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

“There’s a general call out,” I said as I hurried to the door. “There’s been a quadruple killing.”

  Jesse was putting his jacket on.

  “Hurry up,” I teased him. “The first unit in the squad to reach the scene will get the case.”

  We were young and ambitious. This was a chance for us to do our first major investigation together. I was a more experienced officer than Jesse and had the rank of sergeant. The higher-ups liked me. Everyone said I had a great career ahead of me.

  We ran to our car and bundled ourselves in.

  I set off at speed and Jesse picked the flashing light up from the floor, switched it on, and reached through the open window to put it on the roof of our unmarked car, sending red flashes into the darkness.

  That was how it started.

  JESSE ROSENBERG

  Thursday, June 26, 2014

  Thirty days to opening night

  I had assumed that I would spend my last week in the police hanging around the hallways, drinking coffee with my colleagues and saying leisurely goodbyes. But for the last three days I’d been in my office from morning to evening, absorbed in the file which I had taken out of records on the murders of 1994. My encounter with the journalist Stephanie Mailer had shaken me. I could think of nothing but that article, and her saying: “The answer was right in front of your eyes. You just didn’t see it.”

  As far as I was concerned, we had seen everything there was to see. The more I went over the file, the more convinced I was that it was one of the most solid investigations I had conducted in my whole career. All of the pieces had fallen into place. The evidence against the man Derek and I had identified as the murderer was overwhelming. We had been meticulous. I could see no flaw in what we had done. How could we have gotten the wrong man?

  That afternoon, Derek came to my office.

  “What on earth are you doing, Jesse? Everyone’s waiting for you in the cafeteria. The people in the administrative department have baked you a cake.”

  “I’ll be right there, Derek. I’m sorry, my mind’s on other things.”

  He looked at the documents spread out on my desk and picked one up. “Oh no, don’t tell me you’re swallowing the crap that reporter gave you?”

  “Derek, I’d just like to make sure—”

  He didn’t let me finish. “Jesse, the case was rock solid! You know that as well as I do. Come on now, everyone’s waiting.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  He sighed and left my office. I picked up the business card I had in front of me and dialed Ms Mailer’s number. Her telephone was off. I had tried to call it the previous day, without success. She herself had not contacted me since our encounter on Monday, and I decided not to persist. She knew where to find me. Derek was right, I told myself. There was nothing to make us revisit the conclusions of the 1994 investigation. My mind at rest, I joined my colleagues in the canteen.

  An hour later, when I got back to my office, I found a fax from the State Police in Riverdale in the Hamptons announcing the disappearance of a journalist named Stephanie Mailer, thirty-two years of age. She had apparently been missing for three days.

  My heart skipped a beat. I tore the page from the machine and hurried to the telephone to contact the station in Riverdale. An officer there told me that Stephanie Mailer’s parents had shown up early that afternoon, worried that they had not heard from their daughter since Monday.

  “Why did her parents go to the State Police, not the local police?”

  “They did, but the local police don’t seem to have taken it seriously. So I told myself it might be best to pass it on to your squad. It may be nothing, but I thought you should know.”

  “You did the right thing. I’ll take care of it.”

  I immediately telephoned Ms Mailer’s mother. She had last spoken with her daughter on Monday morning. Since then, nothing. Her cell phone was off. The mother told me how worried she was. None of her daughter’s friends had been able to reach her. Her mother had finally gone to her apartment with the local police, but there was nobody there.

  I went straight to Derek in his office.

  “The reporter who was here on Monday has disappeared.”

  “What are you talking about, Jesse?”

  I handed him the missing persons report. “We have to go to Orphea and find out what’s going on. This can’t be a coincidence.”

  He sighed. “Jesse, aren’t you supposed to be leaving?”

  “I have four days more. During those days, I’m still a police officer. On Monday, when I saw her, she said she was meeting someone who would be able to supply something we had missed.”

