Even then, likely not. This could behernew empire. Certainly, the corporation her father had started and built would serve as the lynchpin in her personal success going forward, but this new thing…
This…strangething…
This would beallhers.
Her future legacy.
She smiled as she thought about the potential power that might one day be hers. Not just monetary and political power—literal power.
Manuel was an idiot.
Past-tense, because of course she believed he was dead. Her cousins Manuel and Raul had both been wastes of flesh. Had she been in their positions, she would have aliteralempire at her fingertips by now.
She also would have had them killed long ago.
But they’d been older than her, and men. So of course there were different standards. Allowances made that she as a woman never could have survived. They’d wasted their opportunity.
Certainly, she understood why her father walked away from the cartel and turned his back on his siblings when their father died. Building a life on the fringes of society with an illicit undertaking wasn’t an easy way to earn a living no matter how lucrative it might be.
Still, the money was nice. Her father had mastered the art of bending people to his will commercially and financially and even legislatively sometimes, but without the worries of constantly looking over his shoulder to spot if law enforcement or competing cartels were bearing down on him.
She reached for her phone and tapped one of the contacts, waiting while the call connected. “Aunt Lucia? It’s Miranda. I just wanted to call and check on you…”
Twenty minutes later, Miranda finally managed to get off the phone with the woman but she had answers.
Unfortunately, it left Miranda with still more questions.
Manuel was still out of contact, and Miranda now felt absolutely certain he was dead, even though she didn’t share those thoughts with her aunt.
What she wasn’t certain of, no matter what she’d told her father, was if Carl and Mateo, the two men who’d accompanied Manuel on this useless little joyride, were also dead. Or if they’d had a hand in Manuel’s “disappearance.”
She had no proof of any of their fates.
But from what she could ascertain, Mateo’s little sister, Brianna, was no longer attending university. In fact, she was apparently no longer in the country. And Carl and Mateo had been oddly agreeable about the entire venture. Not immediately deriding Manuel’s ideas, like the average person might, but almost as if they held insider knowledge they didn’t wish to to reveal.
That posed a conundrum for Miranda.
Because to pique her father’s interest in allowing further inquiries into this meant a delicate balancing act between posing reasonable questions he could swallow in terms of the answers possibly protecting their business, while herself not appearing overly eager to answer those questions. To defer to him totally and let him believe it was his decision.
Especially since she’d let him believe she was fine with ending that line of inquiry due to the risk of drawing unwanted attention upon them from any sector.
She needed a viable reason to resurrect the inquiries in such a way as to make sense to her father.
The way she’d left it, she’d told her father she didn’t know much about the girl. The truth was, of course she did, and she’d known which university she’d attended.
Her father might not have cared about facts such as that, but Miranda did. She was fully aware that vulnerable points such as little sisters could easily be leveraged against people, and had Carl and Mateo ever needed prodding, or appeared to show signs of moving against them, Miranda wanted the advantage of knowing exactly who and where the girl was.
After thinking about it for a few minutes, she finally hit upon an idea and opened her personal laptop.
Twenty minutes later, she had a shiny new fake e-mail address with which she’d sent her public work e-mail address a message.
My name is Rocio Soto, and I am a cousin of Brianna and Mateo Soto. I have been attempting to contact them for months without success. I know Brianna once said that Mateo worked for your company. I apologize for this intrusion, but letters are returning unopened, and when I traveled to Mexico and visited their apartment not only were they not living there, but the manager said they had abandoned it. I am concerned about them, naturally. I need to discuss my father’s estate with them because there was a sum left to them and I wish to make sure they receive it. If you have any information about them that you could give me, or if you could please contact them and ask them to call me or message me at this e-mail, I would be most grateful…
The number was an Internet phone number she created, located in Texas supposedly, but it forwarded to a burner phone her father wasn’t aware she had. She’d purchased it over a year ago on a trip to the States, and she used it hooked to Wi-Fi, but the calls looked like they were from the US. She’d also created an online profile to attach to the e-mail address that said the person was in Texas, and she used a screen capture of a stock photo image for the picture.
Her father was eighty-two years old and far from computer savvy. He didn’t even like using his smartphone.
The chances of him suspecting anything were slim. The chances of him suspecting her being behind it were even slimmer.
