by Joël Dicker
“Goodbye, Mark.”
He pushed against the door as I was shutting it. “Wait, Betsy. At least let me help you.”
I was too much in need of a helping hand to refuse. And anyhow, he was already here. He put on his Mr Perfect act, carrying furniture, hanging pictures, installing a chandelier.
Between drilling holes, he said, “Are you planning to live here all alone?”
“Yes. This is where my new life starts.”
*
The following Monday was my first day at the station. At eight in the morning I presented myself at the desk, in plain clothes.
“Are you here to make a complaint?” the officer asked me, without looking up from his newspaper.
“No,” I said. “I’m your new colleague.”
He looked up, gave me a friendly smile, and called out, “Hey, guys, the girl’s here!”
A whole squad of officers appeared, gawping at me as if I was some kind of strange animal. Chief Gulliver came forward and held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Betsy.”
I was warmly welcomed. I greeted my new colleagues in turn. I was offered a coffee and asked lots of questions. Someone cried out cheerfully, “Guys, I’m going to start believing in Father Christmas. A shriveled old cop retires and we get a hot young babe as a replacement!” They all burst out laughing.
But the good-natured atmosphere was not to last.
JESSE ROSENBERG
Friday, June 27, 2014
Twenty-nine days to opening night
Early that morning I left for Orphea.
I absolutely had to figure out what had happened in Stephanie’s apartment. As far as Chief Gulliver was concerned, it was a simple burglary, but I didn’t believe that for a moment. My forensics colleagues had stayed there until late in the night looking for fingerprints, but they found none. For my part, judging by the force of the blow I had received, I inclined strongly to the idea that the intruder was a man.
I had to find Stephanie and I sensed that I did not have much time. Driving now along Route 17, I accelerated on the last straight stretch before getting to Orphea, without putting on either my flashing lights or my siren.
It was only when I passed the road sign marking the city limits that I noticed the unmarked police car concealed behind it, which immediately started following me. I pulled up onto the shoulder. In my rear-view mirror I saw a pretty young woman in a uniform get out of her vehicle and walk toward me. I was about to make the acquaintance of the first person who would agree to help me in unraveling this case: Betsy Kanner.
As she approached my open window, I showed my badge and smiled.
“Captain Jesse Rosenberg,” she read. “I think I saw you briefly on Bendham Road yesterday.” She introduced herself. “Deputy Betsy Kanner. How’s your head, Captain?”
“My head’s fine, thanks. But I’m a little disturbed by what happened in that apartment. Chief Gulliver thinks it was a burglary, but I don’t hold with that. I wonder if I haven’t gotten myself involved in a really weird case.”
“Gulliver’s a complete idiot,” Betsy said. “But tell me about your case. I’m interested.”
I realized then that Betsy might be a valuable ally in Orphea. And as I was subsequently to discover, she was also a terrific policewoman.
“Betsy, can I buy you a coffee? I’ll tell you the whole story, as much as I know it.”
A few minutes later, in a roadside diner, I was telling Betsy how everything had started, how Stephanie had come to see me at the beginning of the week and told me about an investigation she was conducting into the quadruple murder in Orphea in 1994.
“What quadruple murder in 1994?”
“The mayor of Orphea and his family were murdered, as well as a woman who was out jogging, who happened to pass by. It was the opening night of the first Orphea Theater Festival. And it was the first big case I worked on. My partner Derek Scott and I reckoned we had solved it. But on Monday, this woman, a journalist on the Chronicle, approached me at my retirement party to tell me she thought we had made a mistake. We had gotten the wrong man. And then she vanished. Last night, someone paid a visit to her apartment.
“According to the parents,” I said to Betsy, “the only duplicate was the one in their possession. That means that whoever was in the apartment last night had Stephanie’s keys.”
I had already mentioned the text received by her editor Michael Bird, and now Betsy said, “If that person has Stephanie’s keys, he or she may also have her cell phone.”
“You mean she didn’t send the text? Then who did?”
“Someone who was playing for time.”
From the back pocket of my pants I took the envelope I’d slipped out of the letterbox the previous day and handed it to Betsy.
“This is Stephanie’s credit card statement,” I said. “She traveled to Los Angeles at the beginning of the month. We don’t know what that was about. I’ve checked, and she hasn’t taken a plane since. If she left of her own free will, she most likely left by car. I put out an A.P.B. on the license number. If she’s on the road somewhere, the Highway Patrol will find her soon enough.”
“You didn’t waste any time,” Betsy said.
“There is no time to waste,” I said. “I also requested her telephone records and credit card statements for the last few months. I hope to have them by this evening.”
Betsy quickly read the statement. “Her credit card was last used at 9.55 on Monday evening at the Kodiak Grill. That’s on Main Street. We should go there. Someone may have seen something.”
The Kodiak Grill was located at the top of Main Street. The manager consulted the week’s roster for us and pointed out the members of staff there now who had also been on duty on Monday evening. One of the waitresses we questioned recognized Stephanie from the photograph Mrs Mailer had insisted I take with me when I was at their house yesterday.
