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  DEAD GIVEAWAY

  FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES #5

  Chloe Kendrick

  Copyright © 2015

  Published by: Rascal Hearts

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  For questions and comments about this book, please contact us at [email protected]

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 1

  I watched as the movers brought in the truckload of furniture to my new apartment. In the last six months, the food truck business had boomed. So much so, that I was able to make a few lifestyle improvements.

  I determined from my budget that I could afford either a new place to live or a new car. Hey, my business wasn’t good enough to take on both new expenses at once. Even so, I spent more than a few weeks vacillating between the two options. One night after my next-door neighbors had fought until 3 a.m., I’d made up my mind. I wanted a new place to live. I wanted upscale and I wanted walls that were thick enough to block the noise from the adjoining apartments. I wanted security doors that wouldn’t give way to those who wanted to mug me in the parking lot.

  I wasn’t going to shed any tears over the apartment I was leaving. My former apartment complex resembled nothing more than the Bates Motel. It was a series of one level apartments slung out around the circumference of a parking lot. Their idea of a security system was shining the brights from your car into the apartment if you got home late. I’d had things stolen twice from my apartment while I lived there, though to be honest, I think it had more to do with the murder investigations I had going on than the general crime rate for the neighborhood. However, I’d still made up my mind to move.

  My new apartment sat on the third floor of a newer building, one of many such buildings that sat among some green spaces surrounding each building along with a clubhouse and a pool. While I was never the type to sunbathe – my Irish heritage saw that I went from lily white to bright red – I liked the idea of having a pool. I got home early enough from work to admire it from a distance.

  I hadn’t asked the guys that I work with to help me move. While we were all on a friendly level, I felt that there was a fine line between asking for help and them thinking it was expected because I was the boss. I didn’t want to have that kind of relationship with the two men who helped with the trucks. Land was now a minority owner, since he had a quarter interest in the new truck, and Carter had just started working full-time, cooking for the original truck in Land’s former role. Still I didn’t want either to think that working for me included doing my errands.

  So I’d hired a local, two-man firm to move my few possessions. I’d boxed it up, but they’d loaded the truck and moved it here. Looking at the stairs, I was glad that I hadn’t wanted to do this myself. The stairwell was steep and narrow. While I was glad to have the security of a third-floor unit, I wasn’t keen on the daily hike. There was an elevator, but Land had already shamed me for wanting to take it when I brought him to see my new place.

  All of the boxes had been marked with their destinations so I didn’t even have to worry about moving boxes by myself inside the apartment. I went to the living room and began rearranging the furniture. I spent about an hour getting things where I wanted them. The big-screen TV could wait a few more days until I could borrow the tools to put it on the wall.

  The kitchen was next, and the job flew by. After cooking all day at the food truck, I didn’t bother to cook much at home. I ate takeout food from any number of places, or I found some ready-to-eat meals that weren’t terrible. I was still young, so I knew my metabolism could handle it for a few more years. While I had more take-out menus than pots and pans, I could still cook when the opportunity called for it.

  The bathroom and walk-in closet, being about the same size, were completed next. The massive amount of space in my closet made my wardrobe appear meager. Now that I had to pay a more substantial rent, I wasn’t going to have the chance to expand it for a few more months though. Shopping sprees were still a ways off. My daily wardrobe consisted of t-shirts and jeans. My more upscale clothes were all at least two years old.

  I looked at the clock. It was after 7 p.m., which meant that I could probably finish before bedtime tonight. I’d done this on a Saturday thinking it would only take the weekend. I work Monday through Friday at the food truck, and I hadn’t wanted to take a day off work. Carter, the second man on Dogs on the Roll, was still fairly new, and I was still mistrustful about leaving him alone with the truck and the cash. It had cost me more to find a moving company, but it would be worth it not to miss any work this way.

  I stopped long enough to get something to eat. Fortunately, I had some leftovers that I’d hand-carried from my old apartment, knowing that I’d need sustenance before I was able to get to the grocery store. I heated the Thai food in the microwave, a new feature for me here, and sat down to eat.

  I could feel the energy seep out of me as I sat there. It had been a long day, and it wasn’t quite over yet. I put my plate in the dishwasher, which was also another new feature in the new apartment, and then started back to work.

  I decided it would be best if I went to the spare bedroom first. I planned this room to be an office of sorts. The work for the food trucks involved profit and loss spreadsheets, invoices with the vendors and tax information. At my old apartment, I had just spread out the paperwork across all of the available surfaces in my living room and tried to work. I preferred the idea of a centralized location where I could do everything in one place. I’m nerdy enough to be excited about the prospect of buying a filing cabinet.

