THE REAL GYRO (Food Truck Mysteries Book 4) by Chloe Kendrick

follow up on.
    “One gun shot at close range. The murder occurred about two hours before you found her, so—give or take—noon.”
    “Noon? How does that make sense?” I asked. “Her food truck should have been open and ready for business at noon. Instead the ME is saying that she was being shot, which almost assuredly means that the window was closed. I had a new line of inquiry as well. I would ask some of my customers if they’d noticed Holding Out for a Gyro that morning and whether or not the window had been open at some point before noon.
    I was beginning to have a feeling that if I solved some of these other minor mysteries that I could clear up the question about the locked food truck. If Janelle had been killed earlier, then the window would still be down and locked. That might explain part of the issue. However, I wondered under what circumstances the ME could be mistaken about the time of death. I knew of ways to make a body temperature get cooler faster, but I wasn’t sure about how to keep it warm. It wasn’t as if the killer could have kept her in the oven on warm.
    That line of thought made me jump to another topic. Perhaps I could better tell the time of death from the state of the kitchen. How far had she been in preparing the day’s fare? Those gyros wouldn’t make themselves. “That reminds me—did they find any food at the scene? Was she prepped and ready to go?”
    “There was meat on the griddle, and some other prep work done. However, the meat had been turned off at some point prior to the murder. Danvers can’t know if it was before or after the crime.” Land’s eyes lit up, which told me that he was awake enough to see where my thoughts were heading.
    “Why would the killer care if she was shot or she burned to death? Dead is dead, right?”
    “If the meat had been left on the grill, the fat and grease would have caught fire at some point, and the smoke would have called attention to the murder. If the fire department had been called to the scene, they might not have looked around to see if the place was locked up tight. The killer wanted the body to be found later rather than sooner, and he had planned this out. He wanted the crime to be impossible. Like I said, at this point there’s no way it could come to trial, even if they find evidence of who did this.”
    That fit in with my theory. If the body was discovered later, then it would be even harder to determine the exact time of death. The state of the kitchen could be a clue for me, or a way to throw the police off the track of the real time of death.
    “Are you just being your normal sexist self or is there some reason you keep using the word ‘he’?” I asked, wondering about his thought patterns.
    Land shrugged. “Habit. English doesn’t have a nice word for he or she.”
    He was right, so I let it slide. It was amazing how sometimes he noticed things about English that I didn’t bother to see.
    “What about the till? If she’d been open, there would have been money in the till, right?” I asked, hoping to find out more.
    “Yeah, the till was full. So that means that either she’d been open at some point, or she had a very full drawer from the previous day. Danvers is having a forensic accountant look at it and see if the food truck was making money.”
    “That’s good,” I said, “because I had an idea last night.”
    Land raised an eyebrow, which signaled that he was interested in hearing more.
    “With Janelle gone, I’m going to be looking into how and when she bought the truck. I was thinking that such an investigation could be considered due diligence for buying the truck, especially if the accountant says the food truck was making money.”
    Land actually grinned at me, but the smile only lasted a minute. “Wait, don’t you think you’ll raise some suspicion if you buy a competitor’s truck right after that competitor dies under mysterious circumstances?”
    I sighed. “That’s why I want to get