Mugshots by John A. Hoda

Author:John A. Hoda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John A. Hoda

As the busboy stacked our plates, we both sat staring silently into our coffee mugs.

Finally, the retired cop fledgling private investigator finished his thought. "And he never came back to tell me what was on his mind."

The diner was like any small town diner where everybody knows everybody and he picked the place for good reason. It probably made the best pancakes in The County to go along with the bottomless cup of coffee. I found it from my motel easily enough, after I scraped the layer of frost from my windshield the chilly morning after my meeting with the Insured. The Insured urged me that I should meet the PI and hear what he had to say. I now learned that there was much more to this claim than I could imagine.

"He had come to Jesus, just before his last trip and wanted to confide in me." The PI knew all the players here and more. "The driver wasn't always coming home empty, I suspect." he said.

The former cop's prior contacts in the Organized Crime units said that a well known motorcycle gang with affiliates all over the country was rumored to be in charge of smuggling, fencing stolen goods, and moving cigarettes from the southern low tax states to Canada, along with the usual gun and drug running. It was a sophisticated operation. Then there was the not so discreet situation where the grieving widow was on a long vacation in Hawaii with her boyfriend, betting on the life insurance proceeds and the workers comp benefits to pay out any day.

"The driver was set up at the American Eagle Truck stop for a reason. The wife grew up a few towns over interstate I-691 and it was the long-time home of one of the gang's affilIates. A phone call or two and the shooter would know exactly when the driver would be there." he continued.

Loose threads were becoming connections of how the Special Investigations Unit could delay payment. I never had an insurance case like this and knew that I might not ever catch a real-life homicide again. Sitting there swirling cream into my mug, the story also swirled around my head. The truck driver could have been running contraband in an international smuggling operation run by a North American motorcycle gang and a contract hit was ordered to shut him up before he could cleanse his soul in confession to the PI.

The second scenario that seemed to be the working hypothesis was that the driver's wife wanted him dead, while on the job, so she could collect a double payout.

Both scenarios were possible. Catching a bullet from a would-be truck thief was the least plausible third scenario.

The body was dropped in Massachusetts a few feet from the Boston Harbor instead of with the fishes where he would possibly never be found. Why Massachusetts and not Connecticut?

Why put the body on display and why there? The truck was still missing so it could look like a truck theft gone bad.

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