Livia Lone

50-THEN

Portland Police Bureau would have been a natural fit. Rick and Gavin were there, of course, and she liked the town enough. More important, Portland still felt like the closest connection she had to Nason, the actual place where she and her sister had been amputated from each other. But she also knew those feelings weren’t logical. Rick and Gavin and others like them had done all they could in Portland, and had found no trace of Nason. What could she do there that they hadn’t?

So she started thinking about Seattle. The best lead, she knew, was the imprisoned white supremacist, Weed Tyler, who had survived the police raid on the barge from Portland and whose gang, Hammerhead, was based in the area. Moreover, she had learned that the Seattle region, with its variety of ports, vast rural stretches, proximity to Asia, and location on the Canadian border, was a hotbed of trafficking, and particularly child trafficking. And the city was doing something about it, too-SPD had a newly formed Vice & High Risk Victims Unit, which investigated sex crimes involving children and all forms of child trafficking, with detectives cross-deputized with the FBI’s Innocence Lost Task Force and the Department of Homeland Security’s Investigations unit. That meant federal dollars, federal databases, and federal resources, but with a local focus. Livia couldn’t imagine a better combination.

So she applied for a position. There was a written test, a physical fitness test, and a battery of interviews. They all went well, and her interviewers made clear that if she passed the background check, the psychology tests, and the polygraph, she was a shoo-in.

She had a little trouble with the psychology test and the polygraph. She thought she was saying the right things, but apparently her hostility to rapists and child abusers leaked through her attempts at bland “serve and protect” professionalism. And they told her there was some evidence of deception regarding whether she had ever committed a serious crime. She was surprised about that, because she didn’t consider anything she had ever done to be criminal. Not really. But she stuck with her answers, and in the end, the powers that be must have decided that a few psychological blips and some indicia of deception weren’t much compared to a straight-A student with a degree in criminology who was a top judo competitor and a minority female on top of it. They offered her a position, and she immediately accepted.

That summer, she sold the Ninja, rented a truck, put her few possessions in back, drove to Seattle, rented a cheap walk-up in the International District, and entered the Basic Law Enforcement Academy. For the next six months, she studied the Constitution and the law of justified use of force, much of which she already knew from SJSU; various Washington State and Seattle ordinances; pursuit and precision driving; proper entry and clearing rooms; handcuffing suspects; use of firearms, the Taser, and pepper spray, and much more. As part of the training, everyone had to get pepper-sprayed and tased. Being tased was excruciating, but she didn’t mind. She knew it was important for recruits to know the effects of weapons, and to know they were tough enough to keep fighting even when they were hurt. But it made her uncomfortable when everyone laughed at the tased recruits’ contorted faces and howls of agony. She was stoical about her own pain. But it hurt her to see pain in others.

Unless, of course, they deserved it.

She missed the Ninja, and though the Pacific Northwest climate was nowhere near as good for riding as what she’d left in the Bay Area, she broke down and bought a new bike: a Ducati Streetfighter. And a battered, used Jeep Wrangler, for when the weather made the Streetfighter unsafe to ride.

She excelled in all her courses, and quickly developed a reputation as a star. Not everyone liked that. She knew there were rumors that her success was due to her looks, and maybe even sexual favors. None of it was true. Yes, she got a lot of attention from the male trainers, but she didn’t seek or even want any of it. There were some good-looking SPD cops-a detective named Mike Devine in particular, who was one of the lecturers and who had a cowboy vibe she liked-but she wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t going to let anyone she worked with get inside, literally or figuratively. It was too likely to cause trouble.

Although the irony was, refusing all advances, refusing even to flirt, caused trouble anyway. The cops who came on to her and got shot down told their buddies she was probably a dyke. Because of course, a woman who didn’t share a man’s inflated opinion of himself could only be a lesbian. Meanwhile, there really were lesbians on the force, but she kept them at arm’s length, too. Her sexuality, like her life, was a mystery, which of course only made the topic more alluring. In retrospect, she wondered if she would have been better off putting on a ring and pretending she had a husband before entering the academy. But the idea came to her too late to matter.

Her self-defense skills were another source of attention. There wasn’t an instructor at the academy she couldn’t crush on the mat. Everyone knew about the judo, of course, and reactions varied. Some of the guys had to test themselves against her, and were embarrassed by the results. Some were intimidated. A few, though, were respectful and appreciative, and had no problem asking her to share her knowledge. And a few of the women, too, rather than being jealous and treating her like a freak, asked if she would teach them. She was happy to, and made her first friends in the process.

