Skull Face was watching her, seemingly intrigued that she had given her open can to Nason. But Livia didn’t care about that. The smell was making her head swim. She pulled the ring back just as the man had done, and the top of the can peeled off like a magic trick. She dug in and winced-the edge of the can was sharp, like a knife. But she was too hungry to care about a cut. She brought the can up, tilted her head back, and poured the contents into her mouth. She thought she had never tasted anything so delicious-balls of meat, some kind of noodles, and a tasty, tangy sauce. She actually moaned with relief and realized the other children were making a similar sound.
The men watched and waited while the children ate. It took a while because the children were wiping and licking every last drop of sauce out of the cans. A few of them cut their fingers on the edges, as Livia had done, or even their tongues, but none seemed to care very much beyond a momentary wince. Livia showed Nason to be careful, then handed over her can when she had finished eating from it so Nason could lick it clean, keeping the top for herself.
One of the men walked around with one of the buckets, indicating to the children that they were to throw their empty cans in it. Livia finished licking the top and was ready to throw it in the bucket when she realized-the edge of the top was so sharp, it could be useful as a weapon. She glanced at the men, saw that no one was watching, and quickly slid the top into the back pocket of her pants.
Just in case.
5-NOW
In a little under an hour and a half, she was in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood, once a thriving center of manufacturing, now an unlikely amalgam of small industry, hipster eateries, and container shipping yards wedged between Interstate 5 to the east and the Duwamish Waterway to the west.
She rode in along the overpass above the Union Pacific rail yard, cut across to Airport Way, and drifted into the gravel parking lot of the office trailer park at Corson Avenue, where she killed the engine and dismounted. Tentative yellowish light seeped over from the sodium-vapor streetlamps nearby, but beyond that, the area was pooled in shadows. She raised the helmet visor and tasted a morning moisture in the air, heard the whoosh of the earliest commuter vehicles on the freeway overpass above and behind her. Beneath the overpass, at the bases of the giant support columns, were a few cardboard shelters, their inhabitants silent, doubtless sleeping.
She unlocked her trailer, which she rented under a fictitious name and paid for in cash, rolled in the bike, and removed the magnetically attached stolen license plate. Then she pulled off the backpack, shoved the plate and the florescent vest into it, re-shouldered the pack, secured the trailer, and headed south along the sidewalk.
Thirty yards down, she paused to remove the helmet. She shook out her hair and glanced back. Nothing stirred. She put the helmet in the pack and moved off again.
Five minutes later, she reached her building, a three-story brick colossus dominating the western half of her fantastically misnamed dead-end street-South Garden. Built a hundred years earlier as a can and bottle manufacturer, it was now shared by an auto-wrecking operation, a metal recycling plant, and a machine shop run by the guy who owned the building. The guy had been there for decades, and had suffered enough break-ins that a few years earlier he had been thrilled to rent the third-floor storage space over his operation as a loft to the investigating SPD officer. The space-three thousand square feet cluttered with unused machine tools, featuring a kitchenette so spare it might embarrass a college student and a bathroom not much bigger than what you could find on an airplane-wasn’t well suited to human habitation, but it was perfect for Livia. She liked being on the border of the polluted Duwamish, with its crumbling brick warehouses, their windows shattered, corrugated eaves rusting like dried blood, smokestacks inert and anachronistic. And the area’s solitude, particularly late at night, was unmatched. Best of all was the access to tools she could use for motorcycle maintenance and repairs. The property developers were working with city hall to turn the warehouses into condos and upscale offices with views of the Duwamish, and one day, she knew, she would be sad to see her ghostly, brooding neighbors blazing with light and life. Well, nothing lasted forever. She knew that better than most.
There were multiple CCTV cameras installed around the building, trained on the doors, garage bays, and ground-floor windows, all of which were also alarmed. Ordinarily, the security wasn’t a problem, but after killing someone like Barnett, she didn’t want to be recorded entering at an odd hour. Late-night coming and going could be explained, of course, if it ever came to that, but it was always safer to have nothing to explain to begin with.
She set down the backpack and removed a mountaineering grappling hook-four steel prongs she had coated with spray rubber and attached to a length of knotted climbing rope. She re-shouldered the pack, took hold of the rope, and swung the grappling hook up onto the fire-escape landing. The hooks caught with a quiet thud, and she was up the rope, arm over arm, in under five seconds. She paused on the first landing to reel in the rope, scooted noiselessly up the remaining sets of stairs, raised the window, and slipped into her apartment.
The lights were off, but there were so many windows exposed to the city’s ambient glow that the space was never really dark. Everything was exactly as she’d left it: mattress on the floor in the corner. Desk and chair alongside it. Dresser and wardrobe opposite. Next to the window and fire escape, a small shrine. Several judo and jiu-jitsu gis hanging from pegs on the wall. A cinderblock-and-plank bookshelf containing a row of volumes, among them Alice Vachss’s Sex Crimes, and The Essential Abolitionist, John Vanek’s comprehensive guide to human trafficking. Everything else belonged to the shop-drill presses, grinders, lathes, and the other tools of the trade, most of it older, put in storage here on the third floor as the shop acquired newer, more efficient equipment.
She checked the mobile phone she’d left on the rug alongside the mattress to corroborate that she’d been in all night. Not that it would come to that, but she’d put away enough rapists based on cell phone metadata to know not to take the chance. No messages. Good, everything was good. Just a few small matters to take care of, and she could relax.
She opened a window on the southwest side of the loft and turned on the industrial fan facing out from it. The electric motor and loud rush of the blades brought the still space to life, and a cool breeze immediately drifted past her as air was drawn in from the fire-escape window and sucked out by the fan. She grabbed a steel bucket and placed it under a shredder, moving quickly and easily, the layout and the machinery all comfortable to her, familiar. The press of a button, and the shredder started up with a loud whine, its twin shafts spinning toward each other, the teeth of each sliding smoothly into the grooves of its counterpart. She tossed in the stolen plate. There was a brief metal shriek, and then the plate was gone, reduced to confetti-sized scraps deposited at the bottom of the bucket.
She shut off the shredder and carried the bucket over to an oxyacetylene torch next to the fan. She attached a rosebud tip, pulled on a pair of welder’s goggles, fired up the torch, and melted the license plate scraps, keeping the torch moving to make sure she didn’t go through the bottom of the pail. The contractor bag with the wig and other potentially contaminated materials went in next. She scoured everything down with the 6,000-degree flame. Billows of black smoke rose from the pail like an evil spirit, but the fan sucked it all away and expelled it, and in seconds, the contents of the pail had been reduced to an undifferentiated, glowing lump.