Livia Lone

55-NOW

None of the available police and federal databases had anything on a Rebecca or Becky Lone. A social media search was similarly fruitless. Not surprising-it had all happened decades earlier. And if Livia’s intuition was right, Becky would have kept a low profile anyway.

But her intuition suggested a few other things, as well. Someone fleeing an abusive past and desperate to build something safe and secure. A new family. A new life. And someone who wanted those things not far in the future, but soon. Maybe as soon as graduating from college, or soon after. Maybe Becky had met a boy, the right kind of boy-sane, stable, reliable. She’d married him, and taken his name. Probably a California boy, since about eighty percent of Berkeley undergraduates were from California. And Livia knew from having lived in the Bay Area herself that people from there tended to stay. That gave her a lot to cross-reference with alumni organizations, property records, car registrations, voter registrations, and vital records databases. Of course, she could have been wrong about any of the particulars, in which case she would have to expand the search. But her gut rarely failed her, and she sensed she was using the right parameters.

As the day’s first light began to creep through the windows, though, she was starting to doubt herself. It had all felt so right. But she wasn’t finding anything. Becky Lone had just… disappeared.

And then, as she was on the verge of deciding she’d been wrong and was going to have to figure out a completely different approach, Livia found her.

She was called Rebecca MacKinnon now, married to William MacKinnon. Same class at Berkeley. MacKinnon had been a partner, now some kind of emeritus, at a big Bay Area law firm. They lived in San Francisco-Vallejo Street in Pacific Heights, a high-end neighborhood. Three children. Two small grandchildren. One of the children had a Facebook page with a photo of a birthday party-the baby, the parents, the grandparents. Livia saw the wide-set eyes of the grandmother and knew she was looking at Becky Lone. She looked up the woman’s mobile phone number and confirmed its current location. Pacific Heights. She was home. Probably still sleeping.

Her heart pounding, Livia started writing an email to Lieutenant Strangeland. She wasn’t going to make it to roll call this morning. It seemed she needed a personal day.