  However, when I stepped into the room, I was shocked to see a large chest freezer in the middle of the room. This oversized appliance definitely had not come from my old apartment. I walked over to the freezer and studied it carefully. A local carrier had delivered the freezer today, apparently while the movers were shifting my possessions and I was at the old apartment. The carrier service would not have known that this did not belong to me, and they had moved it out of the way into a bedroom that wasn’t being used.

  I looked at the shipping label on the freezer and noticed that the shipping information read 362 instead of my own apartment’s 326. At least the freezer’s owner is on the same floor, I thought. I thought I detected a whiff of something going bad inside the appliance, which was not good. I didn’t want to find a pool of tainted water on my new carpet, which would take time to clean and probably lose me my security deposit on the first day of possession.

  I tried to plug the freezer into the wall, but the plug didn’t fit. I realized that it was likely a 220 plug and an apartment would have 110 outlets except in certain areas. I was pleased that owning a food truck and working on enhancements to it had taught me a few things to know around my own place.

  I walked down the hall to apartment 362, but no one was home. I left a note on the door, asking for them to contact me. I walked back to my place, wondering what to do. The only reasonable solution was to remove anything that could spoil from the freezer and put it into my refrigerator. That would alleviate any odors and save the other tenants a bundle in lost groceries.

  I went back into the spare room and untied the ropes that bound the appliance. They fell away as I lifted the top
of the freezer. Then I immediately slammed the lid back down. There was no way that I would be putting a corpse into my new refrigerator.

  I took myself to the kitchen to make the necessary phone calls. I had no desire to stand around the spare room and use the phone. I wanted to be as far away from the dead body as I could be.

  While I’d found dead bodies before, most of them were recently dead. I couldn’t say that about this one. While the man’s corpse was preserved, the body had frost and ice over much of it. I wasn’t sure how long this one had been dead, but it wasn’t a matter of hours or days. I would guess he’d be gone for months at least. He looked like some meat in the freezer that had been stored past its expiration date.

  Unfortunately, I knew all too well the routine for handling a corpse. I started by dialing a number that I knew too well. Detective Jax Danvers, full-time detective and part-time potential romantic interest, answered on the third ring. “What?” he said, not wasting any time on social niceties.

  Today must be one of the days where he wasn’t my romantic interest, I guessed. I knew he wouldn’t be once he heard my news. So I decided to make him squirm a little too. “Jax, I just got my new apartment, and I wanted you to be the first to see it,” I said, trying for seductive, but just sounding as if I had a head cold. I might as well have fun before this investigation began.

  “Maeve, we’ve been through this. We work together sometimes, and I don’t think it would be conducive to a good working relationship if we took our relationship further. Besides, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s a little late on a Saturday night to be making plans,” he said. He dropped his tone to a whisper. “I have a date.”

  “Oh, well she’s not going to be happy at all with what I have to say next,” I said. “There’s a corpse in my freezer.”

  The silence lasted so long that I checked the elapsed time on the call to see if we’d been disconnected.

  “You’re kidding, right?” he finally said. “Please tell me that you’re kidding.” His voice was clipped and deeper than normal.

  I sighed deeply. “Oh that I were.”

  “Recognize him? The last guy you invited over tonight, perhaps?” His tone had an edge now, like I’d found a corpse in my new apartment just to mess up his evening.

  “No, and no. Total stranger, and he doesn’t even belong to me. He was delivered to the wrong apartment.” Danvers was right. It had been a man in the freezer, a hulking man of a corpse. He had obviously been older, judging from the bald spot I could see from my vantage point. He was clean-shaven, but his skin showed signs of age – and ice crystals. I didn’t want to think about death by freezing. I’d always heard that it was painless. That you just went to sleep, but the crystals around his eyes and on his ears suggested a long-term residence in the freezer.

  I heard a deep sigh on the other end of the line. “Luck of the Irish, eh? Have you called the police?”

  I rolled my eyes. “What do you think I’m doing?”

  “I meant the emergency responders. How can you be sure he’s not still alive?”

  “The blue complexion and the icicles on his nose were a dead giveaway,” I said, regretting the word choice almost immediately. “He’s very obviously dead, and no one is reviving him.”

  “Fine. I’ll call this in. I’ll be there in about 20.” The phone went dead in my hands.

  I dialed another number after that. The operator of the second food truck was Land Mendoza, who was an amazing chef who had a mysterious military or police background. He didn’t care to talk about it much, or really ever, but when it came to matters of dead bodies, he was definitely the person to see on my organization chart.

  Land picked up at once. “What’s wrong? Bad date or dead body?”

  “Dead body. I don’t do bad dates.”

  He laughed. “So what do you really want?” he asked. He seemed to be in a good mood

  “Land, that was serious. I have a dead body in the freezer. It was delivered here – to the wrong address and there’s a frozen corpse in it.”

  There was a long pause. “I hate when you ruin my jokes,” he said. “Have you called the police?”

