FIVE WILL GET YOU TWENTY (Food Truck Mysteries Book 9) (12 page)

“I’m pretty sure I was followed here. I ran the last bit,” he said when he caught his breath.

I cringed. I’d been in bad situations before, especially early in the morning when foot traffic was very light. I wasn’t up to getting into mortal danger at the moment. I had a wedding to plan.

I looked out of the door, but saw nothing. I wasn’t sure why someone would follow Thomas at that time of morning when he was going to work. They had to know his destination and that they’d likely be seen given the few people on the streets. Jack Reilly might have relieved me of $100 for some incomplete information, but he didn’t seem dumb enough to pull a stunt like that.

I tried to put the story out of my mind as I prepped for the morning coffee rush. Was another operative watching Thomas? Or had the Secret Service already come on board, and they were watching the people who had passed the phony twenties? That seemed more likely, though Land had made it sound like their involvement was in the future.

I didn’t have long to wait. Danvers was at the food truck by 8:15, hands stuffed deep in his pockets and looking down at the sidewalk. I had a coffee ready for him when he approached the window. I had hoped that this would be a short visit, but he looked like he wanted to talk. “Got a minute?” he asked after I’d taken the next order.

I nodded and walked out to meet him. Thomas took over the cash register, and I went out to talk to him. I was hoping that his mood was the result of the case and not of his relationship with Sabine. I was in no mood to play cupid, especially with a man I had foolishly kissed once.

“What’s up?” I asked when we got far enough away from the truck so that we wouldn’t be heard. I suspected that it was going to be case-related since others weren’t supposed to hear what we were talking about.

“I was curious if you had come up with any information you hadn’t shared with me. I am trying to wrap this case up quickly, and I need everything you have.”

I thought back to what Land had said last night. If Danvers was off the case, then he’d gone rogue here to solve it himself. He had no more authority than I did at this point. It made me feel better to see us both in the same boat.

“I know Carter called you yesterday about Mrs. Pohler. Is there something you can do to find out more about her?” I thought about Jack Reilly who had a file on her. Was there anything in that file which would have made her more pliable to being used by her husband? I knew it wouldn’t have bothered me enough to commit a felony, but at the same time, I was in very different straits than she was.

“Not really. I don’t have much to go on there. Do you think she’s guilty?” he asked. Danvers still had not told me about his status and the case. Land had long ago told me that I shouldn’t trust Danvers, and now more than ever, I saw that he’d been right.

“I think she’s guilty of something, but I’m not sure that it’s the murders. There were five bills and four people we know of who passed them. I’m curious to find that last person; I think he or she might know something more about this whole operation. Something that the others did not.”

Danvers scratched his cheek, which he usually did when he was trying to hide a smirk, but the sarcastic grin was still on his face when he took his hand down. “There were only the four people involved. I can tell you that. When the bank first detected the five counterfeit bills, two of the bills were stuck together tightly. New money can be that way at times, but new fake money is like that most of the time. You’re chasing someone who doesn’t exist.”

I felt momentarily embarrassed that I hadn’t known that, but Danvers had not seen fit to add that detail to what we knew. As a result, I’d been hunting a mirage, thinking that another person was involved. It had been Pohler all along who had been passing the bills. If his wife was to be believed, there was no printing equipment at the house, so either he had a partner in this venture or he had another location to print the bills.

I still had a few leads over Danvers. I’d located the private investigator and learned more about what each of the people had done prior to the blackmail. I thought about keeping that back, but I knew that the mix-up with the number of bills had been an oversight, and not a malicious act on Danvers’ part. I gave in and told Danvers all about Jack Reilly and the information he’d shared with me. He nodded and then took notes as I talked. I left out everything in the file about Land. That wasn’t relevant to the case, and if I was right about the timeline, Danvers already knew that Land had been in the army and in the police force.

“Maeve, you don’t know how much this helps me. Thank you.” I thought he was going to hug me for a second, which my body instinctively stiffened for, but instead he gave me a handshake and headed off.

With that, I headed back to the truck.

Thomas was waiting for me anxiously when I returned. At first, I thought he was just glad to see me again since running the truck with only one person can stretch a person’s abilities. However, within a few seconds, I knew something else was up.

I’d already been overloaded with information at that moment, and so I decided to let him tell me his concerns in his own time, while I tried to make sense of all I’d been told.

A few minutes later, when I was well into the routine of ringing up coffee sales, he cleared his throat. “Remember the other day when you called that supplier?” he said casually. “He called back today and asked if you were still interested.”

I thought about the Secret Service, and Danvers’ warning about getting involved, but I weighed it against wanting to know more about what happened. If nothing else, I could feasibly argue that I wasn’t investigating, but just looking into new opportunities to save money. “I’d be interested in talking to him,” I answered. I made myself sound just as casual.

