The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer: A gripping new thriller with a killer twist, Joël Dicker [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

He didn’t let me finish. “Jesse, the case was rock solid! You know that as well as I do. Come on now, everyone’s waiting.”

“Give me a minute.”

He sighed and left my office. I picked up the business card I had in front of me and dialed Ms Mailer’s number. Her telephone was off. I had tried to call it the previous day, without success. She herself had not contacted me since our encounter on Monday, and I decided not to persist. She knew where to find me. Derek was right, I told myself. There was nothing to make us revisit the conclusions of the 1994 investigation. My mind at rest, I joined my colleagues in the canteen.

An hour later, when I got back to my office, I found a fax from the State Police in Riverdale in the Hamptons announcing the disappearance of a journalist named Stephanie Mailer, thirty-two years of age. She had apparently been missing for three days.

My heart skipped a beat. I tore the page from the machine and hurried to the telephone to contact the station in Riverdale. An officer there told me that Stephanie Mailer’s parents had shown up early that afternoon, worried that they had not heard from their daughter since Monday.

“Why did her parents go to the State Police, not the local police?”

“They did, but the local police don’t seem to have taken it seriously. So I told myself it might be best to pass it on to your squad. It may be nothing, but I thought you should know.”

“You did the right thing. I’ll take care of it.”

I immediately telephoned Ms Mailer’s mother. She had last spoken with her daughter on Monday morning. Since then, nothing. Her cell phone was off. The mother told me how worried she was. None of her daughter’s friends had been able to reach her. Her mother had finally gone to her apartment with the local police, but there was nobody there.

I went straight to Derek in his office.

“The reporter who was here on Monday has disappeared.”

“What are you talking about, Jesse?”

I handed him the missing persons report. “We have to go to Orphea and find out what’s going on. This can’t be a coincidence.”

He sighed. “Jesse, aren’t you supposed to be leaving?”

“I have four days more. During those days, I’m still a police officer. On Monday, when I saw her, she said she was meeting someone who would be able to supply something we had missed.”

“Let someone else deal with it,” he said.

“No way! That girl assured me that in 1994—”

He didn’t let me finish. “We solved the case, Jesse! It’s ancient history! What’s gotten into you? Why are you so determined to go back to it? Do you really want to relive all that?”

I was irritated that he was not more supportive. “So you won’t come to Orphea?”

“No, Jesse. I’m sorry, but I think you’re crazy.”

So I went to Orphea alone, twenty years after I had last set foot there. Twenty years since the murders.

It was an hour’s drive from headquarters, but to gain time I put on the siren and the flashing lights so I did not have to obey the speed limits. I took Highway 27 as far as the fork to Riverhead, then 25 in a north-westerly direction. The last stretch of road passed through a gorgeous landscape, with luxuriant forests and ponds strewn with water lilies. Finally I got onto Route 17, which was straight and deserted, and which led to Orphea. I sped along it like an arrow. A huge billboard soon told me I had arrived.

WELCOME TO ORPHEA, NEW YORK

National Theater Festival, July 26 – August 9

It was five in the evening. Main Street was bright and verdant. I drove past stores, restaurants, coffee shops. There was an air of relaxation about the place. The lampposts were decorated with the Stars and Stripes in preparation for Independence Day, and billboards announced a firework display for the evening of the Fourth of July. Along the marina, lined with borders filled with flowers and neatly pruned bushes, people strolled between shacks offering excursions to look at the whales or bicycles for hire. It was a scene straight out of a movie.

*

My first stop was the police station.

Chief Ron Gulliver, head of the Orphea police department, invited me into his office. I did not need to remind him that we had already met.

“You haven’t changed,” he said, shaking my hand.

I could not have said the same of him. He had not aged well, and had become noticeably fatter. It was well past lunchtime and he was eating spaghetti out of a plastic container. In the time it took me to explain the reason for my visit, he gobbled down half the spaghetti in a disgusting manner.

“Stephanie Mailer?” he said, his mouth full. “We looked into that. She hasn’t gone missing. I told her parents, but they’re real pains in the ass. You can’t get rid of them!”

“They may simply be parents worried about their daughter,” I said. “They haven’t heard from her for three days, which they say is quite unusual. I’m sure you’ll understand that I’d like to treat it with due diligence.”

“Stephanie Mailer is thirty-two, right? Old enough to do what she likes. Believe me, Captain Rosenberg, if I had parents like hers, I’d run away, too. Take it from me, the girl has taken off for a while, that’s all.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because of what her boss, the editor of the Orphea Chronicle, told me. She sent him a text message on Monday evening.”

“The evening she disappeared.”

“But I tell you: she hasn’t disappeared!” Chief Gulliver growled at me.

Each of his exclamations was accompanied by a spray of tomato sauce. I took a step back.

“My deputy went to her place with her parents,” Gulliver said, after swallowing. “They got in with their duplicate key and had a look around. Everything was neat and tidy. The text to her editor made it clear that there was no