Livia Lone

52-NOW

She tossed the revolver and the meth from a bridge into the Methow River just south of Winthrop. She’d been wearing her riding gloves the entire time and hadn’t touched anything. And any gunshot residue on the helmet or the leathers wouldn’t survive the long ride back to Seattle. Not that a little GSR on a cop’s clothes was so difficult to explain regardless. Anyway, her connection with Tyler was ancient history. She doubted even Rick would suspect she had anything to do with it. And Masnick would take their conversation to his grave-because he knew he’d be in that grave a lot faster if he didn’t. No, when the shooting victim was someone like Weed Tyler, the working theory was typically Drug Deal Gone Bad. Which, in its way, in this case wasn’t so far from the truth.

She didn’t want to go straight back to headquarters. Seeing Tyler, killing him, recounting the past, putting together some of the pieces… she had so much to think about. She needed air. She needed to move. To let her emotions wash through her so her mind could be clear.

Back at the loft, she changed out of the leathers, pulled on jeans and a fleece, and drove the Jeep to Alki Beach, where she walked north along the water. The air smelled clean, and the only sounds were the wind, the crunch of her boots on the gravel path, the waves lapping against the shore.

She stopped at the northern point and looked out at the Space Needle and the lights of downtown across Elliott Bay. The wind whipped her hair around, and she tied it back in a ponytail, then zipped up the fleece and just stood there, watching the silent passage of the Bainbridge Island ferry, the slow-moving lines of distant traffic, feeling cocooned by the wind. The city looked so peaceful from here, so clean. You’d never know the vile sewer underneath.

She had saved a baby girl raped so many times by her father the child’s rectum was prolapsed. Rescued an elderly woman kept in a dungeon, chained in her own filth, her legs infested with maggots, imprisoned by the son who was cashing her Social Security checks. And caught the Montlake rapist, of course. The system had worked for that one. But every time she thought about the way he had used his victims’ love for each other to control and further torment them, she couldn’t help wishing the system had failed, so that she could have gotten justice for those women another way.

She had taken psych courses at SJSU, and knew that protecting others, avenging them, was sublimation. If she’d been raised Catholic, she might have understood the behavior as atonement instead. Either way, she couldn’t save Nason, and would spend her life trying to make up for that failure by saving others in Nason’s place.

She really did help people, she knew that, and when it happened, it was just… magic. And when helping wasn’t possible… when a repeat rapist slipped through the system… sublimation took the form of her hobby. And it wasn’t just sublimation. She also understood that her high-risk activities, even her decision to become a cop, were ways of proving to herself over and over that she wasn’t a victim anymore, and never would be again.

It was interesting how much insight you could have into your own pathologies, and how little impact the insight would have on your underlying needs.

Or on your behavior.

At times, though, none of it mattered. At times, all the sublimation and atonement in the world weren’t enough. And the only thing that might help would be to know what had happened to Nason. Just to know. Just to know. Nothing more than that. Just to know.

Facing Tyler, she realized, the culmination of a decade and a half of anxiety and desperate hope, had overwhelmed her defenses, and made all the horror and loss immediate again. And now, looking out at the city, she felt so… empty. Alone. So fucking bereft.

She shivered against the wind and watched the lights and let her grief have its way. After a while, she was able to think clearly again.

Four kids. Not three. And two of them sisters.

Why such a specific cargo? She thought back to her conversation with AUSA Velez, and how he had explained the way trafficking worked-wholesale down to retail. So had Skull Face sent them all off to market just hoping buyers would turn up?

No, that didn’t make sense. Skull Face was using a gang with no experience moving people, only with drugs. Why would he do that, unless he had a designated buyer somewhere in the vicinity? A buyer who wanted, who had ordered, something specific, forcing Skull Face to turn to Weed Tyler and his gang despite their lack of relevant experience?

Or maybe… it was because of their lack of experience?

She made a mental note to log in to the FBI’s crime database, to see if she could cross-reference the name Kana. It was a long shot, but worth a try.

So someone had, what, bought them all? Ordered them, the way you would order a pizza?

She imagined it. Get me a Guatemalan housemaid. Get me a Chinese busboy. Get me a little Thai girl to rape.

