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

Other officers would have already put Tennenbaum in preventive detention and let the law finish the job. There was enough evidence to charge him with homicide in the first degree and to get the legal process going, but that was the problem. Knowing Tennenbaum and his fiend of a lawyer, they might well manage to convince a jury that there was reasonable doubt, and Tennenbaum would be acquitted.

So we did not want to rush in and make an arrest. Our progress had impressed the major, and we had decided to wait a little. Time was on our side. Tennenbaum was bound to lower his guard eventually and make a mistake. Our reputations, Jesse’s and mine, depended on our being patient. Our colleagues and our superiors were watching us closely and we knew it. We wanted to be the tireless young detectives who had sent a quadruple murderer to prison, not a couple of amateurs crushed by Tennenbaum getting acquitted and being awarded damages, his legal costs paid by the State.

Furthermore, there was one element of the investigation that remained unexplored: the murder weapon. A Beretta with a filed-off serial number. A professional criminal’s weapon. That was what intrigued us: how had a man from a respectable Manhattan family procured that kind of gun?

The question led us to crisscross the Hamptons, discreetly. We ended up focusing on a disreputable bar in Ridgesport, where Tennenbaum had been arrested for a violent brawl a few years earlier. We staked the place out for four days, hoping Tennenbaum would show up. It was because of that stakeout that we were called to Major McKenna’s office early one morning. There was another man there, who immediately started bawling us out.

“I’m Special Agent Grace, A.T.F. So you’re the two assholes who are sabotaging a federal investigation.”

“Good morning to you, too,” I said. “I’m Sergeant Derek Scott and this is—”

“I know who you two clowns are!” Grace cut in.

The major explained the situation more diplomatically. “The A.T.F. spotted the two of you outside a bar in Ridgesport that they already have under surveillance.”

“We rented a house opposite the bar. We’ve been there for months,” Grace added.

“Special Agent Grace, are we allowed to know why you’re interested in that bar?” Jesse said.

“Because of a guy who was arrested holding up a bank on Long Island in February, and who started talking in return for a reduced sentence. He told us he’d bought his gun in that bar. When we looked into it, we found it was a place where stolen army weapons are being resold. And these thefts are inside jobs, if you see what I mean. In other words, military personnel are involved. So you won’t be upset if I don’t tell you more. It’s sensitive.”

“Could you at least tell us what kind of weapons we’re talking about?” Jesse said.

“Berettas, with the serial numbers filed off.”

Jesse threw me a startled look. Maybe we were on the verge of playing our match ball. It was in that bar that the murderer had acquired the murder weapon.

JESSE ROSENBERG

Friday, July 18, 2014

Eight days to opening night

The announcement made by Kirk Hayward the day before at the Grand Theater, that the name of the killer from 1994 would be revealed in the course of his play, had caused a great stir. Orphea was seething with excitement. In my opinion, Hayward was bluffing.

One point bothered us, however: “The Darkest Night”. How could Mayor Gordon, having, as we knew, torn up his copy, still have been in possession of a copy of the script? To try to answer this question, Betsy, Derek and I were on board the ferry that ran from Port Jefferson in the Hamptons to Bridgeport, Connecticut. We were on our way to New Haven to question Mayor Gordon’s brother Ernest, who was a professor of biology at Yale. With his brother’s family all dead, he had inherited everything. It was he who had sorted through his brother’s affairs at the time, so maybe he had come across that playscript. He was our last hope.

Ernest Gordon was now seventy. He was Joseph’s elder brother. He received us in his kitchen, where he had cookies and coffee ready. His wife was also present. She seemed nervous.

“On the telephone you said you had new information about the murder of my brother and his family,” Gordon said.

His wife could not stay seated.

“That’s right, Mr Gordon,” I said. “To be honest with you, there are a number of things we’ve discovered recently that lead us to think we may have been mistaken twenty years ago about the guilt of the man called Ted Tennenbaum.”

“You mean he wasn’t the killer?”

“Yes, that is what I mean. What we came today to discover, Mr Gordon, was whether you can remember seeing among your brother’s effects a playscript entitled ‘The Darkest Night’.”

Gordon sighed. “My brother had an incredible amount of paperwork at home. I tried to sort through it a little, but there was too much. In the end, I threw most of it away.”

“We have the impression this play was quite important. Apparently he had resisted giving it back to its author. This suggests that he might have kept it somewhere secure. Somewhere unusual, too, a place where nobody would think to look for it.”

Gordon stared at us. There was a heavy silence. It was his wife who finally broke it.

“Ernie,” she said, “we have to tell them everything. It may be important to these officers.”

Gordon sighed again. “After my brother’s death, I was contacted by a notary public. Joseph had drawn up a will, which surprised me because he didn’t have any other property apart from his house. But this will mentioned a safe deposit box in a bank.”

“We were never told about this safe deposit box back then,” Derek said.

“I didn’t inform the police about it,” Gordon admitted.

“Why?”

“Because there was cash in that box. A lot of cash.