Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(60)

There was nowhere to do jiu-jitsu near Rick’s apartment, but she found a place called Portland Judo in the northwest of the city that was easy enough to get to by bus. It was run by a man named Roy Kawamoto, a fifth-dan judoka from Hawaii. Rick took her there the first time she went, and would sometimes drop by to take her home, too, depending on his shift. She didn’t mind, but she told him he didn’t have to. He said it was good for people to know she had family. She thought about what had happened with Skull Face and Mr. Lone, when it was obvious she didn’t have family, and she thought she understood what he meant.

Not that he needed to worry. She had developed a sense for the vibe predators put out, and Kawamoto-sensei didn’t have it. He had even been a stepfather twenty years before to two brothers when their father had died—two brothers who had come all the way from Hawaii with him to become the top instructors at his new school. They all treated Livia with kindness and respect—and even awe, because her judo was so strong. The mat work was a lot like jiu-jitsu, of course, so she was hardly a beginner. But she had a knack for the standing techniques, too, and by the end of summer, they promoted her to black belt because she was defeating experienced black belts not just on the ground, but with throws, too. Her favorite move was the flying triangle, where she would go for the strangle even before her opponent had hit the mat. She learned her opponents weren’t usually expecting that. They conceived of fighting on their feet and fighting on the ground as two separate arenas, and were therefore vulnerable during the transition, which to Livia was the most promising arena of all.

Rick let her read the file on her and Nason. It wasn’t very thick. There were several ships from Thailand that had berthed in Portland around the time it was assumed Livia had been moved onto the barge destined for Llewellyn. By the time Livia was discovered, all the possible ships had departed. Worse, they were all flying under “flags of convenience,” which meant they were owned by people in one country and registered in another, a practice that could make it difficult or even impossible to determine who the real owner was. In other words, a dead end.

The barge should have been a better lead. She was called the Vesta, and the captain and crew had been questioned. But they all claimed to have no knowledge of the container of smuggled people on board, nor of the three men who had kept the smuggled people captive. The captain and crew all had clean records. The captain had been charged some sort of fine, but that was it.

The survivor of the three men who had kept her on the barge would have been the best lead. He was the one Rick had told her about in Llewellyn, Timothy “Weed” Tyler. Weed had been belowdecks when the police raided the boat and hadn’t been involved in the gunfight, which was why he had survived.

Weed had been sent to the federal prison in Victorville, California. Livia asked Rick if there were some way she could go to the prison and question him. She was afraid Rick might belittle her—a high school girl, wanting to interrogate an imprisoned white supremacist—but Rick treated her request with understanding and respect. Even so, he talked her out of it. If Weed had been willing to cooperate, Rick explained, he likely would have done so in exchange for a reduction of that twenty-year sentence. Now that he was in prison, no one had any leverage over him.

“Why do you think he wouldn’t talk?” Livia asked one night as they sat for dinner at the small table in the kitchen. “Is it possible he really didn’t know anything?”

Rick served her a miso-glazed salmon steak. “Well, not impossible, anyway. But remember that time in Llewellyn when I said you had good cop instincts?”

She nodded, eager for him to go on. He glanced at her salmon steak, a subtle reminder that he liked her to eat while the food was hot and at its tastiest. She took a forkful, chewed, and swallowed. “It’s delicious,” she said. And it was. But, as usual when her mind was on Nason and related matters, she didn’t care about food. Or anything else.

He smiled. “Thanks. Anyway, yeah, I think Weed knew a lot. The reason being, I talked to the AUSA, and he told me that in response to his offer to reduce Weed’s sentence in exchange for information, Weed wouldn’t give him anything.”

“What does that mean?”

Rick took a mouthful of salmon. “Damn,” he said, chewing. “That is good.” He swallowed, then said, “Well, here’s how it works. When a prosecutor threatens a bad guy with a long prison sentence, the bad guy will try to bargain. Offer to testify against his cohorts, that kind of thing. In exchange for a reduced sentence. Defense attorneys and prosecutors dance these dance steps all the time. It’s a routine. The ugly truth is, prosecutors are almost always looking for a plea deal. It saves them time and energy and they’re all overloaded.”

Livia was horrified. “But that’s not fair.”

“No. It’s the system. And the system is never fair.”

He twisted the cap off a beer and poured it into a glass. Livia had juice in hers. “Anyway. So when a guy looking at a twenty-year stretch refuses to offer up anything at all, you know he has information. But he’s scared.”

“But how do you know . . . I mean, you said it’s possible, or not impossible, he didn’t know anything?”

He glanced at her salmon again. She ate a big mouthful, along with some bok choy and cabbage.

He smiled appreciatively and drank some of his beer. “Right, but here’s the thing. All bad guys know something. A street dealer who’s rumored to have killed someone. The scuttlebutt on who really raped that girl in the projects. Where the Brown Pride Sure?os are getting their guns. Something. And if they really don’t know anything, which never happens anyway, they make something up. Because hey, why not, right? Facing twenty years in the can, what have you got to lose?”