A THIEF OF ANY MAN (Food Truck Mysteries Book 6) (3 page)

We had to go back out the way we came in, over the fence. There was still no guard at the gate. We headed back to my place after that for a more traditional date.

On Monday morning, even though I’d had late nights the last two evenings, I made sure that I was the first one to the truck. I had to see if the hair was still there. Sure enough, when I checked the register, the dark red hair from my head was still in place. Nothing like being a ginger to reduce the odds that someone can fake your hair. I thanked my Irish heritage for my ability to spot a break-in.

I managed to get the truck to Elm Street and start work. I didn’t need to count the cash since it hadn’t been touched since my totals last night. I started on the coffee and made a note to tell Land we were almost out again. I paused for a second to ponder this. I was fairly certain that I’d just had a coffee delivery from Land last week. I doubted that we’d gone through all of his normal batch in just under a week. Our coffee sales weren’t high enough to support that. When inventory doesn’t match sales, that typically means that someone has either taken the coffee itself or is selling coffee without ringing it into the register.

Great – now we could add coffee to the things being stolen around here. Nobody could be ringing up the register or filching cups of coffee in Dogs on the Roll without me noticing, but of course, coffee could be stolen after hours just as the cash could be taken. I was even more frustrated by the time I opened the window for business. Carter could tell my mood, but he kept to his work and left me alone.

We managed to get through the shift without difficulty. I wasn’t sure what to tell Land about the coffee, though I walked across Government Plaza as soon as I had the money counted and the truck cleaned. I had to vent to someone, and I didn’t want Carter to think that I was blaming him for this in any way.

“This doesn’t bode well. What happened now?” Land asked. He didn’t even look up from his work as he spoke. I knew that he was busy and focused, but I needed to talk this out with someone. My dad would only be concerned about the bottom line in the situation, and my mother would worry that I was getting involved in another police investigation that might put me in danger.

“I think someone is stealing our coffee too,” I said without preamble. “We’re low on coffee, and it’s only been a week since your last delivery.”

This did get him to pause. He looked far more concerned about the coffee theft than the money. “When did you find this out?” he asked, eyes focused only on me.

“This morning. I just noticed we’re running low, and I don’t think the coffee sales support the amount of coffee used.” I shrugged. “Do you really think someone is stealing coffee too?”

He didn’t blink, but continued to stare at me. “As much as I believe that someone is stealing ninety dollars from you, yes. Weird things happen to you.”

I nodded and looked down at what he was doing. He had been chopping fish, but even though his knife continued to move, the fish had long been cut. He was now just chopping the cutting board with nothing under the knife. Land was usually so calm and collected that even a minor mistake like that told me that he was dealing with an emotion or situation that he was unfamiliar with. I didn’t know what, but I knew something had affected him. Given that I didn’t have much experience in this matter, I stood there in silence, hoping for a cue from someone.

I waited a few seconds, hoping that he’d talk about it, but he didn’t speak. So I just began helping him get prepped for the evening rush. I knew that when he was ready I’d learn whatever was on his mind, but I also knew that I’d better get ready for something big. Land was not the type to chop without a food item underneath the knife.

I finished working with him in about thirty minutes. He gave me a smile and a hug before opening the window. “I’ll be over around 9pm to see the action,” he said, giving me a bad imitation of Carter’s famed eyebrow wiggle. I rolled my eyes, thinking that it was not a good thing that Carter was rubbing off on Land.

I smiled at him and left. I drove the truck back to the secured lot and spent some time working on the cameras to get the best vantage points for the register. Big budget movies spend less time on setting up their lights. The cameras had a battery back-up, which is what I set them to. I didn’t want to arrive in the morning and find the truck’s battery drained.

On the way out, I stopped to talk to Bryson, the day guard at the lot. He and I had exchanged pleasantries over the past two years, but we rarely spoke more than few words to each other. The most he’d ever said to me was that I was the lot’s only multiple spot lease. Apparently most people only had a single parking space to their name. However, today I wanted to learn more about what he saw at the lot. I explained that I’d put a new security system into the food truck because of some issues with theft.

