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

by Joël Dicker

  “Unfortunately, the tire tracks at the side of Route 17 are going to yield nothing. But the shoe is definitely Stephanie’s and the piece of cloth comes from the T-shirt she was wearing. They also found a print of her shoe at the side of the road.”

  “Which confirms that she went into the forest at that point,” Betsy said.

  We were interrupted by the arrival of Dr Ranjit Singh who had come with the first results of the postmortem.

  “Thanks for working so fast,” Derek said.

  “I wanted you to get ahead before the Fourth of July break.”

  Dr Singh was an elegant, affable man. He put his glasses on to read us the main points of his report.

  “I found a few fairly unusual things. Stephanie Mailer died by drowning. There was a great deal of water in her lungs and in her stomach, as well as silt in her trachea. There are major signs of cyanosis and respiratory distress, which suggests that she struggled with her attacker. I discovered bruises on the back of her neck, left by a broad hand, which would mean that her neck was gripped firmly in order to push her head into the water. In addition to the traces of silt in the trachea, there are also some on her lips and teeth as well as on the top of her hair, which suggests that her head was kept under the water, at a shallow depth.”

  “Was she physically assaulted before she was drowned?” Derek said.

  “There is no trace of violent blows, by which I mean that Stephanie was not knocked out or beaten. Nor was there any sexual assault. I think Stephanie was running away from her killer and that he caught up with her.”

  “He?” Derek said. “You think it was a man?”

  “Judging by the strength necessary to keep someone under the water, I’d say a man, yes. But it could have been a strong woman.”

  “So she was running through the forest?” Betsy said.

  Singh nodded. “I found a large number of contusions and marks on the face and arms, caused by scratches from branches. There were marks on the underside of the bare foot. She must have been running fast through the forest and grazed the sole of her foot with branches and stones. There were traces of earth under her nails. I think she probably fell on the shore of the lake and the killer only had to push her head into the water.”

  “Which might make it an unpremeditated crime,” I said. “Whoever did that had not planned to kill her.”

  “I was getting to that, Captain,” Singh said, showing us close-up photographs of Stephanie’s shoulders, elbows, hands, and knees.

  Dirty, reddish wounds were visible.

  “They look like burns,” Betsy said.

  “Indeed,” Singh said. “They’re relatively superficial abrasions in which I found pieces of asphalt and gravel.”

  “Asphalt?” Derek said. “I’m not sure I follow you, doctor.”

  “Well, judging by the location of the wounds, they’re due to a forward roll on asphalt, in other words, on a road. Which might mean that Stephanie threw herself from a moving car before escaping into the forest.”

  Singh’s conclusions would be backed up by two crucial testimonies. The first was the account of a teenager on vacation with his parents who every evening met up with a group of friends on the beach near which we had found Stephanie’s car. It was Betsy who questioned him after his parents, alerted by the media storm, contacted us, thinking their son might have seen something important. They were right.

  According to Dr Singh, Stephanie’s death occurred on the Monday night. The teenager told Betsy that on Monday, June 26, he had walked away from the group for a quiet phone call to his girlfriend, who had stayed behind in New York.

  “I sat down on a rock,” the boy said. “From there, I had a view of the parking lot. I remember it was deserted. Suddenly, I saw a woman coming along the path from the forest. She waited for a while, until 10.30. I know that because that’s when I finished my call. I checked on my phone. Just then, a car drove into the parking lot. I saw the woman in the headlights. She was wearing a white T-shirt. The window on the passenger side was rolled down and the woman said something to the person at the wheel, then got in next to him and the car drove off. Was it the woman who died?”

  “I’ll check it out,” Betsy said, not wanting to shock him needlessly. “Could you describe the car for me? Did you notice anything you rem-ember? Maybe you saw the license plates? Even part of them? Or the name of the state?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “Was the driver a man or a woman?”

