Proof (Caroline Auden Book 2)

by C. E. Tobisman

  “He wasn’t always like this,” Caroline said quietly.

  “Everyone here has a story,” said the coordinator, looking up in the direction Hitch had disappeared. “I’m sure he does, too.”

  Caroline appreciated the invitation to tell her uncle’s tale. To give his identity more contour and nuance than the drunk, homeless man they’d just witnessed throwing a tantrum.

  “My uncle used to be a police detective,” she began. “A good one, too. He cracked some huge cases back before . . .” Caroline shook her head. “He wasn’t the stereotypical detective whose job drove him to drink. He always drank too much.”

  The coordinator inclined his head in understanding. “I’ve seen people dig themselves out of very deep holes. You never know, he might even get his old job back someday.”

  Caroline gave a humorless laugh. “There’s no chance of that.” Her uncle had failed enough people enough times that there’d be no chance of any return. He’d missed appointments, meetings, and even court hearings until everyone had, like her, stopped relying on him. His last investigation had almost gotten several people killed, including his own partner.

  “Then he could retrain. Many of these charities have job-training programs.” The coordinator tilted his head toward the rows of newly piled pamphlets. Then he withdrew.

  Caroline considered what kind of work her uncle could do if he wasn’t a police detective. Security guard? Private investigator? It was nice to dream about a different future for him.

  Opening the Oasis pamphlet again, she flipped to the page about job-training programs.

  The list of skills the charity taught to the homeless was long.

  Automobile repair. Carpentry. Plumbing. Cooking.

  But it was the last job on the list that caught Caroline’s attention.

  Certified nursing assistant.

  “Damn,” she breathed.

  “Patricia Amos came from Oasis, didn’t she?” Caroline asked. It was her second phone call to Harold DuBois in one day, and it promised to be even more unpleasant than the first.

  “Yes, but we’ve gotten many CNAs through the Oasis training program. They’ve always been very good.” Harold’s voice held a defensive note.

  “Do you always let them proselytize to residents about Oasis?” Caroline asked. When she’d seen the training program listed in the Oasis pamphlet, she’d known how her grandmother had learned about the charity. Her confused, demented, failing grandmother.

  “We let them educate residents about their programs,” Harold said, as if it were a distinction with a difference. “We also let other charities put on presentations to our residents from time to time,” he added.

  “But other charities don’t provide you with caregivers who develop ongoing relationships with your residents.” Caroline recalled Nancy Feinstein’s annoyance at the overly solicitous CNAs at The Pastures. Maybe her suspicions about their motives had been well founded.

  “Oasis isn’t doing anything wrong,” Harold said. His tone begged for agreement. “So long as no one unduly influences our residents, they can leave their money wherever they want. You know who Duncan Reed is, right?”

  Caroline’s brow wrinkled at the non sequitur. Of course she knew who Duncan Reed was. For five decades, he’d hosted a children’s show. With his twinkling blue eyes and Irish accent, his cable-knit sweater and penny loafers, Duncan Reed had embodied neighborly values to generations of viewers. He’d suffered a stroke, she recalled, that ended his TV career.

  “What’s he got to do with this?” she asked.

  “Oasis is Mr. Reed’s charity.”

  Caroline considered Harold’s reasoning. Duncan Reed’s television persona exuded kindness. As far as she knew, he was a decent man. But the fact that Oasis was his charity didn’t exonerate it of providing caregivers that proselytized to vulnerable elders in the hope of receiving bequests. Nor did it exonerate nursing home administrators of letting it happen.

  “What’s in it for you?” Caroline asked quietly.

  “Nothing,” Harold said, “except that sometimes Oasis hosts social programs and clinics for our residents. It’s helpful to us.” He didn’t have to explain why. The new floors told the tale. Oasis’s assistance left The Pastures with a little extra money in its budget.