“I remember her,” she said. “She was here at the beginning of the week. A pretty girl, all on her own.”
“How come you remember her out of all your customers? Was there something special about her?”
“It wasn’t the first time she was here. She always asked for the same table. She’d say she was waiting for someone, but whoever it was never showed up.”
“What happened on Monday?”
“She got here when my shift was starting, around six. And she waited. In the end she ordered a Caesar salad and a Coke, and then she left.”
“Around ten.”
“That’s possible. I don’t remember the time, but she was here for quite a while. She paid and left. That’s all I remember.”
Leaving the Kodiak Grill, we noticed that the building next door was a bank with an A.T.M. on the outside.
“There must be cameras,” Betsy said. “Stephanie may have been filmed on Monday.”
A few minutes later, we were in the cramped office of the bank’s security officer, who showed us the angles from which the different cameras on the building recorded the scene. One of them was aimed at the sidewalk and we could see the outside seating area of the Kodiak Grill. He ran Monday’s footage for us, from six o’clock onwards. Peering at the people passing on the screen, I suddenly saw her.
“Stop!” I said. “That’s her.”
The security officer froze the image.
“Now go back slowly, please,” I said.
On the screen, Stephanie walked backward. The cigarette she was holding between her lips reconstructed itself, then she lit it with a gold lighter, took it between her fingers, and put it in a pack that she put into her bag. She moved back farther and veered off the sidewalk to a little blue car, in which she took her seat.
“A three-door blue Mazda. I saw her get into it on Monday, in the parking lot at troop headquarters.”
I asked the security officer to play the sequence again, forward this time, and we watched Stephanie get out of the car, light a cigarette, smoke it as she took a few steps along the sidewalk, and head for the Kodiak Gr
ill.
We moved the recording forward to 9.55, the time when Stephanie had paid for her dinner with her credit card. Two minutes later, we saw her come back out. She seemed nervous as she walked to her car. As she was about to get in, she took her cell phone from her bag. Someone had called her. The call was brief. She did not seem to be speaking, only listening. After hanging up, she got into the car and sat there motionless for a while. We could see her distinctly through the car window. She searched for a number in the phone’s contacts and called it, but hung up again immediately, as if she had not been able to get through. She waited another five minutes, sitting behind the wheel. Then she made a second call. This time we saw her speaking. The exchange lasted perhaps twenty seconds. Finally, she started the car and drove away.
“That may be the last image of Stephanie Mailer,” I said.
We spent half the afternoon questioning Stephanie’s friends. Most lived in Sag Harbor, her hometown.
None of them had heard from Stephanie since Monday and they were all worried, especially since her parents had called them. They had tried to reach her by telephone, by e-mail, through social media, they had gone to her apartment and knocked at her door. But no-one had gotten hold of her.
It emerged from our conversations that Stephanie was a terrific young woman. She didn’t do drugs, didn’t drink to excess, and got along well with everyone. Her friends knew more than her parents did about her private life. One of them told us she knew Stephanie had had a boyfriend recently.
“Yes, there was a guy, his name was Sean. She came with him to a party. It was weird.”
“In what way weird?”
“The chemistry between them. Something wasn’t right.”
Another friend told us that Stephanie had been up to her ears in work.
“We’ve hardly seen her lately. She said she had a lot going on.”
“What was she working on?”
“I don’t know.”
A third friend told us about her trip to Los Angeles. “Yes, she did go to L.A. two weeks ago, but she told me not to talk about it.”
“What was the purpose of the trip?”
“I don’t know.”
The last of her friends to have talked to her was Timothy Volt. He and Stephanie had seen each other the previous Sunday evening. “She came to my place,” he said. “I was on my own, and we had a few drinks.”
“Did she seem worried?” I said.
“I wouldn’t say so.”
“What kind of woman is Stephanie?”
“She’s brilliant, but she’s a tough cookie. She can be really stubborn. When she gets hold of something, she won’t let go.”
“Did she tell you what she was working on?”
“She said she was working on a really major project, but wouldn’t go into any details.”
“What kind of project?”
“A book. In fact that’s why she came back to the area.”
“How do you mean?”
“Stephanie’s very ambitious. Her dream is to be a famous writer, and she’ll make it. She was earning a living working for a literary magazine until last September. The name escapes me.”
“The New York Literary Review.”
“That’s it. But it was really only a sideline to pay her bills. When she was fired, she said she wanted to come back to the Hamptons so she could write in peace. I remember her saying to me one day, ‘The only reason I’m here is to write a book.’ I think she needed time, and she needed peace and quiet. She certainly found it here. Why else would she have accepted a job as a freelance reporter for a local paper? Like I said, she’s ambitious. She aims for the moon. She must have had a good reason for settling in Orphea. Maybe she couldn’t concentrate in all the excitement of the city. It’s quite common to see writers moving out to the country, isn’t it?”
“Where did she write?”
“At home, I guess.”
“On a computer?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
As we left Volt’s place, I mentioned to Betsy that I had seen no computer in Stephanie’s apartment.
