Free A GRAVE CONCERN (Food Truck Mysteries Book 8) by Chloe Kendrick

eyes at me, but some of the antagonism left his body. “You could have just as easily asked your fiancé. I told him about my interest months ago.”
    “What?” I said. I cursed Land for being tight-lipped. He’d let me speculate on their relationship for months, while he’d known the truth all along. I tried to think back to see if I’d asked him directly if he had known their status. I would have to be more forthright with him on some things if I wanted to know the truth.
    “Yeah, not that it’s any of your business, but Sabine and I go way back—to Basque back. Now that we’re both older, there’s no reason not to see if things would work out. Land gave us his approval, so that was that.”
    I tried to think of having Danvers as a potential brother-in-law. It might put a cramp in my investigations if I had to take his position into consideration. Worse yet, we could compare notes on cases at family holiday dinners.
    “Well, I still didn’t have anything to do with her taking this art gallery job. She attended the party with us last night to make it look like we were a family business operation, rather than looking for answers. She went off by herself, and the next thing I knew, she had a job.” I shrugged to let him know that I hadn’t done anything with the infiltration of the art gallery.
    He made a growling sound. “That’s just like her. She is not someone who does things just because you ask nicely. I’m sure her plan is to beat you two to the punch and solve this on her own.”
    I wasn’t sure that I liked being out-sleuthed by another amateur detective. “That might show up Land, but would that be wise? She’d be getting in the way of an investigation and obstructing justice.” I thought about this. Land had warned me about the repercussions of the times I’d solved cases before Danvers.  I was a mere acquaintance. It wouldn’t be good to have his girlfriend do the same. Since I was in a matchmaking mood lately, I just decided that I would have to hurry things along and solve the murder before anyone else did—just to keep the peace, of course.
    “No, it would be downright stupid,” Danvers said, with a tone of total exasperation. I recognized the tone too well from our previous encounters.
    “Then you need to throw some information my way, so that she doesn’t show you up.” I said matter-of-factly, wondering if this ploy would work.
    Apparently, it would. Danvers scoffed at first and then opened up. “The autopsy was finished last night. The details are not going to be released, but the cause of death was a blow to the head. We haven’t found the murder weapon, and I don’t know if we’ll announce it even if we do, but it’s starting to look like the crime was not overly premediated.”
    “Overly premeditated?” I asked, not sure that I recognized that term.
    “A case where the motive might have existed prior to the crime, but the perp didn’t actually decide to do it until the moment it happened. I mean, who would pick a park as the place to kill someone?”
    I thought back to the night where I’d seen Hamilton Preston in the park. I’d casually seen him during my run. How many other people might have seen him, as well? It was curious that no one else had come forward to report what they’d seen.
    “Well, it worked. No one saw him—or her—do it,” I said.
    “Yeah, but the autopsy suggested that it might have been a rock or piece of cement. That’s not exactly a premeditated instrument. It’s more the type of thing you pick up in the heat of an argument. As luck would have it, most rocky surfaces are hard to get fingerprints from, so even if we found the exact one that hit him, we still wouldn’t have much to go on.”
    “So what now? Any thought on the time of death?” I asked, hoping to get as much out of Danvers as I could before he had cause to regret it. “That would help with the alibis.”
    He laughed. “I know why we ask for time of death. You don’t