The Confession Tape

Iris Kemp has listened to a thousand confessions. She knows the exact sound a person makes right before they admit the worst thing they have ever done. So when she drops a mystery cassette into the deck, she recognizes that sound before she understands a single word, and then she realizes the voice is hers.

Her own voice, in the careful private register she uses on no episode, calmly explains how she killed a man named Aaron Wych, why she did it, and that she does not want anyone else blamed. The date she names is nineteen days from now. The only problem is that Iris has never in her life heard the name Aaron Wych.

It should be impossible. A spliced fake, a sick joke, a perfect impersonation. But the longer she works the tape, the way she works other people's cold cases for a living, the more it refuses to come apart. The voice knows things only she knows. And there is one case she has never once touched on her show, the murder of her own sister fifteen years ago, that she is about to find sitting underneath all of it. Whose voice is on that tape, who is the man she is supposed to kill, and why does it keep coming true?