Coyle's hands shook. He rewound and listened again. The woman kept talking. She described a man's body, a frozen pond, a winter long ago. He knew the voice but couldn't place it. He grabbed the whole box of tapes and carried them home to listen to every one.
That night Coyle drank himself to sleep with the tapes still spinning. When he woke, the box was gone and his front door hung open. Someone had heard the recorder through the thin walls. They knew exactly what he'd found, and now they had it.
Coyle searched his lawn and found a single tape dropped in the snow. He held it up to the streetlight. The label read DANNY V. The thief had grabbed the box but lost one piece, and that one piece named the choir director as a killer. Coyle took it straight to the police, and the whole town's quiet church secrets finally came out.