The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer: A gripping new thriller with a killer twist by Joël Dicker (ebook reader play store .txt) 📕

hesitated for quite a while, but the price was attractive. We’d never have been able to afford a house this size if we’d had to pay top dollar.”

“Is the layout of the house the same as it was then?” I asked.

“Yes, Captain. We refurbished the kitchen, but the layout of the rooms was exactly as you see it now.”

“Do you mind if we take a look around?”

“Go ahead.”

We began with the front door, following the reconstruction in the police file. Betsy read out the report.

“The killer kicks the door down,” she said. “He comes across Leslie Gordon in the hallway and shoots, then turns to his right and sees the Gordons’ son in the living room, and shoots him. Then he heads for the kitchen, where he kills the mayor before going back out through the front door.”

We walked the route from the living room to the kitchen, then from the kitchen to the front steps.

“As he comes out,” Betsy continues, “he sees Meghan Padalin, who’s trying to run away. He shoots her twice in the back, then finishes her off with a bullet in the head.”

We now knew that the killer had not come in Tennenbaum’s van as we had thought, but either in another vehicle or on foot. Betsy looked again at the garden and said suddenly:

“You know, there’s something that doesn’t make sense.”

“What doesn’t?” I said.

“The killer is trying to take advantage of the fact that everyone’s at the festival. He wants to be invisible, silent, furtive. Logically, he should prowl around the house, slip into the garden, look into the house through a window.”

“Maybe he did,” Derek said.

Betsy frowned. “You told me there was a leak in the sprinkler system that day. Everyone who set foot on the lawn had wet shoes. If the killer had come through the garden before kicking down the door, he would have brought water into the house. But the report doesn’t mention damp footprints. There should have been some, shouldn’t there?”

“That’s a good point,” Derek said.

“Another thing,” Betsy went on. “Why did the killer come in through the front door and not the kitchen door, at the back of the house? He’d only have had to break the glass. Why didn’t he get in that way? Probably because he didn’t know there was a glass door there. His M.O. is quick, brutal. He kicked down the door and shot everyone.”

“Agreed,” I said, “but what are you getting at, Betsy?”

“I don’t think the mayor was the target, Jesse. If the killer had wanted to kill the mayor, why rush in through the front door, when he had better options?”

“What are you thinking? A burglary? But nothing was stolen.”

“I know,” Betsy said, “but there’s a detail that doesn’t ring true.”

Derek thought about it in his turn and looked at the park near the house. He walked over to it, sat down on the grass, and said:

“Charlotte Brown stated that when she arrived Meghan Padalin was in this park doing exercises. We know from the timeline that the killer got here a minute after she left. So Meghan was still in the park. If the killer leaves his vehicle and goes to the house and kicks the Gordons’ door down and shoots them, why does Meghan run in the direction of the house? It makes no sense. She should have run in the other direction.”

“Oh, my God!” I cried.

It had just hit me. It wasn’t the Gordon family that was targeted in 1994. It was Meghan Padalin.

The killer knew her habits, he had come to kill her. Maybe he had already attacked her in the park and she had tried to run away. He had then taken up position on the street and shot her. As far as he knew, the Gordons were away that day. The whole town was in the Grand Theater. But suddenly he had seen the Gordons’ son in the window—Charlotte had also seen him a few minutes earlier. He had then kicked in the door of the house and killed all the witnesses.

That was what had been in front of the investigators’ eyes from the beginning, but nobody had seen it: the body of Meghan Padalin in front of the house. She was the one who had been targeted. The Gordons had been collateral damage.

DEREK SCOTT

Mid-September 1994. A month and a half after the Gordon killings and a month before the tragedy that would strike Jesse and me.

We had Tennenbaum in a corner.

The very afternoon on which we had questioned Corporal Ziggy and he had admitted selling Tennenbaum a Beretta, we went to Orphea to proceed with the arrest. To make sure we didn’t miss him, we had two teams from the State Police with us: one, led by Jesse, to break into his house, and the other, led by myself, to go to Café Athena. But we drew a blank: Tennenbaum was not at home, and the manager of his restaurant had not seen him since the day before.

“He’s taken a break,” the manager told us.

“A break?” I said in surprise. “Where to?”

“I don’t know. Only a few days off. He should be back on Monday.”

A search of Tennenbaum’s house yielded nothing. Nor did a search of his office at Café Athena. We could not wait quietly until he deigned to return to Orphea. According to our information, he had not taken a plane, at least not under his own name. His immediate associates had not seen him. And his van wasn’t there. We launched a search. His description was sent to the airports and the borders, his license number sent to all the police forces in the country. His photograph was distributed to all businesses in the Orphea area and to a large number of gas stations in New York State.

Jesse and I moved between our office at troop headquarters, which was the heart of the operation, and Orphea, where we mounted a stake-out in front of the Tennenbaum house, sleeping in our car.