He shrugged as I finished my little speech. “No worries on first shift. No one is going to come in here during broad daylight and rob people. That’s probably the best part of my job,” he said, keeping one eye on his phone, which was playing some movie.

“So no signs of anything funny going on around here?” I asked. I only had about half of his attention, but I was hoping it was enough to get some ideas.

“Nah. Kristoff, the night guy. He said something about a ruckus the other night, but that was it.”

“I don’t think I know him,” I said honestly. I knew Bryson, who worked about the same hours that I did, 5am to 3pm. I had no idea about the guards who worked the other shifts. I had respect for them because I wasn’t sure how brave I’d be here in the middle of the night. This wasn’t a bad neighborhood. However, it was mostly industrial with a few homes around the perimeter, which meant it closed down with the end of the business day. It was just me and the street lamps when I arrived each morning.

“You’d know him if you saw him. He’s about five foot five and all muscle. Short, but built. No one would mess with him.”

I thanked him and made a note to visit Kristoff by coming in early one day. I went home and tried to find something to occupy my time. I ran the accounts on coffee sales for the past week, and my suspicions were confirmed. We should only have been about one-third of the way through the supplies we’d received. We were missing several pounds of Land’s special blend. I worried for a moment, thinking that perhaps the competition had taken the coffee to have it analyzed, but that didn’t explain the situation with the small amounts of missing cash.

I had to assume that both thefts were coming from the same person. While it was not inconceivable that we would have multiple thieves attacking the food truck, I didn’t want to face the idea that multiple people were coming through the truck at night to take what they wanted. I could park the truck on the street and have less traffic through it at night.

Land showed up just before 9pm, and I gave him a long kiss. “I don’t know what that’s for, but I’m glad,” he said with a smile when I broke off the kiss. He was more like himself. The pensive behavior from earlier tonight was gone without a trace – or an explanation. Somehow, between closing the truck and going home to shower and change, he’d also found time to bring a huge bag of ready-to-eat popcorn. The snack had been drizzled with white chocolate, and I wasn’t sure if I was gladder to see him or the treat.

I had already cued the video from the website and watched a few minutes of the video feed. Of course, I’d seen nothing in the food truck at all. I’d stopped when I realized that Land would be expecting to watch it with me. I rewound the video feed so that Land wouldn’t know that I’d already checked out some of the footage.

We sat down on the sofa, and I snuggled in close to him. He gave me one of those looks that meant he suspected I might be cuddling just to get closer to the snack, but he didn’t comment on it.

We had talked about what to do with the feed. We had decided to start the viewing at the end of the shift and move on, so that we wouldn’t miss a minute or a penny. I took the remote and began to speed through the footage. The image didn’t really change over time, since it was focused on the register, an inanimate object. Any changes would represent a movement in the food truck where none should be.

We were probably about four hours in when I saw some motion. We watched the section twice, but the images looked to be shadows. I wondered if it could be one of the guards walking around the lot that had caused the change in lights. The time suggested that the sun would be setting, and the automatic parking lights would be turning on. The movements stopped after a few minutes and the tedium began again. We didn’t find any images of people at the register, so I continued on. We were nearly at the six-hour mark, where the feed would turn to live viewing, when I saw another motion.

This time the cameras caught a person in the food truck. I sat up straight with the remote gripped tightly in my hand. We both watched in silence. Land had been right. Sure enough, the woman stepped to the register, opened it, and pulled out a few bills and some coins. Nothing too much, and nothing that would cause immediate alarm.

She turned and faced the camera. I had never seen her before. She was not a guard, and I hadn’t seen her collect a vehicle when I arrived or left the lot.

I looked to Land. “Do you know her?”

He shook his head. “New to me.”

We watched as the woman turned again and started to make her way out of the truck. She stopped as the shadows moved across the screen again. I couldn’t see what was stopping her, but I wondered if she’d been apprehended by a guard.