  Harold was corrupted, Caroline realized. Soft corruption, to be sure. Not a bribe. Not exactly. He’d simply succumbed to a modest monetary incentive to think favorably of Oasis.

  “How many other wills have you seen like my grandmother’s?” Caroline asked. Harold had told her that nursing home policy required him to retain signed copies of residents’ wills and to read them with the residents’ heirs. He’d know if there were others leaving funds to Oasis.

  “I’ve seen a few each year,” Harold admitted. “But no one’s ever complained. We’re talking about people who would’ve left their money to the SPCA. Not that there’s anything wrong with dogs or anything . . .”

  Harold left a space in the conversation to laugh, but Caroline didn’t.

  The opportunities for abuse were simply stunning. If Harold had been corrupted by Oasis’s soft incentives to allow caregivers into his facility to educate residents, how many other nursing homes had succumbed to similar incentives? There were ten facilities in Southern California operating under The Pastures’ banner. Had Oasis placed caregivers at all of them? And what about all the other nursing homes in Los Angeles—was Oasis operating those?

  “Are you going to sue us?” Harold asked.

  Caroline considered the question. Depending on whether Oasis was pressuring vulnerable elders to give gifts to it, she could imagine pursuing a suit against Oasis. But what about The Pastures? The nursing home might’ve been tacitly complicit. That was certainly bad. But was she really going to sue The Pastures?

  “No, but I’m going to need some information from you,” Caroline said.

  As Caroline rode the elevator up to her office, her mind chewed through questions like a hungry termite. Was Oasis’s education of nursing home residents really a benign practice, as Harold had suggested, or was it as shady as Caroline’s instincts told her it was? And who was that other Patricia Amos—the nurse in Burbank? Was she connected to Oasis?

  Stepping into her small office suite, Caroline was so preoccupied she almost tripped over her assistant.

  Amy Garber sat cross-legged on the floor, organizing files. In a lavender blouse, yellow headband, and white scarf, she looked like an iris on fairy dust.

  “I’ve got some great stuff for you on Gonzalez,” she said, grinning up at her boss.

  It took Caroline’s brain a few seconds to catch up. The guardianship. Right.

  “What did you find?” Caroline asked.

  “That place where Gonzalez told Mateo to play spot-the-cop really is a storage facility. Cooperated Storage. The manager’s name is Stanton Escovar. He was a font of information once I told him I was thinking of renting space there.” Haloed in blonde curls, Amy’s face was the picture of innocence. Her eyes, however, glittered with the subterfuge.

  Caroline’s conscience gave a weak protest. Initiating Amy into the ways of social engineering might have been a sin. But learning how to find information was part of learning about tech, and Amy wanted to learn all she could from Caroline. One of those lessons included the principle that gaining a gatekeeper’s trust was the easiest way to obtain access to information.

  “Also, Gonzalez has a girlfriend named Floriana Perez,” Amy said.

  “We already knew about Perez from Gonzalez’s guardianship petition.”

  “True, but what we didn’t know is that her family owns a shipping business called Perez Shipping. They handle all of Gonzalez’s shipments of lingerie down to Mexico.”

  “Lingerie?” Caroline raised an amused eyebrow.

  “That’s what Gonzalez’s apparel business sells.” Amy smiled. “Gonzalez has a wholesaler downtown. He buys a bunch of panties and teddies and whatnot, sells some at his store, and ship
s some to Mexico.”

  “There’s nothing illegal about selling underwear.” Caroline shrugged, continuing toward the door of the office. She didn’t have time to plumb the depths of Gonzalez’s panties business. Not now, anyway.

  But Amy followed Caroline to the door of her office.

  “Are you going to tell your boy Boyd about what I found out?” she asked.

  Caroline turned, scowling at her assistant.

  “Boyd isn’t my boy,” Caroline protested.

  “Yeah, but he wants to be.” Amy kept smiling.

  Caroline tried to think of a comeback, but her mind was uncharacteristically blank. That Boyd insisted on having her come down to the DA’s office in person suggested Amy was right.

