As Good As Dead

“She couldn’t talk about it, not to a professional, not to anyone. Because it was impossible, incompatible. It had torn her in two and there was no way to stitch those parts back together. It was untenable. Beyond sense. No one could understand, except…maybe him.”

Pip is contemplating her own murderous urges in contrast to her desire to uphold truth and justice. She’s referring to Charlie Green in this quote. His advice in book two stayed with her when he suggested that justice often can’t be found in the courts. Right and wrong isn’t a matter of law but of feeling. This flies in the face of everything Pip has been taught to believe, yet she acknowledges the truth of Charlie’s observation.

“Max Hastings was her cornerstone, the upturned mirror by which she defined everything, including herself. But it was meaningless, twisted, because Max had won; he would never see the inside of a prison cell. The black-and-white smudged back out to gray.”

In the first book of the series, Pip approached justice as a black-and-white concept. However, the facts she uncovered about Andie Bell and many others in the community made her doubt her moral compass. Nobody was completely good or completely bad. Pip finds herself in the uncomfortable gray area between right and wrong. Her discomfort only intensifies when Max is acquitted.

“‘This is the kind of thing that happens when you make yourself a public figure.’ ‘Make myself a public figure?’ Pip stood a step back, to keep the fire away from Hawkins. ‘I didn’t make myself a public figure, Hawkins, that happened because I had to do your job for you. You would’ve been happy to let Sal Singh carry the guilt for killing Andie Bell forever.’”

Pip has just told Hawkins about her stalker. As usual, he implies that she’s crazy and blames Pip for attracting negative attention through her podcast. This quote speaks directly to the theme of The Struggle to Be Heard. Hawkins is doing his best to silence Pip by devaluing her testimony. However, she stoutly reminds him of the risks of ignoring her.

“Charlie Green taught me one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned. He told me that sometimes justice must be found outside of the law [...] But, actually, I think he didn’t go far enough. Maybe justice can only ever be found outside of the law, outside of police stations like this, outside of people like you who say you understand but you never do.”

In previous sections of the book, Pip alludes to Charlie during her internal monologues, but here she overtly tells Hawkins why a murderer is more righteous than a member of the police force. Pip and Charlie are both devastated by the broken system of law and order that didn’t give either one justice. In this quote, Pip suggests that she would be inclined to act just as Charlie did given the unresponsiveness that Hawkins is displaying.

“There was no running away from this; she’d asked for it. She needed it. This was how she would make herself fine again. And the scarier it got, the more perfect the fit. Out of the gray area, into something she could comprehend, something she could live with. Black and white. Good and bad.”

In this early section of the book, Pip is still trying to find a case for her third-season podcast. Because all her previous investigations left her stranded in a morally gray area, she wants a culprit for whom she will never feel sympathy. Her anonymous stalker seems to fit the bill. Pip frequently stresses that solving a black-and-white case will heal her own moral ambiguity.

“So subtle. So clever. The police think I’m crazy and my mom thinks it’s nothing—just a cat and some dirty tires. Cutting me off, isolating me from help. Especially because everyone already thinks I’m fucked up. Very clever.”

Pip contemplates the tactics that her stalker is using against her. The dead pigeons and chalk drawings can easily be explained as something other than sinister. However, Pip’s attempts to articulate her anxiety are dismissed by her parents and the police. In some sense, these ploys by the stalker are attempts to silence Pip. The isolation she mentions results from her voice being muted by the authorities in her life.

“‘So, all of these details tying Billy to the murders, they’re related to his job,’ Pip said. ‘What’s the name of the company he worked for?’ Too late. Just asking it meant it was already too late for her. That, on some level, she must think it possible, that she might not be speaking to the mother of the DT Killer at all.”

Pip is conducting a routine interview with the mother of Billy Karras. Her initial intention was simply to ferret out details about her own copycat stalker. In the process, she discovers facts that suggest Billy’s innocence. Pip dreads such a realization because she is being cast back into a morally gray area. Now, she feels sympathy for a wrongly convicted felon.

“Pip had asked for this, wished for it, begged for it. One last case, the right one, to fix all of the cracks inside herself. [...] There was no gray area here, none at all, not even a trace. The DT Killer was the closest thing to evil the world could offer her. There was no good in him at all.”