However, in the next second, I knew that wasn’t true. Two hands, unattached to a body from the viewing angle we had, reached up and began to strangle the woman. The hands grasped her by the neck and squeezed. I’d never seen anyone actually killed. I knew that most crimes did not have an eyewitness, which meant that circumstantial evidence has to solve the crimes. I’d seen people in the moments after death, and after they’d been found dead, but I was watching the live-action murder of this woman.

Land wasn’t speaking. I couldn’t believe that he didn’t seem to have a reaction at this viewing. I knew that I’d be having nightmares for ages.

After what seemed like an age, but I knew was only a few minutes, the hands moved back, and the woman’s body fell limply to the floor. Even though the feed did not have any audio, I heard the sound of her body hitting the floor in my head. I shivered at the noise.

Land pried the remote from my hands and rewound it enough to watch the woman crumple to the floor.

After watching the video feed for a second time, he threw me my cellphone, which had been sitting on the coffee table. “Call 911. Tell them what you just saw. I’ve got a call to make too.”

I did what he said. I knew the steps to reporting a violent crime to the police, but I’d been flummoxed by the images of what I’d witnessed. Land’s instructions revitalized me. I called the number and explained to the operator that I’d just witnessed a murder in progress. She had a lot of questions to ask before letting me go. I couldn’t seem to get her to understand that I was not physically present at the crime but had been watching it on a video feed. I hung up and sank back on the sofa, moving in closer to Land.

I tried half-heartedly to listen in on Land’s call, but I could learn little of the conversation, besides that he’d called Detective Jax Danvers, one of Capital City’s homicide detectives, about the murder. Danvers had made a point of not coming to Dogs on the Roll once Land and I had announced that we were dating. Suddenly, he was too busy to get a cup of coffee or a dog on the house. I had noticed the absence, but there was really nothing I could do about the situation. I wasn’t his friend. I was just a woman who had a knack for getting involved in murder cases. Danvers and I had kissed once during an early case, but he’d made the point clear to me that he considered the incident a mistake. His words.

I hung up before Land did, and I got the indication that we’d be meeting Danvers and a CSI team at the food truck as soon as we could get there. I threw on some different clothes while Land was finishing up the phone call, and I was ready to go by the time he hung up.

We didn’t say much in the car. There were no words for me to explain how I was feeling, and Land was not one to share emotions easily. I was sure that he’d seen similar things before, but he wouldn’t tell me what they were or when they’d occurred. I just knew enough to understand that Land and Danvers had worked together in some military capacity before they got out and went into very different careers. Given his calm under pressure, I suspected that he had been in some very tight places in his early career, but to me, he was a chef and boyfriend. Those vague, earlier days didn’t have a major impact on our relationship.

The police were already waiting at the scene when we arrived. Apparently the security guard was missing again tonight, and the police had bolt-cutters ready to snip the eight-foot wall. It seemed odd to me that the lot’s own guard would be absent in what was likely the most eventful time. We waited as they cut through the chain link fence and entered the lot. I pointed the way to our food truck, which wasn’t hard to find since its name was emblazoned on its side.

I unlocked the door, not wanting to repeat the destruction of the fence on my truck. I’d already composed myself enough to realize that a crime scene in the food truck would likely mean that we’d be out of commission for a week, if not more. I didn’t want to witness any physical damage to the food truck as well. My expenses were going to be high enough if I didn’t have a steady income flowing in.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting when I flung open the door. The video had been graphic in the extreme. The body had fallen to the floor after the two hands had squeezed the life out of the woman. However, when I looked into the truck, nothing was there. No hands, no woman, no corpse. The prep area looked the same as it had when I’d left the lot around 4pm.

I stepped back, feeling a little sick to my stomach, and let the police do their job.

Land had a quizzical expression on his face. He knew me well enough to know that I would have given away the existence of the body via my expression. Yet I hadn’t done so, and he wanted to know why.

“She’s not there,” I whispered to him. “I didn’t see any trace of a body anywhere.”