  “Anyway, I hope you can use some of the stuff I found,” Amy said. “I know it isn’t exactly on point, but I was hoping the girlfriend angle might help.” She paused. “Here’s where you pat me on the head and tell me I’m doing great for a nonlawyer.”

  “You’re doing better than great. For a nonlawyer,” Caroline dutifully repeated.

  And it was true. Despite Amy’s indifference toward the law, she’d become a great legal assistant. She’d needed work after her son, Liam, had fallen ill, and she’d left her job at a title company to care for him. By the time Liam had recovered, Caroline had needed help at her firm. That many of Caroline’s clients were poor made payment of full wages difficult, but Amy had agreed to take part of her compensation in tutoring. Amy wanted to become a software engineer. Having worked as one herself, Caroline would teach Amy the skills she’d need to enter the field.

  And then Caroline would be alone.

  She tried not to think too deeply about it.

  Stepping into her office, Caroline felt the tension leave her shoulders at the sight of her familiar things. Two large monitors and a state-of-the-art computer sat on a long, industrial desk. Speed. Bandwidth. Functionality. All were worth paying for. All were necessary to her.

  Though she was a lawyer, Caroline had a skill set that most lawyers didn’t share.

  Her eyes traveled across the walls of her office.

  There were two framed diplomas. One for undergrad. One for law school.

  A third frame held a printed circuit board. Flat and shaped like a skull the size of a pancake, the Def Con 23 badge was one of many that Caroline had hacked at the famous tech conference. This badge had been the hardest. After hours of experimentation, she’d discovered it had a built-in microphone. She’d won the hacking competition by attaching a Secure Digital card reader to the back of the badge and modifying the code so that it would store the microphone input, effectively turning the badge into a listening device.

  Of all the diplomas on the wall, the Def Con badge was the one that mattered most to Caroline. It reminded her that she could think her way out of anything.

  Now she tried to think her way out of her current problem.

  She had an appointment with an assistant DA in a little over an hour. The meeting was more than a chance to figure out whether Gonzalez was a criminal. It was also an irresistible opportunity to bring the prying fingers of the state into her quest to discover whether Oasis was engaging in elder abuse.

  Tasked with representing the state in all criminal proceedings, assistant DAs could snoop and prosecute as their suspicions dictated. Caroline knew she could get her old classmate to help her with the Mateo Hidalgo matter. Ensuring a child’s safety would be an easy sell. But convincing Boyd to investigate a charity associated with a beloved TV personality was another matter. To attract Boyd’s interest, she needed to intrigue him. And to do that, she needed a hook.

  Caroline began her research with one of the hotly burning questions in her mind: Who was Patricia Amos?

  Social media provided a golden road to the center of a person’s identity.

  Caroline searched the name “Patricia Amos” in Los Angeles.

  She retrieved no hits showing the face of the red-haired caregiver. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Instagram. Not even Tinder.

  Caroline cocked her head at the screen.

  In the modern world, it was unlikely for someone to have no social media presence.

  But what did it mean? Was Patricia Amos using an alias, like her middle name? Or was it a fake identity? And if so, were other CNAs trained by Oasis using fake names, too?

  There was no way to know.

  What about that other Patricia Amos—the one from Burbank? Who was she?

  Caroline pulled up the personnel file of the woman with short brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses.

  This Patricia Amos had graduated from nursing school fifteen years earlier and had started working as a licensed vocational nurse at Meadowlark Convalescent Hospital eight years ago. Nothing in the file described her employment history during the first seven years of her career. But nothing suggested any connection to Oasis, either. Or to the other Patricia Amos.

  Another dead end.

  Caroline tried another angle. Oasis’s CNA-training program.

  She found nothing illuminating when the program had started or who had started it.

  But she did find that Oasis’s job-training programs were a favorite of city government, which regularly gave it grants to help fund projects designed to put Oasis’s job trainees to work.

