MURDER IN THE SPOTLIGHT (Food Truck Mysteries Book 2) (6 page)

He watched me carefully, but I just smiled at him. Finally, he asked, “What can I do for you?”

I went into my spiel about wanting to catch the person who was responsible for peeing on our pots and pans. I told Jim that if he’d let me review the tapes that perhaps we could have a scene where I confronted the person responsible, which would lead to great ratings for the drama associated with such a scene. I made it sound like advertisers and viewers would eat that up, which sadly, was probably the truth.

I must have made a good pitch, because he hit the button on the intercom system and got a secretary into his office in a few seconds. He explained the situation, and she motioned for me to follow her.

The secretary took me to a small room with a television, DVD player and a chair. “I’ll go get you the security footage. I’ll be pulling just the one camera’s view for the day in question. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She left me in the room, closing the door behind me. I thought about exploring the area to see if I could find the person who had been talking to Jim, but I also knew I had to be back here before the secretary returned with the DVDs. I sat patiently in the room, playing with my phone. I’d gone through my emails and was playing a mindless game app when she appeared with some DVDs.

“I burned these for you. This should be everything. The security firm that set this system up sends us the security footage after one week. It’s just a series of digital files that are maintained on our server. We hold on to them for three more weeks, and then remove them to make room for the new footage.” She popped the first DVD into the player and grabbed the remote. A few clicks later, I was watching the view from the camera nearest to where the pots and pans had been left on set.

True to her word, the secretary had given me almost the entire day’s worth of video. I started fast forwarding through the DVD, since the pots and pans had not even put in an appearance yet. I finished the first DVD and put the second one into the player. I was about 20 minutes into the second disk when the power went out. The room was pitch-black, and an eerie silence fell over the entire area.

Since the room I was in was used for viewing video, there were no windows or light sources in the room except for the overhead lighting. I stumbled across the room and felt my way to the door. I opened it and was greeted by the glow of the vaguely green emergency lights that lit the hallway. I walked down the hall, trying my best to remember the path that the secretary had used earlier. I made a few wrong turns but finally came back to the producers’ offices. Jim Jackson was standing in the hall with his hands on his hips. He did not look pleased.

“What the hell is going on? Have you seen Louise?” he asked. “Louise? Where are you?” he shouted.

I assumed that Louise was the secretary. “No, I came looking for someone to find out what happened. I don’t know where she is. What exactly is going on here?”

Jim Jackson mumbled something and stormed off. I decided to follow him, thinking that I didn’t particularly want to be alone in a darkened building with a prankster on the loose. That was not my idea of a good time. I followed Jim down another long hallway, one I had not been down before. He stopped at a particular door and pulled out a set of keys to unlock it. He pushed the door open. Again this room had no windows or other light sources, so it was near pitch-black inside.

“Hold the door,” he barked at me.

I held the door and waited. Within a few seconds the lights were back on.

“Some jackass flipped off the circuit breaker. I’m tired of these pranks,” he said as he sailed by me. I hurried to follow him as he headed down the hallway again. The halls looked incredibly different with the lights on, and I wasn’t sure I would have been able to find my way back to the producer’s office without assistance. A few heads popped up over the walls of the cubicles, but we didn’t stop to talk to anyone.

When we arrived at his office, I headed back down the other hallway to the viewing room. I stepped inside the room and immediately noticed that the DVDs were gone. I looked around on the tiled floor, thinking that perhaps I’d knocked them to the floor when I was traipsing around in the dark. However, they were nowhere to be found. Either Louise or the prankster had removed them from the room while I was gone.

Of course, this meant another trip to the producer’s office. I found Jim on the phone and waited for him to finish.

“Someone took the surveillance videos while we were fixing the lights,” I explained. “Would it be too much to ask Louise to burn another set for me?”

He nodded and paged the secretary on the intercom again. The woman took her sweet time about getting here this time around. I stood outside the office for several minutes waiting. I explained the situation to her when I saw her. She nodded and headed off to repeat her earlier task for me.

She returned in a matter of minutes. She wasn’t carrying any DVDs which did not look promising to me. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said as she approached. “The video files are gone.”

“Gone? What happened to them?” I asked, already knowing the answer. Someone, presumably the prankster, had turned out the lights in the studio, taken the DVDs and then erased the files before Louise could get back to them and burn another set. Or perhaps they had been deleted prior to the power outage. Either way, the files were gone and so were my answers.

