FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES: The Complete Series (14 Books)

by Chloe Kendrick

  “No.” His voice was emphatic. “I would have heard about that, and nothing ever came up to suggest that. Where did you hear such a story?”

  I explained how Sylvia had told me the story before fobbing me off on the mother. She had been equally certain that Ronnie had been involved with a member of the faculty.

  “Did you get my list of cases that Fisher had highlighted?” I asked.

  “Yes, I have to look up a few of them, but one was suggestive. It was about the fate of a business when the owner goes missing and the heirs have to wait seven years for him to be declared dead.”

  It was very interesting, given the case, but I didn’t see how the case applied to Fisher, since he didn’t own a business.

  We hung up just as Land came in the door. “How did the meeting with the woman go?” he asked after a suitable pause for our greetings.

  I showed him all of the materials I’d gathered, and he opened a few of the books and notebooks. The physical message from Fisher to someone else was the most interesting to him. Land was never one who wanted to sit and think about the possibilities. He accused me of overthinking, which is true to some extent.

  He preferred action, whether it was asking questions, following leads or chasing witnesses. This case didn’t seem to have much of that, and I knew that he felt a bit disconnected from the entire matter. Since there was no immediate danger to us, the people we loved, or the business, Land politely listened and chimed in, but didn’t get overly involved.

  “If he was putting things like that on his calendar,” Land said after hearing my summary of the evidence, “he thought someone else would be reading the date planner. It was a cover-up.”

  I honestly hadn’t thought of that before. My suspicions were that he had left the date like that to put the police off the path after the disappearance, but what if he’d been faking some of the entries in the date planner so that whoever was spying on him would not know what he was doing?

  I had noticed that no entries had dealt with dating, while the entry from the notebook seemed to indicate some type of ongoing relationship. I was more inclined to believe the notebook’s evidence since it had not been visible over the plainly seen list of activities that Fisher had entered into the date planner.

  After exhausting the discussion, I went off to bed as Land flipped through a few of the pages of the notebooks, giving it half his attention as the TV played in the background.

  Chapter 6

  Land was actually up before me the following day. Rare as that was, his reason for being awake was even more surprising. “I found something,” he said simply.

  He might have been talking in small words, because I hadn’t had coffee yet today, but it was also like him to play down any grand development that he had uncovered.

  “What?” I said, looking through one bleary eye and trying to focus on him.

  He handed me a steaming cup of coffee, which told me exactly how well he knew me. “Look at the textbook,” he said, holding it open to a pair of pages that appeared to be on ethics vs the law. “Look at the first word of each of the highlighted sections of text on these pages.” He pointed to them in sequence with his finger.

  They read. “Help me. Something is wrong.”

  I managed to raise an eyebrow then. “This was in the book?”

  He nodded. “I don’t think that could be a coincidence. It’s a fairly simple code, but one that wouldn’t be noticed unless you were specifically looking for it.”

  “And what made you look for it?” I asked, feeling like a failure at the moment. I’d had all evening and had not even thought to look for codes or maps or anything spy-like. I had been looking back to see patterns and developments. Land had looked at the materials at hand.

  “I started reading some of the text. The things he highlighted on any page didn’t make sense. I mean, even if he wasn’t a good student, he highlighted “doesn’t meet with scrutiny” on one page, and “could result in jail time” on another. Without the subjects, he wasn’t not going to be able to come back to it quickly and review.”

  I nodded, waking up a bit. “That makes sense. His highlighting was crap, but I didn’t look for reasons behind it. I just noticed that it was bad.”

  “After I saw the ‘jail time’ quote, I started thinking that perhaps he might have been wanting to leave a message for someone. So I started using some basic code skills to see if I could break it. I had the code in no time..”

  “What else did it say?” I asked, taking the book from him.

  “Not much. He was suspicious of some activity, and he thought that it could be illegal. Then, near the end, he asked for help.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I wish he’d been more helpful in his message.”

  Land shrugged. “He had to work with the materials at hand, and probably the type of words he needed weren’t in the law book.”

  “So why there?” I wondered out loud. “Why would there be a message in the textbook?”

  “It was visible in the room when you walked in. You said that it looked like a play set. Perhaps it wasn’t the highlighter or the missing man everyone was supposed to notice, but instead it was the book.”

  “Well, that was a flop, because the police didn’t pay any attention to it for days and then the university boxed it up and gave it to the family before anyone could even look at it.”

  “So the message was lost until now,” Land said. “I’ll take another look at materials again this morning and see if I can find anything else.”

  “I also got this last night,” he said, handing me a file. “I wanted to look at it first before giving it to you.”

  I opened the file and looked inside. It was the police report for the security guard’s murder. I flipped through the pages and got to the reason Land had wanted to read it first. The police had opened fire on a gang member with a knife about three months after the guard had been stabbed. The knife appeared to match the wounds from the guard.

