Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(71)
She traveled to the Beijing Olympic games as an alternate. She didn’t compete, but to even travel with the team was a notable achievement. Everyone told her that London, four years hence, would be her event.
She knew they could be right. She was only twenty, and had probably a decade, maybe more, before she was past her physical peak. That was a lot of time to continue to become a more skilled competitor. She knew an Olympic medal was possible. Maybe even gold.
But she had never stopped wanting to be a cop. She still whispered her vows every night, and felt them deeply. They weren’t just words, an empty mantra, a tradition bleached of meaning. Nason might need her. It was one thing to study criminology and get a college degree. That was all calculated to make her a better cop, and she believed it had been worth it. But four more years of full-time judo, just so she could maybe earn a medal? How would she ever explain that to Nason, or live with it herself?
And besides. As much satisfaction as she took in knowing that the men she had killed, starting with Mr. Lone, would never hurt anyone again, it wasn’t enough. She didn’t lie to herself: she craved the sexual rush killing a would-be rapist provided. But that wasn’t the only point. Rick had been right: she was a sheepdog. She needed to protect people, people like Nason, and she felt damaged, diminished, incomplete when she wasn’t doing so. There were predators in the world, lurking, waiting, wanting to hurt someone, ruin someone, and they would do it if they could. She hated them. She needed to fight them. Not just some of the time. All of the time.
And she had waited long enough.
50—THEN
Portland Police Bureau would have been a natural fit. Rick and Gavin were there, of course, and she liked the town enough. More important, Portland still felt like the closest connection she had to Nason, the actual place where she and her sister had been amputated from each other. But she also knew those feelings weren’t logical. Rick and Gavin and others like them had done all they could in Portland, and had found no trace of Nason. What could she do there that they hadn’t?
So she started thinking about Seattle. The best lead, she knew, was the imprisoned white supremacist, Weed Tyler, who had survived the police raid on the barge from Portland and whose gang, Hammerhead, was based in the area. Moreover, she had learned that the Seattle region, with its variety of ports, vast rural stretches, proximity to Asia, and location on the Canadian border, was a hotbed of trafficking, and particularly child trafficking. And the city was doing something about it, too—SPD had a newly formed Vice & High Risk Victims Unit, which investigated sex crimes involving children and all forms of child trafficking, with detectives cross-deputized with the FBI’s Innocence Lost Task Force and the Department of Homeland Security’s Investigations unit. That meant federal dollars, federal databases, and federal resources, but with a local focus. Livia couldn’t imagine a better combination.
So she applied for a position. There was a written test, a physical fitness test, and a battery of interviews. They all went well, and her interviewers made clear that if she passed the background check, the psychology tests, and the polygraph, she was a shoo-in.
She had a little trouble with the psychology test and the polygraph. She thought she was saying the right things, but apparently her hostility to rapists and child abusers leaked through her attempts at bland “serve and protect” professionalism. And they told her there was some evidence of deception regarding whether she had ever committed a serious crime. She was surprised about that, because she didn’t consider anything she had ever done to be criminal. Not really. But she stuck with her answers, and in the end, the powers that be must have decided that a few psychological blips and some indicia of deception weren’t much compared to a straight-A student with a degree in criminology who was a top judo competitor and a minority female on top of it. They offered her a position, and she immediately accepted.
That summer, she sold the Ninja, rented a truck, put her few possessions in back, drove to Seattle, rented a cheap walk-up in the International District, and entered the Basic Law Enforcement Academy. For the next six months, she studied the Constitution and the law of justified use of force, much of which she already knew from SJSU; various Washington State and Seattle ordinances; pursuit and precision driving; proper entry and clearing rooms; handcuffing suspects; use of firearms, the Taser, and pepper spray, and much more. As part of the training, everyone had to get pepper-sprayed and tased. Being tased was excruciating, but she didn’t mind. She knew it was important for recruits to know the effects of weapons, and to know they were tough enough to keep fighting even when they were hurt. But it made her uncomfortable when everyone laughed at the tased recruits’ contorted faces and howls of agony. She was stoical about her own pain. But it hurt her to see pain in others.
Unless, of course, they deserved it.
She missed the Ninja, and though the Pacific Northwest climate was nowhere near as good for riding as what she’d left in the Bay Area, she broke down and bought a new bike: a Ducati Streetfighter. And a battered, used Jeep Wrangler, for when the weather made the Streetfighter unsafe to ride.
She excelled in all her courses, and quickly developed a reputation as a star. Not everyone liked that. She knew there were rumors that her success was due to her looks, and maybe even sexual favors. None of it was true. Yes, she got a lot of attention from the male trainers, but she didn’t seek or even want any of it. There were some good-looking SPD cops—a detective named Mike Devine in particular, who was one of the lecturers and who had a cowboy vibe she liked—but she wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t going to let anyone she worked with get inside, literally or figuratively. It was too likely to cause trouble.