“You didn’t have much of a chance to look around,” he countered, but honestly, a food truck is not a three-bedroom apartment. There’s the work area and kitchen and the area up front where I sat to drive. Granted, I hadn’t given the place a good onceover, but at the same time, unless the woman’s corpse had been stuffed into a cabinet, she was not there.

Land moaned. “This is not going to end well. Danvers is going to be seriously pissed.”

As if by cue, Detective Danvers stepped out of the food truck and marched over to us. He barely nodded at me, facing Land and talking directly to him.

“There’s a charge that can be leveled for filing a false police report, getting a police crew out here for nothing. Capital City is on a cost-cutting kick. We’ll have to answer questions about this call.” The look on his face was one of pure annoyance. His mouth was pursed, with his lips drawn thin. A vein on his neck was pulsing like a salsa beat. I wondered how much of this emotion was from being called out on a weeknight vs. having to put up with me on another investigation. I didn’t want to be vain, but I did wonder about his real feelings towards me.

I didn’t say a word, in part because he had his back turned to me. Land was more patient than I was anyway, so it worked better to have him talk. “We watched the video feed for the food truck tonight, hoping to find out who was stealing small sums of money from the register each night. When we got near to the real time feed, we witnessed a strangling. As I told you, two disembodied hands wrapped around a woman’s throat and tightened until the woman went down. We didn’t see who the hands belonged to, and we’ve never seen the victim before either. So we can’t do much for identification. However, we can provide you with the feed so that you can see for yourself.”

Danvers grunted. “I’m going to want to see that – tonight. Now. Just as soon as we get done here I’m going to see for myself. Then I’ll decide about charges.”

I muttered something under my breath about good deeds being punished, but I was still being ignored.

Danvers asked, “The security guard is gone. Do you know anything about that?” The question was pointed, but I chalked it up to Danvers’ bad mood.

Land shook his head. “I’ll look into it. I don’t like the idea of a guard not being here. It leaves our trucks vulnerable.”

Danvers walked off to the food truck again. He was gone about ten minutes. Land and I exchanged glances, but there wasn’t much more to say. We both had a ton of questions, but we knew that those would have to wait until we didn’t have a police escort, as some thoughts and suggestions would involve us conducting our own investigation into the entire mystery.

When he returned, he looked from one of us to the other. “Which of you drove?” he asked. “I’m riding with you so you don’t have any chance to mess with the video feed.”

I noticed that he was carrying a pair of latex gloves in his left hand. “Are those…?” I asked.

“They were on the floor in the food truck. Sanitary latex gloves in a food prep area are not a sign of a crime being committed. Now, not having sanitary gloves in a food prep area would be a sign of a crime, but that’s not my area.” He smirked at his own joke, but my eyes were riveted to the gloves. The opaque white of the gloves might have made the hands look free floating, I thought. If the person was dressed in darker clothes, it would look like the hands did not belong to a person.

Land held up his car keys, and Danvers followed us to the car. He made Danvers sit in the backseat, which was none too comfy in a sports car. We drove back to my apartment in silence and headed inside to watch the video.

All during the drive back, I had been concerned. What if I’d been wrong? What if the crime wasn’t really there? I kept trying to remind myself that I hadn’t been alone. Land had seen the woman fall to the ground too, and he had forced us both to watch it more than once. There was little doubt of what we’d seen. We were not mistaken. Someone had beat us to the food truck and moved the body.

So why would someone take the time to clean up a crime scene and remove a body? The obvious answer was that if the person belonging to the hands had not known of the video feed, this would be a perfect crime. No victim, no suspicions of a murder taking place. The only clue would be a missing person. If I had noticed a pair of gloves on the floor, I would have thought that Carter had left them, and he would think the same of me. I doubted that it would even bear a mention. Everything was normal – except for the video feed.

As soon as we got inside my apartment, I cued up the TV. My hands were shaking as I started to fast-forward through the feed. I got to the 9pm mark and slowed the feed down. Just when I thought that perhaps I had imagined the entire thing, the woman appeared, followed shortly after that by the hands. All three of us watched in silence as the woman crumpled to the floor. Danvers played it twice more, and I left the room, excusing myself for the restroom. I couldn’t bear to see a murder replayed like a football penalty. My nerves were shot.

