“What would she have blackmailed me for? I wasn’t married. I didn’t have money.” Shannon raised her mug in a mock toast, and for the first time, a flicker of dark humor crossed her face. “I was the other woman. Hardly a position of leverage.”
“But you are confirming that Iris had recordings of you and Richard,” Kinsley pressed.
“Look, Richard is many things. Arrogant, selfish, dishonest with the people closest to him. But he loved his children. I think he even loved his wife, in some twisted way, because he was never going to leave her no matter what he promised me. But murder?” Shannon shook her head with a conviction that had the weight of certainty behind it. “No. Richard did not kill his daughter.”
“Pride and love don’t preclude violence, Ms. Utgoff,” Kinsley said softly. “Especially when someone threatens to destroy everything one has built.”
Shannon’s gaze was steady now, her earlier nervousness replaced by a firmness that hadn’t been present at the start of the call.
“You’re barking up the wrong tree, Detective. Whatever his faults, and there are many, he couldn’t have done that to Iris. Not Richard.”
Toby wrote something on the top sheet of his notepad and angled it in Kinsley’s direction. The wordPaulwas underlined twice. Since that was the next person she had planned to bring into the conversation, she was pleased to see Toby operating on the same wavelength. The kid was sharp, and he was getting sharper by the hour.
“What about Paul Fisher?” Kinsley asked, and the question caused a flicker of unease to cross Shannon’s face that was distinct from her reaction to questions about Richard. This was something different, less defensive and more wary. “You worked alongside him for years. Do you know if Iris attempted to blackmail him?”
“You keep referencing blackmail, but I didn’t know Iris was blackmailing anyone. She had taped some private conversations. That’s all I was aware of.”
Kinsley and Toby exchanged a brief glance, arriving at the same understanding simultaneously. Richard Bell had kept Shannon at arm’s length when it came to the details of Iris’s activities. Whatever he’d known about the blackmail operation, and Kinsley was increasingly certain he’d known a great deal, he had been careful about what he discussed with his mistress. The affair was one thing. Sharing information that could implicate him in a cover-up was another.
“Look, Paul and I weren’t close. I was Richard’s assistant, not Paul’s.” Shannon’s hesitation was brief but telling, the kind of pause that happened when someone was deciding how much candor the situation required. “In all honesty, I didn’t like himmuch. He was manipulative, the kind of man who could smile at you while positioning a knife behind your back. And I thought he might have been skimming off the top, though I could never prove it. Some of the invoices he pushed through to the firm’s CPA just didn’t add up. The numbers were wrong in ways that seemed deliberate rather than accidental.”
Kinsley filed the information away. Paul Fisher, potentially embezzling from the firm he co-owned with Richard Bell. If Iris had somehow recorded evidence of financial misconduct, that would explain why Fisher had called her bluff so aggressively. A tape proving an affair was embarrassing. A tape proving embezzlement was criminal, and a criminal charge would give a man like Fisher far more reason to act decisively than any amount of personal embarrassment.
“Why did you break things off with Richard just one week after his daughter’s funeral?” Kinsley asked, and the sudden change in direction caught Shannon visibly off guard. “He would have been grieving, vulnerable. And yet you not only ended the relationship, you quit working for him, too. Why then?”
Shannon’s lips parted, but no words came. She shifted on the stool, buying time, and her hands found the tea mug again.
“I’m going to be direct with you, Ms. Utgoff. We know you were in the neighborhood the night of the murder. Is there something you’d like to share with us?”
“No.” Shannon pressed both hands against her cheeks. “No, no, no. It’s not what you think. I swear to you, it’s not.”
“A witness placed you there,” Kinsley continued, maintaining steady eye contact through the screen. “Your car was seen driving out of the neighborhood.”
Toby cleared his throat and leaned slightly into the frame, adjusting his posture so that Shannon could see him more clearly.
“Ms. Utgoff,” Toby said, and his tone was notably gentler than Kinsley’s, warm without being patronizing, “perhaps you were there on business? Dropping off papers for Mr. Bell, maybe?”
Shannon’s posture softened visibly at the shift in approach, her shoulders lowering by a fraction. Kinsley relaxed as well, though for a different reason. Toby was a natural at this, reading the emotional temperature of a witness and adjusting his delivery accordingly. The way he’d phrased the question had given Shannon an off-ramp, a less threatening explanation she could either accept or reject, and more importantly, it had kept her on the video call instead of ending the conversation with a promise to call a lawyer.
“Iwasthere,” Shannon admitted quietly. “But not at the house. I was parked on the corner, near where the block party was being held.”
Her voice had taken on a distant quality, as if the memory were pulling her backward through time to a night she’d spent thirty years trying not to think about. She drew a sharp breath, a small inhalation that suggested the recollection was less comfortable than she’d anticipated.
“I was there to end things with Richard.”
“The block party,” Kinsley repeated, wanting to make sure she understood the situation correctly. “You were planning to have this conversation during a neighborhood gathering? With his wife present?”
Shannon gave a short, bitter laugh that held no humor.
“No. I’d called Richard earlier that day, told him we needed to talk. He suggested I park down the street and that he’d slip away from the party to meet me.” Shannon shook her head, and the disgust on her face was directed inward as much as at Richard. “I waited for almost an hour and a half. He never came out. Never sent word. I sat in my car in the dark like somepathetic teenager waiting for a boy at prom, and he didn’t even have the decency to tell me he’d changed his mind.”
“Why that night specifically?” Toby asked. “Why end things then?”
“Because I’d had enough.” Shannon pushed back from the counter, and Kinsley could sense that the emotional reserves she’d brought to this conversation were nearly depleted. “Richard was never going to leave Eden, and I was tired of pretending otherwise. I wanted to move on with my life. I even brought my resignation letter with me that night, though I didn’t get the chance to give it to him. I heard the next morning that Iris had died, and by Monday, the entire firm knew that Grant Tatlock had been arrested for her murder. I stayed through the rest of the week because I felt terrible for Richard, but I made sure to submit my resignation before he returned to the office.”
“Ms. Utgoff, during those ninety minutes you spent waiting, did you see anything unusual?”
“You mean like Grant Tatlock? No.” Shannon’s reply was immediate. “I didn’t see him at all.”