  “Let someone else deal with it,” he said.

  “No way! That girl assured me that in 1994—”

  He didn’t let me finish. “We solved the case, Jesse! It’s ancient history! What’s gotten into you? Why are you so determined to go back to it? Do you really want to relive all that?”

  I was irritated that he was not more supportive. “So you won’t come to Orphea?”

  “No, Jesse. I’m sorry, but I think you’re crazy.”

  So I went to Orphea alone, twenty years after I had last set foot there. Twenty years since the murders.

  It was an hour’s drive from headquarters, but to gain time I put on the siren and the flashing lights so I did not have to obey the speed limits. I took Highway 27 as far as the fork to Riverhead, then 25 in a north-westerly direction. The last stretch of road passed through a gorgeous landscape, with luxuriant forests and ponds strewn with water lilies. Finally I got onto Route 17, which was straight and deserted, and which led to Orphea. I sped along it like an arrow. A huge billboard soon told me I had arrived.

  WELCOME TO ORPHEA, NEW YORK

  National Theater Festival, July 26 – August 9

  It was five in the evening. Main Street was bright and verdant. I drove past stores, restaurants, coffee shops. There was an air of relaxation about the place. The lampposts were decorated with the Stars and Stripes in preparation for Independence Day, and billboards announced a firework display for the evening of the Fourth of July. Along the marina, lined with borders filled with flowers and neatly pruned bushes, people strolled between shacks offering excursions to look at the whales or bicycles for hire. It was a scene straight out of a movie.

  *

  My first stop was the police station.

  Chief Ron Gulliver, head of the Orphea police department, invited me into his office. I did not need to remind him that we had already met.

  “You haven’t changed,” he said, shaking my hand.

  I could not have said the same of him. He had not aged well, and had become noticeably fatter. It was well past lunchtime and he was eating spaghetti out of a plastic container. In the time it took me to explain the reason for my visit, he gobbled down half the spaghetti in a disgusting manner.

  “Stephanie Mailer?” he said, his mouth full. “We looked into that. She hasn’t gone missing. I told her parents, but they’re real pains in the ass. You can’t get rid of them!”

  “They may simply be parents worried about their daughter,” I said. “They haven’t heard from her for three days, which they say is quite unusual. I’m sure you’ll understand that I’d like to treat it with due diligence.”

  “Stephanie Mailer is thirty-two, right? Old enough to do what she likes. Believe me, Captain Rosenberg, if I had parents like hers, I’d run away, too. Take it from me, the girl has taken off for a while, that’s all.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because of what her boss, the editor of the Orphea Chronicle, told me. She sent him a text message on Monday evening.”

  “The evening she disappeared.”

  “But I tell you: she hasn’t disappeared!” Chief Gulliver growled at me.

  Each of his exclamations was accompanied by a spray of tomato sauce. I took a step back.

  “My deputy went to her place with her parents,” Gulliver said, after swallowing. “They got in
with their duplicate key and had a look around. Everything was neat and tidy. The text to her editor made it clear that there was no reason to worry. The girl doesn’t have to justify herself to anybody. What she does with her life is no concern of ours. Nevertheless, we did our job. So please, don’t come here and break my balls.”

  “But the parents are very worried,” I said. “So, with your agreement, I’d like to check for myself that everything is fine.”

  “If you have time to waste, Captain, don’t bother about me. You just have to wait for my deputy, Jasper Montagne, to come back from his patrol. He’s the one who dealt with it.”

  When Deputy Jasper Montagne arrived, I was confronted with a huge wardrobe of a man, heavily muscled and formidable-looking. He told me he had accompanied Ms Mailer’s parents to her apartment. They had gone in, she wasn’t there. Nothing to report. No signs of struggle, nothing abnormal. Montagne had subsequently looked all over the neighboring streets in search of the journalist’s car, but to no avail. He had even called the hospitals and police stations in the area. Nothing. Stephanie Mailer had evidently gone away.

