Leftovers
Authors: 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.
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Table of Contents
I climbed into the food truck, carrying my bag of clothes. I’d done my public duty that morning, and now I needed to get to work. The last few months had seen sales skyrocket at my food truck, Dogs on the Roll. It was definitely a mixed bag for me. The money was great, but it meant that one person could barely handle the traffic when the other had to go testify in court.
“What’s with the bag?” Land said. “Are you going running after work?” He smirked at his own comment, knowing that I was more likely to spontaneously combust than exercise of my own accord.
“Clothes from the trial,” I answered succinctly. I started taking orders in hopes that Land would stop asking questions. Helping to condemn someone to death had not been an easy task for me. I was more a forgiving soul, and punishment, despite the fact that my aunt had been murdered, was something difficult for me. I had a hard time justifying my desire to help prosecute these people with my normally compassionate state.
“What’s eating you?” Land asked. That had become his pun of late, thinking it humorous since we worked in a food truck.
I just rolled my eyes and took two more orders. I went back to pouring coffees. We had a lull in the traffic after another 15 minutes, and Land started his questioning again.
“So what’s going on? You haven’t said two words since you got back?” Land stopped cooking for a minute to look at me. He was normally the silent one. Perhaps he was afraid that I would usurp his role on the truck.
I took a deep breath, knowing that sharing the truth would not make for an easy conversation. “I’m just feeling frustrated. I was on the witness stand, but they didn’t mention Linda Zoz at all.”
“Who?” Land asked.
“The health inspector, Linda Zoz. It was all about the rest of that ordeal, but the prosecutors and defense acted as if she hadn’t existed. It was frustrating.” I felt as though I might cry.
The ordeal of finding the health inspector’s body had been traumatic for me. Someone had cut the head off of the woman, presumably the health inspector, and used it as a paperweight on top of a pile of government papers which had been soaked in blood. Her eyes had been open, and her mouth had made the same O-shape that the other corpse in the case had made. The rest of her body had collapsed onto the floor, where it, too, pooled blood on the carpet.
I had to go with my observations on the matter. I’d interrupted the murderer and had been rendered unconscious for my trouble. I had woken only inches from the body, and I had been in the same room with the person who had done this. Those two thoughts haunted me for weeks.
“Danvers already explained this to you. They got a confession about the other murders. So they’re just going to prosecute that case. For some reason, he won’t cop to the health inspector’s murder, and so they’ll just close the case anyway when they get a guilty plea on this case. It’s easier.” Land looked very peaceful about the whole matter, but he hadn’t been forced to testify in the case.
I grabbed fistfuls of my apron to stop from getting too emotional about this, but it wasn’t easy. “Why do you think that is?”
Land raised an eyebrow. “You want me to tell you why a psychopath does something? No thanks. That way madness lies.” He went back to cutting up some pickles for some more of the homemade condiments we used on the hot dogs. Everything was fresh for Dogs on the Roll. “Besides, why do you care? She gave your aunt all kinds of shit about the permits. Alice almost didn’t get this truck because of her.”
I had to concede that Land had a point. At first, Alice had struggled to get a permit. Alice was able to learn that the city had some permits available from a friend. However, when she went to apply for one, the agency said they were out. She had spent months going around and around with city government over that. Finally, she took a count of the trucks in town and went back to the permit office and demanded to talk to someone about their lack of math skills. The Consumer Affairs Department had been the one giving her trouble about the permit.
Then she had failed to pass a health inspection. Linda Zoz had failed her the first two times. The third time another vendor cleaned the place for her, and the health inspector failed her again. That would have meant that she couldn’t apply for another permit for six months, but the other vendor went to bat for her and pointed out all the errors in the inspection report to the health inspector. The options at that point were to relent or to have a scandal on her hands. Linda Zoz, who was responsible for all three inspections, had finally relented and given my aunt a clean bill of health.
I had to be honest; we had closed the case surrounding the food trucks, but now in retrospect, we’d answered some questions and left other ones unresolved. No one would be charged with the murder of Linda Zoz, and the reasons why she’d refused to pass my aunt on the health inspection were still unclear. While I knew many cases met this fate, it felt wrong to leave it this way. My aunt would have wanted to learn the truth, and so did I.
It seemed like a conspiracy with the information that they’d tried to deny her a permit as well, but I had no proof for that supposition. I had a hard time believing that the two departments had both lied and delayed my aunt’s truck for no reason. I wasn’t a big one for conspiracy theories, especially if another easier solution was available.
With the closing of this case, the answers to those questions would remain forever unanswered. I wasn’t sure that I could live with that. My aunt had been a model citizen, so why had she been treated in that manner? And it concerned me, in that it could happen to me at any point as well. The future of my business was dependent on my permit and the yearly health inspections.
I wasn’t sure why that bothered me so much now. Perhaps it was the fact that I’d been the first to discover the gruesome murder. Perhaps it was the legacy of my aunt and what she’d done for me. I felt grateful for her bequest to me, and I wanted to understand why she’d had such a hard time getting the truck business moving.
Even so, it was most likely that the men behind the murders had killed Linda Zoz too. However, I couldn’t be as sanguine about the results as the police and prosecutors were. Granted, they did this for a living and saw this as a matter of open and closed, wins and losses. I saw it more as the death of someone who would not be avenged if the police were wrong.
I pondered these things as I took orders, handled the money, and handed out the hot dogs to the hungry customers. Land apparently had given up trying to persuade me—or even talk to me—in my current mood. He was cooking and filling orders in silence.
