FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES: The Complete Series (14 Books)

by Chloe Kendrick

  Once in our positions, Danvers pulled his weapon and knocked on the door. He identified himself and knocked on the door again.

  No one responded. I began to doubt that my intuitions had been correct. Yet it had seemed so logical.

  Still with his gun drawn, Danvers turned the knob and opened the door. Nothing happened. Gun held in front of him, he leaned around the frame. He entered the building with the gun still pointing ahead.

  We heard nothing for a moment or two and then heard him shout an all clear. Even at 30 degrees, it was still cold and I hurried along with the others to the interior of the building.

  I stopped dead in the doorway. Angela was standing in the middle of the room, only a few feet from the body of Danny Gardner. She’d obviously been crying.

  “So I was right,” I said to no one in particular. “I knew what a mother would do.”

  She nodded. “Yes, he was my son, and I loved him. I knew he had a bad streak in him, but I still loved him all the same.”

  Danvers looked about ready to put the handcuffs on her—if he’d even packed those in his luggage. Instead, he holstered his gun and stood solidly between Angela and the exit of the building. No one would be getting out before telling a story.

  I pulled the door closed behind me. It would make it more difficult to leave the building by the door, and it would also keep in what little warmth existed.

  “We need to hear your story,” Danvers said, crossing his arms over his chest. While he was annoyed that the resort employee had gotten past him, he was likely twice as angry that I’d been the one to find her.

  “There’s not much to tell,” she said plaintively.

  Danvers let out a harsh laugh. “I think there’s plenty to tell. You can start with how Danny Gardner got up here.”

  “From what I understand, he took a bus to the nearest town and then caught the shuttle up here. He was by himself.”

  “Where did he get the money?” Danvers asked, barely letting her finish her sentence before peppering her with another question.

  “From the theft he’d been charged with. He was getting out of town with the money. He wasn’t planning on returning for a long time, if ever.” The woman looked sad all over again at the thought of her son leaving and not coming home. I could understand. I already loved my own little bundle of joy, and I would be miserable to think that my baby would leave one day, never to return. My mommy hormones were apparently in high gear today.

  “Care to tell us about the theft?” Danvers asked. He was so busy asking questions as soon as she was finished that he had forgotten that he had three witnesses to the interview. In these conditions, he would likely have needed a single witness, but that would have been Land. I chose not to speak in hopes that he would continue his questioning without thinking about my presence.

  She drew a deep breath before responding. “He worked for a financial firm that dealt with large sums of money. He had a chance to make good. Instead, he got a large sum of money and took part of it.”

  “He was caught?” Danvers asked, sounding slightly mollified that the woman was answering the questions honestly. I assumed that he knew most of this story and was using her responses to see if she was being truthful.

  She nodded. “He was caught within hours. He was locked up in the jail where he was awaiting trial. They didn’t recover the money, and so no one was interested in making a deal with him until he gave up the cash. He refused to do so, and as a result, he just sat in jail while the lawyers battled it out.”

  “Did you know where he’d hidden it?” Danvers asked. I thought the question was redundant, since no one in her right mind would admit to that.

  “No, he wouldn’t tell anyone. I don’t know if he didn’t trust his family or if he didn’t want to get them in trouble.” She teared up talking about the family, and I felt a little misty eyed as well.

  Danvers took the questions about family in another direction. “Is your daughter here?” he asked.

  “Why would she be?” the woman countered.

  “When we called to find out more about your son, the Capital City police told me that both you and your daughter were unavailable. We’ve found you, but we still don’t have a line on your daughter.”

  “I’ve worked here for years. It’s not like I decided to hide out at my place of employment. That’s absurd.” The woman’s eyes flashed with anger. I was guessing that at some level, despite Gardner’s many flaws, she blamed the police for what had happened to him. “Check with Mr. Wayne. You’ll find out soon enough from him.”

  Danvers didn’t give in to the angry words. He kept his cool, which was more than he’d ever done with me. “I will. Don’t worry. So you’d be willing to swear that your daughter isn’t here with you.”

  She rolled her eyes. “My daughter is not here. Is that what you want to hear?”

  I heard it again, that emphasis that she put on a word. The word “daughter” had been stressed in an odd way, the way that she’d put emphasis on the word “murder” earlier. We knew that Danny Gardner’s sister was missing, but had the police made the clear statement that Angela was the mother to both? She could easily be the girl’s stepmother instead.

  I took a step towards Danvers and whispered my thought into his ear. He turned and looked at me with an emotion I couldn’t recognize; perhaps it was gratitude or appreciation. It wasn’t one in his normal repertoire with me.

  “So none of Gardner’s family was here either?” Danvers asked, shooting a look back at me.

  Angela sighed and looked defeated. “Yes, Danny’s sister was here too, but she didn’t know that Danny was here. Not until we found out that he’d been killed.”

  “Where is she now?” Danvers asked. His voice grew a bit louder, as if he’d come to the part of the inquiry where time was of the essence.

