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

down on the table in front of me, and noiselessly approached the door. I peered through the peephole. It was Derek.

I opened the door and stared at him for a moment in silence. He noticed the weapon in my hand.

“You really think this is serious, huh?” he said.

I nodded.

“Show me what you have, Jesse.”

I spread everything I had on the dining room table. Derek studied the photographs from the surveillance cameras, the lighter, the note, the cash, and the credit card records.

“It’s obvious that Stephanie was spending more than she earned,” I said. “The ticket to L.A. alone cost her $400. She must have had another source of income. We have to find out what it was.”

Derek plunged into Stephanie’s expenses. I caught a gleam in his eyes I had not seen there in quite a while. After spending a lot of time going through the credit card expenses, he took a pen and circled a monthly automatic debit of $60, starting the previous November.

“The payments are to a company called S.V.M.A.,” he said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“No, nothing.”

He opened my laptop, which was on the table, and searched on the Internet.

“It’s a self-storage company in Orphea,” he announced, turning the screen toward me.

“Self-storage?” I said, remembering my conversation with Mrs Mailer. According to her, Stephanie had had only a few things in New York, which she had taken straight to her apartment in Orphea. So why would she have been using a self-storage facility since November?

The facility was open twenty-four hours a day, so we decided to go there at once. After I’d shown him my badge, the security guard on duty checked in his register and indicated to us the number of the unit rented by Stephanie.

We walked through a maze of corridors and lowered blinds and came to a metal shutter with a padlock on it. I had brought a pair of wire cutters, and I soon got through the lock. I rolled up the shutter and Derek shone a torch into the unit.

What we discovered there left us thunderstruck.

DEREK SCOTT

Early autumn 1994. One week had passed since the Gordon killings.

Jesse and I were putting all we had into the case, working on it day and night, all the hours we could, forgetting about sleep or time off.

We had taken up residence in Jesse and Natasha’s apartment, which was more welcoming than the cold office at headquarters. We settled in the living room, in which we had put two camp beds, coming and going as we pleased. Natasha waited on us hand and foot. She sometimes got up in the middle of the night and made us something to eat. She said it was a good way to test the dishes she would be putting on the menu of her restaurant.

“Jesse,” I would say with my mouth full, savoring what Natasha had cooked for us, “make sure you marry this woman.”

“It’s all planned,” Jesse said one evening.

“For when?”

He smiled. “Very soon. Want to see the ring?”

“You bet!”

He disappeared for a moment and came back with a box containing a magnificent diamond.

“My God, Jesse, it’s beautiful!”

“It was my grandmother’s,” he said, hurriedly putting it back in his pocket because Natasha was coming in.

*

The ballistics analysis was categorical: one weapon had been used, a Beretta. Only one person had been involved in the murders—probably a man, according to the experts. Not only because of the violence of the crime, but because the door of the house—which had not been locked—had been kicked in.

At the request of the D.A.’s office, a reconstruction was conducted, which established the following chain of events: having kicked in the door of the Gordon family’s house, the murderer had first come across Leslie Gordon in the entrance hall and had shot her four times from the front, in the chest, at almost point-blank range. Then he had seen the boy in the living room and had shot him dead with two bullets in the back, fired from the hallway. He had then headed to the kitchen, pre-sumably because he had heard noises from there. Mayor Joseph Gordon was trying to escape into the garden through the French windows in the kitchen. He had shot him four times in the back then, retraced his steps and left through the front door. Not one of the bullets had missed their target, which meant he was an experienced shooter.

Coming out of the house through the front door, he had come slap- bang up against Meghan Padalin, who was out jogging. She had tried to run away and he had shot her twice in the back. His face had probably been uncovered, because he had subsequently fired a bullet at point-blank range into Meghan’s head, to make sure she was truly dead.

A further difficulty was that, although we had two indirect witnesses, they were not in a position to help us with our investigation.

At the time of the murders, Penfield Crescent was almost empty. Of the eight houses on the street, one was for sale, and the occupants of five others were at the Grand Theater. The last house was occupied by the Bellamy family, of whom only Lena Bellamy, a young mother of three children, had been in the house that evening with her youngest child, who was not yet three. Her husband Terrence was at the marina with the two older children.

Lena Bellamy had, of course, heard the shots, but she had thought they were fireworks going up from the marina to celebrate the opening of the festival. Just before the shots, though, she had seen a van with a big logo on the rear window, a logo she could not describe. It was some kind of drawing, she remembered, but she had not paid enough attention to recall what it depicted.

The second witness was a man named Albert Plant, who lived alone in a single-story house on a parallel street. Confined to a wheelchair since an accident, he had been at home