  “I called Danvers a few minute ago. He’s on his way, and so are the EMTs and the crime scene techs, but this guy is well and truly dead.”

  “I bet Danvers loved that. He supposedly has a hot date tonight.”

  I grunted. Apparently he and Land were on good terms at the moment, if Land knew about the hot date. At times, they barely spoke, and at other times they seemed to be pals. “Yeah, he was on a date when I called. He was not happy about this at all.”

  “I bet,” Land said. “I imagine he’ll want to take this out on you for ruining his evening, so I’m going to stop by.” He got the new address from me and hung up.

  *

  It was only a matter of four minutes before the first responders arrived and told me what I already knew. There was no way that they could revive him. The one EMT, an older woman, called it in to someone and headed out. The responders must have let the crime scene people in the security door, because several people with their bags and kits were banging on the door before I even got back to the kitchen. I opened the door and pointed the way into my spare bedroom.

  I had planned on having a small housewarming party after I got settled, but frankly, I hadn’t expected it to be so soon – or with a dead body as the centerpiece. My guest list would have probably included fewer members of the police department.

  Detective Danvers showed up on the heels of Land, who arrived a few minutes after the crime scene team. Danvers looked annoyed to say the least. Seeing Land there only made it worse. He sighed heavily as he went into the other room to see what I’d discovered.

  “How are you holding up?” Land asked as he craned his neck to see what was going on in the other room.

  “I’d be doing much better if I hadn’t found a dead body in my apartment. Suddenly the idea of a new car sounds better.”

  Land looked at me. “You’d find a dead body in the trunk or the wheel well. It’s ingrained in you at this point. Why fight it?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Why don’t you go back there? Danvers is probably just watching, and I can tell you want to find out what happened.”

  He nodded and walked down the hall to the bedroom. That left me alone in the living room. I wished I’d put up the TV earlier so that I could try to focus my mind on something else for a while. I had too few diversions at the moment.

  Land came back out and shook his head. “You’re not going to like this at all.”

  I slapped a palm to my forehead. “What now? What the hell is going on?”

  Land gave me an odd look. Granted that I normally didn’t use a lot of profanity, but I thought the rules were off when you find a dead body in your brand new apartment.

  “First, there’s no identification on him – at all.” He stressed the last words as if they were to mean something to me.

  “What do you mean exactly?” I asked, not wanting to decipher him tonight. A lack of ID could just mean that he wasn’t carrying his wallet when he was killed, or it could mean that the police would never be able to put a name to the corpse.

  “All labels cut out of the clothes, no wallet, no rings, no jewelry, even the brand of shoes blacked out with a Sharpie. Someone wanted to make sure that he couldn’t be located easily. That’s not a good thing for you, but in other ways it is.”

  “Care you explain?” I asked, thinking that this couldn’t get much worse.

  “Sure, it’s bad news because it’ll be that much tougher to figure out who he is and what he’s doing here. I have no idea what prolonged freezing does to DNA or fingerprints or general identification. The bright side is that the killer wouldn’t go to these lengths to put him in your spare room, so you’re off the hook on this one. You would have no cause to put him in there if you wanted to hide any and all ties to the man. ”

  “So the good news is that I’m going to be cleared, but the ba
d news is that this likely won’t be solved.” I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. It didn’t bode well for my immediate future. I would be known as the woman with a man in the freezer, which didn’t sound too appetizing, considering that I ran a food truck. We might as well hang a sign up on my balcony announcing that the body was found here.

  “Pretty much,” Land said. He shrugged. “I’m going to go back in and see what Danvers is thinking. Maybe you can do some investigating about this, speed up the process? I’ll keep an eye on what the police are doing, like normal.”

  I nodded. It wouldn’t be the first time that I’d looked into a crime that the police had fumbled. Now Land was calling our investigations “normal.” He walked off, and I decided to make some coffee. I had a hunch I was going to need the boost tonight.

  I used the blend that Land had created for the food truck. He never would tell me exactly what beans were in it, but he kept enough available that I could appropriate some for home use. If I was going to be hosting a party, I might as well play the part. The coffee was brewing in a few minutes, and the apartment, devoid of other smells, was filled with the aroma of coffee. The feeling was something like going to work on your weekend.

  Two officers were in the living room talking, and I took them both a mug. “There’s creamer and sugar on the table. No cream, since I just moved in.”

  They took the mugs gratefully and didn’t bother with any additions to it. They moved far enough away that I couldn’t hear them without sneaking closer.

  I walked to the back bedroom where Land and Danvers were having a heated discussion. I figured it was probably about the case and what to do with me. I seemed to be a sore point between them. Land knew that Danvers and I had toyed with the idea of dating, and Land did not approve. He’d known Danvers in his past somehow, and he routinely issued commands to me not to trust Danvers at all, which I promptly ignored.