FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES: The Complete Series (14 Books)

by Chloe Kendrick

So often when a husband or wife is killed, the obvious suspect is the remaining spouse, but that didn’t apply here. They’d both been killed, dragged across the room, and positioned with their arms folded across their chests. The poses had looked peaceful, nearly like people at repose in a coffin. I felt that had to be important somehow, but at the same time, I had no idea what it represented.

  It felt like the work of a serial killer in some respects, but since there had only been two deaths here that seemed like an unlikely scenario.

  A series of thumps and crashes came from outside. I moved to the window to see what was happening, but Land spoke before I could open the curtains. “If I’m not mistaken, the electricity is back on, which means that in a few minutes, you’ll be able to use your precious Wi-Fi.” He gave me a smile, to remind me that he knew me that well.

  It was opportune timing. I wanted to find out what I could about the Blaines before I discussed the matter with Danvers. He seemed satisfied that the solution of the case was Angela, but I had more than doubts. I had a gut feeling that he was wrong. From previous experiences, I knew that he wouldn’t budge until I had a fairly ironclad case to present to him.

  We saw Yuri on the way back to our room, and I stopped to talk to the head of housekeeping. “What did you know about the Blaines?” I asked. “Were they regulars here, or was this their first time to the resort?”

  With a wry smile, he said, “It was their last time, for sure.”

  I waited and didn’t speak. The method usually worked with people in obtaining information. Throw out a question and wait for them to finally answer it.

  Finally, he said, “They’ve been here twice before this visit. They always request to stay in the same cabin for some reason, and they’ve always asked for extra towels. I’m not sure why. In most cases, the extras are still on the dresser when they leave, which means I have more laundry to do.”

  I pondered that for a second. Had the Blaines been waiting for another guest, one who didn’t come in through the front door? Since the building was all one level and far-flung, access from a window would be easy even with the snow.

  However, Land had not seen any footprints in the snow. I knew that he had been looking at the Gardner cabin, but certainly he might have seen the unknown guest sneaking into the other cabin’s window. Had the killer then done away with Gardner because he’d seen too much?

  I looked up to realize that I’d missed whatever Yuri had said. “Sorry, I was lost in my own thoughts for a minute.”

  He smiled. “My wife got like that when she was pregnant. One minute she was talking and the next, she was lost in thought. I just told you that the towels were still on the dresser when we had to clean the room today.”

  I stopped again for two reasons. First, I recalled that a do-not-disturb sign was hanging from the Blaines’ doorknob, which had been a deliberate attempt to delay discovery of the body. Danny Gardner’s room had no such sign, meaning that his body would be discovered whenever the housekeeper got to his room.

  The second was that someone had cleaned the Blaines’ room today. I had thought about sneaking back into the room to see if I spotted any additional clues, but from what Yuri said, the room had been cleaned, which meant that there were likely no clues to be found at that juncture. I would still go back into the room to look around, but if Carletta had cleaned the room, it would likely be futile.

  I wondered if Danvers knew about this. I would have thought that he would have wanted the room to be untouched so that the local police could process the area, but now it would be somewhat useless. I made a decision to tell him, thinking that he would go to inspect the site and I could follow along to do my own snooping.

  We found Danvers and Sabine in their room. They looked warmer than they’d been when we’d talked to Angela in the outbuilding. Sabine was sipping a large mug of tea, and Danvers had changed into a sweater. I made a mental note that we would get him a rather ugly Christmas sweater and try to shame him into wearing it.

  “Did you tell the staff here to clean the Blaines’ room?” I asked as an opening salvo. With the return of electricity, I knew that the roads would be open within a few hours. A resolution to the case would have to come in the very near future, or it would be passed over to the local police.

  “Of course not,” he said, but I could see from the look in his eyes that he knew I was asking for a reason. He slipped on a pair of house slippers and led the way down the main hall to the Blaines’ cabin.

