The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer: A gripping new thriller with a killer twist

by Joël Dicker

  “That’s more than enough, Mark!”

  But he had no intention of leaving it there. “What I’m asking you, Betsy, is this: when you left me, did you take even a few moments to put yourself in my place and try to understand what I was going through? Like all those times we were supposed to meet for dinner after work, but then you would have a last-minute emergency and I would wait for hours before going home and going to bed without eating. And the number of times you told me ‘I’ll be right there’ and in the end you didn’t show up at all because something went on longer than you had anticipated. But for heaven’s sake, out of the thousands of officers in that fucking N.Y.P.D., couldn’t you just once have handed the case to one of your colleagues and joined me for dinner? Because while you were busy saving everyone, out of the eight million people in the city I felt like the eight million and first, the one who always came last! The police had stolen my wife!”

  “No, Mark,” Betsy said. “You lost me. You weren’t able to keep me!”

  “Give me a second chance, I beg you.”

  Betsy hesitated for a long time, and then said, “I’ve met someone. Someone nice. I think I’m in love. I’m sorry.”

  Mark stared at her for a long time in icy silence. He seemed broken. He finally said, bitterly, “Maybe you’re right, Betsy. But don’t forget, after what happened at Sabar’s jewelry store, you weren’t the same anymore. And it could have been avoided! That evening, I didn’t want you to go! I asked you not to answer your fucking phone, do you remember?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “If you hadn’t gone to that jewelry store, if you’d listened to me for once, we’d still be together today.”

  BETSY KANNER

  It was the evening of September 21, 2012.

  The evening when Sabar’s jewelry store was held up.

  I drove uptown in my unmarked car at breakneck speed, all the way to 57th Street, where the store was located. The immediate area had been sealed off.

  My chief motioned me into the van serving as the command post.

  “There’s just one armed robber,” he said, “and he’s violent.”

  I was surprised. “Just one? That’s unusual.”

  “Yes. And he seems nervous. Apparently, he took the jeweler and his two daughters, who are ten and twelve, from their apartment in the same building. He forced them downstairs to the store, presumably hoping they wouldn’t be found until the next day. But some beat cops were passing, saw the lights on inside, became suspicious, and raised the alarm.”

  “So we have a hostage taker and three hostages?”

  “Correct. No idea of the robber’s identity. All we know is that it’s a man.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Three hours now. The situation is beginning to get critical. He’s demanding that we stay back, we have no visual, and the negotiator we called in is getting nowhere. Not even telephone contact. That’s why I sent for you. I told myself you might be able to get somewhere. I’m sorry to have to call you while you’re on leave.”

  “Don’t worry, Chief, that’s what I’m here for.”

  “Your husband is going to hate me.”

  “He’ll get over it. How do you want to proceed?”

  There weren’t that many options. In the absence of a telephone connection, I had to make contact in person by approaching the store. I’d never done anything like that before.

  “I know this is a first for you, Betsy,” my chief said. “If you don’t feel up to it, I’d understand perfectly well.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “You’ll be our eyes, Betsy. Everyone is switched to your channel. There are marksmen on the upper floors of the building opposite. If you see something, say it, so they can modify their position if need be.”

  “Alright,” I said, adjusting my bulletproof vest.

  He wanted me to put on my ballistic helmet, but I refused. You can’t make true contact when you have a helmet on your head. I felt the adrenaline making my heart pound. I was scared. I wanted to call Mark, but I crushed the temptation. I only wanted to hear his voice, not unkind comments.

  I went through a security rope and advanced alone, a megaphone in my hand, along the deserted street. Silence reigned. I stopped ten paces from the store and announced myself through the loudspeaker.

  After a few moments, a man in a black leather jacket, wearing a balaclava, appeared at the door with one of the girls, a gun at her head. She was blindfolded and had adhesive tape over her mouth.

  He demanded that everyone get away and that he be allowed to leave. He kept close to his hostage and moved all the time so as to complicate the work of the marksmen. In my earpiece, I could hear my chief giving authorization to shoot him down, but the marksmen couldn’t get a lock on their target. The robber took a quick glance at the street and the surrounding area, no doubt weighing up his escape options, then disappeared back inside the store.

  Something wasn’t right, but it didn’t strike me immediately. Why had he shown himself? He was alone. Why take the risk of being shot instead of making his demands by telephone?

  Twenty minutes went by, then the door of the store opened abruptly, and the girl appeared again, still blindfolded and gagged. She advanced step by step, feeling her way with her feet. I could hear her moans. I wanted to approach, but suddenly the robber in the leather jacket and the balaclava appeared in the doorway, with a gun in each hand.

  I let go of my megaphone, took my pistol out of its holster, and aimed it at the man.

  “Put down your weapons!” I cried.

  Hidden by the recess of the store entrance, he was not yet visible to the marksmen.

  “Betsy, what’s going on?” my chief asked over the radio.

  “He’s coming out,” I said. “Shoot him if you have a visual.”

