The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer: A gripping new thriller with a killer twist Joël Dicker (booksvooks TXT) 📖

put on my ballistic helmet, but I refused. You can’t make true contact when you have a helmet on your head. I felt the adrenaline making my heart pound. I was scared. I wanted to call Mark, but I crushed the temptation. I only wanted to hear his voice, not unkind comments.

I went through a security rope and advanced alone, a megaphone in my hand, along the deserted street. Silence reigned. I stopped ten paces from the store and announced myself through the loudspeaker.

After a few moments, a man in a black leather jacket, wearing a balaclava, appeared at the door with one of the girls, a gun at her head. She was blindfolded and had adhesive tape over her mouth.

He demanded that everyone get away and that he be allowed to leave. He kept close to his hostage and moved all the time so as to complicate the work of the marksmen. In my earpiece, I could hear my chief giving authorization to shoot him down, but the marksmen couldn’t get a lock on their target. The robber took a quick glance at the street and the surrounding area, no doubt weighing up his escape options, then disappeared back inside the store.

Something wasn’t right, but it didn’t strike me immediately. Why had he shown himself? He was alone. Why take the risk of being shot instead of making his demands by telephone?

Twenty minutes went by, then the door of the store opened abruptly, and the girl appeared again, still blindfolded and gagged. She advanced step by step, feeling her way with her feet. I could hear her moans. I wanted to approach, but suddenly the robber in the leather jacket and the balaclava appeared in the doorway, with a gun in each hand.

I let go of my megaphone, took my pistol out of its holster, and aimed it at the man.

“Put down your weapons!” I cried.

Hidden by the recess of the store entrance, he was not yet visible to the marksmen.

“Betsy, what’s going on?” my chief asked over the radio.

“He’s coming out,” I said. “Shoot him if you have a visual.”

The marksmen informed me they still had no visual. I continued to aim at his head. The girl was a few yards away from him. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. All at once, he made an abrupt movement in my direction. I pressed the trigger. The bullet hit him full in the head and he collapsed.

The shot echoed in my ears. My field of vision shrank. My radio started crackling. Immediately, intervention teams appeared behind me. I recovered my senses. The girl was at once hurried away. I entered the store behind a column of armed, helmeted officers. We discovered the second girl on the floor, bound and gagged, a blindfold over her eyes, but safe. We evacuated her, then continued searching the premises for the jeweler. We finally discovered him locked in his office, after we had broken the door down. He was lying on the floor, his hands tied with a hose clamp, adhesive tape over his mouth and eyes. I freed him and he writhed, holding his left arm. I thought at first that he was wounded, then realized that he was having a heart attack. I called the emergency services and in the minutes that followed the jeweler was taken to hospital and doctors attended to the two girls.

Outside the store, police officers were bustling around the body lying on the sidewalk. I joined them. And I suddenly heard one of my colleagues say in surprise:

“Am I dreaming or does he have the guns taped to his hands?”

“But . . . they’re fake,” another one said.

We took off the balaclava that was hiding his face. A thick piece of adhesive tape was stuck to his mouth.

“What the hell is going on?” I cried.

Overcome by a terrible suspicion, I took out my phone and tapped in the name of the jeweler in the search engine. The photograph that appeared on my screen left me dumbfounded.

“Fuck,” one of my colleagues said, looking at my screen, “this guy looks a hell of a lot like the jeweler.”

“It is the jeweler!” I screamed.

“If this guy’s the jeweler,” one of the other officers said, “then where’s the hostage taker?”

That was why the robber had taken the risk of coming out and showing himself. So that I should associate him with a balaclava and a leather jacket. He had then forced the jeweler to put them on, had stuck the guns to his hands with tape, and had forced him outside, threatening to do something to his other daughter if he didn’t go. Then he had gone into the office, locked himself in, tied his hands and stuck tape over his mouth and eyes, so that he could be taken for the jeweler and evacuated, his pockets full of jewels, to a hospital.

His plan had worked perfectly. When we arrived in force at the hospital where he had been taken for his supposed heart attack, he had disappeared from the examination room. The two police officers who had gone with him to emergency were waiting in the corridor, talking idly, with no idea of what had happened.

The robber was never identified, or found. And I had shot dead an innocent man. I had committed the worst sin for a member of a special unit: I had killed a hostage.

Everyone assured me that I had done nothing wrong, that they would all of them have done exactly the same. And yet I could not help replaying that scene in my head.

“He couldn’t talk,” my chief kept saying. “He couldn’t make a gesture without moving his weapons in a threatening way. He couldn’t do anything. He was a dead man walking.”

“I think when he moved, he was going to throw himself to the ground to show he was surrendering. If I’d waited one second more before firing, he might have done that and he’d be alive now.”

“Betsy, if the guy had