Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(78)

She remembered how afterward, Skull Face’s men had restrained him from going after her. He’d wanted more revenge, but cooler heads—dollars-and-cents heads—had prevailed. She tried to find holes in the theory, but couldn’t. It was simple. Skull Face was supposed to deliver two intact sisters. But he’d lost control and hurt one so badly that he could only deliver the other.

She’d been just a little girl when it happened. She’d only been trying to protect Nason. She knew it wasn’t her fault.

But it was her fault. It was. If only she hadn’t attacked the men . . .

She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. She pushed aside the guilt and forced herself to focus. Focus.

If the Lones had wanted sisters, why bring other children on the barge from Portland, just to poison them? And why poison some of the adults, too?

Because Mr. Lone couldn’t adopt four kids. He had wanted something he could control. Four would have been too many. But they didn’t want it to look as though they were singling out the children. An adult, or adults, needed to die, too, or at least get sick. So it would look random. Accidental.

It was as though a window she had been trying for so long to see through, a window on what had really happened, was suddenly clearing, at least partly. It was what she had hoped for. But it was also almost too much. She staggered over to a bench and sat.

The Lones wanted sisters. But Fred Lone couldn’t go out and just adopt a pair—it might have caused speculation, suspicion, even in a town as devoted as Llewellyn to not seeing what he really was. So they arranged for a shipment somehow. A shipment that was supposed to be a mix of adults and kids, but with the sisters the only kids surviving the journey. The ones no one would know what to do with. Except Fred Lone, the great benefactor. He would adopt them.

She could feel her mind still trying to resist it. For so long, she’d believed she and Nason had been the victims of circumstance. But a conspiracy?

And they needed a bust, of course. That’s why someone phoned in an anonymous tip to Chief Emmanuel. But there was no tip. Mr. Lone told Emmanuel exactly what to do. Save the victims. Execute the traffickers. Tie up loose ends.

But Tyler . . . he survived.

Remember, there were federal agents, too. Emmanuel had to do the whole thing by the book to avoid scrutiny. He, or he and his men, tried to kill all three, but somehow they couldn’t get to Tyler. Maybe the feds got to him first. Whatever the reason, they went to plan B: not a word, Weed, or your ass gets shanked in prison.

Besides, Tyler didn’t know that much, anyway. But they would take as few chances as possible.

She tried to imagine it from their perspective. How it would look when it was done.

It’s the perfect appearance: routine human trafficking. Heroic local police and federal action. Adoring coverage in the press. A group of adults, all subject to repatriation. And two poor little refugee sisters no one knows what to do with.

No one except Mr. Lone.

But Livia had told them her parents were dead. They couldn’t have predicted that. What if she had told them what had really happened?

Lone would have just argued that they couldn’t send the poor children back. Their parents would only sell them again.

She put her hands to her head and moaned aloud. How could she have missed it all, for so long? Was it because she didn’t want to see?

No. It wasn’t that. It was information she had lacked, not insight. Before Tyler, she had no reason to believe she and Nason were anything other than routinely trafficked children, just two among thousands, hundreds of thousands. Why would it have occurred to her that the two of them might have been specifically requested by a degenerate—a degenerate whose brother had the political connections to order a customized set of child sex slaves?

The political connections. She needed to look into that. Who would a senator have to know to order two sisters all the way from Thailand? He’d need the contacts. A conduit. A circuit breaker, for deniability. How would Ezra Lone have set up all that?

She thought of his “legislative aide,” Matthias Redcroft. That would be one piece—probably the go-between, the bagman. But how would the senator know where to place the order? He trusted someone, and they trusted him. Enough to do this kind of business. And what did he pay? Was it cash? Political influence? Something else? Whatever it was, it was valuable enough so that whoever had paid Tyler and his gang to move Livia and the others to Llewellyn didn’t mind losing fifty thousand dollars in the process. And the cargo, too, obviously.

She remembered her initial impressions of Llewellyn. How she had always sensed something rotten about the town, something she could almost smell. She’d read a book in high school called Watership Down. It was about rabbits—well, rabbits as people. And there was one group of rabbits that lived on a farm, accepting the farmer’s food, grateful that he shot foxes and stoats, their natural enemies . . . and accepting that he laid snares, so that anytime he wanted to make a stew from one of his nice, fat rabbits, he could.

She realized that’s what Llewellyn felt like. The people had known. But they found a way to not know. Because they wanted what Mr. Lone and his brother provided. The ammunition factory. The mill. All the people they employed, through Mr. Lone’s businesses and Senator Lone’s votes. Against all that, why would they care if the Lones decided to snare a little refugee girl . . . and eat her?

The theory felt right. In fact, her own discomfort, her resistance to believing it, suggested it was sound. Still, there was one thing missing, one imaginative leap she knew needed to be bridged. She wasn’t trying to make a case that would stand up in court. But she needed all the pieces to fit. The whole thing had to be solid enough for her to take the next step. Whatever that might be.