  The marksmen informed me they still had no visual. I continued to aim at his head. The girl was a few yards away from him. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. All at once, he made an abrupt movement in my direction. I pressed the trigger. The bullet hit him full in the head and he collapsed.

  The shot echoed in my ears. My field of vision shrank. My radio started crackling. Immediately, intervention teams appeared behind me. I recovered my senses. The girl was at once hurried away. I entered the store behind a column of armed, helmeted officers. We discovered the second girl on the floor, bound and gagged, a blindfold over her eyes, but safe. We evacuated her, then continued searching the premises for the jeweler. We finally discovered him locked in his office, after we had broken the door down. He was lying on the floor, his hands tied with a hose clamp, adhesive tape over his mouth and eyes. I freed him and he writhed, holding his left arm. I thought at first that he was wounded, then realized that he was having a heart attack. I called the emergency services and in the minutes that followed the jeweler was taken to hospital and doctors attended to the two girls.

  Outside the store, police officers were bustling around the body lying on the sidewalk. I joined them. And I suddenly heard one of my colleagues say in surprise:

  “Am I dreaming or does he have the guns taped to his hands?”

  “But . . . they’re fake,” another one said.

  We took off the balaclava that was hiding his face. A thick piece of adhesive tape was stuck to his mouth.

  “What the hell is going on?” I cried.

  Overcome by a terrible suspicion, I took out my phone and tapped in the name of the jeweler in the search engine. The photograph that appeared on my screen left me dumbfounded.

  “Fuck,” one of my colleagues said, looking at my screen, “this guy looks a hell of a lot like the jeweler.”

  “It is the jeweler!” I screamed.

  “If this guy’s the jeweler,” one of the other officers said, “then where’s the hostage taker?”

  That was why the robber had taken the risk of coming out and showing himself. So that I should associate him with a balaclava and a leather jacket. He
had then forced the jeweler to put them on, had stuck the guns to his hands with tape, and had forced him outside, threatening to do something to his other daughter if he didn’t go. Then he had gone into the office, locked himself in, tied his hands and stuck tape over his mouth and eyes, so that he could be taken for the jeweler and evacuated, his pockets full of jewels, to a hospital.

  His plan had worked perfectly. When we arrived in force at the hospital where he had been taken for his supposed heart attack, he had disappeared from the examination room. The two police officers who had gone with him to emergency were waiting in the corridor, talking idly, with no idea of what had happened.

  The robber was never identified, or found. And I had shot dead an innocent man. I had committed the worst sin for a member of a special unit: I had killed a hostage.

  Everyone assured me that I had done nothing wrong, that they would all of them have done exactly the same. And yet I could not help replaying that scene in my head.

  “He couldn’t talk,” my chief kept saying. “He couldn’t make a gesture without moving his weapons in a threatening way. He couldn’t do anything. He was a dead man walking.”

  “I think when he moved, he was going to throw himself to the ground to show he was surrendering. If I’d waited one second more before firing, he might have done that and he’d be alive now.”

  “Betsy, if the guy had been the real robber and you’d waited one second more, you’d have taken a bullet in the head.”

  What affected me most was that Mark couldn’t understand or sympathize. Not knowing how to handle my distress, he simply went over and over the story, saying, “My God, Betsy, if you’d stayed home that evening . . . You were on leave! You didn’t even have to answer your phone! But you always have to show willing.” I think he was angry with himself for not making me stay. He could see I was distraught, and he was angry. I was allowed a period of leave, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I stayed home, brooding. I felt depressed. Mark did try his best to cheer me up, he’d suggest I go for a walk, go running, go to a museum. But he couldn’t get beyond that anger eating away at him. In the cafeteria of the Metropolitan, as we were having a cappuccino after a visit, I said to him:

  “Every time I close my eyes, I see that man in front of me, holding his two guns. I don’t notice the adhesive tape around his hands, all I see are his eyes. I have the impression he’s terrified. But he doesn’t obey. The girl’s there in front of him, blindfolded . . .”

  “Betsy, not here, please, we’re here to cheer ourselves up. How can you move on from this if you never stop talking about it?”

  “Shit, Mark,” I cried, “this is my reality!”

  Not only had I raised my voice, but in an abrupt gesture I had knocked over my cup. The customers at the other tables stared at us. I felt weary.

  “I’ll get you another,” Mark said in a conciliatory tone.

  “It doesn’t matter. I think I need to walk. I need to be alone for a while. I’ll go for a walk in the park, I’ll see you at home.”

  I recognize with hindsight that Mark’s problem was that he didn’t want to talk about it. I wasn’t interested in his opinion, and I wasn’t looking for his approval. I just wanted someone to listen to me, whereas he wanted to act as if nothing had happened, or else as if everything was forgotten.

  I had to talk freely. On the advice of the squad’s psychologist, I talked about it with my colleagues. They were all attentive. I went for a drink with some of them, others invited me to dinner at their homes. These excursions did me good, but, unfortunately, Mark got it into his head that I was having an affair with one of my colleagues.

