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

be traced or reached. So Derek and I had been staked out in the street next to his building for nearly twenty-four hours. It was all we could do for the time being.

All leads led to him. He had been Meghan Padalin’s lover from January to June 1994. The Northern Rose Hotel had been able to confirm to us that he had stayed there quite regularly during that six-month period. That year, he had not come to the Hamptons only for the theater festival in Orphea. He had been there for months. That must have been for Meghan. So he had not been able to take it when she left him. He had killed her on opening night, along with the Gordon family, unwitting witnesses of the murder. He had had time to get there and back on foot and be in the theater for the beginning of the play. He had then been able to give his opinion of the performance to the newspapers so that everyone would know he had been in the Grand Theater. It was an impressive alibi.

A little earlier in the day, Betsy had been to see Miranda Bird, taking with her a photograph of Ostrovski, hoping that she would identify him, but she had been quite vague.

“It might have been him,” she had said, “but it’s hard to say for certain after all these years.”

“Are you sure about the tattoo?” Betsy had asked. “If not, we need to know.”

“I don’t remember now,” Miranda had said. “Maybe I was confused.”

While we were waiting for Ostrovski in New York, Betsy, in the archive room of the Chronicle, had been going over everything in the file with Hayward and Bird. They wanted to make sure they had not neglected anything. They were tired and hungry. They had eaten almost nothing all day apart from the candies and chocolate bars that Bird would fetch at regular intervals from the drawer of his office upstairs, where there was apparently an unending supply.

Hayward couldn’t take his eyes off the wall covered with notes, images, and press clippings. He finally said to Betsy:

“Why is the woman who could identify the killer not named? All that’s written on the list of witnesses is: ‘The woman in the motel on Route 16’. All the others are named.”

“That’s true,” Bird said. “What’s her name? It might be important.”

“It’s Jesse who’s dealing with that,” Betsy said. “You’ll have to ask him. Anyway, she doesn’t remember anything. Let’s not waste time on it.”

But Hayward would not let go.

“I looked in the State Police file from 1994. This witness isn’t there. Is this a new element?”

“You’ll have to ask Jesse,” Betsy said again.

Since Hayward kept insisting, Betsy asked Bird if he could fetch some more candies. Once he had left the room, she took advantage of his absence to sum up the situation to Hayward, hoping he would understand how important it was to not mention that witness again in front of Bird.

“Oh, my God,” Hayward said in a near-whisper. “I can’t believe it. Michael’s wife worked as a prostitute for that bastard Fold?”

“Keep your mouth shut, Kirk,” Betsy said. “If you don’t, I swear I’ll kneecap you.”

Betsy already regretted telling him. She could see him blurting it out. Bird came back into the room with a bag of candies.

“So, what about this witness?” he said.

Betsy smiled. “We’re on to the next point. We were talking about Ostrovski.”

“I can’t see Ostrovski wiping out an entire family,” Bird said.

“We should never trust appearances, you know,” Hayward said. “Sometimes we think we know people and then we discover incredible secrets about them.”

“Never mind,” Betsy cut in, glaring at Hayward. “We’ll know exactly where we are once Jesse and Derek have laid their hands on Ostrovski.”

*

It was 8.30, outside Ostrovski’s building.

Derek and I were about to abandon our stakeout when we saw Ostrovski coming along the street, walking at a steady pace. We leaped out of our car, guns at the ready, and hurried to intercept him.

“You’re crazy, Jesse,” Ostrovski complained as I pinned him to the wall and handcuffed him.

“We know everything, Ostrovski!” I cried. “It’s over!”

“What everything do you know?”

“You killed Meghan Padalin and the Gordons. As well as Stephanie Mailer and Cody Springfield.”

“Are you sick or something?” Ostrovski said.

A crowd of onlookers was forming around us. Some were filming the scene on their cell phones.

“Help me!” Ostrovski called to them. “These two aren’t police officers! They’re crazy people!”

We were forced to show our badges to the crowd. We pulled Ostrovski inside the building to be somewhere quiet.

“I’d like you to tell me what’s wrong with you,” Ostrovski said. “How could you think I killed those poor people?”

“We saw the wall of your suite, Ostrovski, with the press clippings and the photographs of Meghan.”

“There’s your proof right there that I didn’t kill anyone! I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to understand what happened.”

“Or it could be you’ve spent the last twenty years trying to cover your tracks,” Derek said. “That’s why you commissioned Stephanie, isn’t it? You wanted to see if it was possible to trace the crimes back to you, and when it looked like she was doing precisely that, you killed her.”

“Oh, goddammit! I was just trying to do the job you two incompetents should have done in 1994.”

“Don’t take us for idiots. You were Jeremiah Fold’s slave! That’s why you asked Mayor Gordon to get rid of him for you.”

“I’m nobody’s slave!” Ostrovski spat at me.

“Enough of this bullshit,” Derek said. “Why did you leave Orphea so suddenly if you have nothing to hide?”

“Since you ask, my sister had a stroke yesterday. She had to have an emergency operation. I wanted to be with her. I spent all night and all day in the hospital. She’s the only family I have left.”

“Which hospital?”

“New York Presbyterian.”

Derek contacted the hospital to check. Ostrovski wasn’t lying to us. I immediately removed his handcuffs.

“Why are you so obsessed with those killings?” I said.

“Because I loved Meghan, dammit!” Ostrovski