“According to the foreman of the foreclosure crew, the tape that was already loaded in the recorder captured someone else threatening Iris’s life, and the crew believes it was her brother, not Tatlock. He was apparently going on about how he’d kill her if she ever dared record him without his permission. It sounded like he broke something in the room, too.” Kinsley motioned to the left side of the whiteboard. “Until I have those tapes in hand, I thought I’d start with a preliminary breakdown of everyone connected to Iris. Her parents, Richard and Eden Bell, still live in Fallbrook, though they downsized a couple of years ago. The brother, Joey, runs a landscaping business in town. Tatlock, as I said, died in prison. And then there are friends and neighbors mentioned in the original police reports who were interviewed at the time. I want to map out who had access to the house that night and who might have had a reason to want Iris silenced.”
Izzy studied the board with a thoughtful expression, her arms crossed loosely over her chest.
“Kind of creepy that she was secretly recording people, isn’t it? I mean, what was her endgame?”
“According to the statements from the original investigation, Iris wanted to be an investigative journalist. That’s what kicked off her interest in taping conversations.” Kinsley paused, considering how much more complicated the truth likely was. A seventeen-year-old with that many recordings wasn’t just practicing for a future career. She was collecting ammunition, though against whom and for what purpose remained to be seen. “But twenty-seven tapes are a lot of material. If she were recording arguments, confessions, private moments, that’sa significant amount of leverage over a significant number of people. Any one of them could have had a motive if they found out what she was doing.”
Kinsley’s gaze shifted to the center of the whiteboard, where she’d pinned Iris’s senior portrait. The photograph showed a young woman with waist-length blonde hair and striking blue eyes that seemed to challenge even through the faded image. There was a sharpness to her expression, a tilt to her chin that suggested she had been fully aware of the effect she had on people and wasn’t above using it.
“She doesn’t look like someone who would end up at the bottom of a staircase,” Izzy observed quietly.
“Does anyone?” Kinsley asked, a note of wryness in her voice given that murder was quite literally what paid their salaries. “A part of me is hoping to agree with the jury on Tatlock’s guilt. But if the tapes tell a different story, we owe it to everyone involved to follow where they lead. Doorbell cameras and home security systems weren’t really a thing back in the nineties, so there’s no footage to fall back on. These recordings might be the closest thing to an eyewitness account we’ll ever get.”
Izzy launched into a nostalgic tangent about the nineties being a great decade, listing off reasons that ranged from music to fashion to the blissful absence of social media, but Kinsley’s own words had derailed her concentration entirely.
Cameras. Surveillance. Recordings.
Practically everything nowadays was recorded in some way, from store cameras to traffic cameras to doorbell systems on every other house in the suburbs. The only reason she had been able to get away with killing Gantz was that it had taken place on a rural back road. She and Noah had driven his vehicle to Terrapin Lake, taking only routes without city surveillance, sticking to county roads and gravel paths that wound through farmland and forest.
But a car that had been submerged in water for nearly two years wouldn’t simply drive away. Noah had laid it out for her just last night, the sheer scope of what it would take to retrieve a vehicle from that depth. One would need a heavy-duty winch, industrial grade, something rated for several tons. A commercial tow rig or flatbed wrecker with a boom to handle the load. Maybe even diving equipment to secure the cables to the submerged vehicle before the extraction could begin. The engine would be destroyed, and any electrical system would be corroded beyond repair.
And hauling a water-damaged vehicle in the middle of the night, dripping lake water and trailing the unmistakable smell of decomposition, was not the kind of thing a person did without leaving a trace somewhere.
Kinsley’s pulse quickened as the implications unfolded in her mind. Whoever had moved the car would have needed to take it somewhere, and the routes away from Terrapin Lake were limited. She and Noah had used the fire road on the eastern shore that night, the most direct path to the embankment where they’d rolled the car in. But there were two other routes that led away from the lake without passing through any areas with municipal surveillance.
One of those routes connected to a main road that ran toward town and the interstate. And near the onramp sat a convenience store that had upgraded its security system a few years ago after a string of robberies. She remembered the case because Alex had pulled the footage for one of those robberies when a suspect’s alibi had placed him at a nearby gas station. The cameras at that store covered the parking lot and a wide stretch of the road in front of the building. Someone hauling a waterlogged vehicle on a flatbed or behind a tow rig in the dead of night would have been captured on that footage if they’d used that particular route.
The question was whether the store kept its recordings long enough to be useful. Most commercial surveillance systems recycle their footage every sixty to ninety days, unless an incident prompts them to preserve a specific window of time. If the car had been pulled from the lake recently, within the last couple of months, there was a chance the footage still existed. If it had happened earlier, the window might already be closed.
But it was a thread.
And right now, a thread was more than she’d had an hour ago.
“...loved those oversized black velvet jackets, didn’t you?”
“I can honestly say that I never wore black velvet, Izzy,” Kinsley said with a brief laugh before pushing her chair back. “Listen, I appreciate the offer for lunch. I really do. But I just thought of something I need to follow up on for the case. Potential case. Catch me next week, okay?”
“Fine,” Izzy muttered, her disappointment evident. “I’ll make Wally go with me.”
“Do me a favor?” Kinsley grabbed her purse out of the bottom drawer of her desk. “Tell him that my dad bought the entire family tickets to a preseason Vikings game next month. I’ll take pictures for him.”
Before Izzy could press further, Kinsley turned and headed for the elevator. Walter Elm, the county’s medical examiner, wasn’t the typical personality who usually filled that position. He was young, a devoted football fanatic, and loved to socialize. Dangling Vikings tickets in front of him through Izzy was the kind of bait that would keep both of them occupied and away from asking questions Kinsley wasn’t prepared to answer.
The nature of how the Aspen family had ended up with those preseason tickets wasn’t lost on her. Her father had bought them as cover for what was supposed to have been a goodbye dinner, a final evening together before Kinsley turned herself in.The fact that they now served as casual conversation fodder was like another small cruelty layered on top of the larger ones she was already carrying. But the distraction had worked, and Izzy hadn’t asked a single question about the lead Kinsley actually needed to pursue.
She didn’t have to wait long for the elevator. The doors slid open with a soft chime, and Kinsley stepped inside before anyone else could join her. She pressed the button for the ground floor, prompting the doors close, sealing her into the small, quiet space.
For the first time since Shane had stood on her porch yesterday afternoon, Kinsley had a thread of hope dangling in front of her. It was thin and fragile, and it might lead nowhere at all. But if there was footage of someone hauling Gantz’s car away from Terrapin Lake, she intended to find it. Knowing who had moved the body wouldn’t undo what she’d done, and it wouldn’t bring back whatever she and Shane had lost. But it would give her something she desperately needed. An answer to the question that had been gnawing at her since yesterday.
Who else was aware of what she had done, and what did they plan to do with the proof?
7
Beck Serra
July
Friday, 9:03 pm