“Great. I’ll take you there after work,” he said.

I wanted to argue that he was being followed, and that it would be better for me to drive, but my mind was already swimming, trying to determine what the new details about the case meant to my ideas. I still was certain that someone else was behind this.

I went back to work after that and didn’t give the meeting much thought until the end of the shift. Thomas said that we should leave the truck and go over together. I had wanted to stop and tell Land, but Thomas groused, so I just sent him a quick text to tell him what I was doing.

We headed off to the warehouse. Thomas made a few extra stops and turns to get to Center Street, which was in the midst of an industrial area of Capital City. Factories and warehouses lined the road for as far as the eye could see in either direction. There were no homes, schools or parks. This was business—and only business—here.

I’d been watching behind us all the way from the truck, looking for a tail, but I didn’t see one. Either the event that morning had been Thomas’ imagination or they’d given up for the day. I suspected the former, since it seemed like Thomas was the type to bring attention to himself.

We stepped inside of the warehouse through a door beside three truck docks. The area was silent, and I wasn’t sure if they were done for the day or if the hard times over the past few years had put many of these places out of business. It would make an ideal storage unit, an abandoned warehouse in an area that no one frequented.

That thought gave me a shiver, thinking that we were here with people who quite possibly killed Ryan Pohler and Bernadette Cravens.

Inside the warehouse was nothing but cement floors and sheet metal walls. Nothing was stored in this oversized room. A few pallets sat on the floor, but that wasn’t even enough food to get me through a day. “I thought you said that he was meeting us here,” I said, perturbed that I had gotten my hopes up for nothing. Apparently this case would be solved by the professionals and not by me.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Thomas said. “He called. I swear.”

There was a single pallet on the floor that had lettuce in it. The edges of the greens had started to turn brown, and I felt a little sick thinking that someone would serve this to customers. I also knew that lettuce could be sprayed with chemicals to keep it looking better over time. I wondered how many things had been sprayed on this food.

If this was the food that Pohler had been serving, he’d been playing a very shortsighted game. No one would eat at his place again if they got sick from the food at his trucks. I was unsure why anyone would take that risk.

The irony would be if Pohler had been blackmailed by someone else into using the foods. It would be a sort of karmic justice to learn that was the case.

Since the warehouse floor had so little to offer, I decided to check out the office. I had hopes that perhaps in the rush to leave the suppliers had left something that would help explain what was going on. The office, which barely lived up to its name, was a cement floor, three paneled walls and a Plexiglas fourth wall that looked out to the warehouse floor. My hopes buoyed a little when I saw the chaotic state of the room, which included a desk and filing cabinets.

I rifled through the drawers in the desk to no avail. Everything was gone. I turned to look into the filing cabinets, the five metal sets of drawers that stood on the far wall. There were a few files that had been missed in each drawer. I scanned through them quickly, hoping to get something that could bring a solution to this case. In the third filing cabinet, I found a printout of the company’s books. I practically squealed with excitement as I pulled the thick folder from the drawer and threw it on the desk.

If Pohler’s business had been used to launder money, we just needed to find out whose accounts had deposits that closely matched Pohler’s cash withdrawals. Since Danvers had called it child’s play, I thought a quick scan might give me a hint. Just as incriminating, I found entries that indicated withdrawals from this company’s funds that corresponded to the money deposited in Pohler’s account, which had allowed him to purchase the three new trucks. This company, whatever it was, had been involved in Pohler’s business. He had allowed another organization, presumably one that was illegal, to use his company as a front for money laundering. In return, he’d been rewarded for his efforts with the money necessary to expand quickly. I was thrilled that I had at last come up with a scenario that made sense.

I heard a noise behind me and turned. In my hurry to get through the cabinets, I’d totally forgotten that Thomas was here with me. The thought of someone coming back and finding us here, rooting through the drawers, would be hard to explain.

When I turned, Thomas was standing behind me with a gun in his hand. It was pointed at me. “Don’t point that at me,” I said, failing for a second to realize what was going on. “It could go off.”

Thomas laughed. “Even now, you’re used to giving the orders. Nice try.”

At that moment, the reality of the situation hit me. I’d been operating under the assumption that the mysterious fifth person was the mastermind behind the operation for all that time. Then, when I found out there was no fifth person, I should have known that the mysterious organizer had to have been one of the four people I’d already talked to in the investigation. Bernadette was dead. Ruschman had left town. Mrs. Pohler was clueless, which left only Thomas as the logical suspect.

I cursed myself for feeling sorry for people and for my own stupidity. I’d not wondered why Thomas was not included in the list of people investigated. I’d just assumed Pohler didn’t need to investigate Thomas because he’d already figured out the man’s deception.

Thomas stood watching me puzzle this out. He didn’t speak for several moments, and then he said, “Have you finally come to the right conclusion? It took you long enough.”