  The city’s press releases touting the grants invoked Duncan Reed, who had apparently worked side by side with Oasis volunteers to feed the poor and the destitute. Prior to suffering the stroke that had robbed him of his mobility and ended his television career, Duncan Reed had championed Oasis’s good works. Although Caroline didn’t recall ever having heard about Reed’s charitable endeavors, they were certainly consistent with the values he’d espoused on TV.

  Still, the information provided no clues about whether anyone had ever complained about Oasis’s CNA trainees convincing nursing home residents to leave money to the charity. She needed a way to find those complaints.

  Caroline knew that the government kept track of all entities that were registered as charities and thus eligible for tax-preferred status. And all of the information was online.

  Navigating to the Internal Revenue Service’s website, Caroline found the portal for the Cumulative List of Organizations.

  She typed “Oasis Care” into the search pane.

  The screen changed, and Caroline’s search results appeared:

  There are no tax-exempt organizations matching those search values.

  Caroline checked the spelling and tried again.

  Same response.

  Leaning back in her chair, Caroline let the unavoidable conclusion permeate her mind: Oasis was not a registered charity.

  Charities were subject to strict rules and government oversight. Oasis’s for-profit status meant that its operations were shielded from scrutiny. From oversight.

  Caroline stared at the framed circuit board and its painted skull.

  Something about Oasis wasn’t right.

  When Caroline emerged from her office, she found Amy chewing on the end of a pen, laboring over a coding exercise.

  “Hey,” Caroline said.

  Amy looked up in surprise.

  “Sorry to startle you. I need your help,” Caroline said.

  While Amy put the coding aside, Caroline told her about Oasis.

  When she finished, she extended the document that Harold had just sent to her.

  “What’s that?” Amy asked.

  “It’s a list of all of the residents who’ve died at all of The Pastures’ facilities in the last five years,” Caroline said. To placate her anger, Harold had apparently figured out how to attach and e-mail the list. Unfortunately, the PDF format of the document wasn’t useful to Caroline.

  “I need you to run that list through our optical character recognition software,” she said. “We need to turn the printed text on the list into machine-encoded text so that I can check the names of the dead residents against the courts’ probate records database.”

 
Amy’s brow crinkled as she tried to follow.

  “When a person dies, the superior court opens a probate so that it can supervise the administration of the estate,” Caroline said. “Basically, the judge makes sure the dead person’s stuff goes to the right people.”

  “Okay.” Amy’s voice rose in question at the end.

  “Probate records are public. You can access them online. That means I can take the names of all the people who died at The Pastures’ ten facilities in the last five years, and I can cross-check those names against the court’s probate records. That’ll let me see how many people left their estates to Oasis.”

  “You’re assuming it’s a scam,” Amy said.

  “I’m not assuming anything. I’m just investigating,” Caroline said. “If the numbers are large enough, I’m hoping the DA will look into it.”

  Amy searched Caroline’s face, as if trying to decide if her boss was brilliant or crazy.

  “Just humor me,” Caroline said.

  Shrugging, Amy took the page.

  Caroline eyed the list of names that Amy had prepared for her. It would take hours to sort them by county, then laboriously run searches of them against each court’s probate records.

  Or she could use a quick Python-based bot to do her work for her.

  A simple task like filling in templates to search a court’s records was perfectly suited to a bot. The bot would employ a script that would run through each search step for each resident at each court’s website, and then catalog the information that the search found. If all went well, she’d have a list of people who’d left bequests to Oasis—a list she could give to Wallace Boyd.

  The first results for Los Angeles Superior Court were ready in just ten minutes.

  Your search has retrieved no hits.

  “What?” Caroline asked her empty office. The search results could not be right. Harold had admitted that Oasis had received some bequests from The Pastures’ Chatsworth facility in the last year. Those probates should have shown up on the court’s website.

  There had to be something wrong with the scripts she’d written.