Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(70)

She breathed deeply, in and out, calming herself. Her left eye was beginning to swell, and she put ice on it. That would be explainable, at least. She must have taken a shot to the eye at practice without realizing at the time. It had swelled up afterward. It happened. And it would hardly be the first time she’d been marked by bruises and abrasions. Judo was a contact sport.

What if someone had seen her? She hadn’t gone to the front desk with him, so she was safe that way, at least. But what if the police knew she’d met him at the bar, and asked witnesses for a description? And the marks on his neck—would they know someone had used a judo strangle? That could lead them to the SJSU team. They would see her eye, and ask where she was when the guy was killed. Studying in my room, she would tell them, but would that hold up?

She paced back and forth, naked. She’d tossed the panties in a sewer. Wouldn’t want to have to explain how they’d gotten torn that way. She had marks on her left outer and right inner thigh. That made sense—the guy had been right-handed, and had ripped the panties off right to left. The elastic around the leg holes must have held for a moment and cut her before giving way. Again, explainable as a minor judo injury. Or at least, she hoped, not provable otherwise.

Worst case, she would explain what happened. Claim self-defense. Which is what it had been, of course. At least up to a point. She’d say she hadn’t meant to kill him, but when she’d released the strangle—which she’d been forced to use to save her own life—she couldn’t revive him. She panicked and fled. Not good, but maybe good enough. But even if she avoided prison, the thought of being some sort of campus tabloid fodder was horrifying. People would ask questions. Her past, at least parts of it, would be revealed. Maybe people would even wonder what had really happened to her revered adopted father, whether she was suffering from PTSD. And what would all of it mean for her career prospects as a cop?

She considered every angle she could think of. Maybe she should have taken his wallet, to make it look like a robbery? She hadn’t thought of it at the time—she wanted to touch as little as possible, disturb the scene as little as possible, something she knew about from her classes. She wasn’t sure now which would have been the better course, but she hadn’t considered it when it mattered.

Eventually, her exhaustion and the post-adrenaline backlash began to overwhelm her. Overall, she thought there was a better-than-even chance the body wouldn’t lead back to her. But she couldn’t be sure. She should have been more careful.

Well, next time, she would be.





49—THEN

It was on the news the next night. Parker “Park” Crader, forty, of Campbell, California, was found dead in a motel room. Police believed a sex worker had lured him into the room, where a waiting accomplice ambushed and strangled him. Crader had a record: two charges of rape. Both times it had been a sex worker in a motel room, and both times he had pled down to misdemeanor assault. He’d been out of prison for less than a year. The working theory was that this was payback from a victim who was connected to, or could afford, some kind of muscle for hire. It didn’t seem to occur to the police that a woman could have strangled Crader by herself.

The police spokesman said they were following up leads, but Livia had a feeling he was talking about the women who had accused Crader of rape before, and presumably those women would have alibis, or otherwise be impossible to place in the motel room at the time of Crader’s death. Everyone knew SJPD was overworked—the city had a serious gang problem, among other things. She thought of Rick, of what he’d told her of his job, how he worked leads and prioritized cases. Unless something panned out right away, she couldn’t see a homicide detective spending a lot of time trying to solve the killing of someone like Crader. Her assessment of better-than-even chances of not getting caught went to more like ten-to-one.

She still felt nervous about it, especially late at night, alone in bed. But when a week passed and nothing happened, she started to feel more confident. By the end of the semester, she barely even thought about it anymore.

Except, sometimes, to fantasize about it.

The rest of college passed without incident. From time to time, the craving for a dangerous encounter became overwhelming, and she would get on the Ninja and find the right kind of bar. After that first time, she made sure always to travel outside San Jose so as not to leave an easily traceable pattern. Salinas. Bakersfield. Visalia. Stockton. If anyone ever thought to try to map any of the resulting deaths, San Jose would be at the periphery. The locus would look like Fresno. Not a particularly likely scenario, considering the obvious degenerates she was leaving in her wake. But she’d learned to be careful.

She knew on some level that her hobby, as she liked half humorously to think of it, was f*cked up. Certainly no one would ever be able to understand it, and realizing this only enhanced her sense that she was different from other people, separate from them, like something human on the surface but alien underneath. But she didn’t care. She imagined a lifetime of psychotherapy, administered by a doctor who could have no notion of what it was like to be sold like a farm animal by your own parents. And victimized the way she had been afterward. And to be unable to protect your own sister from being victimized, too, despite bartering with the most desperate currency available to your thirteen-year-old self.

Yeah, maybe that.

Or maybe f*ck that. Maybe she would just deal with it her own way. Keep her secrets buried down deep, the way she always had. And rid the world of a few monsters along the way. She didn’t have to explain herself to anyone. Justify herself to anyone. What she did was her business, and no one else needed to know anything about any of it.