  “It’s funny,” he said, “you’re always in a good mood when you come back from your evenings out. It makes a change from the way you are when you’re with me.”

  “Mark, don’t be stupid, I just went for a coffee with one of the team. He’s married and has two kids.”

  “Oh, that’s a comfort to know he’s married! Because married men never cheat on their wives, do they?”

  “Mark, don’t tell me you’re jealous?”

  “Betsy, you sulk all day when you’re with me. You only smile when you go out on your own. And I’m not even talking about the last time we had sex!”

  I couldn’t explain to Mark that he was imagining things. Or maybe I didn’t tell him often enough that I loved him. In any case, I was guilty of neglecting him, of dwelling too much on what was getting me down, of abandoning him. He finally found the attention he had been missing with a female colleague, who had been biding her time. The whole office knew about it, which meant so did I. The day I found out about it, I went to stay at Lauren’s.

  Then came the period of Mark’s regrets, his excuses, his begging me to come back. He made honorable amends to my parents, who started pleading his case after he’d vented our whole life in their living room.

  “Betsy, all the same!” my mother said to me. “Four months without sex.”

  “Mark told you that?” I said, aghast.

  “Yes, and he cried.”

  I think the most difficult thing was not Mark’s torment, but that, in my mind, the seductive, protective man, the one who saved lives in restaurants and charmed everyone, was now a whiner who complained to my mother about our sex life. I knew something was broken, and at last, in June 2013, he agreed to a divorce.

  I was tired of New York, made weary by the city, its heat, its size, its unending noise, its lights that never went out. I wanted to settle somewhere else, I wanted change, and, as chance would have it, in the New York Literary Review, to which I subscribed, I came across an article about Orphea:

  THE GREATEST LITTLE THEATER FESTIVAL

  by Steven Bergdorf

  Do you know this gem called Orphea, nestled in the Hamptons? A little paradise where the air seems purer and life gentler than elsewhere, which every year hosts a theater festival whose main production is always special and of high quality. [. . .]

  The town itself is worth a visit. Its Main Street is a jewel of peace and quiet. Its coffee shops and restaurants are delightful and attractive, the stores enticing. Everything here is both dynamic and pleasant. [. . .] If you can, stay at the Lake Palace, a really superb hotel just outside the town, with a magnificent lake on one side and an enchanting forest on the other. It is like being in a film set. The staff waits on you hand and foot, the rooms are spacious and elegantly decorated, the restaurant sophisticated. It is hard to leave this place once you have experienced it.

  I took a few days’ leave while the festival was on, booked a room at the Lake Palace, and went to Orphea. The article hadn’t exaggerated: I discovered there, so close to the city, a wonderful, protected world. I could immediately picture myself living there. I fell under the spell of its little streets, its movie house, its bookstore. Orphea seemed to me the place I had dreamed about, the place where I could change my life.

  One morning, when I was sitting on a bench in the marina, gazing out at the ocean, I seemed to glimpse in the distance the breath of a whale that had risen to the surface. I felt the need to share this moment with someone. The witness I chose was a passing jogger.

  “What’s happening?” he said.

  “A whale, there’s a whale over there!”

  He was a good-looking man in his fifties. “We often see them,” he said, amused by my excitement.

  “It’s my first time here,” I said.

  “Where have you come from?”

  “Manhattan.”

  “That’s not very far.”

  “So near and yet so far,” I said.

  He smiled and we chatted for a while. His name was Alan Brown and he was the town’s mayor. I told him briefly about the personal difficulties I was going through and how I hoped for a new start.

  “Betsy,” he said, “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about what I’m going to say. I’m a married man and I’m not trying to hit on you. But would you come to dinner at our house tonight? There’s something I
’d like to discuss with you.”

  That’s how it came about that I had dinner that night with Mayor Brown and his wife Charlotte. They were a lovely couple. She must have been a little younger than he was. She was a vet and had opened a small local clinic that was doing well. They didn’t have children and I didn’t ask any questions about that.

  The mayor did not reveal the reason he had invited me until we got to the dessert course.

  “Betsy, my chief of police is likely to retire in a year’s time. His deputy is not the replacement I am really looking for. I have ambitions for this town and I’d like someone I can trust in that job. I have a feeling you’re the ideal candidate.”

  As I was taking a moment to think, he added:

  “I must warn you it’s a quiet town. It isn’t the city . . .”

  “All the better,” I said. “I need the quiet.”

  The next day, I accepted Mayor Brown’s offer. And that’s why, one day in September 2013, I moved to Orphea. In the hope of starting over. And above all of finding myself again.

  JESSE ROSENBERG

  Monday, July 28, 2014

  Two days after opening night

  Thirty-six hours after the opening night fiasco, with the Orphea theater festival long canceled, there was still an air of panic in the town. The national media had had a field day, accusing the police of failing to protect the public. Coming so soon after the murders of Stephanie Mailer and Cody Springfield, the shooting at the Grand Theater was one horror too many. A killer was on the loose in the Hamptons. Throughout the region hotels emptied and bookings were canceled as vacationers shelved their plans.