Chapter 5
Kinsley Aspen
July
Kinsley’s grip tightened on the steering wheel as she drove her black Jeep Wrangler down the tree-lined street of one of Fallbrook’s oldest neighborhoods.
The morning sun poured through the branches overhead, casting dappled patterns across her dashboard that danced with each turn.
Between the bright rays and a restless night, not even her sunglasses could ease the ache behind her eyes.
“I’m pulling up to the Bell mansion now,” Kinsley said, turning the wheel slightly as she brought the Jeep to a stop alongside the curb. “What did you say the foreman’s name was again?”
“Ken Pfeifer.” Alex’s deep voice came through the speaker system, with a slight distortion on the right. The door speaker had been acting up for the last couple of weeks, but today it was worse than usual. “The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. Maybe another case?”
“I don’t recognize it,” Kinsley said, shifting the gear into park. “Oh, and tell your mom that if she needs anything while you’re gone, all she has to do is call me. I’ll pop over there a couple of times to check on her, too.”
“Any chance you could stop in tomorrow night? Say around sevenish?”
Kinsley glanced in confusion at the console screen where Alex’s name was displayed, wondering why he was being so specific.
“Do you want to elaborate on that?”
“Mom is going out to dinner with Paul.”
“Paul?” The name registered, and Kinsley smiled for the first time in two days. “Paul, the plumber?”
“Maybe I should cancel my fishing trip.”
“Don’t you dare,” Kinsley said with a laugh. “And don’t worry. I’ll get all the details when I check in on her.”
Alex groaned in misery over the potential intimate revelations, but she didn’t give him a chance to deny her the opportunity.
“Enjoy your fishing trip, partner,” Kinsley called out as she rested her thumb on the button to disconnect the call. “Catch a big one for me.”
She pressed down and ended the conversation. For a long moment, she sat motionless, staring at the screen and contemplating whether to scroll to Shane’s contact information.
Would he answer if she called?
And if he did, what would she even say?
Their last conversation had ended with a boundary so clear it might as well have been carved in stone. Stay out of each other’s way. She let her hand drop to her lap.
Through the passenger side window, the grandeur of the Bell mansion was unmistakable despite obvious signs of neglect.
Alex’s vacation had given her some breathing room, and investigating a cold case from the nineties gave her something to focus on besides the lengths someone had gone to in retrieving Gantz’s vehicle and body from Terrapin Lake.
She needed a distraction right now.
She needed a problem that belonged to someone else.
“No body, no crime,” Kinsley muttered, echoing Shane’s words from yesterday. The phrase that had given her freedom was more like a trap, a reminder that the absence of evidence didn’t mean the absence of guilt. “One minute at a time, Kin.”
The knot in her stomach tightened, and she closed her eyes. She drew a deep breath, held it for a count of four, and slowly released it.
Focus on the job.
One foot in front of the other.
Kinsley grabbed her keys, collected her phone from its holder, and left her leather shoulder bag on the passenger side floor. She’d only be a few minutes, and she didn’t plan on going inside the house. At least, not yet.
With one final deep breath, she tugged on the handle and stepped out of the Jeep.
The morning’s humidity was worse than yesterday, the air thick and clinging, but she hadn’t worn a blazer.
Instead, she’d opted for a short-sleeved white shirt long enough to tuck into a pair of black jeans. It was Friday, after all.
Three stories of Victorian opulence stretched skyward before her, the grand bay windows reflecting the morning sunlight.
Upon closer inspection, their gleam was dulled by a fine layer of dust and neglect.
Paint had begun to curl along the eaves, and the decorative trim beneath the roofline was losing its battle with weather and time.
The house had the look of something that had once been beautiful and was now just doing its best to remember its glory days.
Kinsley slowed her stride on the flagstone path just inside the boundary of a low stone wall. The barrier was barely three feet tall, but it circled the property with a stern formality that made clear where the Bell estate ended and the rest of the world began.
She lingered there, taking in the way the stone cut a clean line between the grounds and the neighboring properties.
Unlike the other residences on the street, the Bells had opted for an air of affluence that set them apart.
She wondered if their current, downsized home displayed the same kind of intentional grandeur.
“Detective Aspen?”
Kinsley continued up the thin path that wound through what had once been a meticulously manicured front yard.
Now, overgrown hedges sprawled like wild tendrils, while dandelions and crabgrass had laid claim to the flower beds.
The grass, however, had been cut to a reasonable height, which suggested the homeowners’ association had taken it upon themselves to handle at least that much of the upkeep.
“Yes,” Kinsley called out as she approached the front porch. “You must be Ken Pfeifer.”
The wraparound porch that embraced the front of the house had wide planks and elegant railings.
The white paint was still intact, and the wood appeared to be in solid shape, which was more than could be said for the rest of the exterior.
A man in stained jeans and a faded black t-shirt was leaning against one of the support columns.
His skin was tanned the deep, uneven brown of someone who worked outdoors year-round, and he straightened as she reached the top step, extending a calloused hand.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m the foreman for the foreclosure crew.”
“Captain Thompson mentioned you found something of interest inside the house. I’ll be honest with you, I’m not familiar with your line of work. What exactly does a foreclosure crew do?”
“We’re the guys who come in after people walk away from their homes,” Ken explained as he stepped back to retrieve what appeared to be a grocery bag near the front door.
“We clean out any personal belongings, handle basic repairs, make the place presentable enough for the bank to auction off. We were clearing out the attic and found this.”