  “She isn’t here.”

  Danvers started to say something, but I decided to chime in. “She’s Mrs. Richardson, right?”

  The woman took a deep breath. “Yes. Why are you asking me all these questions if you already know the truth?”

  Danvers cleared his throat. “We need to verify our suppositions. So when Danny arrived, what happened?”

  “He showed up at the resort two days ago. He didn’t come into the main building; he waited outside instead. When he saw me go back to the employee building, he called out to me. Nearly scared me to death. He told me what had happened and how he’d escaped from jail. I have to say that I was frightened for him. He saw it as good fortune, but I saw a real possibility that he would be killed or hurt when he was recaptured. I loved him dearly, but he didn’t think things through very often. He’d found a way out of jail, and he’d taken it, without any thought to the consequences.”

  “He didn’t tell you who had helped him?” Danvers asked. Of course he would want to plug the hole in the justice system that had been highlighted by Gardner’s escape. I doubted that any of the co-conspirators had also come to the resort.

  “No, he said that one of the other escapees had planned it out, and he’d just gone along for the ride. That was so like my Danny.”

  “What happened then?” Danvers asked.

  “There was an extra room for the night at the resort. I added his name to the reservation system and gave him a place to stay. I told him that he had to play it by ear. The room was supposed to be occupied by another couple the next night, but the weather made it doubtful that they’d make it.”

  “And the second day?”

  “I had to talk to him about his behavior. Yuri noticed him and asked me some awkward questions about him. Then Mr. Wayne said something about Danny and his rather aloof behavior. I wasn’t sure what he wanted Danny to do. I thought it best that he stayed away from the other guests, since his photo had been on the news.”

  “What about the second night?” Danvers asked. I held my breath, hoping for some revelation that would solve the case.

  “I said good night to him, and that was the last I s
aw of him. The next time I heard something he was murdered.”

  Danvers tone softened a bit. “I hate to ask you this, but were you the one who killed him?”

  Angela began to weep. “No, not in a million years. I couldn’t do that. He was my child. No matter what he did, I wouldn’t have killed him.”

  The sound of her weeping filled the room. Sabine gave me an awkward glance, and I chose to just stand there. I knew that she was telling the truth. However, I didn’t know if the rest of our little party knew that too.

  “Did anyone else know that Danny was at the resort?” Danvers asked after a long pause.

  “That’s just it. No one knew. I didn’t tell my family or the people who worked here. We had different last names. I remarried after I divorced Danny’s dad, so no one here would have had a clue. I told them that Danny Gardner was a family friend.”

  “And no one at the resort knew him?” I asked, thinking again of the Richardsons. “Didn’t the Richardsons know him?”

  She had stopped crying now, but I could still see tears on her face. “They knew him, but he checked in late, and I knew that they were going to shuttle down into town first thing, so I knew it would be much later until they returned. So I had hours before they would meet and questions would be asked.”

  I wondered about her statement. Granted, few people were up and about at 4:00 a.m. for breakfast, according to the Richardsons’ story, but more than one person had known about Danny’s presence at the resort.

  “So why were the Richardsons at the resort?” I asked. “The police thought she was still in Capital City, helping—or looking for—Danny. Why come to a resort?”

  Angela sighed and took a deep breath before answering. “They needed a break. She’d been worn out worrying about Danny, so her husband brought her up here to relax. I got them a good rate on the room. They’d had this planned for quite some time. He refused to let her cancel, so they came even with all the chaos going on.”

  It made sense. The idea of getting away sounded good. That was why Land and I had taken a short trip. We had wanted to relax as well, and now we were hunting down a killer at a ski resort.

  Yet I still had a hard time imagining that brother and sister could be in the same resort and not see each other. The chances of them running into each other were fairly strong. The 4:00 a.m. rendezvous seemed like it had been planned. Why did they really get the money from Danny? Had his story been true? He’d just given them some money to cover the bill. The story seemed lame.

  The thought of relationships made me ask another question. “Was Danny seeing anyone? I don’t remember hearing about anyone special in his life.”

  The woman snorted. “Not likely. Who would want to be involved with a man like that? We had encouraged him to settle down and find someone to love, but he was having none of that. He was always about the big scheme and the easy money.”

  “So there was no one he was interested in?” I was thinking that someone who was always chasing more would do the same in his personal life. Perhaps the topic did not come up between mother and son. The larger question was whether or not Danny had succeeded in interesting a girl.

  “Have you had a chance to talk to the Richardsons since they left?” Danvers asked as I ruminated over what I’d learned—or hadn’t learned.

  She nodded. “They called me to tell me that they wouldn’t be able to come back. They asked me to pack up all their stuff and to put it in storage until they return.”

  The tone sounded off again. If this woman had wanted to play poker, she would have had to keep her mouth shut. I was reading additional information into each thing that she said. “When did you talk to the Richardsons?” I asked. “We can check the phone records if we need to, so I would suggest telling the truth.”

