Well, how stupid is that?
The second phone produced evidence, an unusual phone number he’d called a few weeks earlier.When she searched it, it appeared to be an Australian cell phone.
Noting that number, she then powered down both phones and returned them where she’d found them.After shutting down her laptop and stowing it, she stopped by the downstairs powder room to pee before returning to the bedroom.
He didn’t even stir when she returned to bed and carefully slipped under the covers.
Good.
She lay there for a long time, however, struggling not to fidget and toss and turn.Because sleep eluded her.
Namely because of all the information she now possessed and wanted to sift through.
That would have to wait.She’d take every precaution to make sure Abundio didn’t know she’d found it.Whatever this was had most likely gotten Manuel and Miranda both killed, meaning it was important.
Maybe important enough to get her out of this sham of a marriage with her new bank balance preserved and her widowhood assured.
Maybe even before she hit the point of no return and could rid herself of the burden she now carried.
Hey, a girl could dream.
Four days later,she’d finally had time alone to go through the information and realized what she was potentially looking at.
And, careful to use a burner phone of her own, she used it to search for this Ray Dorland person and finally found evidence of him living in Australia.But no way to contact him other than the cell number she’d found in one of the burner phones, and she didn’t want to risk triggering the ire of whoever sent the warning.
Manuel was convinced these…people, or whatever they were, had a population in Idaho.Perhaps more in Florida.
Looking at Miranda’s notes, she’d made a little headway and had even traced the first half of the final flight of Manuel’s plane to Spokane, Washington.
So what happened there?
Whoever the people were, they had to be powerful—or at the very least well-armed—to take down all of Manuel’s men.
And then Abundio’s two best men?
Jacinta was limited in how she could investigate them, retrace Miranda’s footsteps, because she wanted to ensure she didn’t attract attention from Abundio’s technical team.
Miranda likely got careless.Sloppy.Abundio was easy enough to fool, but you had to play the subservient role, and she suspected Miranda was too much like her father to be able to pretend that for very long, even with so much at stake.
Not to mention Miranda likely loved her father.
Jacinta wasn’t hampered by that in the slightest.
Whatever story she had to sell, whatever lie she had to tell—as long as it meant she had control of this company and its wealth when the old man took his last breath?
Worth it.
There had to be ways to break the will.Or to financially juggle the assets in a way that a company she controlled could then take over, while not technically violating the terms of the will.
Hopefully ways that meant she didn’t have to become a mother in the process
She shuddered, dreading carrying to term.If forced to last that long, she’d make sure to ask the doctor for a planned C-section and to knock her out, so she didn’t have to endure it.
At least they could afford nannies, so she wouldn’t be tethered to it.
Ooh…
Babieswerenotoriously fragile.And it was stupidly easy for them to accidentally suffocate.
