“Will Shannon be at this dinner?”
Kinsley’s hand went still on the recorder. She glanced at the whiteboard, scanning the names she’d listed during her preliminary breakdown on Friday. No one named Shannon appeared in the original case report or trial transcript. She wrote the name underneath Paul’s on her legal pad and added a question mark.
Richard’s drawn-out pause raised the tension of the exchange considerably. It was obvious that Eden suspected her husband of having an affair. The inquiry hadn’t been casual. It had been pointed, deliberate, the kind of question a wife asks when she already knows the answer and wants to know if her husband will lie to her face. Eden Bell’s voice was raspier than Kinsley had expected, and she made a note to determine whether that was due to the emotional strain of the conversation or simply how the woman sounded.
She wasn’t going to find out from this tape, because a chair could be heard rolling back against a wall, followed by the faint sound of footsteps retreating from the room. The voices became muffled and indistinct after that, reduced to murmurs that the aging tape couldn’t capture with any clarity.
Kinsley turned off the recorder.
She removed her headphones, which had left a faint pressure above her ears, mirroring the dull headache forming behind her eyes. She sat with what she’d heard, letting the pieces arrange themselves in her mind.
Richard Bell had been conducting an affair with someone named Shannon, using business dinners as cover and relying on his partner Paul Fisher to corroborate the alibis. Eden had suspected, or at least had been suspicious, enough to name the other woman directly. And Iris had captured all of it on tape.
Had Iris confronted her father with the recordings?
If Richard had discovered his seventeen-year-old daughter possessed recorded proof of his infidelity, proof that coulddestroy his marriage, his reputation, and his standing in a community that worshipped the Bell family name, that was a motive worth examining.
Kinsley selected the next tape, also labeled with Richard’s name. The pattern continued with depressing predictability. Intimate phone calls followed by careful arrangements of alibis, each one a small brick in the wall of deception Richard had built around his double life. By the third tape featuring Richard, she had established a clear picture of a man who managed his affairs with the same meticulous attention to detail he probably applied to his architectural designs. Every meeting was planned, every excuse rehearsed, every loose end accounted for. Except the one he apparently hadn’t known about. His daughter’s tape recorder, quietly cataloging his sins from behind a desk drawer or inside some ceramic vase.
The bullpen had grown quieter around her as lunchtime approached. Several detectives had left for their break, and the phones rang less frequently, giving the room a hollow, half-occupied vibe. She welcomed the relative quiet as she continued working through the evidence.
She quickly did the math. Each tape held roughly forty-five minutes of material on each side. Twenty-seven tapes meant she was looking at over twenty hours of listening ahead of her if she didn’t hand these off to another officer or two. And that was if she didn’t pause a single time for note-taking or analysis. In reality, it would take her the better part of the week to get through everything.
Kinsley stood, stretched her stiff muscles, and made her way to the break room. She glanced into the captain’s office on the way, but Thompson was on the phone with his back to the door, one hand gesturing in the air with the particular emphasis he reserved for conversations with the mayor’s office. It probably wouldn’t hurt to arrange preliminary interviews with the Bellsand Paul Fisher, but she wanted to wait until she’d formed a more complete picture of what the tapes contained before approaching anyone.
Walking into an interview unprepared was the fastest way to lose control of it.
She filled her mug with fresh coffee, adding a generous splash of the caramel creamer she’d stashed in the back of the communal fridge where no one else would find it. The warmth of the mug against her palms steadied her as she walked back to her desk and settled into her chair. She pulled the headphones over her ears once more, the familiar pressure already feeling like a second skin.
The next tape bore only a date, no name.
Kinsley loaded it into the recorder and pressed play.
The background sounds initially seemed like ambient noise. The subtle creaks of an old house settling, distant footsteps on hardwood floors, the muffled hum of what might have been a television in another room. But as she adjusted the volume, distinct voices emerged. Two young women, their words growing clearer as they moved closer to wherever the recorder had been hidden.
“Are you seriously going to blackmail Principal Winters with that recording?” The voice had the high, nervous pitch of a teenage girl trying to sound casual while discussing something she understood was deeply wrong. “Iris, you could get expelled.”
“I don’t consider it blackmail.” Iris’s voice was calm and matter-of-fact. There was no hesitation in it, no second-guessing. Just a settled certainty that what she was doing was justified. “I consider it penance. She allowed a student to graduate after her father made a generous donation toward the new science lab. Stella Simmons failed Physics. We all knowthat, and yet she was able to walk across that stage last year as if she’d earned it. That’s wrong, Amelia.”
“It’s not just Principal Winters you have to worry about. It’s Stella’s dad. He’s some hotshot investment guy with a lot of money. Threatening to expose?—”
“It’s not a threat if I don’t ask for anything in return.” Iris’s logic had the confident ring of someone who had thought through her position. “I’m simply informing Principal Winters that I have evidence of her making an arrangement with Mr. Simmons. What she does with that information afterward is on her, isn’t it?”
The girls’ footsteps faded, their conversation becoming indistinct as they moved away from the recorder’s range. Kinsley heard the faint sound of a door opening and closing, and then nothing.
She sat back in her chair, the headphones still on, processing what she’d just heard. Iris hadn’t limited her recordings to the privacy of her own home. She’d been taping conversations at school, collecting evidence of corruption that extended well beyond her family’s walls. And the girl Iris had been speaking with, Amelia, had used the word blackmail without hesitation, which meant Iris’s methods were known to at least one other person. Possibly more.
The implications unfolded rapidly.
If Iris had been using recordings against a school principal and potentially against the wealthy father of a fellow student, the circle of people with motive to silence her expanded dramatically. This wasn’t just a family matter anymore. This was a seventeen-year-old girl who had been systematically collecting compromising material on the adults around her, and any one of them could have had reason to want those tapes destroyed and the girl who made them gone.
On its own, this recording would have been enough to have Tatlock’s defense attorneys filing motion after motion seeking his release on newfound evidence. It painted a picture of a victim with enemies far beyond a jealous boyfriend, enemies with money, influence, and every reason to protect their reputations at any cost. The prosecution’s narrative of a simple crime of passion would have crumbled under the weight of it.
But Tatlock was dead. Three years in the ground, killed in a prison mess hall fight, and no amount of new evidence could give him back the decades he’d spent behind bars for a crime he might not have committed.
Kinsley slid off her headphones and set them on the desk beside the recorder. She stared at the whiteboard for a long moment, then stood and walked to it. She uncapped her marker and wrote two new names in the column of persons of interest.
AmeliaandMr. Simmons (Stella’s father).
