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

himself? What did Hayward really know? What kind of game was he playing with us and the whole town of Orphea?

Just then, Betsy’s cell phone rang. It was Montagne.

“Betsy, we’ve been looking for you everywhere. We need you at the station right now. Your office was burglarized during the night.”

When we got to the station, some of Betsy’s colleagues were gathered in the doorway of her office, looking at the fragments of glass on the floor and the smashed-in shutter, and trying to figure out what had happened. The answer, though, was simple. The station was all on one story. The offices were all at the rear of the building and looked out on a patch of lawn surrounded by a picket fence. The only security cameras were in the parking lot and at the main entrance. The intruder would have had no difficulty in climbing over the fence, crossing the lawn, and getting to the window of the office. He had then forced up the roll-down shutters, broken the window, and climbed into the room. The officer who had delivered her mail had been the one to discover the break-in.

Another officer had been in there the previous afternoon, when everything had been intact. So this had happened during the night.

“How come nobody realized what was going on?” I said.

“If all the officers are on patrol at the same time, there’s nobody in the station,” Betsy said. “It sometimes happens.”

“What about the noise?” Derek said. “It must make a lot of noise lifting those shutters. Didn’t anybody hear?”

All the buildings in the immediate vicinity of the station were offices or municipal warehouses. The only likely witnesses might have been the firefighters in the next-door fire station. But when a police officer informed us that during the night, around one in the morning, a major traffic accident had necessitated the intervention of all patrol cars and firefighters from the fire station, we realized that the intruder had had free rein.

“He was hiding somewhere,” Betsy said, “waiting for the right moment to do what he did. He might even have been waiting for several nights in a row.”

A viewing of the footage from security cameras inside the station allowed us to confirm that there had in fact been no break-in at the front of the office. There was one camera in the hallway, aimed straight at the door of Betsy’s office. The door had remained closed. It was clearly her room that had been the target.

“I don’t understand,” Betsy said. “There’s really nothing to steal. In fact, so far as I can see, nothing’s missing.”

“There’s nothing to steal, but there is something to see,” I said, pointing to the whiteboard and the walls covered with papers connected with the case. “Whoever got in here wanted to know what stage the investigation had reached. And he had access to Stephanie’s work and ours.”

“Our killer is taking risks,” Derek said. “He’s starting to panic, exposing himself. Who knows your office is here, Betsy?”

Betsy shrugged. “Everyone. I mean, it’s no secret. Even people who come to the station to lodge a complaint have to come along this corridor and they see my office. My name’s on the door.”

Derek drew us aside and whispered in a grave tone:

“Whoever broke in here knew what he was doing when he took that risk. He knew perfectly well what was in that office. It’s someone on the inside.”

“Oh, my God,” Betsy said, “you mean it’s one of our colleagues?”

“If it was anyone on the force,” I objected, “all he’d have to do would be to go into the office when you weren’t there, Betsy.”

Derek said, “He’d have been caught by the camera in the corridor. If he thinks he’s under surveillance, he’s definitely not going to make that mistake. But by breaking in, he puts us off the scent. There may be a rotten element inside the station.”

That meant we were no longer safe there. But where could we go? I no longer had an office at troop headquarters and Derek’s office was open-plan. We needed somewhere where nobody would come looking for us. That was when I thought of the archive room of the Chronicle, which we could access by going through the back door of the offices.

Bird was pleased to welcome us.

“Nobody will know you’re here,” he assured us. “The reporters never come to the basement. I’ll leave you a key, along with a duplicate, so you’ll be the only ones to have access. And the key to the back door, too, so you can come and go at any hour of the day or night.”

Within a few hours, in the greatest secrecy, we had set up a reconstruction of our investigation wall.

*

That evening, Betsy was due to have dinner with Lauren and Paul. They were back in Southampton for the week and had planned to meet her at Café Athenato make up for the disastrous previous dinner.

At home to change, Betsy suddenly remembered her conversation with Springfield concerning Bergdorf’s book about the theater festival. Springfield had told her that in the spring of 1994 he had decided to set aside a space in the bookstore to local authors. What if Hayward had put his play on sale there? Before leaving for supper, she dropped by Springfield’s house. She found him on the porch with a glass of whiskey, enjoying the mildness of the early evening.

“Yes, Betsy,” he said, “we did devote a room in the rear of the store to local authors. A gloomy little cubbyhole, which we turned into an annex called the ‘Local Writers’ Room’. It was an immediate success. More so than I could have imagined: tourists love local stories. Actually, that section still exists and it’s in the same place. But I’ve knocked down a wall since then, so it’s part of the main store. Why are you interested?”

“Just curious,” Betsy said. “I was wondering if you remember which writers gave you their books back then.”

Springfield was amused at the question. “There