  Since I wanted to take a look at the apartment, he offered to go with me. She lived on Bendham Road, a quiet little street close to Main Street, in a narrow three-story block. A hardware store occupied the first floor, there was a single apartment on the second floor, and Ms Mailer’s was on the third.

  I rang her doorbell for a long time. I drummed on the door and called out, but it didn’t get me anywhere.

  “You can see for yourself, she isn’t there,” Montagne said.

  I tried the handle. The door was locked.

  “Can we go in?” I said.

  “Do you have the key?”

  “No.”

  “Nor me. Her parents opened the door the other day.”

  “So we can’t go in?”

  “No. And we’re not going to start breaking people’s doors down for no reason. If you want to set your mind at rest, go to the local paper and talk to the editor. He’ll show you the text he got from Ms Mailer on Monday evening.”

  “What about the downstairs neighbor?” I said.

  “Brad Melshaw? I talked to him yesterday. He didn’t see or hear anything unusual. There’s no point ringing his doorbell. He’s a cook at Café Athena, the hip restaurant at the top of Main Street. That’s where he’ll be right now.”

  I wouldn’t give in, though. I went one floor down and rang Brad Melshaw’s bell. No response.

  “I told you,” Montagne sighed, going back downstairs, while I stood a little longer on the landing in the hope that someone would open the door.

  By the time I decided to follow him, Montagne had left the building. When I got to the lobby, I took advantage of the fact that I was alone to inspect Ms Mailer’s letterbox. Peering through the slit, I could see that there was a letter inside. I eased it out between my fingertips, folded it in half and slipped it into the back pocket of my pants.

  Montagne drove me to the offices of the Orphea Chronicle, which were not far from Main Street, so that I could talk to Michael Bird, the editor.

  The offices were in a redbrick building. The exterior was smart enough, but the interior was shabby-looking.

  Michael Bird took us into his office. He had been in Orphea in 1994, but I did not remember meeting him then. He told me that, through a combination of circumstances, he had taken over the editorship of the Orphea Chronicle just three days after the murders, which was why he had spent most of that time drowning in paperwork rather than out in the field.

  “How long has Stephanie Mailer been working for you?” I said.

  “I hired her last December, so about seven months.”

  “Is she a good reporter?”

  “She’s very good. She’s raised the level of the paper. That’s important for us because it’s hard to always have quality content. The paper isn’t doing too well financially. We survive only because the premises are lent to us by the town council. People don’t read local newspapers nowadays, so the advertisers have lost interest. This used to be an important regional paper, widely read and respected. But now, why would you read the Orphea Chronicle when you can read the New York Times online? Not to mention those who don’t read anything at all, just get their information from Facebook.”

  “When did you last see Stephanie?” I said.

  “On Monday morning. At the weekly editorial meeting.”

  “Did you notice anything unusual? Was her behavior out of the ordinary?”

  “No, nothing out of the ordinary. I know Stephanie’s parents are worried, but as I told them and Deputy Montagne yesterday, she sent me a text message late on Monday, telling me she had to go away.”

  He took his cell phone from his pocket and showed me the text in question, which he had received at midnight on Monday.

  I have to leave Orphea for a while. It’s important. I’ll explain later.

  “And you have heard nothing from her since?”

  “No. But to be honest, I’m not worried. Stephanie is the kind of reporter who likes to be independent. When she has something on she takes her time. I don’t interfere too much with what she does.”

  “What’s she working on right now?”

  “The theater festival. Every year at the end of July, we have a theater festival here in Orphea.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Well, Stephanie wanted to write about the festival from the inside. She’s preparing a whole series of articles about it. Right now, she’s interviewing the volunteers who keep the festival going.”

  “Is it like her to disappear like this?”

  “I’d say ‘go away’. Yes, she goes away regularly. You know how it is, being a professional journalist requires you to leave your desk pretty frequently.”

