Aaron Wych

She had never heard the name, so she did what she did with every name a stranger ever mailed her: she looked it up. That was the thing about being Iris Kemp. A normal person who received a tape of her own voice confessing to a future murder would have called the police, and Iris thought about it, she got as far as picking up the phone, but she also knew, with fifteen years of cold cases behind her, exactly how that call would go. A cassette of your own voice. No, you don't recognize the man. No, nothing's happened to anyone. Nineteen days away. They would write it down and do nothing, because there was nothing yet to do, and Iris had spent her whole adult life on the cases where the police did nothing until it was too late to do anything. She was not going to hand this to them and wait. She was going to find out what it was first. That was the flaw in her, the one Della used to tease her about. Iris always had to know before she'd let anyone help.

Aaron Wych turned out to be appallingly ordinary.

He was forty-nine, which the tape had gotten right, and the rightness of that sat in her stomach all day. He had owned a construction-supply business two towns over and sold it five years ago. He had a house on a quiet street with a paid-off mortgage and a lawn service. There had been a wife, Eleanor, who died of something slow in 2019. There were no children, or none that came up. He gave to a hospital foundation. He had, eight months ago, been added to the same hospital foundation's prayer list, which was how Iris confirmed the other thing the tape had gotten right, because the prayer list was for patients, and a man does not get added to it for a cold. He was dying. Just like her voice had said.

There was nothing else. No arrests. No lawsuits worth the name. No connection to Iris Kemp that any amount of searching could produce. Not a shared town, not a shared school, not a name in common in either of their lives. She looked for the thread that would explain why a recording of her would want this man dead, and there was no thread. He was a sick old man she had never met, and somewhere there was a tape of her promising to kill him in nineteen days, and the two facts sat in the room and refused to be in the same story.

She told Theo about the man before she told him about the tape, which she would think about later. That even with Theo, even rattled, she'd led with the safe half.

Theo produced the show and had been her friend for six years, a big easy skeptic who treated every wild listener tip as guilty until proven boring, and when she said, carefully, that she thought someone might be setting up to hurt a man named Aaron Wych, he leaned back and said, "Okay. And this is our business why? We do the dead ones, Iris. The live ones have lawyers." Then he looked at her face, really looked, the way he did about twice a year, and the easiness went out of him. "Hey. What's wrong. You've got the face."

"I don't have a face."

"You've got the face you had when your dad called about your mom. That face." He sat forward. "What is it."

And she almost told him. She got as far as the shape of it in her mouth. I got a tape, it's my voice. And then she didn't, because saying it out loud to Theo would make it a thing that was happening, and she wasn't ready, and instead she said she'd had a bad feeling about a tip and she'd handle it, and Theo let her have the lie because that was the deal between them, he pushed once and then he let her have it. She'd remember that too, later. How many off-ramps there had been, early, while it was still small.

That night she couldn't sleep, and at two in the morning she did the thing she'd been not-doing all day, the thing her whole body had been steering away from since the tape stopped. She had an archive. Fifteen years of it. Every case she'd ever touched, scanned and tagged and cross-indexed, a private database that was, if she was honest, mostly an elaborate machine for never having to look directly at the one folder at the center of it. The folder she didn't open. The folder labeled with her own dead sister's name.

She told herself she was only being thorough. She typed Aaron Wych into the search box for her own archive (not the public internet now, her own files, the fifteen years), expecting the same nothing she'd been getting all day, expecting the clean blank that would let her finally call the police in the morning and be done.

The search returned one result.

It was in Della's file.