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

crazy about the idea. But in the end, she let me buy her a drink, and we talked for a while. I didn’t think it would go any farther. Until I told her I was a police officer here in Orphea—that seemed to grab her immediately. Right away her whole attitude changed, she suddenly seemed very interested in me. We exchanged numbers, and we went out a few times. No more than that. Then two weeks ago, things suddenly moved ahead. We slept together. Just once.”

“Why only once?” I said.

“Because I realized it wasn’t me she was interested in, it was the records room at the station.”

“The records room?”

“Yes, Captain. It was really weird. She kept mentioning it. She absolutely wanted me to take her there. I thought she was joking and told her it was out of the question. But two weeks ago, when we were in bed together at her place, she woke me up and demanded that I drive her to the records room. As if I owed her something for spending the night with her. I was pretty hurt. I stormed out. I made it very clear to her that I didn’t want to see her anymore.”

“You weren’t curious to know why she was so interested in the records room?” Chief Gulliver said.

“I was, of course. Part of me absolutely wanted to know. But I didn’t want to show Stephanie that I was interested. I felt like I was being manipulated, and, since I really liked her, that hurt me.”

“And did you see her again?” I asked.

“Just once. Last Saturday. She called me a few times that night, but I didn’t pick up. I thought she’d give up, but she just kept calling. I was on duty, and I couldn’t stand the way she wouldn’t leave me alone. In the end, I was such a wreck that I told her to meet me outside her apartment building. I didn’t even get out of my car, I told her that if she contacted me again I’d lodge a complaint for harassment. She told me she needed my help, but I didn’t believe her.”

“What was the help she needed?”

“She said she needed to take a look at a file connected to a murder committed here, something she had some information about. She said, ‘The investigation was badly handled. There’s a detail that nobody saw at the time even though it was really obvious.’ To convince me, she showed me her hand and asked me what I saw. ‘Your hand,’ I said. ‘It’s my fingers you should have seen,’ she said.

“All this about hands and fingers—I told myself she was playing with me. I left her standing there on the street and swore I’d never let her fool me again.”

“And you didn’t talk to her after that?” I said.

“No, Captain Rosenberg. That was the last time.”

I paused for a moment, then played my trump card. “Sean, I know you talked to Stephanie on Monday night, the night she went missing.”

“No, Captain! I swear I didn’t talk to her!”

I waved the phone records and put them down in front of him. “Don’t lie to me, it’s written here. You talked to each other for twenty seconds.”

“No, we didn’t talk!” Sean cried. “She called me, that’s true. Twice. But I didn’t answer! The second time she called, she left me a message. Yes, our phones were connected, like the records say, but we didn’t talk.”

Sean wasn’t lying. Checking his phone, we discovered a message received on Monday at 10.10, lasting twenty seconds. I pressed the button and Stephanie’s voice suddenly emerged from the phone’s speaker.

“Sean, it’s me. I absolutely have to talk to you, it’s urgent. Please . . . [Pause] Sean, I’m scared. I’m really scared.”

There was panic in her voice.

“I didn’t listen to the message at the time. I thought it was her whining again. I didn’t listen to it until Wednesday, after her parents came to the station to report her missing. And I didn’t know what to do.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I was scared, Captain. And I was ashamed.”

“Do you think Stephanie felt threatened?”

“If she did, she never mentioned it. That was the first time she said she was scared.”

Betsy, Chief Gulliver, and I exchanged glances. Then I asked Sean:

“I need to know where you were and what you were doing around ten o’clock on Monday night, when Stephanie tried to reach you.”

“I was in a bar in East Hampton. A friend of mine is the manager. There was a group of us. We spent the whole evening there. I’ll give you all the names, you can check.”

Several witnesses did confirm O’Donnell’s presence in the bar in question from seven o’clock until one in the morning on the night of Stephanie’s disappearance. In Betsy’s office, I wrote Stephanie’s riddle on the whiteboard: What was in front of our eyes and we didn’t see in 1994?

We were sure that Stephanie had wanted to get into the Orphea police records to gain access to the file on the investigation into the 1994 quadruple murder. So we went to the records room. It wasn’t hard to locate the large box containing the file. But the box was empty. Inside, there was only a yellowing sheet of paper on which somebody had typewritten the words:

Here begins THE DARKEST NIGHT.

Like the start of a treasure hunt.

*

The only real lead we had was the telephone call from the Kodiak Grill immediately after Stephanie left. We went back there. The waitress we had questioned the previous evening was on duty.

“Can you tell me where your public phone is?” I said.

“You can use the one on the counter.”

“That’s kind of you, but I’d like to see your public phone.”

She led us across the restaurant to the rear, where there were two rows of coat hooks fixed to the wall, a passage to the toilets, a coin machine, and, in a corner, a phone booth.

“Is there a camera?” Betsy asked, looking up at the ceiling.

“No, there’s no