We took advantage of being in Sag Harbor to go see Stephanie’s parents. They had never heard of a boyfriend named Sean, and Stephanie had not left a laptop in their house. To set our minds at rest, we asked if we could take a look at Stephanie’s room. She hadn’t been in it since the end of high school and it had remained intact—the posters on the wall, the sporting trophies, the fluffy toys on the bed, the school books.
“It’s years since Stephanie last slept here,” Mrs Mailer said. “After high school, she went to college, and then she lived in Manhattan until she left the New York Literary Review.”
“Was there a specific reason for Stephanie to move to Orphea?” I asked her, without revealing what Volt had told me.
“As I said yesterday, she’d left her job at the Review and wanted to come back to the Hamptons.”
“But why Orphea?”
“Because it’s the biggest town in the region, I guess.”
“And in the city, Mrs Mailer,” I ventured, “did Stephanie have enemies? Had she quarreled with anyone?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Did she live alone?”
“She had a roommate, a young woman who worked in publishing. We met her once when we helped Stephanie collect her few pieces of furniture after she’d decided to leave the city. She really had only a few things, we took everything straight to her apartment in Orphea.”
Not having discovered anything in her apartment, or at her parents’ house, we decided to go back to Orphea and check Stephanie’s computer in the Chronicle offices.
It was five o’clock when we got there. The editor led us between his employees’ desks. He pointed to Stephanie’s tidy desk, on which stood a computer screen, a keyboard, a box of Kleenex, a mug with a prodigious number of identical pens, a notepad, and a few scattered papers. I looked through them quickly without finding anything very interesting.
“Could someone have had access to her computer since she’s been away?”
As I spoke, I pressed the computer’s ON button.
“No,” the editor said. “The computers are protected by individual passwords.”
The computer did not come on, so I pressed the button again.
“So there’s no possibility that anyone could have had a look at Stephanie’s computer without her knowing?”
“None at all,” Bird assured us. “Only Stephanie has the password. Nobody else, not even the I.T. guy. In fact, I don’t know how you’ll be able to look at her computer if you don’t have the password.”
“We have specialists who can manage that. But I’d at least like to switch it on.” I leaned down under the desk to make sure that the computer tower was properly connected, but there was no tower. There was nothing.
I looked up again and asked, “Where is Stephanie’s computer?”
“It’s under there, isn’t it?”
“No, there’s nothing there!”
Bird and Betsy immediately bent down to check. There was nothing there but cables hanging down.
“Someone stole Stephanie’s computer!” Bird exclaimed, stunned.
By 6.30, the street outside the Chronicle building was a mass of vehicles from the Orphea police department and the State Police.
Inside, an officer from the forensics squad confirmed to us that someone had indeed broken in to the offices. Bird, Betsy and I followed him in procession to an electrical room in the basement that also served as a storeroom and as the emergency exit. At the end of the room, a door led out to a steep staircase that went back up to street level. Someone had smashed the window and had only needed to put his hand through it to turn the handle from the inside and open the door.
“Do you ever come to this room?” I asked the editor.
“Never. Nobody comes to the basement. There’s nothing but the archives down here, and we very rarely look at them.”
“No alarm, no cameras?
” Betsy said.
“No, who’d pay for that? Believe me, if we had the money, it’d go on the plumbing first.”
“We tried to find prints on the handles,” the forensics officer explained, “but there are so many prints, mixed up with all kinds of filth, that they’re unusable. We haven’t found anything around Stephanie’s desk either. In my opinion, the intruder came through that door, went upstairs, took the computer, and got out the same way.”
We went back to the editorial office. “Mr Bird,” I said, “could it be a member of your team who did this?”
“No way!” he said, offended. “I have complete confidence in my colleagues.”
“So how do you explain how someone unfamiliar with this office could have known which one was Stephanie’s computer?”
“I have no idea,” he sighed.
“Who’s first here in the morning?” Betsy said.
“Shirley. She opens the offices every morning.”
We sent for Shirley.
“Over the last few mornings, have you noticed anything unusual when you got here?” I asked her.
Puzzled at first, Shirley searched in her memory. Suddenly, her eyes lit up.
“I didn’t see anything myself. But on Tuesday morning, one of the reporters, Newton, told me his computer was on. He knew he’d switched it off the day before because he’d been the last to leave. He made a scene, saying that someone had switched on his computer without his permission, but I reckoned he’d simply forgotten to switch it off.”
“Which is Newton’s desk?”
“It’s the one next to Stephanie’s.”
I pressed the button to switch on the computer, knowing there wouldn’t be any usable prints on it because it had been used in the meantime. The screen lit up.
NEWTON’S COMPUTER
PASSWORD:
“He switched on the first computer,” I said, “saw the name, and realized it wasn’t the right one. Then he switched on the second one and Stephanie’s name appeared. He didn’t need to look any farther.”
“Which tells us it was someone from outside who did this,” Bird said, reassured.
“What it means more than anything is that the burglary took place on Monday night. In other words, the night Stephanie disappeared.”