  So the guard’s case had been closed. I pondered this for a moment. The gang member’s guilt had been determined by a knife, and presumably the knife was not custom-made. So many others just like it had been floating around. If I was right that his murder had been the result of the Fisher case, what had the guard known that was so damaging?

  He tapped his watch. “Someone has to get to work.”

  I sighed, put down the books, and headed off to the shower.

  ***

  I managed to make it to the food truck and have it in place by 5:15, which wasn’t bad, considering that my mind was not on the subject at hand. Sabine came in later than normal, but there was always room for error in her position, since it was the rare customer who wanted a hot dog before 9:00 a.m. She had created a new healthy hot dog condiment with avocado and chipotle mayonnaise for today, and she carried a bag of ingredients with her as she entered.

  She was very quiet and didn’t speak much as we prepped for the day. I had my hands full with the customers and coffee, but she typically chatted while cutting up the ingredients. Today she was silent, the sound of the knife the only noise from the prep station.

  During one lull in the demand, I turned back and asked her, “What’s going on back there?”

  She gave me a wan smile. “Are you sure that you’re talking to me?” she said.

  “Of course, sweetie. Why wouldn’t I be talking to you? You’re family—and Mendozas yell, they don’t give the silent treatment.” I’d witnessed too many discussions with Land and his grandmother, who had very specific ideas about family and women, to think that silence was the MO for this group.

  She ran up and gave me a hug. “I heard last night what Jax is doing. I could kill him.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You need to be more specific. What specifically is he doing that earns him death?”

  She pulled back and looked at me. “You have to know. He’s investigating the death of that poor schoolboy.” I loved the way that Sabine made a college senior sound like a third
-grader, but I knew what she meant. Apparently she had not been aware of her soon-to-be-husband’s desire to show me up.

  I put my arms around her and gave her a long hug. “I knew about this, and I knew you had nothing to do with it.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” she asked.

  “I’m going to beat him at his own game,” I said. I had a moment of empowerment. Not that Sabine had chosen me over Jax, but just that even though she was with him, we would still be friends and family.

  Sabine perked up. “How exactly do you plan on doing that?” she said.

  For a second, I wondered about telling her what my plan was. After all, she was Jax’s fiancée. I didn’t want to put her in a position where she would feel a need to tell him what I was doing.

  She sighed. “I’m not going to tell him. Even if you plan on robbing a few banks, I won’t blab—and I doubt that he’d ask me to anyway. I made my displeasure fairly well known last night.” She gave me a smile that let me know I’d missed a doozy of a fight.

  I nodded. “Well, I figure that Jax is going to follow the official trail of the case. He’ll go back over the notes from the police and more. But the police didn’t take the case seriously for a while, and so I’m going to start from the other end. I’m going to look at who has benefited from Fisher’s disappearance and walk backwards to who had the best motive.” I had given this thought last night. I had developed a timeline that included most of what we knew, but with the addition of the mysteriously coded note and the intentional deceptions made to the calendar and the scene of the disappearance, I doubted that I would get much further than I had with the evidence that was thirty years old. I was going to come at it from the current time, where I would have more information and items that could not be shaded or changed.

  “Who benefits?” she asked.

  I nodded. “So I need to look at who has come out well from Fisher’s disappearance,” I said.

  Our conversation was interrupted, and I looked up to find Kamila standing at the order window. “Can I help?” she asked.

  I was shocked to see Kamila. She wasn’t supposed to be at her assigned spot with the truck for another two hours. My mind immediately went to what had happened. If she was unable to work for some reason, I’d be doing a second shift by myself this evening. My small amount of detecting would have to be put aside for another undetermined length of time.

  “What—what are you doing here?” I asked, finally getting the words out that I feared would slow my momentum.

  Apparently my tone let her know that I was concerned. “Nothing’s wrong. I just had an idea. I followed up on it, and I wanted to give you the results.”

  She held out a sheaf of papers, and I took them. Kamila had apparently done some digging on her own regarding the Fisher case. She had found the university newspaper articles on the disappearance as well as some articles in the years following. All of these were bundled together with a binder clip.

  I had to admire the fact that the articles were in chronological order as well. So instead of worrying that I was losing the best new help I had, I was now admiring how she’d organized the papers she’d found in student newspaper archives.

  I really hadn’t given much thought to those archives. Given that the disappearance took place in summer, I’d expected the school newspaper to be closed or severely ramped down; however, it appeared that many of the students had returned to cover the story.

  A few of the articles were written by people who knew Fisher. There was a piece by Trevor Jones, which I read carefully. However, the piece held no mysterious clue that would solve the case. He’d just talked about what a great guy Fisher had been and how much he hoped that the student was still alive. The photo of Jones at Fisher’s closet was used to show him assisting the police. I didn’t see a varsity letter jacket in the photo.