  He opened the door and groaned. The room had definitely been cleaned since our last visit to the crime scene. While nothing could be done about the bloodstained floors, the linens had been replaced and the items on the floor had been picked up or removed.

  I could almost see the anger radiating from Danvers’ head and shoulders. He’d been that way with me on more than one occasion, but it was rare for me to be able to observe it as a bystander. He took a few steps to one part of the room and then another. Each time he would stop and look for something that was no longer present and then repeat the entire procedure.

  “How the hell did you know this?” he asked as he spun around and looked at me. “Did you do this?”

  “Why would I clean someone else’s place?” I asked. “I don’t like to do my own.”

  “Then how did you know about this?”

  “Yuri told us,” I said. I recounted the conversation we’d had with Yuri about the Blaines and their previous visits to the resort. I looked at the dresser, but there were no signs of extra towels. Why had they needed extra towels? Had the killer come in through the window and needed to dry off?

  Yet if that were the case, then the towels would have been used. I wondered if the towels showed any signs of the bloodstains that had marked the room. I could still see signs of the copper-colored splotches on the walls.

  I pulled out my phone and began scrolling through the photos I’d taken of the crime scene. Yuri was right. There had been extra towels on the dresser in those images. No one would think twice of having such an item in the room.

  Beyond the bodies, much more was missing. The bathroom’s shower curtain had been replaced. I assumed that the original was too soiled with blood to be usable. The luggage was missing, along with any personal items that had been in the room. I was able to see that a hairbrush and toothbrush were gone. The maid service had done an impeccable job of cleaning a crime scene.

  Danvers was first out the door. He hadn’t spoken, but I knew that he was in search of Yuri. In a normal crime scene, Danvers could have put up the yellow tape and stationed a man to ensure nothing happened to the room. He’d been hampered by the snowstorm, and now he would be embarrassed by the loss of evidence and the missteps in trying to follow procedure. The case had become infinitely more difficult to prove at this juncture.

  Yuri was talking to Jonathan Wayne when we made it to the common room. Danvers stopped, took a deep breath, and then continued to where the men stood. “Who gave the permission to clean a crime scene?” he asked, somehow making it sound more like a greeting than a dangerous accusation.

  Yuri spoke first. “I did.”

  Danvers spoke softly, and I knew he was trying to control his emotions, in part because he had no real power here. He was just an agent working for the local police, who likely did not want to anger the local businesses. “On whose authority?”

  Yuri paused for a second. “It was on the schedule today. It had been penciled in. To be honest, it looked like Mr. Wayne’s handwriting. I just assumed that you had given the okay.”

  Danvers said quietly. “May I see the schedule for today? The one with the note on it?”

  Yuri excused himself. Wayne looked uncomfortable in being alone with the four of us. He shuffled from one foot to the other. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “I have nothing to hide, and certainly it’s not like I can rent the room again at the moment. Who could get through to rent it anyway?”

  “Have you heard anything from the road crews?” I asked. “Th
e power is back on, so they should be working on it, yes?”

  Wayne shrugged. “Yes and no, they’re working on it as we speak, but they’ll start with the main roads and the streets deemed necessary for emergency vehicles. We’re the only business up a rather long stretch of road, so they’ll get to us, but it will be later. I would guess maybe twelve hours?”

  I nodded, thinking that the window to solve the case was slightly longer than I had expected. I would still have some time to look into this.

  Yuri returned with a sheet of paper. “You can see that the notation is written on that room to clean it as best as possible.”

  He pointed to a box on the line with the room number. A light pencil had been used to write a few words into the box. I certainly couldn’t make enough sense out of it, but I took him at his word.

  Wayne looked over the head of housekeeping’s shoulder. “That does look like my writing, but it’s not. I can see how someone would mistake it for such.” He pointed at a letter. “I make my S like that, but I don’t have a loop in my L.”