The prankster had been close enough to the room where I was to handle the situation. While I wasn’t any closer to finding out who had perpetrated the pranks, I did know that it had to involve someone from the studio. I added in the conversation I’d overheard in Jim’s office, and I had evidence of the studio’s complicity in this matter. I felt good that I had ruled out the contestants, meaning that I might be able to trust them with news about the pranks.

I left the building and called Danvers to tell him about the latest events in the saga. His phone went right to voicemail, which was about the way my day had been going. I left a message and headed for home.

I made it home, cooked some dinner, and sat down to make a timeline of the events before the most recent challenge. At least no one could to do a mind dump and erase my memories. I could control at least that much of the process. I was feeling frustrated that every time I got close to an answer, someone was a step ahead of me, removing the clues. For a paranoid moment, I wondered if Land or Danvers might be involved, since I’d shared my plans with them. However, I soon let that go, since I knew that Land had no connections to the studio. The producers had run a background check on all of us to ensure that we didn’t have any relatives or close friends at the studio that would provide us with information on the contests or selection criteria. Danvers was not really a likely suspect, since he didn’t know my exact schedule or times.

I drew up a timeline for the day in question. I blocked out the times that the food truck was in the secured lot. I highly doubted that the prankster could have managed to break into the lot, and it seemed unlikely that an amateur could get over that fence or through the gates.

So essentially it left the time period in which we had taken the truck to the studio, left it there while we were given our challenge and then from the time we went to our location until we closed up and drove the truck back to the lot.

The timeframe was much easier than I expected. I knew that I’d not left the truck once we left the studio. That only allowed the time when we went inside the studio for someone to steal the cilantro. As I had suspected, the prankster had not gone from location to location, taking things from guarded trucks. He or she had gone to the studio with the rest of us, taken a minute to sneak outside and take the ingredients. Our truck is locked, but we’d learned the hard way that the security system on the truck itself was shoddy. It would be simple to steal from multiple trucks if they were all parked in the same lot.

Having narrowed it down in that way, I knew that I’d have to investigate further to find out who had left the studio while we were filming. I could recall some people, but I didn’t have them all. I figured that Land would know who had stood next to him, and he would be able to fill in the holes in the chart. With a narrowed down list, I could start asking some questions.

The next morning came early at my house. I was up and out the door before 4:30 a.m. I made it to the lot, picked up the food truck, and had it to our location on Elm Street in a matter of minutes. Land and I always text each other to let the other know when the truck has been picked up. It saves time since no one is hunting for the truck in the wrong location. Typically, I was the one receiving the texts most days, a fact that I ascribed to being a woman; therefore, I needed more time for prep before I could appear in public. I wasn’t sure that Land believed me, but he also didn’t seem to care. So I let things stand.

I started my prep work and waited for him to appear. It figured that the one day I wanted to talk about clues and a timeline, he was slower in arriving. He showed up just after 5 a.m. and got to work on the day’s condiments. He was chopping avocados and pickles when I broached the subject with him.

“Do you remember if anyone left the studio the day before yesterday when we found out about the challenge?” I asked. I explained to him how I’d drawn up the timeline of events and the only time we could have been robbed was during the studio time.

He nodded. “I figured that out last night. As for the other people, nobody left once they got on set. Marsha gets irate if anyone wanders off on their own. The only place the contestants should be in the studio is on the show’s set or the green room. Everything else is off-limits. You’ve probably seen more of the studio than anyone else there.”

“Okay, so what does that leave us?” I asked, feeling like I’d just talked myself out of thinking anyone had taken the cilantro. If there hadn’t been other trucks that had the same circumstances, I might have thought that Land had merely forgotten the cilantro—as he’d not brought the avocado on another day. However, with all the thefts and pranks going on, I felt that he was right. We’d had the cilantro taken from our truck while we were inside the studio.

“The staff. The people who work at the studio can come and go as they please. Any one of them could have stepped outside and taken the ingredients. If they’d have waited until the filming started, there would have been practically no chance of getting caught. They’d know that all of us would be on camera, so there was no way that we’d be able to go outside. They could do what they wanted.”

I had to agree with him. The best shot for someone to take the ingredients would have been while we were filming the introduction of the new challenge. That meant someone from the studio was behind this. I thought of the DVDs yesterday and how easily that fit into this theory. The best person to manipulate the circuit breakers, steal the DVDs and wipe out the files would be someone who worked at the studio. They’d know the procedures and which rooms in the building to access. I explained all of this to Land, who merely nodded.

I went back to counting the money. Land took his phone out, hit a few buttons, and waited. The phone rang, and I gave him an odd glance. Land didn’t seem to know many people in Capital City, so for him to decide to call someone during work hours was strange indeed. I couldn’t recall him ever making or taking a personal call during work hours—ever.