  “I couldn’t say. It was pretty dark and it happened quickly. I didn’t really pay that much attention. If I’d known . . .”

  “You’ve already helped me a lot. You can confirm that the girl got in the car voluntarily?”

  “Oh, yes! She was waiting for that car, I’m sure of it.”

  So the teenager was the last person apart from the murderer to have seen Stephanie alive. The second testimony was provided by a traveling salesman from Hicksville who showed up at troop headquarters. He told us he had come to Orphea on Monday, June 26, to see some customers.

  “I left town around 10.30 in the evening. I took Route 17 to get back on the highway. As I passed Stag Lake, I saw a car parked at the side of the road with its engine running and both front doors open. I thought that was odd, obviously, so I slowed down. I thought someone might be in trouble. It does happen.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Around 10.50. Shortly before 11, anyway.”

  “So, you slowed down, and . . . ?”

  “I slowed down, because I thought it was strange this car should have stopped there. I looked around, and saw someone climbing back up from the lake. I thought it was probably someone who’d stopped to take a leak. I didn’t think further than that. If this person had needed help, he’d have signaled to me. I started my car again and drove home, didn’t think about it anymore. It was only when I heard about a murder on the shore of the lake on Monday night that I made the connection with what I’d seen and figured it might be important.”

  “The person you saw—was it a man or a woman?”

  “I’d say more likely a man. But it was quite dark.”

  “How about the car?”

  “My recollection is only of the doors being open and the engine. But nothing else.”

  In Betsy’s office at the Orphea police station, we were able to put together these different elements and reconstruct a timeline of Stephanie’s last night.

  “At 6.00 she arrives at the Kodiak Grill,” I said. “She waits for someone—probably the killer—who doesn’t show himself, but is in fact watching her in the restaurant without her knowing it. At 10.00 she leaves the restaurant. Her possible killer calls her from the booth in the restaurant and arranges to meet her on the beach. Stephanie is worried and calls Sean, the police officer, but he doesn’t answer. So she goes to the place they agreed on. At 10.30, the killer arrives in his car. She gets in. Which means she must trust him, or maybe that she actually knows him.”

  With the help of a huge wall map of the region, Betsy traced in red marker the route the car must have taken. From the beach, along Ocean Road, then along Route 17 in a north-easterly direction, beside the lake. From the beach to Stag Lake was five miles, in other words, about fifteen minutes by car.

  “Around 10.45,” I went on, “realizing she’s in danger, Stephanie throws herself out of the car and runs off through the forest, before the driver catches up with her and drowns her. At some point he takes her keys and goes to her apartment, probably that same Monday night. Not finding what he is looking for there, he burglarizes the newspaper offices and leaves with Stephanie’s computer, but there, too, he draws a blank. Stephanie has been too careful. Playing for time, he sends a text at midnight to Michael Bird, knowing he’s her editor and still hoping to get his hands on Stephanie’s investigative work. But when he realizes that the State Police are starting to think that Stephanie’s disappearance is suspicious, things move quickly. He goes back to Stephanie’s apartment, but I show up.
He knocks me out and comes back the following night to set fire to it, hoping at least to destroy whatever it was he never found.”

  For the first time since the beginning of the case, we had a clearer idea of what had happened. But where we felt that the vise was starting to close in, the townspeople were getting increasingly paranoid, and the front page of that day’s Chronicle certainly did not improve matters. I became aware of that when Betsy received a call from Springfield.

  “Have you read the paper?” he said. “Stephanie’s murder is being linked to the festival. I’m calling a meeting of the volunteers today at five o’clock at Café Athena to vote for a strike. We aren’t safe anymore. There may not even be a festival this year.”

  * * *

  Meanwhile, in New York

  In a conference room on the 53rd floor of the glass tower that housed the headquarters of Channel 14, the prestigious private T.V. station, the C.E.O., Jerry Eden, had summoned the principal members of the board.

