Those Empty Eyes

Alex’s mentor, Garrett Lancaster, is by turns the novel’s hero and antihero. Like his partner Jacqueline, he was raped as a child by Jerry Lolland at Camp Montague, which deeply affected him. Until the Quinlan murders, his primary influence is an altruistic impulse toward revenge: He wants to punish men who, like Lolland, perpetrate sexual violence against minors. His plan to create a law firm that gives him the resources to pursue this goal while remaining undiscovered demonstrates his intelligence, will, and long-term planning capabilities.

Garret’s motives shift after the Quinlan murders. When Jacqueline tells him about murdering Raymond, Garrett reflects that “[t]hey had always been protectors of the innocent. Until tonight” (356). This is a turning point for Garrett; his motives shift from a desire for vengeance to guilt about Raymond and obligation toward Alex. This guilt drives his more heroic actions throughout the novel: His successful prosecution of her case, narrated from his perspective, feels victorious not only because he wins but also because he has begun the work of alleviating some of that guilt, though his progress in this is fairly ambiguous at the novel’s end. It’s unclear whether Alex has realized that Garrett, not Buck, was the “mentor” Jacqueline referenced in her final conversation with Alex. She neither confronts nor absolves Garrett; instead, he’s left with unresolved guilt.

The villain of Those Empty Eyes, Jacqueline Jordan, like Garrett, is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse at Camp Montague; this experience deeply shaped her motivations, committing her to a life of trying to protect minors from sexual violence by murdering known predators. Jacqueline, like Garrett, proves herself highly intelligent and driven: She supports her work as a serial killer through careful, long-term planning and maintains a veneer of legitimacy through Lancaster & Jordan. Her path begins to diverge from Garrett’s, however, on the night of the Quinlan murders: While Garrett is horrified that their vendetta has cost the life of an innocent, Jacqueline views Raymond as “collateral damage.”

Jacqueline explicates this mindset to Alex during their final encounter in the hotel room: “My heart still aches for that child. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But his death was for the greater good. And your death will be the same” (324). Jacqueline’s history of abuse fundamentally altered her views on the value of life to the point that she considers all actions, no matter how morally or legally corrupt, justifiable if they support the greater cause of killing child predators. This mindset is rooted in Jacqueline’s attitude toward her past. In comparing the way adults treated her as a child to the way Alex was treated, Jacqueline complains, “I only wish I had received a fraction of that concern from those who were supposed to be watching out for me when I was being abused as a child” (324). This reveals that Jacqueline retains a resentful sense of her childhood trauma, which keeps her from understanding that she is the adult who created the predicament that led to Alex’s troubled childhood. Although Jacqueline wants to believe she’s ending cycles of trauma, she’s unable to understand her role in actively creating them.