Detective Danvers’ voice filled the food truck. I was startled. Not only was Land calling Danvers, but apparently he had the detective’s phone number on his device. They definitely were more involved than I suspected. I didn’t have Danvers’ phone number, and I’d worked on a previous murder case with him. I still had no idea how a Basque chef and a local police detective could know each other. Neither of them had shared that information despite several hints from me.

“Land, what’s up?” the detective said. The use of his first name, almost like a buddy, was surprising as well.

Land cleared his throat and quickly explained the entire situation regarding the DVDs and the timeline. He explained how the studio staff could easily have accomplished both of these while the contestants were less likely to be able to have the time and expertise. He finished, and Danvers was quiet for a few minutes.

Danvers said, “If it’s the staff, I doubt that this is real malice. I’m thinking that this is a huge publicity stunt to get this show in the news. I’m not a big fan of tricks like this, but I’ll tell you, it makes me far less inclined to do anything about it. Their circus, their monkeys. If I got involved, the most likely charges to come out of this would be hauling some of the staff in and threatening to charge them with filing a false report. Given that they brought this to my attention to begin with, I don’t know if it would stick or not.” He sighed deeply. “I wish these reality shows would just go away. It’s all one big publicity grab to become a semi-celebrity.”

Land gave me a broad smirk. Even though I could sympathize with Danvers’ comments, I hadn’t joined the show to get personal notoriety. I had wanted to increase the visibility of the food truck and make enough income from it to support myself without counting on my parents. I’d sat at home on their sofa for too long before my aunt had passed away and left me the truck. My business degree had earned me scant interviews and no offers. I had absolutely no desire to go back to those days.

“So, I’m guessing you’re going to say ‘let it drop’?” Land shot a look at me as he spoke. Subtlety was not a strong suit of his.

Danvers laughed, which wasn’t a good sign. “Well, if it gets too bad, I’d go to the show’s producers and tell them what you told me, but yeah, if this is all smoke and mirrors from the staff, then you don’t have much to go on. You’re going to dump this at their door and then what? Expect them to stop trying to get some buzz going for the show? Good luck with that.”

They talked for a few more minutes, but they gave no clues as to how they knew each other. I figured that Danvers knew he was on speaker and behaved accordingly, which meant nothing too personal would be said. I would be left in the dark as to their connection. I tried not to think about it too much, but when I saw or heard them together, my curiosity was definitely piqued.

Land pressed the disconnect button, and the truck fell silent again. “I don’t suppose you’ll follow that advice, will you?”

I gave him a grin as I put up the window. “To some degree, yes. I will tell the producers what we found and then drop it. We’ll just try to prepare for whatever pranks might occur. I’m going to talk to my mother and see if she can be on-call for any emergency runs that might need to be made to pick up ingredients or whatever.”

He nodded, which was about as much as I typically got from him.

The next six hours were chaos. The promos for the TV show had started to air, and we had many more customers that morning. They all asked about the show and asked about our standing and whether we were still in the competition. I explained to all of them that we had signed a confidentiality agreement that meant we couldn’t say a word about any of it until the episodes aired. Overall, they were understanding about it. However, it only served to change the subject to discussions of the other contestants and their personalities. Who was I friends with? Who was the biggest bitch on set?

We finished our cleanup at 2:05pm. I did some calculations and figured that most of the staff would still be around if I got there by 3. I wasn’t going to clean up or put on a different outfit. I might have in other circumstances, but given that this was a show about food trucks, they’d seen me in these clothes before. I had nothing to hide from the show’s staff.

I drove the truck back to the lot and drove my car over to the studio. I knew my way to the producers’ offices by this point, since I’d traversed that same path a dozen times the day before.

There were no conversations going on when I approached Jackson’s office today. I knocked on the door and went in. No one was around. The lights were off, and the computer was shut down. It didn’t look like anyone had been there in quite some time.

I sighed and headed to our set, but again, the set was empty and still. I decided to try the green room, thinking that Marsha might be there and be able to tell me where Jim Jackson was.

I was right on one part of that supposition. Marsha was there. She was on the floor, tied back to back with Annabella. However, neither of them would be telling me anything as they’d both had their throats slit from side to side. Their heads lolled at precarious angles, telling me how deep the cuts had run. Someone had not liked these women at all. This crime felt personal, even though I couldn’t imagine who would know both of these women except through the show.

The pool of blood circled them and started to make little rivers toward various parts of the room. I felt a lurch in my stomach and headed out of the room as fast as my wobbly legs could move me. I made it halfway to the exit door before I lost my lunch.