by Joël Dicker
“What makes you sure of that?”
He waved a plastic bag containing wads of banknotes. “We found $10,000 in cash in the apartment, hidden in the base of a cast-iron Italian coffee maker. The bills are intact.”
“Right,” Betsy said. “If I were Stephanie and had hidden $10,000 in cash in my apartment, I’d make damn sure I got it out before setting fire to the place.”
“What about the car?” I said. “What did you find there?”
“Unfortunately, no D.N.A. apart from Stephanie’s—we were able to make a comparison with a sample from her parents. On the other hand, we did find a rather mysterious handwritten note under the driver’s seat. The handwriting seems to be Stephanie’s.”
The officer put his hand back in his envelope and took out a third plastic bag containing a sheet of paper torn from a school exercise book. On it was written:
Darkest Night ➝ Orphea Theater Festival
Talk to Michael Bird
“Darkest Night!” Betsy cried. “The same as we found on the note left in the empty file.”
“Let’s talk to Michael Bird,” I said. “He may know more than he was prepared to say last time.”
*
We found Bird in his office. He had prepared for us a folder containing copies of all the articles written by Stephanie for the paper. Most of it was local news—a school fair, the Columbus Day parade, a community party for people on their own, the Halloween pumpkin competition, road accidents—all fairly trivial items. As I spread the articles out on the desk, I asked the editor:
“What’s Stephanie’s salary at the paper?”
“$1,500 dollars a month. Why do you ask?”
“It may be important for the investigation. I’ll be honest with you—I’m still trying to figure out why Stephanie left New York to come to Orphea and write articles about Columbus Day and pumpkin contests. It makes no sense, as far as I’m concerned. Don’t take this the wrong way, Mr Bird, but it doesn’t fit with the ambitious picture of her I got from her parents and friends.”
“I know exactly what you mean, Captain Rosenberg. In fact, I asked myself the same thing. Stephanie told me she had become weary of life in the city. She was looking for some kind of rebirth. She’s an idealist, you know. She wants to change things. The challenge of working for a local paper doesn’t faze her—quite the opposite, in fact.”
“I think there’s something else,” I said, and showed Bird the piece of paper found in Stephanie’s car.
“What is this?” he said.
“A note written by Stephanie. She mentions the theater festival, and says she needs to talk to you about it. What do you know that you’re not telling us, Mr Bird?”
Bird sighed. “I promised her I wouldn’t say anything. I gave my word.”
“I wonder if you grasp the gravity of the situation . . .”
“You’re the one who doesn’t grasp it,” he said. “There may be a good reason why Stephanie decided to drop out of sight for a while. And you’re compromising everything by getting people worked up.”
“What would be a good reason?”
“She may have known she was in danger and decided to hide. By turning the region upside down, you may be putting her life at risk. Her investigation is more important than you might imagine, and the people who are looking for her right now may be the very people she’s hiding from.”
“You mean police officers?”
“It’s possible. She kept things very close to her chest. I kept asking her to tell me more, but she always refused.”
“That’s very much like the Stephanie I met the other day,” I sighed. “But what’s the connection with the theater festival?”
Although the editorial offices were deserted and the door of his office was closed, the editor lowered his voice again, as if fearful someone might overhear him. “Stephanie thought something was going on at the festival, and she needed to question the volunteers without anybody suspecting anything. I suggested she do a series of articles for the paper. It was the perfect cover.”
“Phony interviews?” I said in surprise.
“Not really phony, because we did publish them. I told you about the paper’s financial difficulties. Stephanie assured me that publishing the results of her investigation would make it possible to get things back on their feet. ‘When this is published, people will fight to get hold of the Chronicle,’ she told me one day.”
Back at the station, we finally reached Stephanie’s previous boss, the editor of the New York Literary Review. His name was Steven Bergdorf and he lived in Brooklyn. It was Betsy who called him. She put the phone on loudspeaker.
“Poor Stephanie,” Bergdorf said after Betsy had informed him of the situation. “I hope nothing serious has happened to her. She’s a very intelligent woman, a promising literary journalist, a fine writer. Always friendly to everyone. Not the kind of person to attract hard feelings or problems.”
“If my information is correct, she left the magazine’s staff last fall.”
“I was very sorry to lose her. But we stayed on good terms. She told me later she was working for the Orphea Chronicle and she liked it a lot. I was pleased for her, I suppose, although I was a little surprised.”
“Why surprised?”
“A girl like Stephanie Mailer should be writing for the New York Times. She’s that good. What was she doing at a provincial paper?”
“Mr Bergdorf, has Stephanie been back to your offices since she left?”
“Not as far as I know. Why?”
“Because we’ve established that her car was parked close to your building on several occasions in the last two or three months.”
* * *
For Betsy and me the money found in Stephanie’s apartment was one of the leads we most needed to follow. $10,000 in cash. Stephanie earned $1,500 a month. Once she had paid her rent, her car insurance, and her general expenses, there could not have been much left. If these were her savings, why had she not put them in a bank?
We spent the rest of the day questioning Stephanie’s parents and friends about that money. The Mailers said that their daughter had always gotten by on her own. She had won a scholarship to pay for her college studies and had subsequently lived on her salary. Her friends assured us that Stephanie often had difficulties in making ends meet. They found it hard to accept the idea that she might have put money aside.
