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.