Page 80 of Girl, Remembered

Ripley waved off the compliment. ‘Don’t do that. Dark already did this once tonight. All I did was pull the trigger. It was you who got physical. There was no guarantee I could take down those other two guys alone. If the one with the knife got a lucky shot, it could have gone a lot differently.’

Vernon extended a hand. Ripley shook it – for the second time tonight. Maybe this guy wasn’t so bad after all.

‘I’ll let you get out of here,’ he said. ‘Take the rest of the week off.’

Ripley laughed and headed for the door. Before she got there, she said, ‘Rick, I’m a consultant. I don’t even work here full time.’

‘Nope, but maybe you’d like to.’

Ripley turned. Her arched eyebrow did the all of the talking. Vernon caught it.

‘I’m just saying,’ he said. ‘My word might not mean much after today, but it’ll mean something. And I spoke to Edis earlier tonight. He said the same thing.’

‘About your word not meaning much?’

‘No. About not being able to keep away from this place.’

There was a time Ripley had considered such an undertaking. Then she’d thought herself foolish for doing so.

And now, thirty-four years in and one very long night behind her, she wondered if foolish had just meant not yet.

‘Would you?’ Ripley asked.

‘I would.’

Ripley looked at him for a long moment, and let her face do what her voice usually refused to, which was show gratitude.

‘Thank you, Rick.’

Vernon gave her a thumbs up. Ripley left the office and headed home.

She suddenly hoped the best for him, hoped that the higher-ups went easy on him in the wake of all this. He’d done what he could, given the circumstances. He’d made an oversight, which, in fairness, was easy to make.

Or he’d done what Ripley’s mother would have called a man-look, which boiled down to: if it wasn’t right in front of them, they’d say they couldn’t find it.

A man look.

Maybe that was the real oversight. A hundred-odd years, and nobody had thought to try a woman’s touch.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Ella had found a side office at HQ. A day had passed. The events of last night were hazy and surreal, to the point that they didn’t feel like real events at all. The bandages around her hands were real enough, as was the throbbing at the bridge of her nose. Luca had gotten home at four in the morning, and he’d given Ella all of the details of his impromptu interview with Austin Creed.

Eight hours of sleep had been the vehicle she needed to help put all of the pieces together, to finally commit the incidents of the past nine months to paper. She never usually wrote her official reports so soon after cases were signed off, but given that the perpetrator was now on a slab in a morgue, she could safely say that the Doyle case was as closed as cases could be.

She opened up her laptop. Before she committed the details to legal language, she needed to first get the story straight, equally for her own curiosity.

It had begun in in 1997 in Moss Bluff, Louisiana, when Lindsey and Tracy Doyle – then Blanchard – were twelve years old. They’d endured a traumatic upbringing with a violent father and passive mother. Their father physically, sexually and emotionally abused them, and had pulled them both out of school at eleven years old, most likely to alleviate the risk of anyone finding out that the girls were being mistreated.

Jerry Blanchard, father, supported himself by working odd jobs. Ella knew this because Creed had said Jerry used to do manual labor on Apple Watch, which was the Creed family farm. Ella deduced that it was here that Creed first met the Doyle sisters, likely when Jerry brought his daughters to help him work, and where he likely learned that Jerry was abusing them.

Then, ever the hero, Austin Creed had murdered Jerry Blanchard and, by his own testimony, fed him to his so-called favorite alligator.

Creed’s alligator, according to a grainy tattoo on his arm, was named Doyle.

He’d done the same thing to his own father – something Ella had never known – so Creed had officially become a serial killer at aged sixteen.

The day after Jerry Blanchard disappeared, an anonymous call had been placed to the police informing them that two young girls were being mistreated. The officer who’d responded to that call had been a man named Terrance Dever, who was then a spritely 26-year-old. Terrance Dever had witnessed the atrocities in the house first-hand, and so pulled Lindsey and Tracy out of there and arrested Caroline Blanchard, the mother.