  “As you know,” he told them, “the early summer ratings are bad, disastrous even, and that is why I’ve asked you all here. We need to fix something, and fix it fast.”

  “Which is the main problem?” one of the creative heads said.

  “The six o’clock slot. We’ve been left behind by ‘Look!’”

  “Look!” was Channel 14’s direct competitor. Similar audience, similar content. The two channels had been waging a fierce battle, with record advertising contracts for the flagship shows at stake.

  “‘Look!’ has a reality show that’s a big hit,” the marketing director said.

  “What’s the pitch?” Eden said.

  “That’s just it. It doesn’t have one. There’s this group of three sisters. They have lunch, they shop, they go to the gym, they argue, they make up. We follow their typical day.”

  “And what kind of jobs do they do?”

  “They don’t have jobs, sir,” the deputy director of programming said. “They’re paid to do nothing.”

  “That’s where we could do better than them!” Eden said. “By making a reality show that’s truer to life.”

  “But, sir,” the director in charge of reality shows objected, “the target audience for these shows is generally less well-off financially and poorly educated. They want to dream when they switch on their T.V.s.”

  “Exactly,” Eden said. “We need a concept that brings viewers face to face with themselves and their ambitions. A reality show that shows them the way forward! We have to do something big for the fall season! I can see the slogan: channel 14. the dream is inside you!”

  This suggestion unleashed a wave of enthusiasm.

  “That’s really good!” the marketing director said.

  “I want a show for the fall that makes a big impact. I want to shake everything up. In September, I want to launch a brilliant concept that grabs the viewers. By Monday, July 14, I want a plan for a flagship show for the fall. That’s ten days.”

  As his colleagues were leaving the conference room, Eden’s cell phone rang. It was his wife.

  “Jerry,” Cynthia said, “I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”

  “Sorry, I was in a meeting. You know we’re planning next season’s shows and things are tense here right now. What’s going on?”

  “Carolina got home at eleven this morning. She was drunk again.”

  Eden sighed, overcome with a sense of powerlessness. “What do you want me to do, Cynthia?”

  “Come on, Jerry, she’s our daughter! You heard what Dr Lern said. We have to get her away from New York.”

  “Get her away from New York, as if that’s going to make any difference!”

  “Stop being such a fatalist! She’s only nineteen. She needs help.”

  “Are you telling me we’re not trying to help her?”

  “You don’t realize what she’s going through, Jerry!”

  “What I mainly realize is that I have a nineteen-year-old daughter who gets drunk and does drugs!” In spite of his irritation, he lowered his voice to a whisper to avoid being overheard.

  “We’ll talk about it face to face,” Cynthia said. “Where are you?”

  “Where am I?”

  “Yes. The session with Dr Lern is at five. Don’t tell me you forgot?”

  Eden opened his eyes wide. He had indeed forgotten. He ran out of his office and hurried to the elevator.

  Miraculously, he got to Dr Lern’s office on Madison Avenue in time. For six months, Eden had been at family therapy sessions every week with his wife Cynthia and their nineteen-year-old daughter Carolina.

  The Edens took their seats on a couch opposite the therapist, who was in his usual armchair.

  “Well?” Dr Lern said. “What’s happened since our last session?”

  “You mean two weeks ago,” Carolina said, “since my father forgot to show up last week?”

  “Forgive me for working to pay this family’s insane expenses!” Eden said.

  “Jerry, please don’t start!” his wife said.

  “I only said last session,” Dr Lern reminded them in a neutral voice.

  Cynthia made an effort to steer the discussion in a constructive manner. “I’ve told Jerry he should spend more time with Carolina.”

  “And what do you think of that, Jerry?”

  “I think it’s going to be hard this summer. My company has run into tough competition, and we really need to develop a new show by the fall.”

  “Jerry!” Cynthia said crossly. “There must be someone who can take your place for the summer. You never have time for anything except your work!”

  “I have a family and a psychiatrist to support,” Eden said mildly.

