Livia Lone

66-NOW

One month later, Livia was back in Thailand. She flew from Seattle to Bangkok again, but this time immediately transferred to a connecting flight to Chiang Rai. Where the hill tribes lived. Where she had lived, when she had been a little girl. Before she became someone else.

She had cleaned up the scene at the Hotel Orient that night as well as she could, but really all she had been able to do was wipe her prints from the surfaces she remembered touching. Whether she got away with it, she knew, hinged on how much effort the authorities would expend on an investigation into the murder of a US senator. Ordinarily, such a thing, particularly overseas, involved significant manpower, NSA surveillance databases, and the FBI’s forensics lab, which was probably the finest in the world. She had done what she could to cover her tracks beforehand-using the Tor Browser for her searches on Ezra Lone, for example. But she’d also made liberal use of various law enforcement databases, and those records would remain, if anyone thought to check them. And there was Tanya, who might wonder at the coincidental timing of Ezra Lone’s passing. And Becky Lone, who was also a potential vulnerability. Overall, given the speed with which she’d put the whole thing together and the level of improvisation required, she doubted she could survive full-scale federal scrutiny.

So it would all come down to what the authorities decided should be the official story. If they wanted the truth, they would investigate. If they wanted to hide the truth, because the truth was too embarrassing to various powers-that-be or otherwise undesirable, an investigation might be just pro forma. Or there might be none at all.

It was in the news the very day she arrived back in Seattle: Ezra Lone, the senior senator from Idaho, had died on official business in Bangkok-part of his lifelong efforts to combat the evils of human trafficking. A heart attack. It seemed heart disease ran in the family: tragically, some twelve years earlier, the senator’s younger brother, Fred, had suffered a similar fate. The president offered his condolences to the entire Lone family, describing Lone’s death as “a loss not only to the world’s greatest deliberative body, but indeed to the entire nation Senator Lone dedicated his life to serving.”

One day later, there was another story: a fire at the Bangkok morgue where Senator Lone’s remains had been moved to await transfer to the US authorities. The senator’s body had been burned beyond recognition, though his remains had been identified via dental records and were now on their way back to the United States, where they would be interred at the family mausoleum in Llewellyn.

Livia had searched for other news, and came across an article in the Bangkok Post lamenting the untimely death of one Chanchai Vivavapit, chief of the investigative branch of the Thai National Police. A heart attack. His body would be cremated in accordance with his family’s wishes. Livia suspected those wishes might have been the product of a generous financial inducement.

So Skull Face had been with the National Police. She’d sensed as much in the hotel that night. She could only imagine the number of children he had trafficked during a lifetime in the trade, all the while moving up in the ranks of law enforcement. And obviously, he hadn’t been acting alone. His organization would still be up and running, pimping children like the one Lone had raped at the hotel that night.

She came across another article in the Bangkok Post not long after. Apparently, one morgue worker claimed Senator Lone’s body had been badly mutilated-“like wild game caught and prepped for the cook pot,” was the worker’s lurid description. But a day later, the worker retracted his account, claiming to have been talking about a television program he had once heard about, and describing Senator Lone’s body as having been perfectly intact before the unfortunate fire. The story was bizarre, and other media outlets seemed uninterested in pursuing it.

Tanya never called. That was good. No doubt she would have heard about Lone-they were burying him in Llewellyn, after all. So maybe she simply had made no connection between his death and Livia’s questions. Though more likely, she just wasn’t inclined to ask. It was odd. Livia didn’t have many friends, but somehow this woman she barely knew had managed to become one of them.

She’d been back for a week when a package arrived for her at police headquarters. There was no return address, though it was postmarked San Francisco. Five pints of Sonoma County Wildflower honey. And a note that said only, Maybe it does end after all. Livia nodded grimly when she read the note and thought, Maybe.

Everything else took a little time. There were favors she needed to ask, and chits to call in, but eventually the necessary paperwork had been processed, and the Maryland authorities exhumed the Jane Doe who had been discovered by hikers in Little Bennett Regional Park in the autumn shortly after Livia had first arrived in Llewellyn. The body was that of a young Asian girl. The coroner had determined she had died from blunt force trauma to the head after being repeatedly sexually assaulted, and the authorities had buried the girl in the state’s own potter’s field. DNA tests confirmed the body was that of Livia’s sister. Livia flew to Maryland, had the remains cremated, and brought them back to Seattle. And from there, to Chiang Rai.

