The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer: A gripping new thriller with a killer twist

by Joël Dicker

  Tennenbaum did not react. He was content to let his lawyer talk for him, which had worked well so far. Starr continued:

  “If you’ve finished with this tall story of yours, please allow me to reply to it. My client couldn’t have been at Mayor Gordon’s house at seven o’clock on July 30 for the perfectly good reason that he was the fire officer on duty at the Grand Theater. You can ask anyone who was backstage that night, they’ll tell you they saw Ted.”

  “There was a lot of coming and going that night,” I said. “Mr Tennenbaum had time to slip out. It’s only a few minutes’ drive to the mayor’s house.”

  “Oh, I see, Sergeant! So your theory is that my client jumped into his van, drove over to the mayor’s house, killed everyone who he happened to run across, and then calmly returned to his post at the Grand Theater.”

  I decided to play my trump card. After leaving a moment’s silence, I said:

  “Your client’s van has been formally identified as having been parked outside the Gordon family’s house a few minutes before the murders. That’s why your client is here, and it’s why he won’t leave here except to go to a federal prison while awaiting trial.”

  Starr looked me up and down severely. I had the feeling I had hit the target. He started clapping. “Congratulations, Sergeant. And thank you. I haven’t had such a good laugh in years. So, your whole house of cards rests on this preposterous story of the van, which your witness was apparently unable to identify for ten days until she suddenly got her memory back?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because, unlike you, I do my job. I’m sorry to tell you this, but no judge would accept such an absurd testimony! You have no tangible evidence. Your case is worthy of a Boy Scout. You should be ashamed, Sergeant. If you have nothing to add, my client and I will now take our leave of you.”

  The door of the room opened. It was the major, glaring at us. He let Starr and Tennenbaum go, and when they had left he came back in. With an angry kick, he sent a chair flying. I had never seen him so furious.

  “So this is your great investigation?” he shouted.

  Jesse and I lowered our eyes. We did not dare say a word, we knew it would only have reinforced the major’s fury.

  “Well? What do you have to say for yourselves?”

  “I’m convinced Tennenbaum did it, sir,” I said.

  “How convinced, Scott? So convinced that you won’t sleep or eat until you’ve closed this case?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then get on with it! Get the hell out of here, the two of you, and solve the case!”

  -6

  Death of a Reporter

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 2 – TUESDAY, JULY 8, 2014

  JESSE ROSENBERG

  Wednesday, July 2, 2014

  Twenty-four days to opening night

  On Route 117 an armada of emergency vehicles—fire engines, ambulances and police cars from all over the region—blocked access to Stag Lake. Traffic had been diverted by the Highway Patrol. Tape had been strung across the surrounding meadows, from one part of the forest to another, and behind them officers kept guard, stopping onlookers from getting in, as well as the reporters who had come running.

  A few dozen yards away, at the foot of a gentle slope, in the middle of the high grass and cherry bushes, Betsy, Derek and I, as well as Chief Gulliver and a handful of officers, were gazing in silence at the fairy-tale setting of a vast stretch of water, covered in aquatic plants. Right in the middle of the lake, a patch of color was clearly visible in the vegetation. A little mound of white flesh. A human body caught among the water lilies.

  It was impossible to say from that distance if it was Stephanie. We were waiting for frogmen from the State Police. As we waited, powerless and speechless, we looked at the calm stretch of water.

  On one of the opposite shores, police officers trying to approach had become bogged down in the mud.

  “Wasn’t this area searched?” I asked Chief Gulliver.

  “We didn’t get as far as here. The place isn’t easily accessible. And the shore’s impassable, what with the mud and the reeds.”

  We heard sirens in the distance. Backup was coming. Then Mayor Brown arrived, escorted by Montagne, who had gone to collect him from the town hall. At last, the State Police units arrived, and things moved into higher gear: police officers and firefighters unloading rubber dinghies, followed by frogmen carrying crates of heavy equipment.

