Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Jacinta Segura
Abundio was at work when the gate bell rang. Before Jacinta could make it to the front door, one of their men was already walking out to investigate.
He returned a moment later with a cardboard document envelope.
“What is it?” She asked, holding her hand out for it.
The men had quickly learned not to buck her orders, per Abundio’s orders. Despite it having Abundio’s name on it, he handed it to her.
“Thank you.” She turned and headed to the home office, intrigued by the fact that it came from Australia and felt inordinately light.
Hmm.
Inside she found a single piece of standard paper, black text, laser-printed, if she had to guess.
At the top was printed Cyrillic text followed by a note in English:
Воздерживаться Тотчас
We have no quarrel with you. If you wish answers, follow in your nephew’s footsteps. Your business with Jake and Carl Peterson and Ray Doland does not involve us. Our business with Ray Dorland has been satisfactorily concluded. This is your only caution.
She grabbed her phone and used the camera to translate the text. Unsurprisingly, it was Russian.
CEASE IMMEDIATELY
She sat back in her chair, studying it, wondering what it meant and suspecting it had something to do with whatever Miranda had also been working on before her “departure.”
The little she’d gleaned about Manuel, mostly overheard bits and pieces when Abundio thought she was asleep or otherwise engaged, drew a picture of highly focused madness. The disappearance of his men, and then the disappearance of Manuel and two of Abundio’s men.
Wait!
She scrolled through the hidden notes app on her personal phone, the phone Abundio didn’t know about, and skimmed through information she’d noted.
Yes! Carl Peterson was one of Abundio’s men who’d disappeared with Manuel.
Excited, she took a picture of the paper and envelope and quickly headed upstairs with them.
Studying her dresser, she pulled open the bottom drawer, where her pre-pregnancy jeans and shorts lay folded, and tucked it underneath the paper lining the bottom of the drawer.
Then she replaced the jeans—nothing looked out of place—and closed the drawer.
Her heart pounded as she headed downstairs again and quickly printed up some geological reports she’d been looking at yesterday from one of their researchers, stapling the pages together.
If Abundio asked about the delivery, she’d have a ready answer to show him. She still ordered reports in his name just to cut through any procrastination in response, and he knew it.
Yet another instance of it.
What she was more interested in was his laptop, which he’d left on the desk in the home office. Opening it, she closed her eyes and set her fingers on the keyboard, trying to remember the keystrokes she’d seen him make to unlock it.
On the third attempt, she got it and quickly noted the password in her phone app.
Glancing at the time, she knew she had less than an hour before he returned home.
She found a thumb drive in her laptop bag.
Onto it she copied information from several folders helpfully put right on the desktop.
That took her very little time, with it all gathered in one place.
She didn’t have time to go through it, but what she did see… intrigued her.
Quickly skimming through the rest of the common folders, she didn’t see anything else that caught her attention.
She’d just powered off his laptop and stuck the thumb drive back in the bottom of her bag when she heard the sound of the gate out back start sliding open.
That was close!
She was walking into the kitchen when he entered from the other direction and turned her cheek to receive his kiss.
“Did I receive anything today?”
She held up the report she was reading. “Just this. It was express mailed.” She handed it to him.
He gave it a cursory glance and returned it to her with a smile. “I do believe that’s for you, love. You’re dealing with that now.”
She returned his smile. “You’re not allowed to retire yet, love,” she said, hating the way that word rolled off her tongue.
He chuckled. “No, that’s not my immediate plan. But thank you for humoring my ways.”
She shrugged. “You obviously have done something right throughout the years. It’d be unwise of me to ignore that.”
He studied her, then sighed. “If only my daughter had felt that way…” He shook his head, as if clearing the thought. “No, never mind. I do not wish to discuss her. What’s for dinner?”
The cook turned from the stove and started telling him while Jacinta held her smile in place.
Think about the money. Think about how much money is at stake.
He’d fallen asleep next to her while she continued reading the report. Once he was out, she knew she had at least an hour before his bladder awakened him.
Disgusting man.
She eased herself out of bed, pulling on her robe and slippers and taking the report with her. If he did find her gone, he would believe her excuse of going downstairs to work for a few minutes because she couldn’t sleep. She’d set that excuse up early on for just this reason.
To investigate while the house was still.
She pulled the thumb drive from her bag, slotted it into her laptop, and copied the info into an innocuous-sounding folder in her documents folder before she wiped the thumb drive clean.
Then she took a few minutes to go through the info, her jaw dropping. She’d thought perhaps this would have something to do with Manuel running the cartel, but this?
This was…
Incredible.
Apparently, based on the dates on the files, Miranda had used Manuel’s information to continue the investigation after he disappeared. And yes, she had notes about Carl Peterson and Mateo Soto disappearing with Manuel on a trip to Florida.
But how does all this involve Russians in Australia?
Abundio’s cell phone was plugged into the charger on the desk and she picked it up, turning it on and unlocking it. That phone she’d had the code to for a while, and he didn’t realize it.
But there was nothing there she could see.
Thinking, she closed her eyes.
Where would he hide burners?
It’d need to be an easy place, but less obvious than in a desk drawer. Somewhere in the office where he could get to them easily.
After a few minutes, she opened her eyes and walked over to the small closet in the room.
There hung a couple of old coats and sweaters of his.
She started going through all the pockets, and it was in the third coat, a heavy, ugly, musty woolen thing whose scent nearly gagged her, where she found two burners in an inside pocket, both powered off.
The same phone passcode didn’t work for either of them. She thought about it for a moment and tried a couple of what felt like obvious combinations, without success.
Then she pulled out her own phone and looked up Miranda’s birthdate and tried the day and month.
The first phone unlocked. And when she tried the second, the code unlocked that one, too.
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…
Babies were notoriously fragile. And it was stupidly easy for them to accidentally suffocate.
Hmm.
She’d have to give more thought to that. And what if she took out life insurance on it? Understandable if it were to be Abundio’s heir.
She was already researching Abundio’s various medications to see if there was a way to trigger a fatal reaction or accidental overdose with them.
I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.