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

Grand Theater, that Joseph Gordon is corrupt. I’ll let it all out! I don’t care about the consequences for myself. Today is your one chance to escape.’ Joseph and Leslie Gordon realized I wasn’t bluffing. I was about to explode. They promised me they’d get out that evening at the latest. I left their house and I went to the theater. It was late morning by now. I saw Charlotte, who’d gotten it into her head to recover something that Gordon had in his possession, some fucking play that Hayward had written. She was so insistent that I had to tell her Gordon was planning to take off in a few hours.”

“So you knew and Charlotte knew that the Gordons were going to leave that day?” Betsy said.

“Yes, we were the only people who knew. I can assure you of that. Knowing Gordon, I’m sure he didn’t tell anyone else. He didn’t like the unexpected. His method was to control everything. That’s why I can’t figure out how come he was killed at home. Who could have known he was there? By then, he was supposed to be at the Grand Theater, with me, shaking hands with the invited guests. It was in the program: 7.00 – 7.30, Official reception in the lobby of the Grand Theater with Mayor Joseph Gordon.”

“And what happened to the bank account?”

“It stayed open, I suppose. It had never been declared to the I.R.S., so far as I knew. It was as if it didn’t exist. I never touched it. That seemed the best way to bury the whole story. I guess there must still be quite a lot of money in it.”

“How about the anonymous phone call? Did you ever find out who made it?”

“No, I never did.”

* * *

That evening, Betsy invited Derek and me to dinner at her house.

The meal was excellent and so was her claret. As we were sipping liqueurs in her living room, she said:

“The two of you can sleep here if you want. The bed in the guest room is very comfortable. I have a new toothbrush for each of you, and a whole bunch of my ex-husband’s T-shirts that I kept, God knows why. They would fit you perfectly.”

“Now there’s a good idea,” Derek said. “We could take the oppor-tunity to tell each other our life stories. Betsy will tell us about her ex-husband, I can talk about my terrible life sitting behind a desk, and Jesse can talk about the restaurant he’s planning to open.”

“You’re planning to open a restaurant, Jesse?” Betsy said.

“Don’t listen to him, Betsy, the poor guy’s had far too much to drink.”

Derek noticed the copy of “The Darkest Night” on the low table. Betsy had brought it home to read. He picked it up.

“You really never stop, do you?” he said.

The atmosphere suddenly turned serious again.

“I don’t understand why this play was so precious to Gordon that he put it in a safe deposit box,” Betsy said.

“Along with the bank statements incriminating Mayor Brown,” I said. “Could it be he was keeping the play as a guarantee to protect himself from someone?”

“Do you mean from Kirk Hayward, Jesse?” Betsy said.

“I don’t know. The script doesn’t seem particularly interesting in itself. And Mayor Brown says he never heard Gordon talk about the play.”

“Can we believe Alan Brown after everything he hid from us?” Derek said.

“He’d have no reason to lie about that,” I said. “And besides, we’ve known from the start that at the time of the murders he was in the lobby of the Grand Theater, shaking hands with dozens of people.”

Derek and I had both read Hayward’s play, but, perhaps because we were tired, we had not seen what Betsy had picked up on.

“What if there was a connection with the underlined words?” she now said. “There are about ten words underlined in pencil.”

“I supposed they were notes made by Hayward,” Derek said. “Changes he might want to make in the play.”

“No,” Betsy said, “I think they’re something else.”

We sat down around the table. Derek picked up the script and Betsy noted down the underlined words as he read them out. The result was the following piece of gibberish:

jammed enough return event my interest

arrogant horizontal funny outside lake destiny

“What the hell does that mean?” I said.

“Maybe it’s a code,” Derek said.

Bent low over the sheet of paper, Betsy wrote the sentence out again, this time beginning each word with a capital letter:

Jammed Enough Return Event My Interest

Arrogant Horizontal Funny Outside Lake Destiny

J E R E M I A H F O L D

DEREK SCOTT

Mid-September 1994. Six weeks since the murders.

If what Special Agent Grace of the A.T.F. had told us was correct, then we had located the source of the murder weapon: the bar in Ridgesport, where you could acquire an army Beretta with its serial number filed off.

At the request of the A.T.F. (we characterized it as a sign of goodwill) Jesse and I suspended our stakeout. We only had to wait until the A.T.F. made up their minds to carry out a raid. In the meantime, we would occupy ourselves with other cases. Our patience and our diplomacy paid off. Late one afternoon in mid-September, Special Agent Grace invited Jesse and me to join the raid. They seized arms and ammunition, among them the latest Berettas from the stolen consignment, and arrested an infantry corporal who went by the name of Ziggy. This Ziggy wasn’t an especially bright spark, presumably more cog than mastermind in the arms trafficking operation.

Neither the A.T.F. nor the military police, who had joined in, thought Ziggy had obtained the weapons alone. As for us, we needed to know who he had sold his Berettas to. We ended up coming to an arrangement. The A.T.F. let us question Ziggy, and we made a deal with him: he would give the A.T.F. the names of his associates, and in return would receive a reduced sentence. Everyone was happy.

We showed