A year after arriving in Seattle, she was a full-fledged patrol cop. Rick came to her graduation ceremony. Gavin couldn’t make it, but Rick brought a gift from both of them: a SIG Sauer P238 subcompact with black pearl grips-“petite, beautiful, and not to be fucked with, just like you,” Rick said. She was so overwhelmed at finally being a cop, and by the perfect gift, that she hugged him, and was surprised when she let him go to see he had teared up a little. He gave an embarrassed laugh and said, “You’ve just never been much of a hugger. But that was nice. Really nice. I’d even take another, if you don’t mind.”

She didn’t mind. She was never going to be as physically affectionate as most people, and she didn’t want to be. But she’d gotten used to off-the-mat contact. With someone like Rick, it didn’t cause the kinds of associations it once did. She was proud of that.

They went out for dinner to celebrate, but first, Livia had to make a phone call. She hadn’t forgotten Rick’s story about the little girl Lucy, and she wanted to make a call like that to Tanya, the cop who had been so kind to her when she had been rescued in Llewellyn.

“You probably don’t remember me,” Livia said. “I’m called Livia now, but when you met me, my name was Labee. I’m the girl who got trafficked to Llewellyn. I was so scared and alone, and you were so nice to me. And I wanted to let you know”-she felt the tears coming, and paused for a moment while she willed them back-“I just graduated. Seattle PD. I’m a cop now, like you. I’m going to help people, like you helped me. And I should have called you sooner, but I… I think I just wasn’t ready. And I’m sorry for that. And thank you.”

There was a long pause, and then a familiar voice: “Livia. You think I wouldn’t remember you? Even if I hadn’t heard about all your wrestling exploits over the years. You were the skinniest, scaredest-looking thing I’d ever seen. But you know what? I could tell how brave you were, too. And look at you now. I hope this won’t sound condescending, honey, because I didn’t have anything to do with it, but I am so proud of you.”

Livia tried again to will the tears back, but this time couldn’t. “Thanks, Tanya.”

“Thank you, Livia. You just made my day. More than my day, really. If you’re ever in Llewellyn or I’m ever in Seattle, we’ll get a drink, okay? We sister cops have to stick together.”

Livia told Tanya she definitely would, and they exchanged cell phone numbers. She didn’t add that it would have to be in Seattle. She was never going to set foot in Llewellyn again.

Following the academy, there was an eight-month probationary period-half student, half cop. Her evaluations continued to be outstanding. On free weekends, she would head out of town-Olympia, Vancouver, Port Angeles-and look for the kind of sex she liked, where the man got aggressive and she wound up in control. A few times, she found it. And once, in Pullman, she wound up with a genuine freak, like Crader in San Jose. She put him to sleep with hadaka jime-“naked choke”-which didn’t leave marks the way the cloth strangles did, and then smashed an ashtray into the back of his head to give the coroner a cause of death that didn’t look like something done by a martial arts expert.

Of course she was more careful now than she had been in San Jose. She’d assembled a backup bike from salvaged parts, for one thing, something totally untraceable. And she exploited her ever-deepening knowledge of forensics and crime scene investigations. She prepared much more methodically, too. Still, it was bad enough that SPD knew about the judo. If word got around about the kind of sex she liked, people could easily start asking questions. So she kept turning down all the cops who asked her out.

Twice a week, she taught a women’s self-defense class at a Seattle Krav Maga school, using the same approach she had at Kawamoto-sensei’s dojo in Portland. And, just as had been the case in Portland, word got around, and her classes grew.

Sometimes after a workout, she found herself thinking of Sean. She wondered what he might be doing. She could have found out-you didn’t need to be a cop to use Facebook or the like-but she never did. Her memories of him, and of Malcolm, were too tied up with Llewellyn. With Mr. Lone. With all that. But at the same time… it would have been good to see him.

At the end of her mandatory minimum of three years as a patrol cop, she did a year with the gang unit. And then she passed her detective’s test and started working sex crimes, at last getting to find and catch rapists, as she’d always wanted. She developed a reputation for being good with her victims-respectful, methodical, and above all empathetic. Her clearance rate was excellent, and though there were a handful of excessive force complaints from suspects she arrested, the complaints were all dismissed as unfounded.

And every now and then, when she couldn’t get a case to one of the prosecutors she trusted, and got stuck with one of the careerists Alice Vachss described so well in Sex Crimes, and a known predator got pled down and served too short a sentence because his victim was a prostitute or a drug user or otherwise not what the careerist coward thought would make a winning victim in front of the jury, Livia made sure justice was served another way.

Those extracurricular cases had been good preparation for Billy Barnett. And Barnett had brought her to Masnick, and Masnick to now, this very moment, squatting by the Ninja in the windy chill of a Highway 20 rest stop outside the tiny town of Twisp, waiting for Weed Tyler to emerge from a privy so she could make him tell her what for sixteen years her mind had been shrieking to know.

How to find Nason. Or at least… at least learn what had happened to her.