Pip now realizes that the real DT Killer is still at large and is stalking her. He becomes her Holy Grail of true evil. Unlike all her previous culprits, Pip is absolutely convinced that this man has no redeeming qualities that might arouse her sympathy. She can finally pursue justice with a vengeance.

“Pip had asked for a way out, one last case, and something had answered her. Now it was even more perfect, even more fitting. Because DT was the origin. The end and the beginning. The monster in the dark, the creator, the source. Everything that had happened traced right back to him. All of it.”

This quote can only be understood within the context of everything that has gone before. Jason Bell is interwoven into the motives and actions of all the other major players in Pip’s previous podcasts. She has already stated that she never felt a sense of closure, even after apprehending the culprits from the first two podcast seasons. Aside from the deplorable performance of the justice system, Pip’s lack of closure is also because she never got to the real root of the problem until now.

“Pip tried to scream again, pushing the word ‘help’ against the duct tape, but it pushed it right back. A hopeless cry in the dark. But there was still a spark of herself inside of all that terror, and she was the only one here who could help.”

Pip has been bound and gagged. Her cries for help are silenced by duct tape, but she has already been silenced by the police and her parents. In this urgent situation, Pip comes to the same conclusion as she had previously reached in the face of indifference from the authorities. She is the only person who can help herself.

“She struggled up into a sitting position, watching as he stood over her. The breath in and out of her nose too loud and too fast, the sound reshaping in her mind into DT, DT, DT. And here he was. Strange, really, that he looked just like a man. He’d been so much bigger in her nightmares.”

Part of the stalker’s power in the earlier segments of the book is his anonymity. Terror tactics work best when the perpetrator is nameless and faceless. Now, Pip is seeing Jason’s face for the first time in his role as a serial killer. Bringing the bogeyman out into the daylight reduces his power to frighten. It diminishes him.

“And here you are, trying to interfere again with your last words, telling me about Andie. It doesn’t hurt me, you know. You can’t hurt me. It only proves I was right. About her. Becca too. All of you. Something badly wrong with all of you. Dangerous.”

Part of the DT Killer’s ritual involves allowing his victims one last chance to talk before he strangles them. Strangulation is the perfect means to choke the voice out of his victims. Their permanent silence ensures that they must listen to him. Pip uses the opportunity to tell Jason all the ways that his actions led to Andie’s death and Becca’s imprisonment. As with most sociopaths, Jason takes no responsibility for his own actions. The problem is always someone else.

“So, what was supposed to happen now? There hadn’t been a plan. Nothing beyond breaking the circle, beyond surviving, and killing him was how she survived. So, now that it was done, how did she keep on surviving?”

Pip’s pursuit of truth and justice has been single-minded since the days of her first podcast. The unsatisfying conclusions to her first two investigations have left that need unfulfilled. However, killing Jason has broken the circle permanently. Pip has finally fulfilled her deepest desire to see justice done. As with all completed goals, she’s left to ponder what her life's purpose will be afterward. She has reached the nebulous stage of redefinition and reinvention.

“‘The DT Killer is already in prison,’ Pip repeated, watching his eyes, waiting for him to understand. ‘Jason Bell was a respectable man. A managing director of a midsize company, and no one has a bad word to say about him. Acquaintances—friends, even—with Detective Richard Hawkins.’”

Ravi has just tried to convince Pip to go to the police and tell them what happened. Her response is based on hard-won wisdom about whose words matter. Jason is an upstanding member of the community. Pip is an eccentric teenager who insists on being an amateur sleuth. She has no credibility. Part of the reason for Jason’s success as a serial killer is that nobody would believe him capable of it.

“‘It doesn’t matter what the truth is,’ Pip said. ‘What matters is a narrative they will find acceptable. Believable. And they won’t believe my narrative. What evidence do I have other than my word? Jason got away with this for years.’”

This quote echoes the preceding one in emphasizing that credibility is tied to social status and is completely superficial. Hawkins and the police, in general, are only prepared to view facts that fit their assumptions. Truth has nothing to do with expectations. Pip’s past experience has taught her how to manipulate appearances to suit her agenda just as well as Jason had done.

“And Pip didn’t say but she couldn’t help thinking of Elliot Ward, who’d made a choice exactly like this, making Sal a killer to save himself and his daughters. And there Pip was too, in that messy, confusing gray area, dragging Ravi in with her. The end and the beginning.”