No. Not just a little girl. Two sisters.

Where had that thought come from? Maybe from the way the Montlake rapist had used his victims’ love for each other to manipulate and control them. The way Skull Face had done the same to Livia with Nason.

The way Mr. Lone had done.

Was that why she had found herself thinking about the Montlake case? Was her unconscious trying to tell her something?

She shook her head. It didn’t make sense. How could Mr. Lone have arranged it? All the way from Thailand? It was a coincidence. A sick, evil man sees a powerless little girl, and takes advantage of his good luck. A crime of opportunity, not of planning.

His brother. Ezra Lone. The senator.

It was still too far-fetched. She didn’t believe it. But…

Assume both brothers are that sick. And assume they have the connections to pull off something like what you’re imagining.

Okay, but there were still too many pieces that didn’t fit. Like the fact that there had been other girls in the container from Thailand. Why had Skull Face and his men left the rest of them alone? Why had they been interested only in Livia and Nason, the sisters? If Livia and Nason were some kind of special shipment, wouldn’t Skull Face and the others have abused someone else?

She remembered the way Skull Face had looked at her, when despite her own fierce hunger she had given her food to Nason.

Could that have been it? Was that the sick kink he couldn’t resist? The opportunity to control a little girl by manipulating the girl’s love for her own sister?

And then the opportunity to rip away even that small victory, by violating the sister anyway?

But Nason hadn’t even made it to Llewellyn. Skull Face and his men had sold her somewhere else. Or…

… killed her. Because no one would want to buy merchandise as damaged as that.

She pushed her fist to her mouth and bit down on the knuckles. She hated thinking it, but of all the possibilities, that the men had killed Nason seemed by far the most likely. The only thing that made the thought even remotely bearable was that it didn’t feel true. Her mind could say what it liked, but in her heart, she had never stopped believing her little bird was alive, out there somewhere, and that one day she would find her, envelop her in her arms and never, ever let anything bad happen to her again.

She waited again for the emotions to pass and her mind to clear.

All right. Maybe the Lones had wanted sisters because sisters would be easier to use against each other, easier to control, something like that. Maybe some kind of sick turn-on. The same sort of thing Skull Face had found so irresistible. The same sort of dynamic involved in the Montlake rapes. But then… Nason would have been on the barge from Portland with Livia. And Skull Face and his men never would have damaged her the way they had.

Unless they hadn’t meant to damage her. Not the way they did. Only to use her, like they had used you. And then you cut them, and Skull Face forgot he was handling merchandise ordered by a customer, merchandise he was supposed to deliver more or less intact. He lost control. He needed to hurt the helpless victim who had just cut out his eye. Hurt her in the worst way imaginable. Through her sister.

She choked back a sob. Many times before, she had suspected it was her fault the men had hurt Nason so badly. But it had never felt so true.

She remembered how afterward, Skull Face’s men had restrained him from going after her. He’d wanted more revenge, but cooler heads-dollars-and-cents heads-had prevailed. She tried to find holes in the theory, but couldn’t. It was simple. Skull Face was supposed to deliver two intact sisters. But he’d lost control and hurt one so badly that he could only deliver the other.

She’d been just a little girl when it happened. She’d only been trying to protect Nason. She knew it wasn’t her fault.

But it was her fault. It was. If only she hadn’t attacked the men…

She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. She pushed aside the guilt and forced herself to focus. Focus.

If the Lones had wanted sisters, why bring other children on the barge from Portland, just to poison them? And why poison some of the adults, too?

Because Mr. Lone couldn’t adopt four kids. He had wanted something he could control. Four would have been too many. But they didn’t want it to look as though they were singling out the children. An adult, or adults, needed to die, too, or at least get sick. So it would look random. Accidental.

It was as though a window she had been trying for so long to see through, a window on what had really happened, was suddenly clearing, at least partly. It was what she had hoped for. But it was also almost too much. She staggered over to a bench and sat.

The Lones wanted sisters. But Fred Lone couldn’t go out and just adopt a pair-it might have caused speculation, suspicion, even in a town as devoted as Llewellyn to not seeing what he really was. So they arranged for a shipment somehow. A shipment that was supposed to be a mix of adults and kids, but with the sisters the only kids surviving the journey. The ones no one would know what to do with. Except Fred Lone, the great benefactor. He would adopt them.

