Livia Lone

49-THEN

It was on the news the next night. Parker “Park” Crader, forty, of Campbell, California, was found dead in a motel room. Police believed a sex worker had lured him into the room, where a waiting accomplice ambushed and strangled him. Crader had a record: two charges of rape. Both times it had been a sex worker in a motel room, and both times he had pled down to misdemeanor assault. He’d been out of prison for less than a year. The working theory was that this was payback from a victim who was connected to, or could afford, some kind of muscle for hire. It didn’t seem to occur to the police that a woman could have strangled Crader by herself.

The police spokesman said they were following up leads, but Livia had a feeling he was talking about the women who had accused Crader of rape before, and presumably those women would have alibis, or otherwise be impossible to place in the motel room at the time of Crader’s death. Everyone knew SJPD was overworked-the city had a serious gang problem, among other things. She thought of Rick, of what he’d told her of his job, how he worked leads and prioritized cases. Unless something panned out right away, she couldn’t see a homicide detective spending a lot of time trying to solve the killing of someone like Crader. Her assessment of better-than-even chances of not getting caught went to more like ten-to-one.

She still felt nervous about it, especially late at night, alone in bed. But when a week passed and nothing happened, she started to feel more confident. By the end of the semester, she barely even thought about it anymore.

Except, sometimes, to fantasize about it.

The rest of college passed without incident. From time to time, the craving for a dangerous encounter became overwhelming, and she would get on the Ninja and find the right kind of bar. After that first time, she made sure always to travel outside San Jose so as not to leave an easily traceable pattern. Salinas. Bakersfield. Visalia. Stockton. If anyone ever thought to try to map any of the resulting deaths, San Jose would be at the periphery. The locus would look like Fresno. Not a particularly likely scenario, considering the obvious degenerates she was leaving in her wake. But she’d learned to be careful.

She knew on some level that her hobby, as she liked half humorously to think of it, was fucked up. Certainly no one would ever be able to understand it, and realizing this only enhanced her sense that she was different from other people, separate from them, like something human on the surface but alien underneath. But she didn’t care. She imagined a lifetime of psychotherapy, administered by a doctor who could have no notion of what it was like to be sold like a farm animal by your own parents. And victimized the way she had been afterward. And to be unable to protect your own sister from being victimized, too, despite bartering with the most desperate currency available to your thirteen-year-old self.

Yeah, maybe that.

Or maybe fuck that. Maybe she would just deal with it her own way. Keep her secrets buried down deep, the way she always had. And rid the world of a few monsters along the way. She didn’t have to explain herself to anyone. Justify herself to anyone. What she did was her business, and no one else needed to know anything about any of it.

She traveled to the Beijing Olympic games as an alternate. She didn’t compete, but to even travel with the team was a notable achievement. Everyone told her that London, four years hence, would be her event.

She knew they could be right. She was only twenty, and had probably a decade, maybe more, before she was past her physical peak. That was a lot of time to continue to become a more skilled competitor. She knew an Olympic medal was possible. Maybe even gold.

But she had never stopped wanting to be a cop. She still whispered her vows every night, and felt them deeply. They weren’t just words, an empty mantra, a tradition bleached of meaning. Nason might need her. It was one thing to study criminology and get a college degree. That was all calculated to make her a better cop, and she believed it had been worth it. But four more years of full-time judo, just so she could maybe earn a medal? How would she ever explain that to Nason, or live with it herself?

And besides. As much satisfaction as she took in knowing that the men she had killed, starting with Mr. Lone, would never hurt anyone again, it wasn’t enough. She didn’t lie to herself: she craved the sexual rush killing a would-be rapist provided. But that wasn’t the only point. Rick had been right: she was a sheepdog. She needed to protect people, people like Nason, and she felt damaged, diminished, incomplete when she wasn’t doing so. There were predators in the world, lurking, waiting, wanting to hurt someone, ruin someone, and they would do it if they could. She hated them. She needed to fight them. Not just some of the time. All of the time.

And she had waited long enough.