Pip has already equated Jason with the beginning of the cycle of crime in Fairview. He is the evil originator. In some sense, Elliot Ward was as much a victim as Andie was. By exonerating Elliot of complete blame, Pip also excuses her actions in covering up a crime. Even though she expected that killing Jason would bring a black-and-white conclusion, his death leaves her stranded in shades of gray.

“Would she ever belong in a scene like this again, after what she did? Normal was all she’d wanted, what all of this was for, but was it now out of reach forever? It definitely would be if she went down for Jason’s murder.”

Pip is seeing her family in a whole different light now that she may lose her chance of remaining with them. At various points in the book, she pines for a normal life and normal activities. However, her involvement in true crime seems to continuously place normal farther out of her reach. She must first break all the rules one last time so that she can find her way back into ordinary society.

“Three people she’d been with through the fire and back. And she realized, then, that those same people, the ones who would look for you when you disappeared, they were the same people you could turn to if you needed to get away with murder.”

Pip has just asked Connor, Jamie, and Nat for help. She hasn’t told them any of the details of Jason’s murder. She merely asks Nat to create a diversion at Max’s house and for the others to place his cell phone near Green Scene. To their credit, her friends don’t ask why she needs them to do these things. They are her friends, and that is reason enough.

“And Pip knew, as her eyes trailed away from him, that this wasn’t just about her own survival. She knew herself well enough by now. Had reckoned with that dark place in her mind long enough. This was also revenge. This town wasn’t big enough for the both of them. This world wasn’t.”

Pip is contemplating Max as he remains in a drugged sleep on the couch. She is honest enough to admit her motives for framing him. Knowing that appearances can be deceiving, nobody will ever convict Max of rape because he doesn’t look like a serial rapist. Pip is about to create a set of equally false appearances that will leave the police with no choice but to arrest him. Justice and revenge look very much the same in Pip’s world.

“The fire was to bring the police here, the blood was to send them out to Jason. That’s how this night would finally end, in fire and blood, and a sweep of the trees to find what Pip had left for them.”

Pip conjures an interesting image of fire and blood to describe the culmination of her investigation and its aftermath. She is describing a war zone, which is an apt comparison. For two years, Pip has waged a private war for truth and justice, but the justice system doesn’t seem to be interested in the truth. Her conflagration is an announcement that on this one night, truth will be served, even if she must falsify the entire scene.

“Her eyes snapping to Max’s face as he took a particularly heavy, shaking breath, sounding almost like a sigh. ‘Yeah,’ Pip whispered, looking down at him. Max Hastings. Her cornerstone. The upturned mirror by which she defined herself, everything he was and everything she wasn’t. ‘It sucks when someone puts something in your drink and then ruins your life, huh?’”

This quote echoes a statement that Pip makes in the early chapters of the book, describing Max as her cornerstone. He is everything she never wants to be. In the earlier quote, Pip voices her despair that he will ever face justice for his crimes. In this quote, she is well aware that Max won’t escape. Drugging him is the most appropriate form of revenge. It constitutes payback for all his rape victims who never got justice in the courts because Max didn’t look like a criminal.

“Down that same corridor, from the bad, bad place to the worse, worse place. Treading in her own out-of-time footsteps again. But this one, this Pip, she was the one in control, not that scared girl who’d just seen death for the first time. And she might be following Hawkins now, into Interview Room 3, but really he was following her.”

Pip makes this statement as she follows Hawkins into an interrogation room. She is acutely aware of how much she has changed since her first season podcast. The description of the corridor is meant to convey the intimidation that a police station represents. As always, Hawkins perceives himself as the authority in this scenario. Pip’s first encounter with him would have sustained that impression. However, she is older, wiser, and more cynical now. She knows what he wants to see, and she has given it to him. She is controlling the narrative now.

“There was another unsaid thing hovering between Pip and Nat. And that was a dead Jason Bell. Nat could never ask and Pip could never tell, but Nat must know, the look in her eyes told Pip that. And yet she didn’t look away, she didn’t, she held Pip’s eyes and Pip held hers and though it could never be said, it was understood.”

In a novel concerned with liberating suppressed voices, this quote is interesting because it focuses on silence and eye contact. Pip can never tell her friends that she killed Jason, but they all know. Despite her recognition that he was evil and the only way to ensure justice was to take the law into her own hands, Pip still feels guilty. She projects that guilt onto Nat. However, her friend also recognizes the necessity of killing Jason and doesn’t judge Pip for “breaking the law.”