Carmelita’s missing.She’s run off to find you and headed for the border with a migrant caravan. Come quickly.
Leanna had called her distant relative, a second cousin, right away and heard the confusing story. The baby girl she’d given up for adoption, the one she was told had died, was not only alive, but thirteen years old and missing.
Supposedly, she’d sent a DNA sample to an online ancestry database and found out she was not only adopted, but had a high likelihood of immediate family in the United States.
The weeping and crying cousin, Ana Bandera, had asked Leanna to wire ten thousand dollars to help in the search. Leanna had done so without question, but when she asked Ana to send her pictures of Carmelita and to contact authorities, Ana stopped answering her phone.
That had been almost a week ago.
She hated to think the person she’d trusted to raise her baby had not only lied to her about her baby’s death, but was now scamming her. No, she’d be more charitable.
Ana was a kindhearted person. She needed money for an unexplained reason. Maybe her mortgage was foreclosing, or she had to pay for a funeral.
Jeepers creepers. If Ana was so kindhearted, why the lies about her precious daughter being suddenly alive? There had to be truth in it, right?
What if Ana had been blackmailed or shaken down by gangsters? What would await Leanna should she show up?
Leanna owed it to herself to find out firsthand. She’d never rest if there was a chance her baby had lived.
It was better to go incognito with the aid of a tough guy than to announce anything to her friends and family.
She’d been a fool to call Bad Boys for Hire. Too many of her friends knew guys who either worked there or used to be escorts. It had been a knee-jerk, off-the-cuff call.
No more mistakes.
Leanna needed to take a page from the discreet Denton and trek out on her own. After hiring her protection, she’d simply drop off the face of the planet.
She had to if she didn’t want to spook the unknown people behind Carmelita’s disappearance, and have a shot at finding the truth—that her precious little girl was not in the box of ashes she kept in a bookcase behind her Bible, but was alive, if not exactly well.
