“Others like Ginny Kusman?” Toby interjected, and Kinsley gave him a subtle nod of approval.
“Yes. Mrs. Kusman, Principal Winters, Mrs. Peterson.” Amelia waved her hand in a broader gesture this time, as though the list extended well beyond the names of people she was willing to recite. “You say a name connected to the Bell family, and chances are, Iris had some type of incriminatingconversation to leverage against them. Neighbors, teachers, her parents’ friends. But with me...”
Her voice trailed off as she searched for the right words, her gaze drifting to the window that looked out over the junkyard’s maze of crushed vehicles.
“I walked on eggshells all the time because I never knew when the day would come when Iris finally wanted something in return. It was like she was saving me for something special, something she hadn’t figured out yet. And that was almost worse than having to hand over money or jewelry, because the anticipation never stopped. It just hung over me, every day, waiting.”
The air conditioning cycled on again, its gentle hum filling the brief silence that followed. Outside, the mechanical growl of a forklift provided a distant counterpoint to the stillness inside the office.
“I didn’t kill Iris, if that’s why you’re here,” Amelia said firmly, straightening her spine. “As far as I’m aware, Grant Tatlock killed her. And as I said, there was no reason to bring up Iris’s hobby to the police when they already had their man.”
“Hobby?” Kinsley repeated, and she couldn’t keep the edge from her voice. “You mean her systematic blackmail of half the neighborhood? Her secret recordings of private conversations that she used to extort money, jewelry, and favors from adults twice her age? I’d say that goes well beyond a hobby, Ms. Keery.”
“Call it what you want.” Amelia shrugged, aiming for a casual gesture but falling short. “The police had their killer. Grant was found guilty. And it’s not as though the police didn’t find a recording of him threatening her that very night. What good would it have done to tell everyone that the victim was essentially running an extortion ring? It wouldn’t have brought Iris back, and it would have destroyed a lot of lives.”
“Including yours,” Kinsley noted.
“Including mine,” Amelia agreed without hesitation. “I was going on eighteen, Detective. I had my whole life ahead of me. Why would I tarnish it over something that couldn’t be changed?”
Toby shifted his weight, drawing Amelia’s attention. Kinsley nodded toward him again, signaling he had room to jump in.
“Do you truly believe the police got it right?” Toby asked. “That Grant Tatlock killed Iris?”
Amelia’s expression softened slightly, taking on something that seemed almost like pity.
“Grant had a temper. Everyone knew that. The steroids made it worse. He’d fly into these rages over nothing, one minute laughing and the next punching a wall or throwing things across a room.” Amelia shook her head with a remorse that appeared genuine. “I saw him grab Iris once, hard enough to leave marks on her arm. She laughed it off afterward, said she’d pushed his buttons on purpose. That was Iris, though. Always playing with fire, always convinced she could control the burn.”
“And you never wondered if someone else might have had reason to push her down those stairs?” Kinsley pressed.
“Everyone had a reason,” Amelia replied flatly, and there was a finality in her tone that said she considered the interview close to over. “But opportunity is different. Grant was there. He was caught at the scene. I was with our friends at the bonfire, and most everyone else was at the block party. The math isn’t that complicated, Detective.”
“What about the money?” Kinsley gestured vaguely toward the junkyard beyond the windows. “Ten thousand dollars is a substantial sum even now. In the early nineties, for a teenager, it was a small fortune. Any idea where she was keeping it all?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Amelia replied with an emphasis that pushed a fraction too hard to be entirely natural. “Iris never breathed a word about money to me.”
The deflection was smooth, almost practiced, and Kinsley wasn’t convinced. But she recognized when a witness had dug into a position and a different angle was needed to dislodge them.
“Did anyone ever push back against Iris’s blackmail scheme?” Kinsley asked, shifting tactics. “Refuse to hand over whatever she was demanding?”
Something flickered across Amelia’s face. A brief hesitation, there and gone in less than a second, but Kinsley caught it. Amelia glanced toward Toby, then back to Kinsley, as though weighing whether the information she was about to share would cause more harm than good.
“One person,” Amelia admitted finally. “He told her to go ahead and play the tape for whoever she wanted. Said he didn’t care, and that the only people who would be hurt by the evidence were her own family.”
“Todd Kusman?” Kinsley guessed, thinking of his conveniently timed arrival home yesterday, which she was increasingly confident had been prompted by news that detectives were questioning the neighbors rather than any desire to surprise his wife.
“I wasn’t referring to Mr. Kusman.” Amelia frowned, as though the guess had been further off the mark than she’d expected. “I meant Paul Fisher.”
Paul Fisher.
Richard Bell’s business partner, then and now.
The man who had provided alibis for Richard’s affair on the tapes Kinsley had already listened to, the man who had testified at Tatlock’s trial about Grant’s erratic behavior at a Bell family gathering. Fisher’s name had appeared in nearly every layer of this case so far, always on the periphery, always in service to Richard Bell. But there hadn’t been a tape specifically featuring Paul Fisher himself, which raised an obvious question. EitherIris hadn’t recorded him, or those recordings were somewhere the foreclosure crew hadn’t found them.
“Amelia, you wouldn’t happen to know if Iris hid any tapes somewhere other than her own house, would you?”
16
Alex Lanen
