Opening
In these chapters, Pippa "Pip" Fitz-Amobi wakes bound in a car trunk and faces the unthinkable truth: the DT Killer is someone she knows. Survival gives way to retaliation as she escapes, returns, and kills her captor—then pulls Ravi Singh into a plan to outwit the justice system that has failed them both.
What Happens
Chapter 26: Dead Girl Walking
Pip regains consciousness in the trunk, wrists, ankles, and mouth sealed with duct tape. Terror swells, but she steadies herself by recalling a true-crime rule: once a victim is taken to a secondary location, survival odds plummet. Accepting this, she focuses not on escape but legacy—she scrapes her scalp and skin against the interior, smearing hair, skin cells, and blood, and presses her fingertips to the plastic paneling to seed the car with evidence.
Her fear shifts to grief as she imagines her family, Cara Ward, and Ravi searching for her. In her head, Ravi urges her to fight. She decides to force a crash by kicking through the back seat—then the car stops. The trunk lid lifts. Sun blinds her until her captor’s silhouette sharpens into a face she knows: Jason Bell, father of Andie Bell.
Chapter 27: Green Scene Ltd.
Jason drags Pip into the chemical-stale storeroom at his remote landscaping company, Green Scene Ltd.—the same room where others died. He taunts her, revealing that the security alarm she once investigated was triggered by Tara Yates’s brief escape before he recaptured her. He frames his murders as necessary corrections, sneering that his victims—including Andie—were “too loud” and didn’t “listen,” a chilling embodiment of The Nature of Good and Evil.
Pip strikes back with the truth: Andie knew what he was and planned to expose him. He flinches, then twists her words into validation—proof, he claims, that Andie and other “dangerous” women needed to be controlled. He binds Pip’s wrists to a metal shelving unit and, before gagging her, gives her one last chance to speak. She uses it to try to cut him where it hurts—his daughters—but he tightens the tape, unmoved.
Chapter 28: The Death Mask
Jason unveils a final cruelty. He followed his other daughter, Becca, into the woods after she got a dog without his permission—then took the friendly golden retriever to the river and drowned it. “I drowned your dog,” he tells Pip, smirking. The revelation that he killed Barney detonates Pip’s grief into blistering rage.
He answers her fury with ritual. He wraps duct tape around her head, layer by layer—a “death mask” that seals her mouth, chin, and ears, leaving only her nostrils open. The last strip blindfolds her. In darkness, voiceless and faceless, she sits bound to the shelving in a room that doubles as grave.
Chapter 29: Break the Circle
Alone, Pip hyperventilates, terrified she will suffocate. In her mind, Ravi steadies her. She inches her taped wrists down the pole, finds a bolt, and painstakingly loosens it—only to drop the screw into the dark. Despair teeters into insight: the loosened shelf wobbles. She shoves with everything she has, tipping the unit against the wall so she can slip her bound hands down and free them.
She tears off the death mask, rifles a toolbox, and grabs a hammer. She smashes a window and stumbles into the trees—just as Jason’s car returns. A grim calculation forms: the police, especially Detective Richard Hawkins, will read her as an unhinged teen obsessed with a closed case. In the world of Justice and the Flawed Legal System, her truth won’t matter. She decides to “break the circle.” When Jason steps into the storeroom doorway, she attacks from behind, striking again and again until he is dead.
Chapter 30: A New Plan
Staring at Jason’s body, Pip shifts from shock to strategy. She finds his burner phone in the car and calls Ravi’s landline. Calm but urgent, she tells him to leave his phone, avoid highways with cameras, and take back roads to Green Scene.
Ravi arrives, horrified. He assumes self-defense. Pip clarifies: she escaped, then chose to return and kill him. She sketches the narrative the police will adopt—a traumatized, obsessive girl who murdered a respectable man—and Ravi, remembering the system’s failures with his brother Sal and with Max Hastings, agrees they can’t go to the police. In a pact of survival and Love, Loyalty, and Sacrifice, he commits to helping. Pip outlines a forensics-based cover: manipulate time of death by altering body temperature, rigor mortis, and livor mortis. When Ravi asks who will take the blame, she gives the final piece—frame Max Hastings.
Character Development
Pip crosses her darkest threshold, transforming from investigator to perpetrator as she concludes the law will never save her. Ravi moves from guardian voice to co-conspirator, choosing Pip over institutions. Jason sheds every mask, revealing cruelty without conscience.
- Pip: Channels terror into method—plants DNA and fingerprints, engineers an escape, and then chooses preemptive violence. The choice marks her Loss of Innocence and cements a self built in response to Trauma and Its Aftermath.
- Ravi: Begins as an inner lifeline, arrives as a panicked protector, and becomes a tactical partner. His decision grows from love and hard-earned distrust of the system.
- Jason: Rationalizes murder as discipline, fixating on women who are “too loud.” His confession about Barney exposes intimate, vindictive cruelty beyond his serial pattern.
Themes & Symbols
These chapters center the collapse of institutional trust, with [Justice and the Flawed Legal System] driving Pip’s most consequential choice. Her imagined exchange with Hawkins condenses a history of disbelief into a single conclusion: truth without credibility is powerless. When she kills Jason, she appoints herself judge, jury, and executioner, accepting the moral cost as the price of survival.
Jason’s monologues embody [The Nature of Good and Evil]. He casts himself as order’s enforcer, recoding misogyny as morality. Against that, Pip’s fury and later calculation blur heroism and monstrosity, forcing the reader to ask whether a just outcome can ever justify unjust means. Their collision also reframes [Love, Loyalty, and Sacrifice]: Ravi’s allegiance isn’t blind romance but a reasoned stand against a system that failed Sal, Pip, and their town.
Symbols sharpen that shift. The “death mask” is a ritualized silencing, stripping Pip’s identity until she rips it off to reclaim voice and agency. The hammer replaces her recorder and research—an instrument of raw survival, the tool she uses to “break the circle” when logic and evidence no longer protect her.
Key Quotes
“They won’t believe me,” Pip told herself, in her own voice now. “They never believe us.” This line distills the series’ legal disillusionment. Pip measures not truth but plausibility in the eyes of biased authorities, and her decision to kill Jason grows from that grim calculus.
“I drowned your dog.” Jason’s confession is intimate terrorism, designed to wound beyond death. It reveals a cruelty that’s not systematic but personal, proving his violence is about domination, not compulsion.
“Too loud. Didn’t listen.” His refrain exposes the gendered logic of his murders. He defines female autonomy as threat, converting control into creed and recasting evil as discipline.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This sequence is the trilogy’s fulcrum. The DT Killer is unmasked and eliminated, but the story pivots from the hunt for a murderer to the aftermath of a murder committed by the protagonist. Pip’s choice finalizes her arc from “good girl” investigator to outlaw strategist and launches a new, morally fraught plot: can she and Ravi outmaneuver the system and live with their choice? The result reframes the series’ core question—not just who did it, but what justice requires when the institutions built to enforce it refuse to see the truth.