Detective Jax Danvers stopped by after lunch. He seemed to have an unerring sense of when we had a break in the customers. Sometimes I had a feeling he stood behind a lamppost until he could see the pause or had some app on his phone to tell him when it was safe to come around. He’d been involved in the murder case and had been one of the policemen who had found me unconscious after Linda’s murder.
“Good job in court today,” he said as he ordered. Normally he just had a cup of coffee, which he got gratis, but today he ordered three hot dogs and a Coke. I was a bit surprised by the fitness buff eating like a couch potato.
He was still wearing his suit from court today. I suspected that he’d worn it to impress the women. He did look good in it. His jacket was tailored to highlight his broad shoulders and narrow waist. His crisp white shirt showed off the contours of his chest and arms. If I was a juror, I would likely ignore the testimony and just watch the man on the stand. He would make a few hearts flutter.
“She’s stewing about the health inspector,” Land said helpfully. “She wants you to fry someone for it.”
“What? Why?” Danvers seemed genuinely surprised by the news. I had stated on several occasions that it struck me as odd that no one had taken credit for the murder. After you confess to multiple crimes, why should you refuse to admit to one more? The logic had always struck me as off. It’s like saying that I stole the bag of M&Ms, but not the blue ones. Why lie when you’re caught? It’s not as if they could execute him twice for admitting to one more crime.
“She thinks that maybe you haven’t found the killer yet.” Land was just being incredibly giving today. I’m sure he thought he was being helpful in his own way, but I felt awkward being talked about in the third person while I stood between them. I knew that while Land played nice with Detective Danvers, they were not friendly at all. There was an unresolved history between them.
Danvers just growled. Normally, I would have found that sexy, but now I knew that this came from frustration, and there was nothing attractive about it. During our last case, we’d shared a kiss, but neither one of us had been willing to discuss it afterward. I thought of what Land was doing now and wondered if he would be willing to do the same for my relationship with Danvers. I doubted it. Land had warned me to stay away from Danvers, and I didn’t think he’d take kindly to being ignored in that manner.
“So what do you plan on doing?” Danvers finally asked. “I know better than to try to talk you out of wasting your time like this.” His tone told me that he was annoyed.
“I went to the health inspector’s office to find out why she’d failed my aunt three times. I think I’d like to see those reports. I can’t talk to her, obviously, but maybe the reports will tell me something. I just find it incredibly coincidental that she was murdered just as I was going to talk to her about this. It feels like they should be connected.”
Danvers sighed. “If you work on police cases long enough, you’d learn that coincidence does happen. So her death was part of a different matter, and your timing was unfortunate. Your aunt could have gotten any number of different inspectors. This inspector could just have not liked your aunt. Ever think of that?”
“You mean the inspector was homophobic? I guess it’s possible,” I admitted. I gave it some thought. My aunt had become involved with a woman after the death of her husband and the two of them had started the food truck together. My family was confused by the matter, thinking that orientation was rigid and unchanging. They strongly thought that Alice’s girlfriend had been her downfall—and the cause of her death. I was now wondering if the food truck and the matter of the health inspections might be related to her death instead.
“If you start looking into this, you could uncover a bunch of ugly attitudes and behaviors, and I really don’t think that would serve you well—or the family of the inspector, either.” Danvers tried to put on a respectful expression, but I had a feeling that he was just saying this to put a lid on any notion I had of looking into this further. He had a point. I only had my permits due to the determination of my aunt. If I kept up the pressure to find out more about this death, the same people could make my life hard when I had to renew the licenses and permits.
“So you’re telling me to drop it?” I asked. I already knew the answer. Both Land and Danvers wanted the same thing here: me to stop pondering this death and get back to the food truck.
Danvers sighed. He seemed to be aggrieved. “Yeah, I am, but I can see that’s not going to go over well. So why don’t I get you copies of the three failed health inspections. That’s what you were going to get from the inspector before she got killed and you got knocked on the head. So you can find out what you want from that and be done with it. Okay?”
I had to admit that it was a good idea, so I nodded. Land watched all of this in quiet observance. He waited until Danvers left to speak. “What exactly is going on with you two?”
“Nothing,” I said a bit too quickly. “Why?”
“I told you when you first drooled on him that you needed to watch out for Jax Danvers. If anything, my warning to you would be twice as strong now as it was then. Stay away from him. He’s dangerous.” Land was washing pans as he spoke, but his eyes burned into me. I had thought it a gentle warning before, but now he was being very serious. Given that Land rarely spoke in full sentences to me, a second warning was definitely something to take notice of.
“Why? What is going on with you two that you have to warn me about him?” I asked. Since Danvers and Land had some sort of acquaintanceship before I met either one of them, I thought that he should share more, even though Land was very closed mouth about his past. I had no idea where my aunt had met him even. He was a huge asset to the business, so I didn’t want to piss him off too much, but his lack of communication drove me crazy at times.
“Just that I’ve done business with him in the past. He won’t hesitate to put him or his career in front of any personal relationships, so if you’re in the way, he’ll run you down. I’m thinking that he’s not going to like anyone second-guessing his police work, especially on a case that is at trial right now. It’s been on the news the last few nights, and so has he. I doubt that he would appreciate you making him look stupid on camera. He has ambitions” Land finished drying the pans and put them away as he spoke. We were almost ready to leave.
“Thanks for the warning, but I know what I’m doing.”
Land snorted. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re young and naïve. You have no idea what you’re doing.”
His manner angered me. I finished counting the cash, completed the deposit bag, and started the food truck to drive it back to the secured lot for the evening. Land said his good-byes, and I headed off. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do after work, but I knew that I had two huge male egos to knock down a few pegs.