She could feel her mind still trying to resist it. For so long, she’d believed she and Nason had been the victims of circumstance. But a conspiracy?

And they needed a bust, of course. That’s why someone phoned in an anonymous tip to Chief Emmanuel. But there was no tip. Mr. Lone told Emmanuel exactly what to do. Save the victims. Execute the traffickers. Tie up loose ends.

But Tyler… he survived.

Remember, there were federal agents, too. Emmanuel had to do the whole thing by the book to avoid scrutiny. He, or he and his men, tried to kill all three, but somehow they couldn’t get to Tyler. Maybe the feds got to him first. Whatever the reason, they went to plan B: not a word, Weed, or your ass gets shanked in prison.

Besides, Tyler didn’t know that much, anyway. But they would take as few chances as possible.

She tried to imagine it from their perspective. How it would look when it was done.

It’s the perfect appearance: routine human trafficking. Heroic local police and federal action. Adoring coverage in the press. A group of adults, all subject to repatriation. And two poor little refugee sisters no one knows what to do with.

No one except Mr. Lone.

But Livia had told them her parents were dead. They couldn’t have predicted that. What if she had told them what had really happened?

Lone would have just argued that they couldn’t send the poor children back. Their parents would only sell them again.

She put her hands to her head and moaned aloud. How could she have missed it all, for so long? Was it because she didn’t want to see?

No. It wasn’t that. It was information she had lacked, not insight. Before Tyler, she had no reason to believe she and Nason were anything other than routinely trafficked children, just two among thousands, hundreds of thousands. Why would it have occurred to her that the two of them might have been specifically requested by a degenerate-a degenerate whose brother had the political connections to order a customized set of child sex slaves?

The political connections. She needed to look into that. Who would a senator have to know to order two sisters all the way from Thailand? He’d need the contacts. A conduit. A circuit breaker, for deniability. How would Ezra Lone have set up all that?

She thought of his “legislative aide,” Matthias Redcroft. That would be one piece-probably the go-between, the bagman. But how would the senator know where to place the order? He trusted someone, and they trusted him. Enough to do this kind of business. And what did he pay? Was it cash? Political influence? Something else? Whatever it was, it was valuable enough so that whoever had paid Tyler and his gang to move Livia and the others to Llewellyn didn’t mind losing fifty thousand dollars in the process. And the cargo, too, obviously.

She remembered her initial impressions of Llewellyn. How she had always sensed something rotten about the town, something she could almost smell. She’d read a book in high school called Watership Down. It was about rabbits-well, rabbits as people. And there was one group of rabbits that lived on a farm, accepting the farmer’s food, grateful that he shot foxes and stoats, their natural enemies… and accepting that he laid snares, so that anytime he wanted to make a stew from one of his nice, fat rabbits, he could.

She realized that’s what Llewellyn felt like. The people had known. But they found a way to not know. Because they wanted what Mr. Lone and his brother provided. The ammunition factory. The mill. All the people they employed, through Mr. Lone’s businesses and Senator Lone’s votes. Against all that, why would they care if the Lones decided to snare a little refugee girl… and eat her?

The theory felt right. In fact, her own discomfort, her resistance to believing it, suggested it was sound. Still, there was one thing missing, one imaginative leap she knew needed to be bridged. She wasn’t trying to make a case that would stand up in court. But she needed all the pieces to fit. The whole thing had to be solid enough for her to take the next step. Whatever that might be.

She’d always assumed Fred Lone was simply a freak. Maybe there was an explanation-he’d been molested by a priest or a teacher or a coach, and infected by evil. She’d certainly seen enough of that. Or maybe he’d just been born twisted. She’d encountered plenty of that, as well. Evil with no explanation, no origin.

But two brothers, and both of them monsters? That wasn’t a coincidence. Something had happened to them both, when they were boys. If she could find out what that thing was, maybe she would be one step closer to finding Nason.

She thought about Fred Lone’s funeral. The family crypt, with the sister who had died when Lone was young. Livia had never thought to ask about that before. She’d never cared.

Well, she did now.