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

that evening. He had heard the shots as he was having dinner, and they had attracted his attention sufficiently for him to go out onto his porch, curious about what was going on in the neighborhood. He had the presence of mind to check the time: 7.10. By then silence had returned and he assumed someone must have been letting off firecrackers. He stayed out on the porch, enjoying the mild evening until, just over an hour later, around 8.20, he heard a man screaming for help. Mr Plant immediately called the police.

One of our first difficulties was the absence of motive. To discover who had killed the mayor and his family, we needed to know who had a good reason to do so. But no line of questioning seemed to lead anywhere. We talked to many townspeople, to municipal employees, to the families and friends of the mayor and of his wife, all without success. The Gordons seemed to have led a perfectly unobtrusive life. No known enemies, no debts, no drama, no dubious past. An ordinary family. Leslie Gordon, the mayor’s wife, was a much-loved teacher at Orphea’s elementary school. As for the mayor himself, although nobody was fulsome in their praise of him, he was well enough liked by his fellow citizens, and everyone assumed he would be re-elected in the elections in September, in which his deputy, Alan Brown, would be standing against him.

One afternoon, as we were yet again going through the case file, I said to Jesse:

“What if the Gordons weren’t running away? What if we’ve been getting it wrong from the start?”

“Wrong in which way?”

“Well, we’ve focused on the fact that Gordon was at home, not at the Grand Theater, and that they had packed their cases.”

“You have to admit that it’s odd for the mayor not to show up on the opening night of a festival he was responsible for.”

“Maybe he was late,” I said. “Maybe he was just about to set off. The official ceremony wasn’t due to kick off until 7.30. He still had time to get to the Grand Theater. It’s only a ten-minute drive. As for the cases, maybe the Gordons had planned to go on vacation. The wife and son had the whole summer off. It’s perfectly logical. They were planning to leave early the next day and they wanted to have their cases packed before going to the theater because they knew they’d be late back.”

“So why were they killed?” Jesse said.

“A burglary that went wrong,” I suggested. “Someone who assumed that the Gordons would be at the Grand Theater by then and they’d easily get into their house.”

“Except that the supposed burglar didn’t take anything—apart from their lives. And would you have kicked the door down to get in? Not very discreet as a method. Besides, none of the municipal employees we spoke to mentioned anything about the mayor having said he was going on vacation. No, Derek, it’s something else. Whoever killed them wanted to get rid of them. The violence of it is indication enough.”

From the file, Jesse took a photograph of the mayor’s body taken in the house and stared at it for a long time.

“Is there anything that surprises you in this photograph?”

“You mean apart from the fact that the mayor is lying in a pool of blood?”

“He wasn’t wearing a suit and tie,” Jesse said. “He was wearing casual clothes. What mayor would launch a festival in an outfit like that? It makes no sense. I reckon the mayor never had any intention of going to the theater.”

In the photographs of the open suitcase beside Leslie Gordon, some of the contents were visible. Photograph albums, a trinket.

“Look at this,” Jesse went on. “When she was killed, Leslie Gordon was filling her suitcase with personal objects. Who takes photograph albums with them on vacation? They were running away, probably from the person who killed them. Someone who knew that they wouldn’t be at the theater.”

Natasha came into the room just as Jesse was finishing his sentence.

“Well, guys,” she said with a smile, “do you have a lead?”

“No,” I said. “We don’t have a damn thing apart from a black van with a design on the rear window, which the witness cannot describe.”

We were interrupted by the doorbell.

“Who’s that?”

“Darla,” Natasha said. “She’s come to look at the plans for the decor of the restaurant.”

I scooped up the documents and put them in a cardboard file.

“Don’t talk to her about the case,” I said to Natasha as she was on her way to the door.

“O.K., Derek,” she said nonchalantly.

“This is serious, Nat. We’re sworn to secrecy. We shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t be seeing all this. Jesse and I could get in trouble.”

“Word of honor.”

Natasha opened the door. Coming into the apartment, Darla immediately noticed the file I was holding.

“So, how’s the case going?” she said.

“Fine,” I said.

“Come on, is that all you can say?”

I used the same words as I’d used with Natasha, rather more curtly than I had planned. “We’re sworn to secrecy.”

“Sworn to secrecy?” Darla retorted. “That’s bullshit! I bet Natasha knows the whole story.”

JESSE ROSENBERG

Monday, June 30, 2014

Twenty-six days to opening night

I woke Betsy at 1.30 in the morning and asked her to join Derek and me at the self-storage facility. She knew where it was, and was there twenty minutes later. We met her in the parking lot. It was a hot night and the sky was studded with stars.

Introducing Derek, I said to Betsy:

“It’s Derek who found out where Stephanie was conducting her investigation.”

“In a self-storage facility?”

Derek and I nodded in unison and led Betsy along the rows of metal shutters. We stopped when we came to 234-A. I raised the shutter and switched on the light to reveal a small room, six feet by ten, lined top to bottom with folders of documents, all devoted to the quadruple murder of 1994. There were clippings from various regional daily papers of the time, notably a series