  Danvers started to say something to me about my tone, but I held a hand up. I wanted to hear the truth from her now.

  “The day before yesterday,” she said quietly.

  Danvers sputtered and Land’s brows rose nearly an inch, a clear sign that he was impressed with my deductions.

  The day before yesterday had been before Danny was murdered and the Blaines were found. That meant that they’d left the ski resort with a strong sense that they wouldn’t be returning. The ruse about getting on a shuttle that had to turn back was all a farce.

  The scenario had seemed too good of an alibi when I’d heard it. The couple had been absolved because they had made an apparent effort to return. The police had believed their story, and rightly assumed that a couple returning to the scene of the crime for an extended stay could not possibly be guilty. However, now I knew that the story was a sham, made up to make the police assume the couple was innocent.

  The thing I liked even less was that the Richardsons had gone to such lengths to appear blame-free. They had arranged to box up their things, and gone through the motions of appearing to return to the resort. If not for Angela, no one would have been the wiser. I was sure that some friction in the family that had led to homicide. I just needed to find out what had happened.

  Yet I kept coming back to the fact that no one had taken the money. Even if the motive was something other than greed, nine people out of ten would have taken that cash as a reward as well. Why would someone leave money that was so readily available?

  Danvers had been talking while I had mulled over the situation. Now he pulled out his cellphone and dialed a number. He instructed the local police to hold the Richardsons and to interrogate them about their alibi and the timing of the decision to leave the resort.

  He hung up and looked at Angela, who had begun to cry. I couldn’t blame her. She had lost a son, and now it appeared that she might be losing a stepdaughter as well. Granted, she had been lying through her teeth, but I didn’t wish this loss on any woman.

  I was worried that she’d cleared everyone else of the crime. If she was truly the only person who had known that Danny Gardner was in one of the rooms, then she was the only one who could have murdered him. I hated to think that this woman who was crying real tears over the matter had participated in her son’s murder. That was just too much for me to contemplate.

  Yet if she was the only person in the resort who knew of his presence, then no one else could have killed him. I paused for a second. That wasn’t necessarily true. It did mean that Danny hadn’t been killed for the money or his escape from jail. It didn’t mean that he couldn’t have been a witness to another crime or any other possible motive.

  I began to wonder what other motives could have gotten him killed. Money was most likely ruled out, since Danny had been the only person at the resort with a large amount of cash. So that wasn’t plausible, since no one had known he was here.

  Revenge was equally implausible, since no one had known that Danny was here. The same logic applied to love. The only motive that I could think of was fear, and that would apply to Danny only if he knew something dangerous about another crime. As the gears in my mind slowly turned, I realized that there had been another murder at the resort. The Blaines had been killed around the same time as Gardner had been.

  We had thought that the Blaines were the unwitting victims of knowing something about the death of a felon. However, it could be equally true that the felon turned out to be an innocent bystander who had witnessed something about the death of the couple.

  The thought made sense, but the new idea also put me back at the beginning of the investigation. I’d only been looking into who had wanted to kill Danny Gardner. Now that I had followed every lead to its inevitable conclusion, I discovered that I had no case. That meant that I’d have to start again and try to find out all that I could about the Blaines. I would have to get the information I could from Detective Danvers and go from there.

  Even though I was brimming with ideas about what to do next, I still had to extricate us from the current situation. Danvers would want to put Angela under arrest, or at least under observation, until the roads were cleared.

  I did my best
to wait patiently, though Land and Sabine kept giving me odd looks. I was having a hard time containing my desire to solve this case anew. I wanted to save this poor woman from any more indignity, as well as finding out what was behind the real motives for these murders.

  Danvers made arrangements that Angela would return to work and not leave the main building or the employee building without notification. We all bundled up against the wind and returned to the main building again.

  Chapter 8

  Danvers and Sabine headed off to their room to get warm again, but I stayed in the common area, and Land decided to stay along with me.

  “What’s up with you?” he asked. “You aren’t acting very pleased with yourself. Why aren’t you satisfied about this solution?”

  I explained my thought process at length to him, starting with the idea of the other couple being the main focus of the homicide. “We jumped to a conclusion that Danny Gardner was the intended victim because he was in jail and had all that money. Yet the killer didn’t take the money and only Angela knew he was here, so the likely motives for his death are gone. It makes me wonder if he just saw too much.”

  Land raised an eyebrow at me. “I’m fairly certain that Danvers has done little more than finding out addresses and next of kin for the Blaines. I doubt that he’s looked at the other guests to see if they have a connection to the Blaines or tried to learn about any motives for their deaths.

  I nodded. That’s what I suspected. I couldn’t exactly fault Danvers, because we were dealing with a homicide only hours old and had a lack of informational resources, but the Blaines had only been an afterthought to the investigation. How sad that their lives were over, and that they seemed to be a footnote in the Gardner murder case.