MURDER TO GO (Food Truck Mysteries Book 1) by Chloe Kendrick

called it a day. I was hot, sticky and tired and I wanted nothing more than a shower and a nap.

Chapter 7
     
    I called Land the next morning, professing to be ill. I was actually fine, but after all that had happened, I needed a rest. My father had agreed to meet with me for an hour to look into the source of Alice’s funds for the truck. However, he’d dictated the ridiculous hour of 9 a.m., knowing I had to work, but I opted to make time for the meeting rather than try to change it.
    We met for coffee at the Starbucks closest to my house. While I didn’t think that their coffee was nearly as good as the coffee at Dogs on the Roll, it was decadent to have someone else serve me for a change. I just sat in my chair while they brought me steaming drinks and pastries. No one screamed at me for creamer or relish. It was refreshing.
    He pulled out a pad of paper and some documents from his bag. In his desire to be a hipster, my father had grown a goatee and carried a bag rather than a briefcase. I wasn’t bothered, but I did find it amusing at times. I would never say that to him, but my mother has made comments behind his back. She felt that their counterculture days were long behind them.
    He cleared his throat in his best business voice and looked into my eyes. “I don’t like what you’re doing here, you know that.” I wondered if he spoke to his clients like this or just his daughter. I wanted to know which part of what I was doing he objected to. Was it the investigation of Aunt Alice’s death, the manner in which the truck was obtained, or the will or—? I had too many irons in the fire to decipher vague pronouncements.
    I nodded and made sure to reply in the same. “I totally understand. I wouldn’t be doing this except for the fact that people keep dying, and the only thing they have in common is the food truck. I want to learn more about how Alice got the truck, where it came from. The first peculiarity I ran into was the fact that she’d bought it at a police auction for cash when she didn’t have that much money available to her.”
    My dad looked down at the papers. “You’re right about that. She didn’t have $30,000 at the time that she purchased the truck. Not in savings and not in investments. Even if she had that much of value, she did nothing to liquidate her assets to gather that much in cash. Besides, it would be extremely foolhardy to collect that much cash on the off chance that you might end up buying a used food vehicle at an auction. I have to wonder if she had some advance knowledge that the truck would be there and that it would go for approximately that much money.”
    “I noticed that someone else was trying to outbid her. Did she get rooked on the sale?” I had to wonder if she’d gotten a bad deal. Was that the real scam involved here
    My father shook his head. “The other bidder dropped out after a while, if I remember correctly, but the price she paid was still below market value. So I don’t think there was anything wrong with the transaction from that standpoint. She just didn’t have that kind of money to be spending though.”
    I took a deep sip of my coffee and swallowed. Not bad, though I still preferred our coffee to theirs. I took a bite of my muffin and waited for my dad to continue. He didn’t. After a moment, I asked, “Do you have an explanation?”
    He shook his head. “None. There’s an influx of cash into her account in the month before the auction. Three transactions for $9,000 each. No explanation. They were completed at an ATM, so no questions from the teller. It’s probably been too long to ask the banks to review the ATM cameras, and that’s even if you could get a subpoena to get them to review them in the first place. They don’t give away private information because you ask nicely. The totals kept this entire deposit under the radar in terms of the federal government. This is the way that drug dealers and terrorists do things. It’s not how