  I wondered how long it would take to get samples of the handwriting of all the guests and staff. Did Danvers even have the authority to do such a thing? It wouldn’t do much good unless one of us was a handwriting expert. I knew that Land and I were not, and I was certain that Sabine was not as well. That would just have left Danvers to examine the handwriting. I doubted that he would think that the best use of his time in the remaining hours before the local police showed up. The detective would likely spend the time trying to come up with a valid reason why the crime scene had been scrubbed clean.

  Danvers started to say something, but I elbowed him in the ribs. He spun on me and opened his mouth to yell, but I motioned him down the hallway. Our little party said our good-byes to the staff and went far enough down the corridor so we would not be heard.

  “What the hell is so important that you stopped an interrogation?” he said when we were out of range. “This had better be good.”

  “In all the excitement, we didn’t see if Danny Gardner’s room had been cleaned as well,” I pointed out. “I didn’t see a note on the schedule to tell the housekeeping staff to clean his room.”

  “So?” he asked with a snarl. “What of it?”

  “All along we’ve thought that Danny Gardner was the major crime in this case and that the Blaines were just witnesses in the way. But now we’re faced with a few facts. First, only Angela, Danny’s mother, knew he was here. That means that either she killed him or he was killed for a reason other than the fact that he had stolen all that money. One reason we could think that is that Gardner’s money was left in the room with no apparent attempt to take it.”

  “Stop right there,” Danvers said. “Angela is the prime suspect here. No doubt about it. Why all this folderol?”

  I assumed that word was one of the pieces of vocabulary from the word-of-the-day calendar he kept on his desk to improve himself in the eyes of the upper brass at the department. I took a deep breath before continuing.

  “So if she is the main suspect, why not ask her why she made the notation to clean the room? She had to have done that too. The pieces all need to fit.”

  Danvers didn’t say a word, which likely meant that he couldn’t come up with a reason why a suspect would go to the trouble of cleaning the other room and not Gardner’s room.

  “What if the Blaines were the intended victims and Danny Gardner was only the witness in the way? It would give you a wide range of suspects, since anyone could have wanted them dead.”

  “Big deal.”

  “It is a big deal,” I said. “Think about it. We learned that the Blaines had been here a few times. They always asked for the same cabin. That sounds like a rendezvous to me. Someone might have been coming here to meet them.”

  “That’s pretty thin,” Danvers said, finally finding his voice. “You’re building up a case on some pretty meager evidence.”

  “No more so than saying that Angela has to be the killer because Danny was the intended victim.”

  “We haven’t looked at them at all,” Danvers said in a somewhat plaintive voice. “The local police will have to investigate that.”

  “Not necessarily. You heard Wayne. We have about twelve hours to see if we can find a motive for their murders.”

  Danvers looked aggrieved, but didn’t speak for a minute. When he did, his tone had changed. “There are three possibilities here,” he said. “The first is that another set of guests was here each of the times that the Blaines stayed at the resort. Land, I want you to check Wayne and look at the books. It shouldn’t take too long. I’m guessing that most of the guests were not here the last time that Blaines were here.”

  Land didn’t bother to argue. He went off to check. Danvers looked around the room.

  “So what are the other two options?” Sabine asked. I was glad that she had chimed in, since he was less likely to chew off her head than mine. She crossed her arms, which indicated to anyone who knew her that she wasn’t going to be relegated to doing nothing.

  “The next is that the Blaines had a connection to the staff. I’m going to have to go back through the Capital City police and see who might be tied to the victims somehow. I’m going to have to do that, since I doubt that they’ll want to take phone calls from civilians.”

  He made sense, and Sabine relaxed a little. I could tell that his answer had mollified her somewhat.

  “So what does that leave us?” she asked.

  “There could be a connection outside the hotel. Land is covering guests, and I’m covering staff, but there’s nothing to say that someone couldn’t have come to meet them here who wasn’t a hotel guest.”