“You were behind this. You worked for Pohler, set him up with the cheap suppliers, fed him cash to buy more trucks, which meant more food to buy from your people, and then you got him into the counterfeit market.”

“For starters, yes,” he said with a smirk playing on his lips. “I’ve been a bad boy. However, I can’t take all the blame here. Pohler took to the food scam without any kind of incentive needed. He was a natural.”

“What kind of ‘incentives’ did you have?” I asked, wondering whom Thomas had used to find out information on the food truck owner.

“For starters, he and Bernadette were an item. Just goes to show you that you’re never satisfied with what you have.”

I thought that the maxim applied equally well to him, but I didn’t speak, since he had a gun pointed to my chest. “So how did you find that out?” I asked, wanting to keep this conversation going for a good 10-15 minutes.

One of the business deductions I’d taken this year was buying new cellphones for Land and me. We shared a cloud account, and as a result, he can track my phone and vice versa. So I wasn’t as scared as I might have been. I had my phone in my pocket, turned on, and knew that he’d look for me. The way I had left without a word to him would raise his suspicions, especially since I left with my new food truck worker. As I’d said before, I was entirely too suspicious of new employees to do such a thing.

“I just happened to be getting food at the Curry in a Hurry truck one day. The door was open, and I saw him kiss her. Trust me; it was not a kiss that married people give each other. I’d been looking for some new business possibilities, and food trucks looked like a good way to go. So I took a job there and got him interested in the food suppliers. Pretty soon, he’d made enough to think about new trucks. I kicked in part of the money, and the business grew.”

“Then you blackmailed him into the counterfeiting?”

“After I told him that the first beta testing would be at your food truck, he was in. I didn’t have to use much persuasion.”

I was weirded out that a business word was being co-opted for use in the counterfeiting scheme. It sounded far too sophisticated for a guy merely printing twenties in his basement. I began to have a bad feeling about this. I’d brushed up against the mob in Capital City before, but they’d never directly opposed me. Now I had someone likely a part of that mob pointing a gun at me. I gave him a long look. “Your name isn’t really Booth, is it?” I asked.

“No, it’s Borelli. You might remember that from the time you found Big Tony’s body?” he said, finger tightening slightly on the trigger.

“I do,” I said. I wanted to say more—to keep the conversation going—but my mouth was dry now, and I was afraid that the conversation was coming to a close. “That’s how you could afford the trucks and had access to the printers and materials for the twenties.”

“Absolutely correct, but Pohler wanted a bigger share of the business, as if ten percent wasn’t enough for him. So he had to go.”

I tried not to gape. Pohler’s share was far less than what I’d expected. No wonder he’d been cheap with employees and other parts of the business. He could barely keep afloat on ten percent.

“I can tell you think that’s not much, but it was more than I was willing to pay. I’d seen him talk to the police a few times, and it was time for him to go—just like it’s time for you to go, too.”

A loudspeaker crackled to life. “This is the police. Come out with your hands up.”

I took a deep breath, but didn’t move my gaze from the gun pointed at me. I didn’t want to die now that I was so close to being saved. I kept perfectly still watching him. I knew that Thomas was playing a game of odds. The longer he stood there, the better the chance that he’d be apprehended. However, he didn’t want to leave a witness who had heard him confess all. Yet shooting me and making sure I was dead would take a few minutes that he didn’t have. He’d be charged with murder, and there might even be eyewitnesses to corroborate the charges.

Finally, after what felt like hours, but I knew was only a minute or so, he made a break for it. He slammed the office door shut on me, which was okay since I had no desire to chase an armed man around a warehouse.

He didn’t make it very far. Apparently, he had been fooled by Land’s approximation of a police speaker. I knew from experience that police don’t use that type of stereotyped announcement. If Danvers were here, it’d be far more likely he’d have a SWAT team in place before making any sound.

Land wasn’t alone, and I was surprised by his companion. It was Sabine, who was armed with two pistols and an assault rifle over her shoulder. Apparently she wasn’t afraid of some work after all.

Thomas raised his pistol, but he was too slow. Sabine fired twice, hitting him in each knee, so that he crumpled to the ground. The pistol went off, missing everything, and then skittered across the floor as Thomas hit the ground hard.

Sabine used her foot on Thomas to make sure he didn’t have any other weapons. Then she took a plastic zip tie and handcuffed him. She yanked him up only using one arm and sat him down on a chair where she used another, larger zip tie to secure him to the chair.

Land grabbed the handgun that Thomas had used and then grabbed me. “Are you okay?” he asked, before kissing me hard on the mouth. It was probably one of those kisses Thomas had talked about, but I suspected that we would continue the hot kisses long after the wedding was over.

When he was good and satisfied that I was all in one piece, he used his phone to call Detective Danvers. He would be pleased to wrap this up before the Secret Service arrived.