  “Did she say anything about another investigation that she’s conducting? She claimed she was meeting somebody about it on Monday night, somebody with information that was important to that story.”

  I was deliberately vague.

  The editor shook his head. “No,” he said. “She never mentioned anything like that.”

  On the way out of the newspaper offices, Montagne said, “Chief Gulliver wants to know if you’re leaving now.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think I’ve done the tour.”

  Back in my car, I opened the envelope I had found in Stephanie Mailer’s letterbox. It was a credit card statement. I examined it carefully.

  Apart from her everyday expenses (gasoline, supermarket shopping, A.T.M. withdrawals, some purchases from the bookstore in Orphea), I noticed a fair number of tollbooth charges from rides into Manhattan. It seemed that she had been going to New York on a regular basis lately. In addition, she had bought a flight to Los Angeles. A quick round trip between June 10 and June 13. Payments while there—in particular, a hotel—confirmed that she had made the journey. Maybe she had a boyfriend in California. Whatever the case, she was a young woman who moved around a lot. There was nothing exceptional in the fact that she had gone away. I could understand the local police. None of these items pointed to a disappearance. Ms Mailer was an adult, she did not have to explain herself to anybody. So, since I did not have anything concrete to go on, I was on the verge of calling it a day when I was struck by one thing, one element that seemed out of place—the offices of the Orphea Chronicle. They did not correspond in any way to the image I had built up of Stephanie Mailer. I didn’t know her, of course, but given the confidence with which she had approached me three days earlier, I could more easily imagine her at the New York Times than at a paper in a small resort town in the Hamptons. That one thing made me decide to look a little more deeply into the case. I would pay a visit to Ms Mailer’s parents, who lived in Sag Harbor, twenty minutes’ drive from where I was.

  It was seven o’clock.

  * * *

  Around the same time, Betsy Kanner parked her car outside Café Athena on Orphea’s Main Street, where she had arranged to meet her childhood frie
nd Lauren and Lauren’s husband Paul for dinner.

  Lauren and Paul were the friends she had seen the most of since quitting New York to settle in Orphea. Paul’s parents had a vacation home in Southampton, fifteen miles away, where they regularly spent long weekends.

  Before Betsy got out of her car, she saw her friends already at a table on the terrace of the restaurant. What she mainly noticed was that there was a man with them. Immediately realizing what was happening, Betsy took out her cell phone and called Lauren.

  “Have you set me up with a date?” she asked as soon as Lauren picked up.

  There was a moment of embarrassed silence.

  “I may have,” Lauren said finally. “How did you know?”

  “Instinct,” Betsy lied. “Come on, Lauren, why did you do it?”

  The only thing Betsy had against her friend was that she spent her time interfering in her personal life.

  “You’re going to love this one,” Lauren assured her, having moved away from the table. “Trust me, Betsy.”

  “You know what, Lauren? It’s not a good time for this right now. I’m still at the office and have a whole lot of paperwork to get through.”

  Betsy was amused to see Lauren becoming agitated.

  “Betsy, I forbid you to stand me up! You’re thirty-three years old, you need a guy! Tell me something. How long is it since you last got laid?”

  That was the line of argument Lauren invariably used as a last resort. But Betsy was not in the mood to handle a blind date.

  “I’m sorry, Lauren. Apart from anything else, I’m on duty.”

  “Oh, don’t start with your duty! Nothing ever happens in this town. You’re entitled to have a little fun, too!”

  At that moment, a motorist sounded his horn and Lauren heard it both on the street and through the phone.

  “Got you, girl!” she exclaimed, rushing out onto the sidewalk. “Where are you?”

  Betsy didn’t have time to get away.

  “I see you!” Lauren cried. “If you think you’re going to take off and dump me now . . . Do you realize you spend most of your evenings alone, like an old lady? You know, I wonder if you made the right choice, burying yourself here.”