Page 81 of Girl, Remembered

Caroline was charged with neglect, and to avoid Caroline ever tracking her children down when she got out of prison, Lindsey and Tracy changed their surnames. They settled on the name Doyle. The person who accompanied them to Clerk of Court’s Office was Terrance Dever, who offered to be their legal guardians in order to give them permission to change their names. They were then placed into the care system.

Many years later, Austin Creed began his killing spree. Ella Dark, then-rookie agent, was the person who caught him. A year after his capture, Ella testified against Austin Creed at his trial, and it was her testimonial that secured him the death penalty.

At that trial, Ella’s personal cell phone and hairbrush had disappeared from her bag. She’d put it down as an accident.

Two months after the trial, then-director William Edis had called Ella into HQ and locked her in an upstairs, because two people Ella knew – her landlord, Julianne Cooper and her old roommate, Jenna Bradbury – had been stabbed to death. Their lips had been sewn shut with strands of Ella’s hair, and these two facts had made Ella a suspect in their deaths. Ella had an alibi for the nights they were killed and was subsequently released. The day she was released, a third body – that of Ben Carter, Ella’s ex-boyfriend – was found in California.

Ella then pieced together that these strands were coming from her hairbrush, which she’d lost in Louisiana. And that the perpetrator had discovered the names and locations of these victims through details in Ella’s cell phone. Believing that this had something to do with Austin Creed, Ella visited him in prison, where a female guard had stood monitoring their conversation.

Creed had denied everything – a fact which still didn’t sit well with her, but one she had no evidence to disprove.

The task force to catch this then-unknown killer was assembled, and Supervisory Special Agent Terrance Dever was assigned as the head. At Creed’s trial, Ella remembered sitting next to a fidgety woman who’d hugged her and said, ‘Thank you,’ when the verdict was read out. Terrance Dever had sourced all of the footage from the trial and Ella had found a shot of that same woman.

She’d been wearing a wig at the time, but the face matched the prison guard who’d been supervised hers and Creed’s meeting. One look into the prison employee records confirmed that this woman was Lindsey Doyle, 44.

Lindsey Doyle’s hero, Austin Creed, had been transferred to the prison where she worked. It was a perfect circumstance for her.

Ella had found the killer, but the killer vanished.

Searches of her home and workplace yielded nothing, and it became clear Lindsey Doyle was now a fugitive.

Two attempted attacks on Mia Ripley and Luca Hawkins followed, but both had failed. Luca had managed to subdue his attacker, but the perpetrator was not Lindsey Doyle. It was her twin sister, Tracy. Whilst in jail, Tracy had refused to speak to anyone. Austin Creed had later confirmed that the woman in custody was not Lindsey, who was, therefore, still on the loose.

Meanwhile, Ella had worked independent cases, and found that multiple perpetrators had links to the prison system. She hadn’t put two and two together, until her previous case, which had involved tracking down a perpetrator named Simon Varro. Upon breaching Varro’s residence, Ella had found Lindsey Doyle herself waiting for her. Varro had been a sewing instructor who had given classes in Angola, where Doyle had worked. This was likely where they met, and where Doyle leaned the stitching technique she used to sew her victims’ mouths shut.

Doyle had escaped – and so the events of two mornings ago had begun. Doyle had summoned three more of her followers to begin their killing sprees, likely as a way to distract Ella. She’d also instructed her captured disciples to commit suicide, but one had disobeyed the order. Doyle had also killed another of Ella’s old friends, a man named Darrell Saunders.

It had taken Terrance Dever to uncover who Doyle’s final planned victim was, and that was former director William Edis.

William Edis had recruited Ella as a field agent following a discreet meeting at the Milestone Bar in Annandale, Virginia. It had been a brand new initiative. Nobody had known about this.

So how did Lindsey Doyle know this?

The answer was frustratingly simple: Ella had told her.

During Austin Creed’s trial, Creed’s defense had called Ella’s credentials into question. It had been Ella’s first case as an agent, and so the defense had tried to diminish the integrity of her claims.

Therefore, Ella had had to describe everything, including William Edis’s new initiative, the dates and locations they’d met, how he’d made the offer to her.

Everyone in the audience had heard it.

And sitting in the audience was one Lindsey Doyle.

This had been the hidden meaning behind Doyle’s joke that she told on the phone.

How did Dever know it? Equally simple. He’d been the one to source the trial footage, and had watched it in full. Ella never had.

After being unable to find William Edis at any of his residences, blue paint from the Darrell Saunders scene had pointed Ella toward the Milestone Bar, the place where it all began. A place that was currently under renovation and made for the perfect place to hide. A place that overlooked a pond, which Doyle’s ex-disciples had said that her hiding place sported. Doyle had set the alarm off, which had summoned Edis there.

Ella had then breached the Milestone Bar and found Doyle holding William Edis hostage. She’d called Ripley en route there and left the call connected, and had given Ripley discreet instructions under the guise of conversing with Doyle. Ripley had arrived through the window and taken out the biggest threat, while Rick Vernon and Terrance Dever had broken down the front door.

William Edis had been the one to pull the trigger on Doyle.

Before she died, she never had chance to see Terrance Dever.

As for motivation?

Ella didn’t know.