Thursday, 7:07 pm
Kinsley pushed her chair back from the dining room table, the soft scraping sound barely audible beneath the layers of family conversation filling her parents’ kitchen. Her mother was discussing a new streaming miniseries with Olivia over Zoom, the two of them talking over each other with a comfortable urgency to share their opinions. Dylan was animatedly describing the new irrigation system he wanted to install at the dairy farm to an attentive Noah, his hands carving shapes in the air to illustrate water flow patterns. Owen sat beside their father, picking at the last crumbs of his apple crumble pie while half-listening to both conversations simultaneously. And Lily was perched on the edge of a chair, holding a fistful of Go Fish cards and clearly winning by the bewildered look on her grandfather’s face.
Kinsley stood, stretching subtly to ease the stiffness in her lower back from too many hours in a chair. Her knee had beenbothering her all day, a persistent ache that had confirmed the storm front’s arrival before the first drop of rain hit the pavement around four o’clock. Making her way to the kitchen counter where a small collection of devices sat charging, she scanned the row.
Dylan’s phone.
Noah’s phone.
Lily’s tablet.
Her own phone had been displaying the red low-battery warning for the past twenty minutes. She tapped Noah’s screen. Thirty-two percent. She pressed her index finger against Dylan’s. Eighty-three percent. Whispering a smallyesin victory, she unplugged his phone and swapped it for her own, which was clinging to life at a critical four percent.
“I suppose we ought to be grateful that you didn’t bring stale donuts from the station,” Owen said as he walked past her toward the freezer. He pulled it open, and cool air wafted out as he retrieved the container of vanilla ice cream for what she knew for certain to be his second helping of pie. He’d inherited their mother’s metabolism along with her inability to pass up dessert. “What happened to the homemade chocolate chip cookies you promised us?”
“I brought stale donuts once,” Kinsley muttered as she rested her forearms on the counter. “I repeat, once. And do you know how much an entire apple crumble pie from the diner costs?”
“And it’s worth every penny.” Owen set the ice cream container on the counter and motioned toward the cabinet nearest Kinsley. She automatically reached up and pulled out a deep bowl large enough to accommodate both ice cream and a generous slice of pie, the kind of bowl that existed solely for the purpose of pretending two desserts counted as one. “You were quiet during dinner. Everything alright?”
“Yeah,” Kinsley said dismissively as she closed the cabinet. “I’m sure you heard that Alex is on vacation. I’m working with a rookie patrol officer in the meantime. It’s been going well, though. He’s got potential.”
Owen nudged her with his elbow as he reached past her to grab a spoon from the drawer. She managed to swipe one before he could shut it. She used hers to scoop out a generous dollop of vanilla before he’d even served himself.
She’d been late for dinner, missing the table prep and the first round of conversation. The afternoon had gone exactly as she’d anticipated. Todd Kusman had shown up at the station accompanied by a lawyer, a trim man in a charcoal suit who had introduced himself with a handshake and a business card and then proceeded to advise his client not to answer any questions of substance. The one piece of good fortune had been the man’s lack of connection to her father’s firm.
Todd had sat through the interview with his arms crossed and his jaw set, offering nothing beyond his name and his willingness to cooperatein principle, a phrase his attorney had repeated often. Since they didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest, Kinsley had been forced to let him walk.
Toby had been frustrated by the lack of cooperation, but Kinsley hadn’t expected Todd to give them anything useful in a room with his lawyer present. The real value of the exercise was elsewhere. While Todd sat in an interview room saying nothing, Kinsley was on the phone with Richard Bell. She’d reached out on the premise of providing an update about a new lead in the investigation, carefully withholding Todd Kusman’s name. She’d gone only so far as to explain that they were bringing someone in for official questioning in connection with Iris’s death, and then she’d let the silence do the work.
She was counting on the Bell family’s curiosity to override their caution.
