The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer 2 (Pages 55 - 117)

 SPOILERS!!!

  

Jesse's boss, Major McKenna, is not happy when he starts to rake up the past, but Jesse wants to know if Stephanie was right. The local police lead by Montaigne, who we discover is a horrible person and worse colleague to Betsy, maintains that she is only away. Even when her apartment burns down and the fire brigate conclude it is arson, they still see no reason for an investigation.

What changes things is when Stephanie's car is found in a car park near a beach. Her trail is found on a trail towards a wood, and then nothing. It is believed that she may have taken a lift from someone who called her previously.

Jesse tells Derek, his partner back then, that he is going to investigate and won't retire until he finds out the truth. Derek reacts angrily, and from the argument we understand that it is because of the investigation in 1994 Derek ended up in desk work. And it seems that something happened to Natasha, Jesse's girlfriend back then. In the end Derek agrees to help, and from then on Derek, Jesse and Betsy work together.

They learn that Stephanie and one of the local officers Sean O'Donnell dated for a while, and the man tells them that soon he realised that Stephanie was more interested in his help getting her the files of the murder than in him, so he stopped seeing her. When Betsy goes to the records room, there is nothing in the box for the case but a note making reference to a play 'Darkness Night'. This name is also found in a note found in Stephanie's car, and in her flight ticket to Los Angeles.

Thanks to Derek they discover that Stephanie had a storage room, and that is where they find all her documents of the investigation and her computer. One of the notes mentions Kirk Hayward, the former chief of police, and they discover that he disappeared shortly after the 1994 murders. They go to see a former police officer, and he tells them that Hayward was a good chief, but then he changed. He wrote plays, but after the success of one play he got disappointed, and things went from bad to worse, and he lost it. He was forced to resign as a chief, and the interesting thing is that Kirk investigated the murders all on his own, and he says that if there are any files of the case, they are in a room in the basement where all his papers were taken.

The last chapter I have read we are told that someone finds a shape floating in the river, and it seems it is a body. Maybe it is Stephanie. 

There are some new leads that Derek and Jesse didn't see back then. In the storage unit they find the computer and they uncover a book that Stephanie was writing. In the book she tells about someone commissioning writing about the murders. This unknown person told her that one of the clues to charge Tennenbaum was his van, which was spotted in the area, and the person mentions that he was not driving the van.