“So he asked you to go and then he met you there even when, or if, he was elsewhere because…?”
“Because the house needed securing.”
I stand to pace as well. He’s near the far wall, me around the mouth of the hall.
“Did the house need securing or did you? And was he there already or did he go there because you went?”
He lifts a finger, walks past me through the hall, and into the room across from his bedroom. He returns with a laptop and sits gingerly at the dining room table.
He thumbs something into his phone and then begins typing in earnest on his laptop.
He’s silent and focused and I don’t interrupt. My brain has ideas, but instead of voicing them, I head to the kitchen to find the dishes already done and all the leftovers put away.
“You were supposed to leave the cleanup for me,” I grumble under my breath, but Liam doesn’t acknowledge it.
I slip out the back door, through the back yards to my townhouse. I grab a change of clothes for tonight and another for tomorrow and the bare minimum makeup, returning to find the man exactly where I left him, fingers flying over the keyboard.
Sliding a hand over his good shoulder, I say, “I’m going to take a shower. You good?”
He lifts his chin in answer, wrapping an arm around my hip, and I plant a soft kiss on his lips. “Enjoy.”
The keys clacking follow me all the way to the bedroom.
Liam
Rental—it’s a fucking rental.
The paperwork shows it’s the home of an established Silicon Valley tech couple who spend a few weeks each fall and winter there but will share with others of their ilk when those people can afford the price tag.
The price is steep. We’re talking thousands per night. The legal jargon is tight. And the kicker? It’s referral only.
So who might Briggs Barnett be connected with to make this happen? Especially if the agreement has his name on it.
Only one thing can be concluded from this… his intent was me left for dead, and for my body to be discovered at another time. Well, there’s another corpse there now, unless No Neck was playing possum. Or unless they came back for him
I’m pissed. Obviously. But how stupid are you to rent for a week in your own damn name when forensics would put time of death in the window.
Yes, the rental agreement is iron-clad, but Wyoming won’t allow a murder to go unprosecuted because legally, the corporation wants to keep their renter safe. No company would conceal murder unless the money is right.
I click through to another screen and begin crawling the web for financial links between Barnett and the Silicon Valley couple, their corporations, and his.
The first hit is too close for comfort. The wife and Briggs sit on the board of two charities. Both deal with children of violence. The web site whitewashes the stories, but digging deeper into exposés on how they fund and who they fund shows not just children who were orphaned by violence, but in more than a handful of cases, financial support for children of serial killers, serial mutilators, serial rapists, and the like.
A Briggs Barnett search of the dark web shows something that trips off alarm bells in my soul.
His mom died in prison for some truly heinous crimes. She lured kids into her house on their way home from school, tortured them, dismembered them, and buried them in her dirt floor basement. This happened consistently until the father of a missing child refused to be stopped and broke into her home, finding evidence of his son’s body and rampaged on her. Hedragged her to the police station and refused to be quiet until they brought in equipment to test for human remains.
He was right, though it cost him his sanity. And his life. Being right didn’t bring his son back and knowing what she’d done drove him crazy.
There were eighteen kids in that basement. One of which was Barnett’s younger brother.
Her name was Lola Briggs…
And Briggs Barnett, whose name at birth was Roger, was her accomplice. He helped lay the traps and lure the kids.
He got rich with some investing after a “charity” wanted to fund his education after high school, wrongly assuming he was the victim. He was successful in college and ran an impressive side hustle. He taught others how to extort, as well, skimming a cut off the top of their earnings.
He’s a genius. He has unlimited resources. He’s a psychopath.