  “What’s going on in this town?” the mayor said as he joined us, staring out at the expanses of water lilies.

  The frogmen rapidly got to work, and the dinghies were launched on the water. Chief Gulliver and I got into one of them. We set out across the lake, followed by a second dinghy carrying the frogmen. The frogs and the birds suddenly broke off their cries, and when the engines were turned off, the silence that ensued was nerve-wracking. The dinghies continued moving through the carpets of flowering water lilies and soon came level with the body. The divers slipped into the water and disappeared in a cloud of bubbles. I crouched in the stern of the dinghy and leaned over the side to get a better view of the body as it was freed by the frogmen. When finally they managed to turn it over, I recoiled. The face I saw, distorted by the water, was Stephanie Mailer’s.

  The announcement that Stephanie Mailer’s drowned body had been found in Stag Lake caused a great stir in the area. Onlookers massed beyond the police barriers. The local media were there in numbers. The whole side of Route 17 was one huge, noisy carnival.

  On the shore, where the body now lay, the medical examiner, Dr Ranjit Singh, proceeded with an initial examination, then joined us—Betsy, Derek, Mayor Brown, Chief Gulliver, and me—to let us know his observations.

  “I think Stephanie Mailer was strangled,” he said.

  Mayor Brown hid his face in his hands.

  “We’ll have to wait for the results of the postmortem to know beyond doubt what happened,” Dr Singh went on, “but I’ve already noticed big bruises on the neck as well as signs of major cyanosis. There are also scratches on the arms and face, and grazes on the elbows and knees.”

  “Why didn’t anyone see her before?” Gulliver said.

  “It takes time for drowned bodies to come back to the surface. Judging by the condition of the body, death occurred eight or nine days ago. More than a week anyway.”

  “Which would take us back to the night she went missing,” Jesse said. “Stephanie was kidnapped and then murdered.”

  “Oh, my God!” Brown said, passing a hand through his hair. “How is it possible? Who could have done this to that poor girl?”

  “That’s what we’re going to have to find out,” Derek said. “You’re facing a very serious situation, Mr Mayor. There’s a killer in the area, maybe in your town. We don’t know anything about his or her motives and we can’t rule out the possibility that they may strike again. Until we catch whoever is responsible, we have to be even more careful. We may need to put security measures in place, with the State Police supporting the local force.”

  “Security measures?” Brown said anxiously. “Don’t even think about it, you’re going to scare everyone! You don’t seem to realize, Orphea is a resort town. All we need is a rumor that there’s a murderer on the loose and the summer season is screwed! Do you know what that means for us?” He turned to Chief Gulliver and Betsy. “How long can you stop this from getting out?”

  “It’s already out, Alan,” Gulliver said. “It’s spreading like wildfire. Look for yourself, up there on the side of the road.”

  We were suddenly interrupted by a commotion: the Mailers had just arrived. They appeared at the top of the slope leading down to the shore. “Stephanie!” Mrs Mailer cried as she approached, followed by her husband. Derek and I, seeing them hurrying down the slope, rushed to stop them coming any farther and spare them the sight of their daughter lying on the shore, ready to be loaded into a body bag.

  “You really shouldn’t look,” I said to Mrs Mailer, who huddled a
gainst me, screaming and weeping. We led the Mailers to a police van, where a counsellor would soon join them.

  A statement had to be made to the media. I preferred to let the mayor deal with that. Gulliver, who seemed not to want to miss an opportunity to appear on T.V., insisted on going with him.

  They climbed back up to the security cordon, behind which reporters were kicking their heels. There were regional T.V. channels, photog-raphers, and the printed press, too. When Mayor Brown and Gulliver appeared, a little forest of microphones and lenses turned in their direction. In a voice that stood out from those of his colleagues, Michael Bird asked the first question:

  “Was Stephanie Mailer murdered?”

  There was a brief, icy silence.

  “We have to wait for the results of the investigation,” Mayor Brown said. “Please let’s not jump to conclusions. A press release will be issued in due course.”

