A GRAVE CONCERN (Food Truck Mysteries Book 8) Read Online Free PDF Page B

and I didn’t want to be a part of that. It was a trick.”
    I nodded, reminded of what I’d thought about the other man’s manicure and haircut. Who were these men, and why were they out on the streets?”
    “Why do you think they were out here?” I asked, hoping he had more information than Delores.
    “He asked a lot of questions about us. He asked Delores about my story. She made something up.” The man laughed, and its sound was a touch too loud and manic. “I don’t like people knowing too much about me.”
    I nodded. “What kind of questions did he ask?”
    “He wanted to know what branch of the service I was in, where I served, when I served, if I had family around here. I was worried that he was sent by my parents and here to bring me home. I don’t want to go home.”
    “I see,” I said plainly. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved more in this man’s life. I knew that I’d have to tread carefully here.
    “He’s gone, though. I made sure that he was gone for good.” A smile appeared on the man’s face and it ran chills up my spine. I didn’t like the way he’d said that, especially since Hamilton was now dead.
    “And how did you do that?” I asked. I was afraid of the answer.
    “I told him to go the park and look around. That the answers he wanted were there. He left after that, and I was glad to be rid of him.”
    Had Albert been the one who had been arguing with Hamilton Preston? And why had he wanted to know so much information about a homeless vet? Was this a campaign strategy, or something personal? I made a note to find out if Preston had any family in the military.
    I still wasn’t sure how I was going to get to see the family. Danvers was icing me out on the investigation, so I would have no official standing with the police for this case. I wondered if this was something that Land had asked Danvers to do, or if the policeman had just had enough of me getting involved in his cases.
    ***
    Land wasn’t coming over tonight, so I stopped and got some takeout on the way home. The local burger place looked good, and I brought home some fries, too. I sat down to eat with the papers I’d collected at Hamilton Preston’s campaign headquarters. I started looking through his positions on several issues. He was strong on local businesses, which wasn’t a surprise, since he and his family owned an art gallery. He was campaigning on new ordinances against the homeless, which made even less sense as to why he would have been dressed like one. He didn’t have a listed opinion on veterans, but that could easily be understood since he was merely running for city council. A quick search showed that he hadn’t served in the military, and it didn’t appear that his father had, either.
    I used my tablet and looked up Chesterfield and Yarmouth, the two candidates who the staffer at the campaign office had suggested. The first site I hit told me that both of these candidates had been running behind Preston. That would be a motive for murder, I thought.
    City council only elected nine candidates to office, so the top nine were the winners and the rest didn’t make the cut. If anyone dropped out of the race, everyone below him in the polls benefited. Was winning an election that important to these people?
    Stan Chesterfield was the first candidate I looked at, based solely on the alphabet. Chesterfield was an old name in Capital City. His father had been mayor. His grandfather had been mayor, and his great-grandfather had been governor many years ago. So it had been expected that Stan Chesterfield would breeze to victory in this race. However, he was lagging in the polls. With Preston out of the race, Chesterfield would finish at a distant ninth place, but he would manage to finish as a winner.
    I had to wonder if the Chesterfield family would kill just to get their progeny a place on city council. Would they consider it an affront to their name if the latest progeny had lost his first election? It