As I was driving down Main Street on my way out of Orphea, instead of continuing toward Route 17 so as to get onto the highway, I veered almost without thinking into the Penfield neighborhood and came to Penfield Crescent. I drove round the little park and stopped outside the house that had been Mayor Gordon’s twenty years earlier, the place where it had all started.
I sat there for a while, then, on the way back home, I couldn’t stop myself from dropping by Derek and Darla’s. I don’t know if it was because I needed to see Derek, or because I didn’t want to be alone. And apart from him I had nobody.
It was around eight o’clock when I reached their house. I stood for a while at the door, reluctant to ring the bell. From outside, I could hear cheerful conversation and yelling from the kitchen, where they were having dinner. Every Sunday, Derek and his family had pizza.
I approached the window discreetly and looked in at the meal. Derek’s three children were still in high school. The eldest would be going to college the following year. Suddenly, one of them noticed I was there. They all turned toward the window and stared at me.
Derek came out of the house, still munching, his paper napkin in his hand.
“Jesse, what are you doing out here? Come in and eat with us.”
“No, thanks. I’m not very hungry. Listen, strange things are happening in Orphea.”
“Jesse,” Derek sighed, “don’t tell me you spent your weekend up there!”
I gave him a quick rundown.
“It’s beyond doubt now,” I said. “Stephanie did find out something new about the murders in 1994.”
“That’s just speculation, Jesse.”
“What about the note saying ‘Darkest Night’ found in Stephanie’s car, the same as the paper in the empty file? What about the link she made with the theater festival—which started in the summer of 1994, if you remember? Isn’t that concrete enough for you?”
“You see the links you want to see, Jesse! Don’t you realize what it would mean to reopen that case? It’d mean we screwed up.”
“Well, maybe we did! Stephanie said we missed an obvious detail.”
“But where did we go wrong?” Derek said. “Tell me where we went wrong, Jesse! You remember how hard we worked, how conscientious we were. We put together a cast-iron case. I think it’s because you’re leaving the force that you’re brooding on these ugly memories. We can’t turn the clock back, we can’t undo what we did! So why are you doing this to us?”
“Because we have no choice!”
“No, Jesse, we don’t have to do anything! Tomorrow’s your last day as a police officer. Why do you want to stick your nose back in a pile of shit that’s no concern of yours anymore?”
“I’m planning to postpone my departure. I can’t leave the force like this. I can’t live with this on my conscience!”
“Well, I can!”
He made to go back inside, as if trying to put an end to this conver-sation he didn’t want to have.
“Help me, Derek!” I said. “If tomorrow I don’t bring the major solid evidence of the link between Stephanie Mailer and the 1994 investigation, he’ll force me to close the case for good.”
He turned. “Why are you doing this, Jesse?” he said. “Why do you want to dig up all this crap?”
“Team up with me, Derek.”
“Why are you trying to drag me back into this? I haven’t been out in the field in twenty years, Jesse.”
“Because you’re the best I know, Derek. You were always better than me. You should have been captain of our unit, not me.”
“Don’t come here and judge me, Jesse, don’t lecture me about how I should have handled my career. You know perfectly well why I’ve spent the last twenty years behind a desk handling paperwork.”
“I think this is an opportunity for us to put things right, Derek.”
“There’s nothing we can put right, Jesse. You’re welcome to come inside and share our pizza, but I don’t want to talk about that case anymore. It’s over.”
He opened the front door of his house.
“I envy you, Derek,” I said.
He turned again.
“You envy me? What could you possibly envy?”
“The fact that you love and are loved.”
He shook his head wearily. “Jesse, Natasha’s been gone for twenty years. You should have rebuilt your life a long time ago. Sometimes, I get the feeling it’s like you’re waiting for her to come back.”
“Every day, Derek. Every day, I tell myself she’ll be back. Every time I walk through the door of my apartment I hope I’ll find her there.”
He sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’m sorry. You should see someone.”
He went back inside, and I walked back to my car. As I was about to drive away, Darla came out of the house and ran toward me. She seemed angry and I knew why. I lowered my window.
“Don’t do this to him, Jesse!” she cried. “Don’t come here and awaken the ghosts of the past.”
“Listen, Darla—”
“No, Jesse, you listen! Derek doesn’t deserve you doing this to him. Leave him alone about that case. Don’t do this to him. You’re not welcome here if it’s just to stir up the past. Do I need to remind you what happened twenty years ago?”
“No, Darla, you don’t need to remind me. Nobody needs to remind me. I remember it every fucking day, Darla, do you hear me? Every fucking morning when I wake up and every night when I go to sleep.”
She gave me a sad look and I saw that she regretted having brought up the subject.
“I’m sorry, Jesse. Come inside and eat, there’s still pizza and I made a tiramisu.”
“No, thanks. I’m going home.”
I drove away.
Back home, I poured myself a drink and took out a folder I hadn’t touched in a long time. Inside were press clippings from 1994, in no particular order. I looked through them for a long time until one of them caught my attention.
POLICE HAIL A HERO
Sergeant Derek Scott was decorated yesterday at a ceremony at the troop headquarters of the State Police for his bravery in saving the life of his partner, Inspector Jesse Rosenberg, while arresting a murderer for the killing of four people in the Hamptons during the summer.
The doorbell dragged me from my thoughts. I looked at my watch. Who could it be this late? I picked up my pistol, which I had put 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 s
aid, 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.