legs. The feet were shod with expensive-looking shoes and the pants covering the legs appeared to be good quality. I set the boxes down, and Carter ran up to me.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. Then he saw the body too and set down his load of boxes as well.

  Aaron was far past us before he noticed that we’d stopped. “What are you two up to?” he asked. His vantage point was such that he couldn’t see the body, which rested between two cars.

  I motioned for him to go on. “Put your stuff in the car, and then go home. Otherwise you could be here all night, and you’ll likely lose a babysitter,” I said, trying to think of the best course of action. I wanted the Audi out of the lot before Danvers arrived.

  Carter took both my things and his and carried the entire load away. I waited until they were both out of sight, and I thought I heard the sound of a car starting up and pulling away. Then I pulled out my phone and started to dial.

  I shouldn’t have even bothered. My instincts had been right. Danvers was standing there when I turned around to look at the entrance to the garage. “Land wanted me to check up on you. He thought you’d been gone a long time, and he wanted to make sure that you were okay. You do have a propensity for getting into trouble.”

  I was in absolutely no position to argue with him, since just out of his line of sight was a dead body. I cleared my throat. “You might want to look over here,” I said. My voice sounded like it might crack.

  He walked to me and looked in the direction I faced. “Maeve, really? Another one?”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said, though rationally we both knew that I hadn’t done anything illegal—well, I hadn’t killed anyone. I might have helped two people sneak away from the scene of the crime.

  “Of course not. I didn’t say you did, but I’m willing to bet that you know who this used to be.” Danvers was already getting out his phone and typing a text as he finished his sentence.

  I thought for a moment. The only person I hadn’t seen tonight who I had expected was Edward Keith. Even with an unobstructed view, he didn’t look familiar. He was tall, with dark eyes, sallow cheeks, and hair that had just started to thin at the temples.

  I could honestly say that if I’d seen him before in life, I hadn’t known him. I wondered if he was attacked on the way to the grand opening or on his way back. I asked Danvers as much.

  “Geez, I knew it. You know this guy, don’t you? This is another one of your cases, which really should be my case, which means it has to do with Brent Collier and his shady business dealings.”

  I remembered what Land had told me about the potential promotion. Danvers wouldn’t want me asking questions or getting into trouble while the decision process was under way. It could make him look like he wasn’t in charge of his own cases.

  I explained that Edward Keith had gone to business college with me, but that I didn’t know him—not even enough to give the police a positive identification. Unlike the other two, he was only a name on a list of people who could be considered suspects.

  Danvers put his hand over the phone to talk. “Two others? And for the record, I think you can probably cross Mr. Keith—if this is Mr. Keith—off your list. He’s not the killer.”

  He asked for back-up, a crime scene team, and some officers to cordon off the area. I wondered how long I would be here tonight.

  While I was waiting, I texted Land and told him what had happened. I knew that he had been worried enough to send Danvers. If neither one of us came back, it would make him frantic. He texted back a sweet message, fairly saccharine, considering that I had just discovered yet another dead body on the cusp of our food truck opening.

  Danvers took me by the arm, presumably to keep me from passing out—as if that was an option—and led me back to the entrance of the parking garage. “Tell them where I’m at when they get here. Since you only found him seconds before I did, I don’t think that you’ll get too much of the third degree. We will want to know your relationship to the deceased though, and what you hoped to get from him with an invitation. The others won’t believe you invited a stranger here. I believe it, but they’ll be skeptical.”

  I went through the spiel again about how I’d gone to school with Collier and had collected some names of people who might have been involved with Sizemore and Collier in business dealings. I explained how the scam worked and what my lawyer had told me. Danvers took plenty of notes, nodding while he did.

  “You’re supposed to stay out of open cases. You know that, right?” he asked as he closed the notebook.

  “I was only asking about people who might know Collier through their transactions with Sizemore. If I was planning on signing that contract, I’d have to do this kind of due diligence to ensure that everything was okay. This just seemed like due diligence after the fact.”

  His mouth twisted up at one corner, since he knew that I was stretching the matter. “But you’re not considering the contract, not in small part because the other person who would need to sign it is dead. I don’t have a fancy degree in business like you do, but I’m pretty sure that death cancels proposed business deals.”

  I nodded. “Can I go now?”

  “Yes, but no talking to the press about this. As far as you’re concerned, this never happened. You didn’t see a thing.”

  I knew that he wanted me as far away from this case as I could get, but I still had some petty doubts about this case. At the very least, I planned another trip to see my old professor and ask him about Edward Keith. There had to be a good reason why I didn’t remember him. In Collier’s case, it was because he’d dropped out before graduation.

  I heard the sounds of police sirens in the background, and I took my exit. Land was waiting for me by the food truck. His eyes asked more questions than I could answer.

