Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(80)

“You have any idea where she wound up?”

“After Berkeley? No, I don’t. But like I said, I never heard of her coming back to Llewellyn. I don’t think she was even here for her brother’s funeral.”

“No. She wasn’t.”

“Well, even for a black sheep, that’s a little odd, now that we’re talking about it.”

Maybe, Livia thought. Or maybe it makes perfect sense.

There was a pause, then Tanya said, “I’ll tell you what, Livia. I won’t ask what this is about. But if you ever want to tell me, I won’t tell you not to.”

She couldn’t tell Tanya. Or anyone. Not without telling all of it. Which she was never going to do.

“It’s probably nothing,” Livia said. “But if I’m wrong about that, I’ll . . . try to find a way to let you know.”

Tanya chuckled. “Fair enough. Either way, I’d still enjoy that drink sometime.”

“So would I. This is the second time you’ve been really good to me. I hope I’ll be able to repay you at some point.”

Tanya laughed. “You don’t owe me anything. Just seeing what you’ve made of your life makes me smile. I will let you buy the drinks, though, okay?”

Now it was Livia’s turn to laugh. “It’s a deal. And thanks, Tanya.”

She clicked off.

Mental illness. Is that what they called it, when the father, or the brothers, or both, were raping a teenage girl and destroying her dignity, her self-image, her peace of mind, ripping apart everything about her until she reached the point where a row of stakes twenty feet down looked like a blessing?

She swung the Jeep around and drove to headquarters. She had a feeling Rebecca Lone had changed her name, and maybe a few other identifying details, too. She was trying to hide—hide from the past, hide from her guilt, hide from her shame.

Or maybe even something worse than all that.

It didn’t matter. Livia was going to find her.





54—NOW

She spent most of the night at her desk at headquarters. The coffee was burnt, so she made a fresh pot, then poured herself a large mugful, cutting it with milk and a scoop of the turbinado sugar she kept in a desk drawer.

Senator Lone was the easy part. All she needed was his website and Wikipedia. It was so obvious, now that she had some of the pieces.

He’d been active against human trafficking since his time as a freshman senator. Wrangled himself a position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he worked to raise consciousness on the issue. Multiple trips to Thailand, to pressure the Thai government to do more against the scourge of trafficking. And every time he was out there, Livia knew, he would have f*cked every impoverished child he could get his disgusting hands on.

His website trumpeted his work, claiming his efforts had led to the protection and rescue of thousands of children and unprecedented cooperation from governments that had formerly turned a blind eye to trafficking—countries like Thailand, where Lone had fostered joint law enforcement efforts that had led to the near destruction of Thai organized crime groups involved in trafficking.

Unsurprisingly, she found nothing about a Thai gangster going by the name Kana. But there were dozens of old news articles on Thai criminal groups generally. It seemed that once there had been three large ones, all of which were known to move human cargo through Southern California and, to a lesser extent, San Francisco and Oakland.

But no known instances of people-smuggling through Portland.

So maybe they used Hammerhead because they knew there was going to be a bust. Not despite Hammerhead’s lack of experience moving people, but because of it, as she’d wondered when talking to Tyler. If a bust was indeed the plan, they wouldn’t have wanted to bring heat on their profitable California routes. If they had to sacrifice something, it would be a relatively small-time narcotics operation in the Northwest, and the expendable peckerwoods they used as distributors there.

She thought of her conversation with AUSA Velez again, and how he had told her containers were usually jammed full of trafficked people because packing the container was just sound economics and risk management. Well, of course that’s why there were so few of them on the barge. They knew the shipment was going to be intercepted. It was supposed to be intercepted. The less wasted cargo, the better. And likewise the shipment from Bangkok. It was a decoy operation. They probably didn’t have local buyers. Those other children, the Hmong boy Kai . . . Skull Face and the rest probably had to ship them individually to wherever they had buyers, at additional cost and risk.

Or simply dispose of them. But Livia couldn’t allow herself to accept that. It was too close to Nason.

So whatever they were getting in exchange for this one shipment, it was worth more than the fifty thousand they’d paid Tyler and his gang. Worth more than the sacrificed cargo. It was worth risking an entire Pacific Northwest Thai ganja operation.

She kept reading. It seemed two of the three Thai gangs had been crushed with multiple arrests and prosecutions. The third had been seriously weakened.

All around the time she and Nason were trafficked to America.

All around the time Ezra Lone was on a crusade to get the Thai government to crack down on trafficking groups.

She put her elbows on her desk and rested her forehead against her knuckles. Could that have been it? Some kind of quid pro quo?