Those Empty Eyes

Jacqueline visits the prison where Reece Rankin is being held. She questions him and learns that he committed rape and murder because two men paid him to do so. In addition, he left a backpack by the body because the men told him it would confuse the police. Jacqueline shows Rankin photos of Duncan and Larry Chadwick, and he confirms that they were the men who paid him.

Annette picks up Lane from the airport. They plan to meet Alex at Annette’s that night.

That night, Lane reveals to Alex that when he ran the information she provided through his algorithm, it revealed the connection between her family, Roland Glazer, and Byron Zell: They all had a connection to Lancaster & Jordan. Unbeknownst to Alex, her parents had hired Lancaster & Jordan to defend them after Glazer’s exposure as a sexual predator. They had been managing his finances for many years. The algorithm also discovered other homicides of people with histories of sexual abuse against minors, and these people all had connections to Lancaster & Jordan as well. All of them were found at the crime scene with photos scattered around their bodies. Lane’s research pinpoints the killer as someone in their mid-forties who was probably sexually abused as a child. In addition, he reveals that when the algorithm searched for similar deaths from before 2013, it uncovered one: at a summer camp many years ago.

At Camp Montague, the victims of Lolland’s abuse attach a gas line to his cabin and asphyxiate him. Once he’s dead, the girl enters his cabin through a window, finds photos that he took of his victims, and scatters them around his body.

Lane reveals that Lolland’s case was ruled death by suicide, but he now suspects that someone at the summer camp killed Lolland—someone who went on to commit this string of murders of child sex predators. When Alex asks for the names of the children at the camp, Lane directs her to the man who investigated Lolland’s death.

Alex heads to the firm, where, with the help of an old friend, she hacks into the client database. She goes through all the cases Lane identified and finds that Jacqueline was the attorney assigned to each. As Alex begins to investigate Camp Montague via the web, Jacqueline appears in the doorway.

Jacqueline arrives at the firm late to finish up some work and finds Alex there. Alex explains that she was finishing up work on the Matthew Claymore case and quickly leaves. Jacqueline doubts Alex’s explanation and goes through the tabs on the computer Alex was just using. She finds all of the cases Alex had pulled up, along with articles about Lolland, and realizes that “her visit to the Quinlan home […] had finally caught up with her” (307).

Alex heads to Wytheville, VA, where she meets Martin Crew, the man who investigated Lolland’s death. Crew reveals that even though it was officially death by suicide, he never believed it. He has evidence that suggests a killer and thinks he knows who it is.

Jacqueline, realizing what Alex has discovered, follows her to Wytheville. Although she initially plans to break into the hotel room where Alex is staying, the sound of a car being unlocked derails her plan. Seeing Alex leaving the parking lot, Jacqueline follows her to a nearby bar.

Crew reveals that the outside of the window, through which the gas line that killed Lolland was slipped, had fingerprints. Because he took prints of everyone at Camp Montague that summer, Crew knew that these prints belonged to Jacqueline Jordan. Because Lolland had assaulted many children at the camp, however, Crew couldn’t use the prints as evidence because Jacqueline was already inside Lolland’s cabin when he assaulted her.

Alex returns to her hotel room to sleep. She realizes that she might be able to match the lone fingerprint from the site of her family’s murders to Jacqueline’s because Jacqueline would have given her print when she took the bar.

Alex wakes to find Jacqueline in her hotel room, injecting her with a chemical that is paralyzing her.

Jacqueline explains that the drug is slowly paralyzing Alex but won’t kill her because it wasn’t administered directly into her heart. She then explains that she killed Alex’s parents because they aided and abetted Glazer and that her brother was “collateral damage.”

Jacqueline admits that she thought about killing Alex at her apartment last night but that Alex’s “mentor” talked her out of it. She adds that she knew she’d eventually have to kill Alex, however, because Alex would never stop searching for the truth. Just as Jacqueline fills another syringe with the paralytic agent, the FBI burst into the room.

Annette, pointing a gun, comes into the room, announcing herself as FBI. Jacqueline refuses to move away from Alex and, just as she’s about to plunge the syringe into Alex’s heart, Annette shoots.

Motivated by memories of Raymond, Alex gets out of bed and moves toward the gun that got away from Annette in the scuffle. Alex hears Jacqueline plunge the syringe into Annette. When Jacqueline gets up and notices that Alex isn’t where she should be, Alex shoots.

Both Alex and Annette recover from the paralytic. Alex retrieves Jacqueline’s fingerprint from the bar and confirms Jacqueline killed her parents. She decides not to go public with this information, since it would destroy Garrett’s career.

Alex returns to her family home, where she meets a realtor who confirms that the house will easily sell. Movers come and take away the grandfather clock. Tracy Carr arrives at the house, and Alex says that she wants to make Tracy an offer.

Alex moves back to London, where she starts working as a private investigator at Leo’s firm. She sees that Tracy Carr has broken the story about Laura McAllister’s report—a story that Alex gave her in exchange for Tracy dropping all investigation into Alex’s personal life.

The unnamed boy from Camp Montague, now a grown man, visits the Chadwick’s private estate. Since the legal system hasn’t brought the Chadwicks to justice, the man waits outside their house intending to enact justice of his own.

On the night of the Quinlan murders, the boy from Camp Montague waits in the car outside the Quinlan home as Jacqueline commits the murders. When Jacqueline emerges, she confesses how the killings went awry and Raymond was murdered. The man returns home, disturbed. Later, his wife, Donna, calls him, and Garrett Lancaster heads to the police station to meet Alex Quinlan.