Page 40 of Girl, Remembered

‘Don’t know,’ Roadrunner said. He switched his laptop on. ‘After Jerry Blanchard disappeared, someone made an anonymous tip to the Louisiana State Police. They told them two girls were being raised in squalor. Cops checked it out, arrested Caroline, and a year later, Lindsey and Tracy Doyle were born. I don’t know about you, but anonymous tips ping my suspicion radar.’

‘Same,’ Ella said, ‘but this was rural Louisiana in the nineties. I’m surprised they even had phone service. Either way, they changed their name to escape their old life.’

‘Yeah. The girls went into emergency custody. Caroline was charged with neglect and endangerment. She apparently didn’t participate in the abuse, but didn’t stop it either.’

‘The typical docile wife.’

‘Yup. She died a few years later in jail.’

Ella thought about it all linearly. Lindsey Doyle – or Blanchard – grows up in an abusive household. Her father treats her and her sister like dirt while the mother sits around doing nothing about it. One day, the dad disappears, and the mother is left with two young girls who, by this point, surely despise her. The abuse, perhaps the thing that the parents relied on to keep the children obedient, is now gone.

The sisters were then presumably put into the foster system with new names.

This was how Lindsey Doyle was born. The damage during her formative years probably then shaped the rest of her life. The shame, fury and frustration at her parents would manifest as control, violence. She’d spend the rest of her life trying to regain the sense of control she didn’t have as a child.

But what did this have to do with Austin Creed? Or her?

‘This is all great, Roady, but why did you bring me all the way out of here for this?’

‘Because that’s not all.’ Roadrunner opened up a picture on his desk. It looked to Ella like a page from a court document. He zoomed in to a small section. ‘This is why I couldn’t tell you this at the office.’

Ella leaned in. A field near the bottom read Responding Officer.

She had to read the name over and over again. It wasn’t a common name, but it also wasn’t crazy to think that more than one person could share this name.

No.

Coincidences existed in this game, but a coincidence of this caliber would be a once-in-a-lifetime offense.

Because, if what Ella was reading was true, the person who’d pulled 12-year-old Lindsey Doyle out of her life of misery was Officer Terrance Dever.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Ella didn’t remember the walk back to HQ, but she did remember getting straight into her car and started driving. She knew her destination, but didn’t know where her destination was.

Roadrunner had kept things discreet just in case certain people were within earshot when he revealed the information. Still, someone else needed to know about this, so she dialled Ripley from her console. She picked up before the first ring had even ended.

‘Dark. I thought you were sleeping on the Hoover mattress tonight?’

‘I’m not sleeping anywhere. I’m going to Terrance Dever’s house.’

‘Dever? Why? Keep that clown away from us.’

Ella was somewhere on Pennsylvania Avenue. Traffic was clearing up now. She guessed which direction Dever would live and headed that way. She settled on east.

‘No. Listen. Roadrunner did some digging. Doyle was a neglected kid, and one day in 1996, a cop showed up to her house and saved her. Guess who that cop was.’

‘Who?’

‘Dever. Terrance Dever.’

Ripley’s confused expression emerged in Ella’s mind’s eye. She was surely pulling the same expression Ella had when she’d heard the same fact.

‘What? How is that possible?’

‘Dever was a cop for Louisiana State in the nineties, right? He must have been the responder to the scene. And according to a court file, he was the one who arrested their mother and thus Lindsey and Tracy ended up in care. And now he’s heading up the task force to catch the little girl he saved. What the hell is going on?’

A silent Ripley was a dangerous one, Ella thought, and that’s what she was dealing with down the other end of the line. She could hear faint sounds, but nothing that suggested Ripley was on the cusp of one of her famous outbursts.