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

“I promise.”

2

Desolation

SUNDAY, JULY 27 – WEDNESDAY, JULY 30, 2014

JESSE ROSENBERG

Sunday, July 27, 2014

The day after opening night

Seven in the morning. Day was breaking over Orphea. Nobody had slept during the night.

The center of town looked unusually bleak. Main Street was still cordoned off, still filled with police officers and emergency vehicles, and strewn with objects of all kinds abandoned by the audience in the wave of panic that had followed the shots being fired in the Grand Theater.

There had been a lot of action at first. Until late at night, the police intervention teams had closed off the area in search of the shooter, with no success. It had also been necessary to secure the town in order to avoid stores being looted in the turmoil. First aid tents had been set up outside the security barrier to treat those lightly wounded, most of them victims of being knocked down and badly bruised, some in shock. As for Carolina Eden, she was not in a good way. She had been flown in a desperate state by helicopter to a hospital in Manhattan.

Now, with a new day breaking, peace and quiet had returned. What had happened at the Grand Theater needed to be figured out. Who was the shooter? And how had he been able to bring a weapon into the theater despite all the security measures?

At the police station, which was still in a state of great agitation, Betsy, Derek and I were getting ready to question the cast, who had been the most direct witnesses of the events. Caught up in the panic, they had scattered across town, and finding them and bringing them in had been no easy matter. They were now all in a conference room, some sleeping on the floor, others slumped on the table in the middle, waiting to be interrogated in turn. The only one missing was Jerry Eden, who had left with his daughter in the helicopter.

The first to be questioned was Hayward, and our conversation would take a turn we were a long way from anticipating. Hayward no longer had anybody to protect him, and we didn’t pull our punches.

“What the hell do you know!” Derek shouted at him, shaking Hayward like a plum tree. “I want a name now, or I’ll smash your teeth in. I want a name! Right now!”

“I have no idea,” Hayward said, “I swear.”

Derek flung him angrily against the wall. Hayward slumped to the floor. I picked him up and sat him on a chair.

“You have to talk now, Kirk,” I said. “You have to tell us everything you know. This has gone far enough.”

Hayward was on the verge of tears. “How’s Carolina?” he said in a choked voice.

“She isn’t doing well!” Derek said. “And you alone are responsible for that!”

Hayward plunged his head into his hands.

“What is it you know?” I said in a firm but not aggressive tone.

He said in a low voice, “I never had the slightest idea who committed those murders.”

“But you knew Meghan Padalin, not Mayor Gordon, was the target back in 1994?”

He nodded. “In October 1994, when the State Police announced that Tennenbaum was the killer, I did indeed have my doubts. Because Ostrovski had told me he had seen Charlotte driving Tennenbaum’s van, which I couldn’t figure out. But I would never have dug any farther if the Gordons’ next-door neighbors hadn’t called me a few days later. They had just discovered two bullet holes in their garage door. The marks weren’t obvious, they’d only noticed them because they had quite by chance decided to repaint the door. I went there, extracted the two bullets, then asked the forensics department of the State Police to make a comparison with the bullets found in the victims. They came from the same weapon. Judging by the depth and angle at which the bullets were embedded, it was clear that they had been fired from the park. That was when I understood that it was Meghan who had been the target. Her killer had missed her in the park, she had run in the direction of the mayor’s house, presumably in search of help, but had been overtaken and killed. Then the Gordons were killed because they had witnessed the murder.”

“Why were we never told this?” Derek said.

“I tried my damnedest to get in touch with you at the time,” Hayward said. “I called you at troop headquarters, you and Rosenberg. I was told you’d had an accident and were both on indefinite leave. When I said it was about the Gordon killings, I was told very firmly that the case was closed. So I went to your houses. At your house, Derek, I was turned away by a young woman who told me not to come back and to leave you alone, especially if it was to talk about that case. Then I went to your place, Jesse, several times. I rang the bell but nobody ever came to the door!”

Derek and I looked at each other, realizing how disastrously wrong we had been about the case back then.

“What did you do?” Derek said.

“It was a mess!” Hayward said. “But in brief: Charlotte Brown had been seen at the wheel of Tennenbaum’s van at the time of the murders, but Tennenbaum was the culprit according to the State Police, and I was convinced that there had been a mistake about the primary target. To make matters worse, I couldn’t tell anybody. My colleagues in the Orphea police department had given me the cold shoulder, and the State Police officers in charge of the investigation—you two—had dropped out of sight. A real mess. So I decided to solve the case myself. I looked to see if there had been any other murders recently in the area. There weren’t any. The only suspicious death was a guy who had been killed in a supposed motorcycle accident on a road near Ridgesport. It looked worth investigating. I