Kinsley went to reach for the bag and then realized she hadn’t brought any gloves with her. Alex was always prepared for these things, his pockets practically a mobile evidence kit, and she wasn’t used to working cases without him.
“Were the contents found in this bag?”
“No, ma’am,” Ken replied, keeping the plastic grocery bag extended in midair.
“I grabbed this from my truck. Leroy was the one who found all these tapes, though. He was up in the attic fixing the insulation when he noticed the tape recorder behind a false wall. I haven’t seen one of these in years. ”
Kinsley took the bag, surprised by its weight.
She parted the handles, peered inside, and found herself staring at a device she hadn’t encountered in a very long time, either.
The tape recorder's dark plastic was covered in a thick layer of dust, resembling a relic from another era.
Along with the device were numerous cassette tapes, and she noticed with curiosity that some were miniature rather than the standard size that the machine would play back.
“Twenty-seven in total, if you can believe it. Some labeled, some not.” Ken grimaced slightly and gave a small shrug that carried the weight of an apology.
“We weren’t sure what we were dealing with, so some of the guys and I listened to a tape that was already inside the recorder.
We had to clean out the battery case, but a set of new batteries got it working.
We’re all pretty much in agreement that the person threatening Iris’s life was her brother.
He was going on and on about how he’d kill her if she ever dared record him without his permission.
It sounded like he broke something in the room, too.
So maybe that Tatlock guy they arrested all those years ago was telling the truth, and he didn’t actually kill Iris Bell. ”
Kinsley kept her opinion to herself. They’d not only handled the evidence, but they had also tampered with it.
Plus, speculation from a foreclosure crew wasn’t evidence, and a heated argument between siblings didn’t prove murder, no matter how ugly the language.
Still, the recordings were worth hearing firsthand.
“How many of you handled the tapes and the recorder?”
“Leroy, Teddy, and me,” Ken admitted after giving it some thought. He paused, then tacked on one more name. “Oh, and Dot, my wife. She stopped by yesterday after I texted her about what we found with the new batteries. Curiosity, you understand.”
Kinsley resisted the urge to groan. Four sets of fingerprints on potential evidence in a decades-old case weren’t ideal, but it was far from the worst chain-of-custody situation she’d encountered. She had no choice but to make the request.
“Mr. Pfeifer, I’m going to need fingerprints from everyone on your crew who handled these items, including your wife,” Kinsley advised as she gripped the top of the bag closed. “It’s standard procedure for the chain of custody.”
“Of course,” Ken agreed with a nod. “Whatever helps you out. Are you ready to go inside?”
Since Kinsley had already decided against entering the residence at this time, she shook her head.
The murder had happened over thirty years ago, and the Bells hadn’t lived here in years.
The house had been through at least one additional owner and was now being gutted by a foreclosure crew.
Whatever trace evidence might have once existed within those walls was long gone.
What she wanted was to sit down with the tapes and listen to each of them before deciding whether to reopen the investigation.
“That won’t be necessary,” Kinsley replied as she extended her arm. She shook his hand firmly to bring their meeting to an end. “Thank you for bringing this to our attention, Mr. Pfeifer. We’ll listen to the tapes and go from there.”
Kinsley descended the porch steps and started back down the flagstone path.
As she approached the sidewalk, she noticed two women in matching workout gear power-walking along the street, their arms pumping with exaggerated purpose.
Their pace slowed noticeably as they caught sight of her, and one whispered something to the other with the kind of urgent sideways glance that told Kinsley everything she needed to know about how quickly this visit would make the rounds.
Fallbrook’s gossip network was already in full swing.
Since she hadn’t worn a blazer, her badge and service weapon were clearly visible on her hip, and it would only be a matter of time before the captain’s phone started ringing with inquiries about why a detective had been spotted leaving the Bell mansion.
Kinsley walked around the front of her Jeep, ignoring their curious gazes, and settled in behind the steering wheel.
She carefully placed the plastic grocery bag containing the recorder and tapes on the passenger seat, treating it with more care than its casual packaging deserved.
She would drop everything off at the forensics lab for processing for prints and preservation, which would delay her ability to sort through the recordings.
But the lab work was necessary, and she’d learned long ago that cutting corners on evidence handling was the fastest way to lose a case before it ever reached a courtroom.
She was grateful, if she was being honest with herself, to have something immediate to occupy her thoughts. The alternative was a slow spiral into the kind of worry that circled endlessly without resolution, always returning to the same question she couldn’t answer.
Who had the resources, the equipment, and the motive to haul an entire vehicle, with a body locked in its trunk, up from the murky bottom of Terrapin Lake? And more importantly, what did they plan to do with what they’d found?
The Bell case was a diversion, and she welcomed it wholeheartedly.
But it was also real work that needed doing, a thirty-year-old wrong that might finally get a second glance because a foreclosure crew had stumbled onto a box of dusty cassette tapes.
If there was even a chance that the wrong person had gone to prison for Iris Bell’s death, Kinsley owed it to the truth to find out.
She’d taken an oath to pursue justice, and the fact that she’d recently broken that oath in spectacular fashion didn’t mean she could stop trying to honor it now.
She started the engine, pulled away from the curb to complete a U-turn in the middle of the street, and left the Bell mansion shrinking in her rearview mirror.
The two women were still staring at her from the sidewalk, their power walk apparently on hold until her Jeep was out of sight.
She resisted the urge to wave. She had tapes to process and a cold case to evaluate.
Anything was preferable to the anxiety of harboring a secret so profound that she feared it might consume her.