  “But it was Stephanie Mailer who was found in the lake?” Bird persisted.

  “I can’t tell you anything more.”

  “We all saw her parents arrive, Mr Mayor.”

  “Yes, it does seem to be Stephanie Mailer,” Brown was forced to confirm. “But her parents have not yet formally identified her.”

  He was at once bombarded by questions from the other reporters present. Bird’s voice again rose above the mass:

  “So Stephanie was murdered,” he said. “Which means there’s no way the fire in her apartment was a coincidence. What’s going on in Orphea? What are you hiding from the townspeople, Mr Mayor?”

  Keeping his composure, Brown replied in a calm voice, “I understand your questions, but it’s important that you let the detectives do their job. I won’t be making any comment for the moment, I don’t want to risk hampering the work of the police.”

  Bird, visibly upset, now cried:

  “Mr Mayor, are you planning to continue with the Fourth of July celebrations when your town is in mourning?”

  Mayor Brown, caught unawares, had only a fraction of a second in which to consider his reply.

  “For the moment, I’m announcing that the firework display on the Fourth of July is canceled.”

  A murmur ran through the reporters and the onlookers.

  *

  For our part, Betsy, Derek and I were examining the shores of the lake, trying to figure out how Stephanie could have ended up here. In Derek’s opinion, it had to have been an unpremeditated murder.

  “Any murderer with the slightest sense would have weighed down the body to stop it coming back to the surface so soon. The person who did this had not planned to kill her here or in this way.”

  Covered as it was with a vast, dense reed bed, which rose like a wall, most of the shoreline of Stag Lake was inaccessible on foot, making it a paradise for birds. It was like virgin forest, within which dozens of species of birds nested and lived in peace. Another part was edged with a real forest, of thick pines, which ran alongside Route 17 all the way to the ocean.

  Our first thought was that it was only possible to access this area on foot if you came along the shore, as we had done. But carefully examining the surroundings, we noticed that a swathe of tall grass on the forest side had recently been flattened. With difficulty we reached the spot and found that the soil was soft and mushy. We then discovered a flat expanse emerging from the forest, where the mud had been shifted. It was impossible to say for certain, but we thought there were footprints.

  “Something happened here,” Derek said. “But I doubt that Stephanie came the same way we did. It’s much too steep. I think the only way to reach this place . . .”

  “Is to come through the forest?” Betsy said.

  “Precisely.”

  Assisted by a handful of police officers from Orphea, we undertook a search of the strip of forest. There were clear indications that someone had been this way: broken branches, a piece of cloth hanging from a bush.

  “This could be from the T-shirt Stephanie was wearing on Monday,” I said, lifting the cloth with latex gloves.

  When I had seen her in the water, Stephanie had been wearing only one shoe, on her right foot. We found the left shoe in the forest, behind a stump.

  “She was running through the forest, trying to escape from someone,” Derek said. “Otherwise, she would have taken the time to put her shoe back on.”

  “And her pursuer caught up with her by the lake and drowned her,” Betsy said.

  “That sounds right. But could she have run all the way here from the beach?”

  It was more than five miles.

  Going back through the forest, following the traces, we came out onto the road, some two hundred yards from the police barriers.

  “She must have come in this way,” Derek said.

  It was around here that we spotted tire tracks at the roadside. Most likely her pursuer had been in a car.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, in New York

  In the offices of the New York Literary Review, Meta Ostrovski was gazing through the window of his office at a squirrel bounding across the lawn of a park. In almost perfect French, he was giving an interview by telephone to an obscure Parisian intellectual magazine curious to know what he thought was the perception of European literature in the United States.

  Ostrovski was in an expansive mood. “The reason I’m one of the most eminent critics in the world today, of course, is that for the past thirty years,” he was saying, “I have never compromised my standards. Discipline and steadfastness of mind, that’s my secret. Above all, never love. To love is to be weak!”

  “All the same,” the journalist at the other end objected, “some people claim that literary critics are generally failed writers.”

