Chapter 50
married a thief
Lorien
Over his veal parmigiana, I tell him about my weekend. He’s livid when he hears about the waitress and literally makes me get up, grab my purse—from my house, mind you—and hand over the police report. “You’re not going to ruin her, right?”
“Ruin? Not exactly. Make her next year hell? Definitely.”
Is it wrong that I want him to? Yes. Totally wrong, but there’s a part of me that desperately wants her to get what’s coming to her. If only because she needs to stay away from my brother.
“You’re smiling. Are you coming around to what being with me means?”
I hold his gaze and offer him a smile. “It didn’t take much coming around when I— I mean, yeah.”
He smiles into his pasta in an almost boyish way.
I’m sure he assumes sex. I mean the care he shows me. He’s protective and kind. He’s good for me and good to me.
“Call and check on your mom, Wifey. When you’re done, I’ll tell you about Wyoming.”
I can’t believe I forgot. “Okay. Leave the dishes for me. You cooked.”
I’m sliding away, when he grabs my wrist and tugs me toward him, leveraging me down to his mouth. He kisses me deep, with tongue, and groans as I scrape the back of his head with my nails.
He’s spoiling me. It’s too much.
And I never want it to stop.
Thirty minutes later, I’m done with my pacing. I’ve hung up with Mom and Dad and have the full download on her next steps medically. Surgery this week, rest then rehab for the muscles around the bone. Something about being over fifty.
“Well, it seems everyone I know will be doing the recovery thing.” The word dies on my tongue as I wander back to the living room in time to see Liam with Poe on his chest talking to her as he bottle-feeds her.
I swear the man is every girl’s fantasy and he doesn’t have a single clue to that effect.
“Yeah. So surgery then?” His eyes find mine.
“On Wednesday morning. Dad’s worried. Mom is not.”
“That’s his job.”
I guess. I sit on the sofa far enough away to not feel his body heat. He grabs the leg of my shorts and tugs, but doesn’t press me to his bad hip.
“So… Poe? How did that come to be?”
He levels me with his gaze as the kitten kneads his shirt. “How much honesty do you want?”
He’s asked me that twice. Last time, I couldn’t handle it. How bad could it be? “All of it. Hit me.”
“I found her when I was locked in a safe room. I’m guessing she came in through the return air duct. It was uncovered and the only real option. I don’t assume the fucker who threw me in there was in the business of animal torture.”
“Just human torture?”
“Something like that.”
He relays to me what happened on Friday and Saturday and I’m lucky I don’t hyperventilate with the number of times I gasp. Poe falls asleep at some point during the story, burrowing into his chest. Her belly is full and her purrs fill the room.
“So, do you think he lured you there to kill you? Or do you think you—” I shake my head. “Would he do that? There’s evidence. The police would have evidence.”
“I need to dig deeper into the man. Something’s off in my gut. Ayla had the same questions you do, and I don’t ever overlook it when smart people pose good questions.”
“You think it’s a good question?” I sit up and my voice rises. “You think it makes sense that someone would lure you out of state in order to murder you? You think that’s reasonable?”
His voice is steady. “I don’t like it. I don’t want it to be the case, but I don’t think Barnett is above it. Whole truth?”
“Whole truth,” I answer with a sigh.
“I won’t put anything past a man who offered me money to murder someone.”
“What?” My voice echoes off the ceiling and wakes the cat who immediately eyes me and hisses. “What?” I say quieter as if she’ll understand my correction.
“I figure if he was willing to ask me to kill for money, he wouldn’t have a moral opposition to paying someone else to kill me.”
“He asked you that this weekend?”
He shakes his head.
“He asked you that in the past”—I use my hand to do this large arc from left to right—“and you still went to meet with him knowing his character?”
“You didn’t have a problem when I married a thief.” He grins at me.
“Do not equate me with whoever this Barnett person is. Besides, how would he know you would come?”
“He couldn’t.” His eyes go vacant as he stares off. He gently sets Poe in my lap as he stands to pace. She’s none too happy about the change of lodging and jumps from me to the warm spot he vacated, circles twice and curls in on herself.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I’d told him no. I told him I had family obligations.” He stares poignantly at me. “I contacted him after you asked me not to go to Illinois with you.”
“You reached out to him?”
He nods.
“And he was home and hadn’t made other plans? What about his family?”
His eyes narrow. “The house is new to him. It’s an investment property, one of several, but it’s not a home, and he has no family to speak of.”
“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.
He dragged 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.
And he knows where I live.