She scooted forward and bumped against his pelvis. It surprised him-he was ready for her to try to pull away, not to push closer. Before he could figure out what was happening or how to react, she jackknifed her body, slamming her legs into his back and driving his torso forward into her arms. She underhooked one arm and overhooked the other and scissored her legs behind his back, then hung on for a moment while he struggled to shake her loose, catching her breath, getting her bearings, waiting for her opportunity. He was strong and managed to slam her back, but she let him-it didn’t matter, the mattress absorbed the impact.
He slammed her again, then a third time. “Fucking bitch,” he said, and she could hear his breathing was already getting labored. “Let me go or I’ll fuck you up for real.”
He tried to reach down with his right arm, and she knew instinctively he was going for a weapon. She kept the overhook tight, tying up the arm, and waited.
He went to slam her yet again. She felt it coming-he obviously didn’t know what else to do, and was flailing now. As soon as his body tensed, she opened her guard, hooked one of his knees, and flipped him on the bed, rolling on top of him into the mount. He had no training, and instinctively scrambled to his stomach to try to establish some sort of base. She let him, taking his back. Keeping her left leg across his stomach, she reached around his throat with her right hand, took the left side of his shirt collar, shot her right knee up into the space between his arm and the back of his neck, and leaned back while jamming the knee forward, forcing his throat forward into the shirt cloth cutting across it. A variation of okuri eri jime, a strangle she liked. A sound came from his throat, like broken glass grinding, and then the cloth cut in more deeply, silencing him. He groped back for her with his left arm, and she swam her own left inside it, keeping it away from her. His right arm was trapped under his body, and now all he could do to save himself was twitch and vibrate. Which was not going to be enough.
“You going to fuck me up now?” she panted, straining to crank the choke tighter. “You going to fuck me up?” His left arm waved weakly, as though requesting a timeout or a do-over, then went rigid, and then went limp, along with the rest of him.
She held him like that for a long time. She could have let him go. If she had, he probably would have wakened at some point after she had gone. But she didn’t want him to waken. She knew she wasn’t the first woman he’d done this to.
But she could damn well make sure she was the last.
48-THEN
Back at her dorm, she examined herself in the mirror. Her hands were shaking. Thank God she’d moved into a single for sophomore year; it would have been bad to have to explain her obvious distress to a roommate.
No scratches she could see. So presumably, no skin under his nails. And she’d thought to push him off the bed and roll up the bed cover, which she’d left in front of a homeless encampment on the way back to campus. The police wouldn’t find it. Or, if they did, hopefully it would be contaminated with the DNA of the last thousand guests who had stayed at the hotel, and of the homeless who were using it now, too.
She’d been right about a knife-a folder, clipped inside his right jeans pocket. In plain sight, if she’d thought to look for it before he’d belted her. All right, a good lesson, thankfully learned at little cost. She hadn’t touched it-better to let the police find it. It would make him look like more of a bad guy.
Still, there were a dozen things, a hundred, she knew from her forensics classes that she hadn’t had the presence of mind to consider at the time. She hadn’t planned things properly. She hadn’t prepared. She’d always known that one of these encounters could get out of control, but she hadn’t anticipated something happening so… suddenly. With someone who gave no warning, but just instantly flipped a switch to violence and rape. Not as a way of getting something else he wanted, but because violence and rape were what he wanted.
She breathed deeply, in and out, calming herself. Her left eye was beginning to swell, and she put ice on it. That would be explainable, at least. She must have taken a shot to the eye at practice without realizing at the time. It had swelled up afterward. It happened. And it would hardly be the first time she’d been marked by bruises and abrasions. Judo was a contact sport.
What if someone had seen her? She hadn’t gone to the front desk with him, so she was safe that way, at least. But what if the police knew she’d met him at the bar, and asked witnesses for a description? And the marks on his neck-would they know someone had used a judo strangle? That could lead them to the SJSU team. They would see her eye, and ask where she was when the guy was killed. Studying in my room, she would tell them, but would that hold up?
She paced back and forth, naked. She’d tossed the panties in a sewer. Wouldn’t want to have to explain how they’d gotten torn that way. She had marks on her left outer and right inner thigh. That made sense-the guy had been right-handed, and had ripped the panties off right to left. The elastic around the leg holes must have held for a moment and cut her before giving way. Again, explainable as a minor judo injury. Or at least, she hoped, not provable otherwise.
Worst case, she would explain what happened. Claim self-defense. Which is what it had been, of course. At least up to a point. She’d say she hadn’t meant to kill him, but when she’d released the strangle-which she’d been forced to use to save her own life-she couldn’t revive him. She panicked and fled. Not good, but maybe good enough. But even if she avoided prison, the thought of being some sort of campus tabloid fodder was horrifying. People would ask questions. Her past, at least parts of it, would be revealed. Maybe people would even wonder what had really happened to her revered adopted father, whether she was suffering from PTSD. And what would all of it mean for her career prospects as a cop?
She considered every angle she could think of. Maybe she should have taken his wallet, to make it look like a robbery? She hadn’t thought of it at the time-she wanted to touch as little as possible, disturb the scene as little as possible, something she knew about from her classes. She wasn’t sure now which would have been the better course, but she hadn’t considered it when it mattered.
Eventually, her exhaustion and the post-adrenaline backlash began to overwhelm her. Overall, she thought there was a better-than-even chance the body wouldn’t lead back to her. But she couldn’t be sure. She should have been more careful.
Well, next time, she would be.
49-THEN
It was on the news the next night. Parker “Park” Crader, forty, of Campbell, California, was found dead in a motel room. Police believed a sex worker had lured him into the room, where a waiting accomplice ambushed and strangled him. Crader had a record: two charges of rape. Both times it had been a sex worker in a motel room, and both times he had pled down to misdemeanor assault. He’d been out of prison for less than a year. The working theory was that this was payback from a victim who was connected to, or could afford, some kind of muscle for hire. It didn’t seem to occur to the police that a woman could have strangled Crader by herself.
The police spokesman said they were following up leads, but Livia had a feeling he was talking about the women who had accused Crader of rape before, and presumably those women would have alibis, or otherwise be impossible to place in the motel room at the time of Crader’s death. Everyone knew SJPD was overworked-the city had a serious gang problem, among other things. She thought of Rick, of what he’d told her of his job, how he worked leads and prioritized cases. Unless something panned out right away, she couldn’t see a homicide detective spending a lot of time trying to solve the killing of someone like Crader. Her assessment of better-than-even chances of not getting caught went to more like ten-to-one.