  Ostrovski replied with a laugh. “That’s utter nonsense, madame. I’ve never, and I mean never, met a critic who dreamed of being a writer. Critics are above that. Writing is a minor art. Writing is putting together words that then form sentences. Even a monkey can do that with a little training!”

  “So what is the role of the critic?”

  “To establish the truth. To make it possible for the masses to distinguish what is good from what is worthless. You know, only a small part of the population has the ability to judge for itself what is good. Unfortunately, since these days everybody wants to give his opinion about everything and we’ve seen utter nonentities praised to the skies, we critics are obliged to put a little order into this chaos. We’re the intellectual truth police. That’s all.”

  The interview was over. A secretary opened the door to Ostrovski’s untidy office without knocking.

  “Today’s mail,” she said, putting an envelope down on a pile of books waiting to be read.

  Ostrovski was disappointed. “One letter, is that all?”

  “That’s all,” the secretary said, and left.

  How dismal that his mail had become so meager! In the days when he worked for the New York Times, he would receive bundles of impassioned letters from readers who seemed never to miss any of his reviews or columns. But that was before. The days when he had been all-powerful—a bygone time. These days nobody wrote to him, he was no longer recognized in the street, in theaters there was no longer a murmur when he passed along a row, authors no longer hung around outside his building to give him their books. The number of careers he had launched with his reviews! The number of would-be writers he had destroyed. But today he was no longer feared the way he had been. What he wrote now was followed only by readers of the Review, which was highly regarded, of course, but much less widely read.

  Waking up that morning, Ostrovski had had a premonition. Something was going to happen, something that would relaunch his career. He realized that it was this letter. His instinct never betrayed him. What could be in this letter? He did not want to open it too quickly. Why a letter and not a telephone call? Having gazed again at the envelope, he cut it open and took out the sheet of paper it contained. He looked first to see who was the sender: Alan Brown, Mayor of Orphea.


  Dear Mr Ostrovski,

  We would be delighted if you could this year attend the 21st National Theater Festival in Orphea, New York State. Your reputation as a critic is so well established that your presence at the festival would be an honor for us. You graced us with your presence at the very first festival. It would give us great pleasure if you would celebrate our twentieth birthday with us. We would take care of all your expenses during your stay and would provide you with the best accommodation.

  What a disappointment! He threw the letter into the wastepaper basket.

  To clear his mind, he took up the latest list of bestsellers in New York, confirmed which was now the number one bestseller, and then set about writing a devastating review of this shockingly bad novel. He was interrupted by a knock at the door, and, a moment later Steven Bergdorf, the editor of the Review, entered his office. Ostrovski reached out to remove a file from a chair so Bergdorf could sit, but the other shook his head.

  “Not to worry, Meta,” he said. “I won’t keep you long, but . . .” He hesitated a moment before continuing. “But I’m afraid I have some unwelcome news. The Review is only too conscious of the debt we owe you, the renown you bring to it, the readers who are devoted to you, but the fact is that our level of subscribers is not rising, our finances are in a perilous state, and I have been instructed by our owners to reduce costs. Believe me, I do this with great professional and personal regret, but I have no option but to bring our relationship with you to an end.”

  Ostrovski stared open-mouthed at Bergdorf. He stifled the sob that was rising in his throat.

  “Very well, Steven,” he said, with all the dignity he could muster. “Thank you for coming to tell me in person. I assume you will be able to have my books and files sent to my apartment?”

  Bergdorf nodded. “Of course, Meta. Of course. I am so very sorry,” he said, before backing out and closing the door very softly behind him.

  * * *

  Orphea was in a restless state. What with the discovery of Stephanie Mailer’s body and the announcement by the mayor that the fireworks display was being canceled, the town was in turmoil. While Derek and I pursued our inquiries on the shores of Stag Lake, Betsy was called to the town hall as backup. Outside the building, a group of demonstrators, all local storekeepers and traders, had gathered, waving placards, to demand that the firework display go ahead.