Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(99)
66—NOW
One month later, Livia was back in Thailand. She flew from Seattle to Bangkok again, but this time immediately transferred to a connecting flight to Chiang Rai. Where the hill tribes lived. Where she had lived, when she had been a little girl. Before she became someone else.
She had cleaned up the scene at the Hotel Orient that night as well as she could, but really all she had been able to do was wipe her prints from the surfaces she remembered touching. Whether she got away with it, she knew, hinged on how much effort the authorities would expend on an investigation into the murder of a US senator. Ordinarily, such a thing, particularly overseas, involved significant manpower, NSA surveillance databases, and the FBI’s forensics lab, which was probably the finest in the world. She had done what she could to cover her tracks beforehand—using the Tor Browser for her searches on Ezra Lone, for example. But she’d also made liberal use of various law enforcement databases, and those records would remain, if anyone thought to check them. And there was Tanya, who might wonder at the coincidental timing of Ezra Lone’s passing. And Becky Lone, who was also a potential vulnerability. Overall, given the speed with which she’d put the whole thing together and the level of improvisation required, she doubted she could survive full-scale federal scrutiny.
So it would all come down to what the authorities decided should be the official story. If they wanted the truth, they would investigate. If they wanted to hide the truth, because the truth was too embarrassing to various powers-that-be or otherwise undesirable, an investigation might be just pro forma. Or there might be none at all.
It was in the news the very day she arrived back in Seattle: Ezra Lone, the senior senator from Idaho, had died on official business in Bangkok—part of his lifelong efforts to combat the evils of human trafficking. A heart attack. It seemed heart disease ran in the family: tragically, some twelve years earlier, the senator’s younger brother, Fred, had suffered a similar fate. The president offered his condolences to the entire Lone family, describing Lone’s death as “a loss not only to the world’s greatest deliberative body, but indeed to the entire nation Senator Lone dedicated his life to serving.”
One day later, there was another story: a fire at the Bangkok morgue where Senator Lone’s remains had been moved to await transfer to the US authorities. The senator’s body had been burned beyond recognition, though his remains had been identified via dental records and were now on their way back to the United States, where they would be interred at the family mausoleum in Llewellyn.
Livia had searched for other news, and came across an article in the Bangkok Post lamenting the untimely death of one Chanchai Vivavapit, chief of the investigative branch of the Thai National Police. A heart attack. His body would be cremated in accordance with his family’s wishes. Livia suspected those wishes might have been the product of a generous financial inducement.
So Skull Face had been with the National Police. She’d sensed as much in the hotel that night. She could only imagine the number of children he had trafficked during a lifetime in the trade, all the while moving up in the ranks of law enforcement. And obviously, he hadn’t been acting alone. His organization would still be up and running, pimping children like the one Lone had raped at the hotel that night.
She came across another article in the Bangkok Post not long after. Apparently, one morgue worker claimed Senator Lone’s body had been badly mutilated—“like wild game caught and prepped for the cook pot,” was the worker’s lurid description. But a day later, the worker retracted his account, claiming to have been talking about a television program he had once heard about, and describing Senator Lone’s body as having been perfectly intact before the unfortunate fire. The story was bizarre, and other media outlets seemed uninterested in pursuing it.
Tanya never called. That was good. No doubt she would have heard about Lone—they were burying him in Llewellyn, after all. So maybe she simply had made no connection between his death and Livia’s questions. Though more likely, she just wasn’t inclined to ask. It was odd. Livia didn’t have many friends, but somehow this woman she barely knew had managed to become one of them.
She’d been back for a week when a package arrived for her at police headquarters. There was no return address, though it was postmarked San Francisco. Five pints of Sonoma County Wildflower honey. And a note that said only, Maybe it does end after all. Livia nodded grimly when she read the note and thought, Maybe.
Everything else took a little time. There were favors she needed to ask, and chits to call in, but eventually the necessary paperwork had been processed, and the Maryland authorities exhumed the Jane Doe who had been discovered by hikers in Little Bennett Regional Park in the autumn shortly after Livia had first arrived in Llewellyn. The body was that of a young Asian girl. The coroner had determined she had died from blunt force trauma to the head after being repeatedly sexually assaulted, and the authorities had buried the girl in the state’s own potter’s field. DNA tests confirmed the body was that of Livia’s sister. Livia flew to Maryland, had the remains cremated, and brought them back to Seattle. And from there, to Chiang Rai.
She rented a dirt bike, like the ones she’d seen trekkers riding so many years before, and rode it up into the hills, the urn containing Nason’s ashes secure in a pack against her back. Gradually the road grew steeper, the air became cooler, and her ears repeatedly popped over the whine of the engine. It was strange to be back. Everything seemed smaller now. In part because she herself was bigger, of course, and because her frame of reference was so much broader. But in part because the world had gotten smaller, too. There were telephone and electric lines now where once there had been only trees. Paved roads where there had been only dirt. Storefronts on what had been empty fields.