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

place here in 1994. By inviting me to put on my play, Mayor Brown will make it possible for the veil to be lifted, for the truth to be revealed.”

The gathering was now spellbound.

“We have come to an understanding,” Mayor Brown said—he would have preferred to remain silent about this detail, but he could see that it was a way to get the attention of the assembled press. ”I have agreed with Mr Hayward, whom some of you will remember as Chief Hayward, that while we are proud to be putting on ‘The Darkest Night’, it is in addition our hope—indeed our expectation—that in the course of the play its author will reveal crucial information based on his own twenty-year study of the 1994 killings. It is my particular hope that the presentation of this play will lead the police to bring their investigation to a successful close.

“On opening night,” Brown went on, “I hope there will be a very large audience to support a play that will allow the truth to be at last established.”

At these words, there was a moment of stunned silence, at the end of which the journalists, sensing they had a priceless piece of news, burst into noisy movement.

Steven Bergdorf was deep in thought, a new gleam in his eyes. This whole idea of putting on a play in return for revelations about a criminal case was unique in the history of culture. His instinct told him to stay a while in Orphea.

Just as the conference was on the verge of breaking up, a journalist stood to address a question to Ostrovski. “Mr Ostrovski. You’ve read the play. If Mr Hayward won’t share with us the sensational information it reveals, can you tell us who the killer was?”

Ostrovski smiled, ignoring the warning look from Brown. “My dear boy,” he said to the journalist, “I would only be too happy to, but I’m afraid that certain passages were redacted.”

Hayward cut in. “There’s no point asking anyone else. Only I will have access to the secret the play will reveal. And I will not divulge anything until opening night.”

* * *

In her office in the Orphea police station, Betsy had installed a T.V. and a V.H.S. player.

“We got a video of the 1994 play from the director Buzz Lambert,” she told me. “We need to watch it. We hope it might show us something new.”

“Was your visit to Lambert productive?” I asked.

“Very,” Derek said enthusiastically. “First of all, Lambert described an altercation between Hayward and Mayor Gordon. Hayward wanted to perform his play during the festival and Gordon apparently said, ‘You’ll never perform that play while I’m alive.’”

“Do you think he could have killed the mayor?”

Derek was not convinced. “It seems beyond belief that he would kill the mayor and his family, and a woman out jogging, over a play.”

“Hayward was chief of police,” Betsy said. “Meghan would have recognized him coming out of the Gordon house and he would have had no choice but to kill her, too. It stands up.”

“So on July 26,” Derek said, “before his play opens, Hayward is going to take the mike and say: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I was the man who slaughtered everyone.’”

I laughed, imagining this scene. “Surely he isn’t lunatic enough to pull a stunt like that.”

Derek studied the whiteboard. “We know now that the mayor’s money roughly corresponded to the many kickbacks paid by local businessmen, i.e., not by Ted Tennenbaum. But if his withdrawals were not intended for the mayor, I’d really like to know what Tennenbaum used that $500,000 for.”

“There’s also the question of his van being out on the street around the time of the murders,” I said. “Our witness was in no doubt it was his van. Was Lambert able to confirm to you that Tennenbaum was absent from the Grand Theater at the time of the murders?”

“Yes, Jesse, he did confirm it. But Tennenbaum was not the only one to have disappeared for half an hour. Believe it or not, Charlotte, who was one of the actors in the company, and who was also Hayward’s girlfriend—”

“The beautiful girlfriend who left him?”

“The very one. Well, according to Lambert she was gone from the theater from just before 7.00 until 7.30. And she came back with wet shoes.”

“Wet like Mayor Gordon’s lawn?” I said.

“Precisely,” Derek said with a smile, amused that I remembered that detail. “Wait, that’s not all. The same Charlotte left Hayward for Alan Brown. It was love at first sight and they ended up getting married. They still are.”

“Damn!”

I stared at the papers we had found in the self-storage facility. There was an airline ticket for Los Angeles and the words Find Kirk Hayward. Well, we’d done that. But had Hayward told her more than he told me? My gaze next came to rest on the clipping from the Chronicle, including the front-page photograph, circled in red, showing Derek and me staring down at the sheet covering Meghan Padalin, outside Mayor Gordon’s house, and, just behind us, Kirk Hayward and Alan Brown. They were looking at each other, maybe talking. I looked closer and noticed Brown’s hand. It seemed to be forming the number 3. Was it a sign for someone? For Hayward? Beneath the photograph, Stephanie’s words, in red pen: What nobody saw.

“What is it?” Derek said.

“What’s the link between Hayward and Brown?” I said.

“Charlotte Carrell Brown.”

“Charlotte Brown. I know at the time the experts said it must have been a man, but could they have been wrong? Could a woman have been the killer? Is that what we didn’t see in 1994?”

Next we watched the video of the play. The image quality was not good, and the camera kept to the stage throughout, so the audience was not visible at all. But the recording started with the official part of the evening. We saw Deputy Mayor Alan Brown get up onstage, looking embarrassed, and approach the microphone. There’s a moment of hesitation. Brown seems to be hot. After