She rented a dirt bike, like the ones she’d seen trekkers riding so many years before, and rode it up into the hills, the urn containing Nason’s ashes secure in a pack against her back. Gradually the road grew steeper, the air became cooler, and her ears repeatedly popped over the whine of the engine. It was strange to be back. Everything seemed smaller now. In part because she herself was bigger, of course, and because her frame of reference was so much broader. But in part because the world had gotten smaller, too. There were telephone and electric lines now where once there had been only trees. Paved roads where there had been only dirt. Storefronts on what had been empty fields.

Other things were different, too. Some of the distant hills were startlingly, almost unnaturally green-terraced with exotic teas now, she had heard, a cash crop the hill tribes had embraced in preference to the subsistence agriculture of Livia’s childhood. But much was still the same. The red dirt that had once caked her bare feet. The smells of the earth and the plants and the trees. The gentle blue of the sky. The villages she passed were still marked by rickety wooden shrines, intended to ward off evil spirits. She hoped they were more effective now than when she had been small. But she doubted it.

She rode on, higher, deeper into the forest, until the trail beneath her stopped and she could go no farther. She took off her helmet, wiped the sweat from her forehead, and looked around. She smiled. Nason would have liked this spot. There was an opening in the forest here, framed by trees to the left and right, looking out over a valley surrounded by lush hills and a line of green mountains beyond. A haven overlooking a beautiful, emerald world, a place where they had known hardship but still had been happy, and innocent, and safe, before anything truly bad had ever happened to them.

She opened the kickstand and dismounted. Then she set down the helmet, took off the pack, and unfolded the portable shovel inside it. She began to dig a hole at the base of a small durian tree. She liked the idea that as it grew, the tree would absorb Nason’s ashes. From the tree’s branches, Nason would have an even better view of the forest paradise that had been her home during her brief time there. And it seemed right that she would become part of the tree that produced the fruit she loved so much.

For a while, as she shoveled out clods of the red earth, Livia’s mind drifted. She forgot what had brought her here. She was just back in the forest. Digging a hole. It might have been a dream.

And maybe it was a dream, because the forest felt different now. How, she wasn’t sure. Something seemed… missing. Or maybe it was just her memory playing tricks on her.

When the hole was deep enough, she stopped and mopped her face with her sleeve. It was good to use her hands like this again. To be in the forest, sweaty and dirty from hard work.

She retrieved the urn from the pack, knelt, and carefully emptied Nason’s ashes into the hole. Then she went to the pack again and brought over the wooden Buddha she had carved as a girl in Portland. She placed it atop the ashes. “To help you sleep,” she whispered.

She stood and filled in the dirt. When she was done, she knelt again.

She put her hand on the spot, as though she might feel Nason’s presence there. As though her touch might comfort her sister, the way it always had before.

“Goodbye, little bird,” she said, and started to cry.

Suddenly, around her, the forest came to life with the calls of hundreds of birds. She looked up, startled. That’s what had been missing. The sounds. The birds Nason had once imitated with such uncanny accuracy.

She knew they must have gone silent at the sound of the bike’s engine. And of her digging afterward. It was no more than that.

And yet. And yet. And yet.

She looked around at the trees and smiled through her tears.

“I love you, little bird,” she said in Lahu. “I found you. I won’t look anymore.” Her voice caught for a moment. Then she said, “But I will never forget.”

She stayed and listened to the birds for a long time. When the sun began to get low in the sky, she started back.

She didn’t know where she would go from here. Well, Seattle, of course. She had several cases, victims who needed her help.

But beyond that?

She thought about Malcolm. She had never really thanked him for everything he had done for her. And not just the jiu-jitsu. Everything.

Of course, if she contacted Malcolm, she would have to ask about Sean. And who knew where that might lead. But for some reason, the thought of it leading somewhere didn’t make her feel bad.

She thought about the Homeland Security task force Donna had mentioned. She thought if this task force involved Thailand, there was a good chance she might join it. Dirty Beard and Square Head, and the other man in the van, and the man who had whipped Kai-they were all probably somewhere in Bangkok. Probably cops, like Skull Face. She wanted to find them. Settle those last debts.

But even more than that, she wanted to find that little girl-Lone’s last victim. The one who had looked at her so beseechingly. She badly wanted to help that girl. Needed to.

And she would. She would help her. And others like her. She would.

One way. Or another.