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

fraction of a second. I didn’t think. I ran to the house, in a state of panic. The adrenaline made me feel ten times stronger. I kicked the door in and found myself face to face with the mayor’s wife, Leslie. The gun almost went off by itself. She collapsed. Then I aimed at the son who was running to hide. I fired several times, and at the mother again, to be sure they were dead. Then I heard a noise in the kitchen. It was Mayor Gordon, who was trying to escape through the back door. What could I do except kill him, too? By the time I came out, Ted had gone. I went back to the Grand Theater to mingle with the opening night crowd and be seen. I still had the gun on me, I didn’t know where or how to get rid of it.”

There was a long silence.

“And then?” Derek said. “What happened after that?”

“I had no more contact with Ted. The police said the mayor was the target and Meghan was an innocent bystander. The investigation was going in another direction. We were in the clear. There was no way to trace it back to us.”

“Except that Charlotte had borrowed Tennenbaum’s van without his permission and gone to see Mayor Gordon just before . . . you got there . . .”

“We must have just missed her. It was only when a witness recognized the vehicle outside Café Athenathat everything went wrong. Ted started to panic. He contacted me again. He said, ‘Why did you kill all those people?’ I said, ‘Because they’d seen me.’ That was when he said, ‘Mayor Gordon was our partner! He was the one who killed Fold! He was the one who wanted us to kill Meghan! He and his family would never have talked!’ Ted told me how, in mid-June, the mayor had become his ally.”

* * *

Mid-June 1994

That day, Tennenbaum went to see Mayor Gordon to talk about Café Athena. He wanted to bury the hatchet. He could not bear the endless arguments anymore. Mayor Gordon received him in his living room. It was late afternoon. Through the window, Gordon saw someone in the park. From where he was, Tennenbaum could not see who it was. It was then that Gordon said in a somber tone:

“Some people shouldn’t live.”

“Like who?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

At that point, Tennenbaum sensed that Gordon might be the kind of person he was looking for. He decided to tell him of his plan.

* * *

“Without knowing it,” Bird said, “I’d killed our partner. Our brilliant plan had turned into a fiasco. But I was convinced the police would never trace it to Ted, since he wasn’t the murderer. I didn’t know you’d track down the man who sold the Beretta, which would lead you to him. He hid for a while in my house. He gave me no choice. His van was in my garage. It would be discovered eventually. I was scared to death. If the police found it, I was done for, too. I finally threw him out, threatening him with the gun, which I had kept. Half an hour later, the police were chasing him. That was the day he died. The police were sure he was the killer. I was in the clear. I met up again with Miranda, and we’ve been together ever since. Nobody ever knew about her past. As far as her family was concerned, she had spent two years in a squat before returning home.”

“Did Miranda know you’d killed Meghan and the Gordons?”

“No, she didn’t know a thing. But she did think I had killed Fold.”

“That’s why she lied to me when I questioned her the other day,” Betsy said.

“Yes, she made up that tattoo story to throw you off the scent. She knew the investigation was focusing on Fold, and she was afraid that would lead you to me.”

“What about Stephanie Mailer?” Derek said.

“She showed up in Orphea one day and told me she was writing a book about the murders. She asked if she could look through the paper’s archives. I offered her a job on the Chronicle so that I could keep an eye on her. I hoped she wouldn’t discover anything. After all, nobody else had. For several months, she didn’t get anywhere. I tried to put her off the track by disguising my voice and calling her from phone booths. I pointed her in the direction of the volunteers and the festival, which was a false lead. I would arrange to meet her at the Kodiak Grilland not show up. I was buying time for myself.”

“And you tried to point us in the direction of the festival, too,” I said.

“Yes. But Stephanie tracked down Kirk Hayward, who told her it was Meghan who was the target and not Gordon. She passed that on to me. She wanted to tell the State Police, but not before she had seen the case file. I had to do something, she was going to uncover the whole story. I made one last anonymous call, telling her there’d be a great revelation on June 23, and arranging to meet her at the Kodiak Grill.”

“The day she came here to headquarters.”

“I didn’t know what I was going to do that night. I didn’t know if I should speak to her, or run away. But I knew I didn’t want to lose everything. She came to the Kodiak Grillat six o’clock, as agreed. I was sitting at a table at the back. I watched her all evening. Finally, at ten, she left. I had to do something. I called her from the phone booth. I told her to meet with me in the parking lot on the beach.”

“And you went there.”

“I said I was going to explain the whole thing, I was going to show her something very important. She got in my car.”

“Were you planning to take her to the island on Badger Lake and kill her?”

“Yes, nobody