  “It’s probably Edward Keith, but I don’t know for sure. I’m not sure what Edward Keith looked like, so it’s hard to be certain. I wanted to find out if he was killed on the way to the food truck or coming back from it,” I said, finishing up.

  “You’re thinking that if he was on his way, he could have been meeting you after all. However, if he was leaving, he’d conducted his business at the event with one of your other guests, and it didn’t include you. That would mean that someone else at the opening knew him well enough to recognize him.”

  One thing, of many, that I liked about Land was his ability to succinctly summarize a situation. Was Keith planning on talking to me about what had happened with Sizemore? If not, then he’d gone to meet someone else about their common relationship with Sizemore and Collier. Then he’d been killed so that he couldn’t tell anyone else the secret.

  Now I just had to determine what that secret was.

  Chapter 8

  I didn’t have much trouble getting up the next morning, despite the later-than-normal night and the discovery of a dead body. Land slept through my departure, and I had the food truck on Elm Street a little after 5:00 a.m. Sabine showed up around 6:15, dressed more appropriately for the truck than she had been last night.

  She didn’t ask anything about the parking garage body, so I assumed that Danvers had already told her everything of importance about it. I couldn’t conceive of someone not being curious about a murder that had occurred within feet of them.

  Around 10:00 a.m., Danvers stopped by. I handed him a coffee and waited for the questions and information.

  “You were right about one thing last night. That was Edward Keith who you found. You really know how to pick them. Maybe I should be glad about not going to the fancy busin
ess school.” He looked genuinely contemptuous of my schooling.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, my curiosity peaked.

  “He had a record. A long record. Theft, extortion, fraud. You name it, he did it. Between two of your classmates, they probably had more priors than the sum of half the jail inmates at the moment.”

  I thought for a second. I wondered how Edward could have received a record on that many things in only five years. “But he wasn’t convicted, was he? I mean, otherwise he’d still have been in prison.”

  Danvers nodded. “Yeah, want to take one guess who his lawyer was?”

  “Sizemore? But I thought that he couldn’t try cases now that he was disbarred?”

  “He served as a consultant on each case. He hired different lawyers to be the attorneys of record. He skated around the edges of the law, even when he couldn’t practice it.” Danvers didn’t look pleased that he was mucking around the edges of the underclass with this case. He likely wanted a nice upper-class murder case this time around to impress his superiors. You’d think that people who had attended graduate school would have fit that profile, but I was quickly having my eyes opened.

  “How did he fit in with Collier?” I asked, thinking that the motive would become an integral part of this case.

  “That’s what we don’t know yet. One was a business partner of sorts and the other was a client. Nothing says that they had to fit in with each other.”

  I gave him a hard look. “Don’t you think that stretches the imagination a bit?” I asked. Two murders in the same circle of business relationships was too much for me. Since Sizemore was the link the two men had in common, it seemed like he was the most likely suspect in the case.

  Danvers seemed to scoff at my idea. “Sometimes coincidences just happen, especially when you’re dealing with people who screw innocent people out of their life savings. Coincidences just like how you keep finding bodies.”

  Danvers looked frustrated. Even seeing Sabine in the background of the truck did nothing to cheer him. I wondered how things were between them. Were they on the outs again?

  “I’ll ask around and see what I can find out,” I told him. “I am betting that there’s some relationship.”

  Danvers just grunted and took a sip of his coffee. He walked away without saying another word. I turned to look at Sabine, but she was studiously cutting jalapeños into thin slices. They were both apparently trying to pretend that nothing had happened between them. They had gone out. Danvers had proposed. Sabine was making secret plans, and now they had attended an event together, but not with each other.

  I texted Land and told him about the visit from Danvers in short bursts. I also mentioned that I would be heading up to my school again after work. This would be the second time in recent memory, after not seeing the campus for so many years.

  After closing out the register and depositing the money at the bank, I headed back to school. The drive felt shorter than it had last time. I usually found that the longest drives were through areas where you were unfamiliar with the terrain. I found a parking spot and headed back to visit Professor Wallace.

  He was in his office with a student, and I waited patiently until the student had been talked down from a complete meltdown. He walked the student to the door and gave me a smile.

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you again,” he said with a grin. “Come to help me out on my mystery?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe some other time, but right now I have questions about another student. Edward Keith.”

  A dark cloud crossed his face quickly and then was gone. “What on earth do you want to know about him for?” he asked.

  “He was murdered last night,” I said. I gave Professor Wallace a complete rundown on the killing and how I’d found Edward. I asked him what he thought of the situation.

  “I think you should have added a criminal justice minor,” he said with a grin. “You get into some curious situations.”

  “You have no idea,” I told him. “So Edward Keith?”