When I returned, Danvers had the remote in his hand. He was moving it back and forth in his hand like a baton. “I was just telling Land here that it looks like your victim lived.” Danvers raised his hands and gave us air quotes for the word “victim.”

“I can understand why you’d think that the woman had died, but it takes a lot of effort to manually strangle someone. A ridiculous amount of upper body strength and willpower. It’s impossible to judge how much pressure was being put on her neck from the video. The camera angle makes it hard to tell. So while you thought that the woman died, it’s more likely that she passed out, woke up later, and left. It’s the easiest solution, and the most likely.” He smiled at us as if he were schooling two children in basic homicide. He neglected the fact that we hadn’t seen her leave, but I knew that he’d have a pat answer for that and any other question I might put to him.

“But there’s no video of her getting up,” I reminded him anyway.

“There’s no video of anyone getting up. If the victim was really dead, the feed should show the killer removing the body, shouldn’t it?”

He was right. I’d missed the implication that the feed should have shown what happened to the body. I’d been too upset to follow through.

Land sighed. “In either case, the feed should have shown what happened, and didn’t. That would point to a cover-up, which is not what typically happens with an assault from which the victim walks away.”

Danvers barked out a short laugh. It definitely was not an amused one. “So your argument is that, since nothing was shown, it must be a case of foul play. Otherwise we would have seen something in the video feed.”

Land shrugged. “It’s true. The victim here would have had to stand up, which would imply that she would be seen immediately. There’s no way to get to the camera without being seen by it. The other person in the food truck had the opportunity to maneuver around and disable the camera somehow until the body could be removed.”

“And then they moved the camera back into position?” Danvers asked. “Because we checked the angle, and it should have caught anyone leaving through the door.”

I furrowed my brow. “That’s not how I had it set up. The main focus should have been the register. That’s where the money was.”

Danvers shook his head. “So your killer would have had to readjust the camera and then come out of the truck through the front – after taking the time to remove the body and stash it somewhere else. I’m sure he stopped and had a Starbucks too – all in a few minutes before we showed up.”

I doubted highly that the woman had come back, after being strangled like that, to move the cameras, but if the police were going to go with the easiest theory, then we would have to investigate on our own.

Danvers talked to Land for a few more minutes and left. Land gave me a curious gaze. “You’re not going to argue about the walking dead?”

“No, not tonight. Danvers is dead set on not believing us – even after watching that video. If he doesn’t believe that, then he won’t listen to anything I have to say.” I took a deep breath and tried to get the images out of my mind. I was still haunted by what I’d seen. The number of times I’d seen the killing had made it an indelible memory.

Land raised an eye. “I’d agree with that. He’s pretty set on not working a murder case with us.”

I sighed. “Because of me?” I asked, feeling sorry for the detective.

Land burst out into laughter. “We think highly of ourselves, don’t we? Not in the way that you’re thinking,” he replied after he got the laughter under control. “Danvers is in a bit of hot water with the brass because you keep beating him to the punch on the homicides you’re involved in. It’s definitely not because he’s harboring some deep, dark, romantic feelings for you.”

“But–” I started.

“Look, Danvers and I spoke just after the first time you and I kissed. I didn’t want to step on any toes. I’m not friends with him, and I don’t trust him any farther than we could toss each other, but I respect him professionally, and I didn’t want there to be any hard feelings. Danvers made it perfectly clear that kissing you had been a mistake, and one that he was not likely to repeat.” Land looked like he might burst out into peals of laughter again. I wasn’t amused, but I knew that he was doing this in part to get my thoughts off the murder. Getting my temper flared up would change the subject effectively.

I was still not amused. I didn’t understand why Danvers had been so against that kiss once it was over. It seemed like he would have known beforehand that it would not be a good idea. Now I just had the urge to show him up again and solve this case. We’d have a lot more leeway to investigate a crime that the police didn’t think happened, and it would look all the worse for Detective Danvers and the Capital City police when we found out who murdered that lady.