  There was a short article, interviewing his parents. I had talked briefly with Mrs. Fisher, but from all accounts, she’d been an overly intense woman even then, determined to squeeze every last ounce of information from the student body. The conclusion of the article asked for any information about Ron Fisher to be sent to his mother’s attention.

  The forcefulness of her personality came through in the interview, when she beseeched the student body to fan out over the campus and look for him. While her efforts were admirable, I thought that the labors had already been completed. Another article talked about how the campus had been cut into grids where groups of volunteers had searched the area thoroughly. Nothing had been found. Given that the campus was mostly flat green space, it seemed unlikely that Fisher’s remains could have been somewhere in the gridded area and still gone undetected. Did Mrs. Fisher think that the police could not do a good job, or was she even aware that such an effort had been made?

  The two lines of thought led me to very different conclusions. If she had been left out, perhaps the police had considered her a reason for Fisher’s disappearance. While I didn’t believe that his own mother would have killed him, that unrelenting pressure would be hard to deal with. Even in the aftermath of not finding a job, my parents had been chill about the matter. I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Fisher, who had dragged me to the middle of narrow alley to deliver some evidence, as anything but intense.

  If she suspected that the police were not giving their best effort, that led me in another direction. From my initial look at the case, the police had made a slow start, but the reasons for not pouncing on the matter were clear. Fisher could have left on his own or had a drinking accident. Making a public scene of his disappearance would only serve to bring notoriety to a young man who would already be in enough trouble.

  I knew that the police wouldn’t help me on this matter, so I would have to find out from Mrs. Fisher. That meant another meeting with the woman, and this time it would have to be in a public place where we could sit down.

  I went through the rest of the newspaper articles, but nothing jumped out at me. The articles grew more vague and wistful as the years went on, hoping that Fisher had found peace and harmony somewhere. I wondered if they had a notion of where the missing man was, or if the best wishes were just poor journalism.

  I had just finished the articles and stuffed them in my bag when the phone rang. Kamila raised an eyebrow, came into the truck, and began taking over my duties. I grabbed the phone and headed out to Government Square, where I could hear better.

  “Maeve, I understand from the secretary that you called very early this morning. Do you have something for me?” It took me a minute to place Professor Wallace’s voice. I’d been so into the articles and the fate of Ronald Fisher that I’d totally forgotten about the morning phone call based on the information about the highlighted words.

  “I just had some questions,” I said slowly, trying to put the pieces of that afternoon together again. “I wanted to ask you about Professor, er, Coach Williams.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I grew concerned. Kamila had heard a conversation between the two men, and now it appeared as if the business professor and the coach were in collusion. I felt my stomach lurch as I wondered how this would affect the new hours I was hoping for.

  “Professor?” I asked again. “Coach Williams?”

  “Yeah,” he said, an odd choice of words for the normally erudite man. “He’s gone, you know. Just like Fisher was.”

  I thought back to the stack of boxes in Williams’ office and the fact that no one had seen him. At the time, I just thought that he’d been indisposed, but now I realized that I had made the same assumptions that the police had made about Fisher. No one had a reason to think that an adult would just up and leave for no visible reason.

  Now Williams had gone the same way as a student thirty years ago. This was the same man that Kamila had overheard talking to Professor Wallace about the earlier disappearance and the odd things that had happened since then.

  “What happened to him?” I asked, a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.<
br />
  “He packed up his office, got in his car, and left.” The words were plain, but I could tell that Wallace was suffering because of the disappearance. He had to be wondering if his interference in a decades-old crime had caused another disappearance now.

  On the face of it, I didn’t hear any similarities to the original crime. In that case, Fisher had not left in a car. He’d left on foot. He hadn’t packed up his possessions. He’d left them. Fisher was a student; Williams was a professor.

  “What did Williams teach?” I asked, wondering about how the two men knew each other.

  “He taught a business class or two, but for the most part, he was the wrestling coach.”

  Chapter 7

  Wrestling. The word made me stop. Ronald Fisher had been on the wrestling team up until the summer session and Coach Williams was one of the coaches for the wrestling team now. There had to be some sort of connection between the two men.

  Now it was my turn to pause and contemplate, but I was brought back to the conversation by Professor Wallace. “You were wondering about the connection between the two men and wrestling,” he said quietly.

  “Yes, there has to be a connection,” I said, thinking out loud. “Something that would mean something to a man today about a student thirty years ago.”

  “I’ve thought about that. He came and talked to me a few times, asked me about the syllabus for my class, things like that. Once or twice, we ended up talking about Ronald Fisher, mostly, I presumed, because of the connection to the wrestling program, but now I wonder.”

  “Did he start the conversation, or did you?” I asked, having a nagging feeling that I knew the answer already.

  “He did,” said Wallace after a long pause. “He mentioned something about the stories of the school, a few things from his previous schools, and then mentioned Fisher. It seemed harmless at the time.”