People hated being kept in the dark, especially those with secrets, and the knowledge that someone from their circle was sitting in a police interview room would eat at Richard, Eden, and Joey like acid on metal. If Kinsley had to guess, at least two of the three Bells would be at the station first thing in the morning, desperate to know who had been brought in and what they’d said.
Richard and Eden had lost their daughter, and Kinsley carried genuine sympathy for that loss. But it was increasingly apparent that they hadn’t been forthcoming, not thirty years ago and not now. Nowhere in the original police reports did it mention that Richard Bell had been having an affair. The investigating detective either hadn’t known or hadn’t considered it relevant, and neither the family nor their neighbors had volunteered the information. Nor had anyone mentioned that Richard’s lover had been spotted in the neighborhood around the time of the murder.
There was a chance that some of those gaps would begin to close tomorrow morning, when she and Toby spoke with Shannon Utgoff via video conference. Shannon was the thread that connected everything. The affair, the tapes, the night of the murder, and the abrupt departure from Fallbrook that followed. If Shannon was willing to talk, the picture Kinsley had been assembling piece by piece might finally start to resemble something recognizable.
“You’re the one who reopened the Bell case, aren’t you?” Owen asked as he tapped her spoon with his when she went to scoop out another helping. Once he’d loaded a large portion into his bowl, he passed her the container. “Don’t let Mom catch you.”
“You know I don’t like to talk about my cases,” Kinsley murmured as she pulled the ice cream container to the far side of the counter, positioning her body to block her mother’s line ofsight. “I should probably get going, anyway. Captain Thompson approved overtime, and I told Toby I’d be in by six.”
“Sorry.” Owen glanced over his shoulder, following her gaze toward the far end of the table where their father was now losing spectacularly at Go Fish, Lily holding only one card to her chest with the poker face of a professional gambler. “I forgot the unwritten rule about discussing cases in the parents’ house.”
“It’s not that,” Kinsley replied, though they both knew it was. “It’s just that cold cases present different challenges. I don’t want to get ahead of myself.”
“Strange to think you’re investigating a murder that happened when we were just kids,” Owen said, leaning his hip against the counter. “It was such a different time back then, wasn’t it?”
“Tell me about it,” Kinsley said, keeping her voice low after confirming that her mother was still deep in conversation with Olivia on Owen’s laptop. “Technology alone changes everything. In the early nineties, there were no home security systems worth mentioning. Hardly any street cameras. No dash cams. No doorbell cameras recording every visitor. You could walk through an entire neighborhood at night and leave absolutely no digital trace of your presence.”
“No smartphones tracking your every move,” Owen added, pointing his spoon at her for emphasis. “Think about it. If Iris Bell were murdered today, especially in that kind of neighborhood, you’d have access to all of it. Ring cameras, home security footage, cell tower data. You’d be able to trace Iris’s movements in the days leading up to her death, see who she was communicating with, where she went, how long she stayed. The entire digital footprint.”
Kinsley’s brain freeze had everything to do with the ice cream she’d just put in her mouth, but the sharp pain through the roof of her mouth gave her a convenient reason not to respondimmediately. She needed the pause, because Owen’s casual observation had sent her thoughts careening toward territory she couldn’t afford to visit at a family dinner.
She had shot Gantz on a back-country road with no witnesses, no cameras, and nothing to record what had happened. She’d been meticulous afterward, checking his phone before destroying it along with the SIM card. His last call had been to a pizza place days earlier. No incriminating texts. No suspicious emails. No recently shared locations, no active navigation, nothing that placed him on that road or connected him to her that evening.
Nothing that would tie her to his disappearance.
The only thing she’d done afterward was call Noah. He’d followed her to Terrapin Lake without asking a single question. She’d been lucky. Lucky that the killing had happened when and where it did, lucky that she’d thought to check Gantz’s phone, lucky that the back roads between Fallbrook and Terrapin Lake were as empty and unmonitored as they’d always been. But luck was not a strategy, and the monthly notes that arrived on the nineteenth were proof that her luck had limits.
