The Killer Collective (John Rain, #10; Ben Treven #4; Livia Lone #3)(3)

I let it go. Whether he was right about me or not, his meaning was clear enough. Horton might have been out. But he was looking for a way back in.

“All right,” I said. “If Horton’s the broker, who’s the client?”

“I asked the same question. Hort wouldn’t tell me. For your ears only. But if you want to share, I’m a good listener.”

I said nothing. Playing it reluctant was an old habit. Maybe I should have been alarmed at how easily I slipped back into it. But the main thing I noticed was that it felt as comfortable as a second skin.

Or even a first one.

“I didn’t tell him I knew how to contact you,” Larison said after a moment. “Even though I was pretty sure I did. Anyway, I don’t know where you are. I couldn’t tell anyone if I wanted to. Or if they tried to make me. You’re safe. Still retired, if that’s what you want.”

Again I said nothing, and after another pause, he went on. “But you know how it works. You don’t call Hort, they’ll keep looking for another way to get to you. And maybe the next way they find won’t be as friendly as I am.”





chapter

two





LIVIA


It looks like you were right about Malaysia,” Trahan called out by way of greeting. “I think we got him.”

Livia felt her heart kick with an adrenaline hit at the news. She locked the door behind her, and walked down the corridor into the loft the Bureau had rented. It was gray outside, but the place was nothing but tall windows on three sides with some brick in between, and even with the lights off, it was well illuminated.

Trahan was sitting at the end of a wooden table in the center of the room, staring at one of the monitors in front of him. Livia stood at the long end of the table and watched him silently for a moment, then said, “Kool Kat?”

“Yeah. The camera, just like you said. I created a spider to search in and around Kuala Lumpur. I found only thirteen expats posting photos on social media with D5 metadata, the same as the photos Kool Kat posts on the site.”

She’d told him the Nikon D5 was too expensive for most locals, and that he should concentrate on expats—particularly expats with jobs in education, childcare, and other professions that offered access to children. Even a top hacker had to know what he was looking for, and no one knew the freaks and predators like Livia did.

“Thirteen?” she said. “Can you narrow it down further?”

“Already have. Three were traveling during the week when Kool Kat didn’t post any new photos. Two Brits and a Kiwi. I just sent you their particulars—I bet you’ll know who’s Kool Kat just by looking. Just like you knew the kids in his photos were Malaysian. Speaking of which, how did you know?”

There were so many ways to answer that. She might have told him that having grown up as a little Lahu girl named Labee in the hills of Thailand’s Chiang Rai province gave her an eye for nuances Westerners generally missed. Or that after watching countless hours of children being sexually abused, she had become attuned to cultural differences. The children of some cultures screamed. Others were more stoic. When she herself had been trafficked to America, at thirteen, she had veered from one to the other, stoic when the men had done it to her, screaming when it had happened to her little sister, Nason.

“A hunch,” she said, willing away the images from Kool Kat’s video posts. She was good at dissociating while she watched—ignoring the terror and the anguish, focusing instead on what language the children were screaming in, and what she could learn from the appearance of their tormentors despite the masks they wore, and whether anything in the background could provide a clue to the location.

Afterward, though, the dissociation always broke down. Leaving her to live as a person with whatever she’d seen as a cop.

“What cops call hunches,” Trahan said, “FBI hackers call pattern recognition.”

It felt like he was fishing for something. “Is that right, Terry?”

He nodded. “But to make sense of patterns, you need data. The more, the better.”

She looked at him, not sure where he was going with the commentary. Trahan, with his shoulder-length brown hair and matching beard, had a vibe so mellow he seemed perpetually stoned. But he was obviously an exceptional hacker—Livia had seen that herself, and besides, if he weren’t good at what he did, the Bureau wouldn’t have put him on the Child’s Play joint task force. So maybe computer networks weren’t the only things he could see into.

When she didn’t respond, he said, “I’m sorry I can’t help with that. The photos, I mean. The videos. I tried, but . . . I can’t look at them anymore. I don’t know how you can.”

So that’s what he’d been getting at. She might have told him most cops couldn’t look, either. She didn’t blame them. People reacted to horror in different ways. She dealt with her own by an obsession with protecting. A never-ending attempt to save poor doomed Nason by proxy.

She suspected the Seattle PD brass understood the psychology. She’d put enough rapists behind bars for the pattern to be obvious. What the brass didn’t know—what no one knew—was that she also needed to avenge. In her mind, the only thing better than a rapist in prison was a rapist in the ground, and starting fifteen years earlier, when she was still in high school, she’d killed over a dozen.