Something crashed in the background. A book thrown against a wall, maybe, or a door slammed hard enough to rattle the frame. The tape crackled a bit before Joey’s voice returned, lower now, though laced with a revulsion that made Kinsley’s skin prickle.
“There’s something wrong with you. You know that, right? You have no right to spy on people. Stay out of my room, or next time I’ll?—”
The recording cut off abruptly. Had Joey snatched the device out of her hands and shut it off? Or had Iris killed the recording herself to de-escalate the situation? There was no way to know, and the ambiguity was maddening. The threat hung incomplete in the air.
Kinsley took the opportunity to turn off the recorder and remove her headphones. She set them on her desk with a controlled exhale, pressing her fingertips against the bridge of her nose for a moment before opening her eyes.
She glanced across at Shane’s desk. He had to have been in the station at some point since Friday, because a coffee mug with stale contents sat on top of a manila folder, and his chair had been pulled out at an angle that suggested he’d left in a hurry. She’d overheard someone mention a domestic homicide case that had come in over the weekend, and if Shane had caught it, that would explain his absence from the bullpen this morning. Part of her was relieved. The other part, the half she didn’t want to examine too closely, felt his absence like a bruise she kept pressing.
“Do your job, Kin,” she muttered to herself, and turned her attention back to the collection on her desk.
Twenty-seven cassette tapes were organized into neat rows, each sealed in its own clear evidence bag with a tag noting the date of processing and the initials of the lab technician who had handled it. The lab had worked through the weekend, checkingfor prints and trace evidence, and the preliminary findings had been largely inconclusive. That wasn’t surprising given the tapes’ age. Decades of dust had compromised most potential fingerprint evidence, though several tapes bore prints matching those of the foreclosure crew members, which at least confirmed their account of handling the material. Nothing else of forensic value had surfaced. No blood, no unusual fibers, no foreign substances.
Kinsley reached for the second latex glove she’d placed on the edge of her desk and stretched the thin material over her fingers as she contemplated the listening order. The labels on each tape had been written in a careful, youthful hand, the letters rounded in the way of someone who still dotted their i’s with small circles. Some tapes were dated, others marked with location identifiers like “Dad’s Office” or “Dining Room”. A few simply bore names: “Joey,” “Mom,” “Dad”. The handwriting was consistent across all of them, which strongly suggested a single person had organized the collection.
Iris.
Kinsley had collected the evidence from the lab first thing this morning, eager to have something concrete to occupy her mind. She’d been listening to Iris and her brother argue for the past half hour, cycling through the tapes labeled with Joey’s name, and she no longer questioned why the foreclosure crew had concluded it was possible that Joey had murdered his sister. The rage in his voice on several of the recordings was visceral, the kind of anger that lived in the body and could spill over into violence without much provocation. Whether it actually had was a different question entirely, and one she wasn’t prepared to answer yet.
The phone on Alex’s desk rang briefly before falling silent, the sound sharp enough to make her flinch. She wouldn’t admit it aloud, but she missed her partner. His steady presence, hismeticulous preparation, even his irritating habit of color-coding his sticky notes by priority level. The desk across from her was conspicuously empty without him, and working a case alone, even a cold one, highlighted how much she relied on him to bounce ideas off and keep her thinking straight.
Still, she couldn’t begrudge him the break.
The last few months had been demanding for all of them.
Kinsley made a quick note on the yellow legal pad she’d swiped from Alex’s desk. She listed the dates from the Joey tapes and the key moments she’d flagged, leaving several lines between entries so she could add notes as patterns emerged. If she was going to recommend that the captain officially reopen a thirty-year-old closed case, she needed her reasoning laid out in a way that was clear, methodical, and impossible to dismiss. Reopening a case like this was extremely rare, and the political complications of accusing a prominent family’s son of murder would make it even harder to push through.
The lab report noted that while the tapes had been discovered coated in decades of dust, they were in surprisingly stable condition. Their hiding place behind the false wall in the attic had shielded them from moisture and extreme temperature swings. The dry, insulated space had acted as an accidental time capsule, preserving the magnetic tape even as the recorder itself suffered corrosion in the battery compartment. That damage had been carefully cleaned by the people who found it, just enough to power the device and confirm the recordings still played. Most were standard cassettes, though a handful were microcassettes designed for the pocket-sized recorders Iris appeared to favor for her more mobile recordings.
Kinsley sorted the remaining tapes by their labeled dates, creating a chronological timeline of Iris’s secret surveillance operation. The earliest recording was dated about seven months before her death, which meant Iris had been at this for longerthan Kinsley had initially assumed. She loaded the first tape in the sequence into the recorder. The label, written in the same careful hand as the others, read simply: “Dad”.
She adjusted her headphones so they settled comfortably over her ears and pressed play. The cassette made a soft whirring sound before voices emerged, and it was immediately obvious that Richard Bell had no idea his words were being preserved.
“Yes, I can’t wait, either. I’ve been thinking of you every spare minute of the day.” Richard Bell’s voice contained the refined tones of a man accustomed to authority and deference. “No, don’t worry. Eden thinks I have a business dinner, so we’ll have plenty of time.”
A pause, followed by a low chuckle that sent an uncomfortable shiver down Kinsley’s spine.
“I can’t wait to remove every piece of clothing on your...”
Kinsley swallowed in distaste, her throat suddenly dry. She reached for her coffee, but she’d polished off the last of it ten minutes ago, and the empty mug offered nothing but a tan ring at the bottom. She set it back down as the recording continued, Richard’s voice growing more explicit as he detailed his intentions for the evening in adjectives that left nothing to the imagination. The man spoke with the practiced ease of someone who’d done this many times before, his tone shifting between seductive and transactional in a way that made Kinsley’s stomach turn.
“You know exactly what I like,” Richard said, lowering his voice into what he clearly thought came across as sensual. “And I know exactly what I want for dessert.”
As uncomfortable as the content made her, she needed to review everything. This was evidence, not entertainment, and her personal discomfort had no bearing on its relevance to the investigation. Still, she pressed the fast-forward button. Shewould arrange for an officer to get the tapes fully transcribed so she could read every word without having to sit through hours of extramarital pillow talk. All she wanted to accomplish this morning was to understand the dynamics within the Bell household, the relationships, the tensions, the fault lines that might have led to murder.
After advancing what she estimated was about fifteen minutes of tape, she released the button and listened again.
“...cover for me, is that too much to ask?” Richard’s tone had shifted to something more businesslike now, clipped and efficient. “That’s more like it, Paul.”
Kinsley made a note on her legal pad.
Paul. Business partner. Providing an alibi for an affair?
Richard had been speaking with Paul Fisher. The two men were business partners, according to the original criminal report and trial transcripts. Fisher had been called to testify during Tatlock’s trial about how erratic Grant had been during some type of gathering at the Bell residence. If Fisher had also been covering for Richard’s affair, it meant the two men were entangled in ways that extended well beyond architecture. Fisher had a reason to protect Richard, and Richard had a reason to keep Fisher loyal. That kind of mutual dependency could become leverage in the right hands.
Kinsley fast-forwarded again, stopping at random intervals to sample the conversation. Most segments contained mundane business discussions or more intimate exchanges that added nothing substantive to the investigation. She advanced to near the end of the tape and pressed play one more time.
“...business dinner. I’ll be late tonight, so there’s no need to wait up,” Richard advised over what sounded like the shuffling of papers on a desk. “Paul and I need to reassure this client that we’re on schedule.”
