Chapter 21 #2
“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.
“I was there,” 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 some pathetic 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.”
“What about anyone entering or leaving the block party? Anyone who seemed out of place or in a hurry?”
“Detective, that was over thirty years ago.” Shannon frowned, and her lines deepened into genuine concentration when Kinsley remained silent, letting the question sit. “I was focused on waiting for Richard, not watching the neighbors.”
“Let me help refresh your memory.” Kinsley reached for her phone and pulled up a series of photographs. She held the screen toward the laptop camera, close enough for the image to be legible. The first was of Ginny Kusman. “Did you see this woman that night?”
“No. Not that I recall.”
Kinsley swiped to the next photograph. Darlene Barrett.
“This woman?”
Shannon leaned closer to her screen, squinting slightly to make out the image.
“Yes, I remember her walking down the sidewalk on her own. She seemed to be heading away from the party, back toward one of the houses across the street.”
That tracked. Darlene had left the block party at the Wilsons’ to walk home for the last tray of cheesecakes.
Shannon had spotted the woman during that walk, before Darlene had noticed the Bell mansion’s front door standing open on her way back.
The timelines aligned, which meant Shannon had driven out of the neighborhood in the narrow window between Darlene leaving the party and Darlene discovering Iris’s body.
“And this man?” Kinsley swiped once more and enlarged Todd Kusman’s photograph. “Did you see him that night?”
“No, I don’t believe so.” Shannon adjusted her laptop.. “Like I said, I was waiting for Richard and not really paying attention to anyone else. I didn’t even see Iris that night.”
She paused before adding an afterthought.
“Just her brother.”
Toby’s pen slipped from his fingers and hit the table with a sharp clatter. Kinsley didn’t take her gaze off the screen. She lowered her phone slowly and rested her forearm on the cold surface of the interview table, every nerve in her body focused on the woman on the other side of the video call.
“You saw Joey Bell that night?”
“I didn’t speak with him, no.” Shannon shook her head, apparently unaware of the significance of what she’d just revealed. “But I spotted him running through some yards with a friend. They were cutting between houses, moving fast.”
She tilted her head, reading something in Kinsley’s expression that made her pause.
“You asked me if I saw anyone unusual, Detective. It was a neighborhood block party. Joey being in the vicinity doesn’t exactly strike me as unusual.”
Except that it was. Joey Bell was supposed to have been at a high school football game, not running through yards between houses in the neighborhood where his sister was about to die.
Every account Kinsley had gathered placed the teenagers at the pond or the high school stadium.
Joey’s presence in the neighborhood, on foot, moving quickly between properties, upended that narrative completely.