  Dr Lern did not react to that.

  “Anyway, Daddy,” Carolina said, “you only ever think about your fucking job.”

  “Do not use that kind of language,” Eden said to his daughter.

  “Jerry,” Dr Lern said, “what do you think Carolina is trying to tell you when she uses those words?”

  “That this fucking job pays her phone bill, pays for her clothes, her fucking car, and everything she stuffs up her nose!”

  “Carolina, is that what you’re trying to tell your father?” Lern said.

  “No,” Carolina said. “But I want a dog.”

  “Always something new,” Eden said. “First of all, you want a computer, now you want a dog . . .”

  “Stop talking about that computer! I never want to hear about it again!”

  “Was the computer a request from Carolina?” Lern said.

  “Yes,” Cynthia said. “She really liked to write.”

  “And why not a dog?”

  “Very simply, because she’s not a responsible person,” Eden said.

  “How do you know if you don’t let me try?” Carolina protested.

  “I see how you take care of yourself, and that’s enough for me!”

  “Jerry!” Cynthia wailed.

  “Anyhow,” Eden said, “she only wants a dog because her friend Neila bought a dog.”

  “It’s Leyla, not Neila! You don’t even know my best friend’s name!”

  “That girl’s your best friend? She called her dog Marijuana.”

  “Well, Marijuana is very sweet! He’s four months old and he’s already housebroken!”

  “That’s not the problem, dammit!”

  “What is the problem, then?” Dr Lern said.

  “The problem is that this Leyla girl is a bad influence on my daughter. Whenever they get together, they do something stupid. If you want my opinion, everything that happened isn’t the fault of the computer, it’s the fault of that Leyla!”

  “No, Daddy, you’re the problem,” Carolina protested, “because you’re dumb and you just don’t get it!”

  She got up from the couch and walked out of the room. The session had lasted only fifteen minutes.

  * * *

  At 5.15, Betsy, Derek and I got to Café Athena. We found a table at the far end. The establishmen
t was filled by the volunteers and onlookers who had come to witness the strange meeting that was taking place. Springfield, taking his function as president of the volunteers very seriously, was standing on a chair, hammering out words that the crowd took up in unison.

  “We’re in danger!” he cried.

  “Yes, in danger!” the volunteers repeated.

  “Mayor Brown is hiding the truth about Stephanie Mailer’s death. Do you know why she was killed?”

  “Why?” the chorus responded.

  “Because of the theater festival!”

  “The theater festival!” the volunteers sang out.

  “Did we give our time in order to be murdered?”

  “Noooooooo!” the crowd chanted.

  A waiter came with coffee and the menu. I had already seen him in the restaurant. He looked Native American, with shoulder-length grizzled hair, and I had been struck by his first name, Massachusetts.

  The volunteers took turns to speak. Many of them were worried by what they had read in the Chronicle and were afraid they would be the killer’s next victims. Mayor Brown, who was also there, listened to all the grievances and tried to respond reassuringly, hoping to make the volunteers see reason.

  “There is no serial killer in Orphea,” he said.

  “But there is a killer,” a wiry, silver-haired man observed. “Stephanie Mailer is dead.”

  “Listen, that was a very tragic thing that happened, I agree. But it has nothing to do with you or the festival. You don’t have the slightest reason to worry.”

  Still standing on his chair, Springfield called out, “Mr Mayor, we’re not going to put ourselves in the way of being killed because of a theater festival!”

  “I’ll say it again, for the hundredth time, if necessary,” Brown said, “this tragedy, terrible as it is, has absolutely no connection with the festival! Your argument is absurd! And the fact is, as you must realize, that without you the festival cannot take place.”

  “So that’s all that worries you, is it, Mr Mayor?” Springfield said. “Your lousy festival rather than the safety of your citizens?”

  “I’m just pointing out the consequences of making an irrational decision. If the festival does not take place, this town will not get back on its feet.”