  I nodded. My mind was already running over the possibilities presented by that search. I had a hunch that Danvers had thought this would be the least visible and least likely of the three categories, but I knew that I could widen that search to do a number of things, especially since the police were unofficially asking for my help.

  Danvers walked to the door. “I’d suggest starting here, and seeing if you can find anything else.”

  I gave Danvers a smile and waited until I heard the man’s footsteps disappear down the hall.

  Sabine looked at me. “I know that look. What are you suggesting that we do?”

  “I don’t think there’s much else to look at here,” I replied. “I think that we were given the task with the least chance of finding anything.”

  Sabine raised an eyebrow at me, a typical Mendoza trait that indicated that I was likely to be getting into trouble.

  “What?” I asked defensively. “Land and I checked the outside yesterday. There were no signs that anyone came up to the windows to enter. That would mean that they’d have to have entered through the front doors, which would have been noticed.”

  “Do you think that they have any surveillance video of the common room?” Sabine asked, getting into the groove of our new task.

  “We can certainly ask,” I replied, thinking it unlikely. Certainty Jonathan Wayne would have mentioned such a potential clue in our discussions.

  I pulled the first of the Blaines’ pieces of luggage to me. “Let’s start with here. If they were meeting someone from outside, they had to have a reason for doing so. Maybe it was something that they brought with them.”

  I opened the suitcase while Sabine grabbed a smaller tote. “Jax can’t get angry about this. The maid must have put this back together when she cleaned, so we can’t possibly contaminate the evidence any further.”

  I nodded as I rummaged through the suitcase. It held a variety of items of clothing, but nothing else. No papers or anything to suggest that they had brought items for their contact.

  I eyed Mrs. Blaine’s purse while Sabine continued to go through the tote. “There’s nothing in here either,” she said. She pushed that aside and grabbed the other larger suitcase. She pushed the tabs to open it but nothing happened.

  I grabbed the purse and rummaged quickly
for the keys. I handed them to Sabine and then took a good look in the bag. A small caliber gun rested at the bottom.

  I let out a whistle. “One mystery solved. I think I found our murder weapon.”

  Sabine came over to look with me. “We should have known to look there. The bloody clothing was in your room. So, of course, the murder weapon has to be in the victim’s belongings. We’d better notify Jax about this.” She fumbled for her phone and texted him a short message. “If you want to find anything else in the bag, do it now before he gets here.”

  Using her own advice, she unlocked the suitcase and took a quick inventory. Nothing was in the bag except for more clothing.

  I held the purse open as wide as I could and looked inside. I didn’t want to put my fingerprints on anything else in that bag. The local police would already be finding my prints inside of the purse, but I didn’t want to make it any worse than it needed to be.

  Danvers was back to the room in a minute. “Where did you find this?” he asked. He had found a pair of latex gloves from somewhere and was now wearing them. He took the gun in his hand and turned it over. He held the barrel closer to his face and sniffed. I assumed he was trying to determine if the gun had been used recently.

  “I can’t say for certain without any forensic or ballistic identification, but I’m going to assume that this is the gun used to kill Gardner.” With that, he slid the gun into his pocket. “I thought you were supposed to be looking for signs that the Blaines met an outsider. Instead I find you rummaging through the victim’s purse. What’s up with that?”

  I jumped in. “We were looking for the keys. I thought we would check out the car and see if we could find anything out there. It seemed like the perfect meeting place for talking to an outsider without being seen.”

  Danvers nodded. He had no quick retort or snappy response to my comment, which seemed reasonable as I said it. I wondered why we hadn’t thought of that before.

  Sabine still had the keys in her hand, and as soon as Danvers left again, we made our way back to our respective rooms to dress for the great outdoors. Bending over to put on boots was no picnic and my coat was a tight fit. I felt like I was waddling out into the snow outside of the resort. Of course, Sabine was fashionably dressed in a thick coat with a faux-fur lined hood.