  He cleared his throat, and I was certain that he was going to refuse to talk about the student. “I remember Keith all too well,” he started. “Let’s see. He would have been a year ahead of you in the program, I think.” He pulled a yearbook down from the shelves behind him and riffled the pages until he found something.

  “Here he is,” Wallace said, pointing to a photo.

  I looked at the picture intently. The man in question looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him at all. I knew he hadn’t taken any classes with me, but I might have seen him around the campus. He definitely bore a resemblance to the body I had found last night.

  “So why do you remember him so well?” I asked. “I doubt that you can name the year of all your students.”

  “That’s true. Edward Keith was something special though,” he said finally. “Something really special.” The words sounded more grim than sincere. The tone of his voice led me to believe that special was not always a good thing.

  “What did he do?” I asked softly, not wanting to upset him more than he was already.

  The professor’s eyes looked sad. “He accused me of impropriety with one of the students in the class. I almost lost my job over that accusation.”

  I knew my mouth hung open. Professor Wallace had never done anything unethical that I had ever heard of, which likely made him better to teach business than to be in it. He was a paragon at the school. The accusations were simply not credible.

  Professor Wallace went on. “I failed him on his midterm and, without a miracle, Keith was going to fail the class, which would have meant another semester of school, one that his parents would not have paid for. This all came out later, you see. So if he couldn’t get a passing grade out of me, then the best thing—in his mind, at least—was to get rid of me. So he came up with that sorry complaint. The girl in question denied the claim, and so did I, but that would be the expected response anyway, wouldn’t it?”

  “But you’re still here, so things must have worked out?” I asked. I didn’t say much, since he seemed more than willing to spill the entire story himself.

  “Not the way I would have liked. The dean was getting ready to relieve me of my duties here, when another student came forward and told him about Keith’s plan. He’d actually bragged to some other students about it. He knew the girl in question from class. She had been a rather unusual girl, and I suspected that he thought that her denial would be less convincing than those of other women in the program.”

  I was floored. Of course I wouldn’t have heard of such a matter. I was sure that the school kept such matters under wraps.

  “When asked specifically about the plan,” he continued, “Keith’s answers didn’t hold water. So I kept my job. They gave Keith credit for my class so that we didn’t have to interact in the future. They gave the girl a cash settlement, and I was given tenure for life in exchange for my silence on the matter. The incident was closed, and I haven’t talked about it. However, if he’s dead, I can no longer defame him. The deal is concluded, as far as I’m concerned.”

  I thought about the story I’d just heard. It fit with what Danvers had told me, case after case of fraud and deceit—and add incompetence to the matter as well. It seemed to fit. Now I had to learn more about the man and what he was involved with.

  “I’m assuming from your silence that this information helps you?” Professor Wallace said after a minute.

  I nodded. I told him about what the police had told me about Keith, the long record and lack of convictions for his crimes.

  “It’s funny because when I’m here for the reunions everyone always tells each other how much they’ve changed, but people don’t change much—not in the ways that really matter. Keith was willing to skirt the truth to get what he wanted then. That’s not a character trait that goes away upon graduation.”

  I thought about what he was telling me, and I wondered about what people would have said of me in school and now.
Had I changed? Was I capable of changing? Land had gone from paramilitary to chef of a food truck. He had wanted to change, and he had done it. Yet most people were essentially the same as I’d once known them.

  “If you want a tip from the old professor, here’s one. These men were stealing companies from people. They were conmen and thieves. They were not entrepreneurs. They were not CEOs. That means that they had to convert these businesses somehow from hot properties to lucrative sales. They didn’t want to run companies for the rest of their lives. They wanted quick sales. I would start by checking out what happened to your friend’s firm after she lost the company.”

  I nodded. It made sense. Owning a start-up required a certain skillset that other businessmen didn’t have. It required vision and risk-taking that most businessmen were adverse to. That was why so many successful companies ultimately removed the CEO who began the company and replaced him or her with someone who could manage a firm long-term. I tried to think about who I’d met in this case that fit the bill, but no one came to mind.

  I definitely had something to follow up on. I thanked the professor and headed towards home.

  Fortunately for me, Land had thought ahead and brought home dinner. It was a fish soup whose name I routinely mangled and a fish entrée that I’d had before. I ate quickly, trying to tell him what I’d learned at the university. The meal went fast, and he gave me a grin.

  “I don’t remember seeing you this hungry before,” he said in the same voice he had used the other night. There was a poignant pause, as though I was going to make an announcement.

  “Just hungry,” I promised him. “Nothing more to report at this juncture.”

  He nodded, even though he seemed as if he wasn’t quite sure of my pronouncement. “So what are you going to do now?” he asked. He knew that business dealings and numbers were much more along the lines of what I preferred. Emotions and drama were things I merely suffered through. Sabine might do the questioning and galas in a beautiful dress, but give me a spreadsheet and I was in heaven.