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

got in touch with the Highway Patrol, and when I spoke with the officer dealing with the incident, I learned that an A.T.F. agent had been asking him questions. So I contacted this A.T.F. agent, who told me that the biker who had died was a gangster who had always evaded arrest and that his own belief was that his death was no accident. At this point, I was afraid of poking my nose into some dirty business with underworld connections. I tried to talk to one of my colleagues, Lewis Erban. But Lewis never came to the meeting I thought we’d fixed. More than ever, I was alone, dealing with a case that was beyond me. So I decided to disappear.”

“Because you were afraid of what you were discovering?”

“No, because I was all alone! I couldn’t stand it anymore. I told myself people would worry when they didn’t see me around. Or they’d wonder why I suddenly quit the force. You know where I was, the first two weeks I was missing? At home! In my own house. Waiting for someone to ring the bell and ask how I was. But nobody came. Not even a neighbor. Nobody at all. I stayed in, didn’t go shopping, didn’t leave the house. I didn’t get one single telephone call. The only visitor was my father, who brought me some shopping. He sat with me on the couch in the living room for hours. In silence. Then he asked me, ‘What are we waiting for?’ I replied, ‘Someone, but I don’t know who.’ In the end I decided to move to the other side of the country and start a new life. I told myself it was an opportunity to devote myself fully to writing, to movies, to a play. And what better subject than this criminal case that as far as I was concerned was still unsolved? One night, I snuck into the station—I still had the keys—and recovered the case file on the Gordon killings.”

“But why leave that note in the box: ‘Here begins The Darkest Night’?”Betsy said.

“Because I was already thinking that once I’d solved the case I’d come back to Orphea and reveal the truth. Tell the whole story in the form of a successful play. I was leaving Orphea a failure. I was determined to come back a hero and put on ‘The Darkest Night’.”

“Why use that title again?”

“It was my way of thumbing my nose at all the people who had turned their backs on me. ‘The Darkest Night’ in its original form didn’t exist anymore. My colleagues, as payback for me not giving 120 percent of my days and nights to police work, had destroyed all the drafts and manuscripts I had kept in the station, and the only copy, which I had given to the bookstore, was in the hands of Mayor Gordon.”

“How did you know?” I asked.

“Meghan Padalin told me. She worked in the bookstore. She was the one who had suggested I leave a copy of the play in the section for local writers. Sometimes Hollywood celebrities visited, and, who knows, it might have been read and liked by someone important. But now in mid-July 1994, after the dirty trick my colleagues had played on me, I went to get my script back from the bookstore, and Meghan told me Mayor Gordon had just bought it. So I went to him and asked for it back, and he told me he didn’t have it anymore. I was convinced he was trying to screw me. After all, he had read the play and disliked it! He’d even torn it up in front of me! Why buy another copy from the bookstore except to do me some sort of harm? So, when I left Orphea, I wanted to prove that nothing can prevent the fulfilment of a work of art. You can burn it, jeer at it, ban it, censor it, but everything can be reborn. You thought you could destroy me? Well, here I am again, as strong as ever. That’s what I imagined. So I entrusted my father with the task of selling my house and I moved to California. With the money from the sale, I had enough to get by for a while. I plunged back into the case file. But I found myself completely stuck, I was going round in circles. The less I advanced, the more the case obsessed me.”

“And you’ve been going over and over it for the past twenty years?” Derek said.

“Yes, but I was also working day and night on scripts for movies. I made myself a living and something of a reputation. I had put the Orphea murders to one side until Stephanie Mailer turned up out of the blue.”

“And what did you manage to come up with?”

“Not much. On one side, the motorcycle accident and, on the other, Meghan Padalin. That’s all I had.”

“Do you think Meghan Padalin was investigating Fold’s motorcycle accident and that’s why she was killed?”

“I really have no idea. I made that up for the play. I thought it made a good opening scene. But you tell me: is there really, in your view, a connection between Meghan and the accident?”

“We’re as sure as you are that there’s a link between the two deaths,” I said, “but we haven’t been able to find anything which connects them.”

“It’s been eating at me for twenty years,” Hayward said. “I told myself I would never find the solution to this case. But when Stephanie Mailer came to see me in L.A. in June, it gave me hope of a breakthrough. I told her everything I knew, thinking she would do the same.”

“So Stephanie knew that Meghan Padalin was the target?”

“That was something I told her.”

“And what did she know?”

“I have no idea. When I told her I didn’t know who had committed the murders, she immediately got up to go. She said, ‘I have no time to waste.’ I demanded that at