Proof (Caroline Auden Book 2)

by C. E. Tobisman

  Caroline’s face flushed. An attorney’s appearance couldn’t waive a defect in service.

  But Judge Chandler was already thumbing through the next file on her desk.

  “All right, then I’ll reach the merits of our opposition to Oasis’s demurrer,” Caroline said, “I’d like to take a moment to review the elements of an undue influence cause of action.”

  “Let me stop you right there,” said Judge Chandler, holding up a well-manicured hand. “I know the elements of the claim. I have a different question for you.”

  Caroline waited to hear what that question was.

  “Don’t you have to present evidence that the decedent’s will was overborne?” asked the judge.

  “Yes. That’s my trial burden.”

  “But not now?”

  “No, Your Honor. At this early stage, we need only allege a cause of action. We don’t have to prove it yet. A demurrer just asks whether, assuming the truth of everything I’ve said in my complaint, I’ve properly stated my causes of action. I don’t have to put on proof until trial.”

  “I’m not sure I can agree,” said Judge Chandler.

  Caroline blanched. How could the judge not agree? Those were the governing standards. Demurrers didn’t require evidence. Proof of a claim came later. Surely this judge knew that.

  “Can you give me an offer of proof?” the judge asked.

  “An offer of proof?” Caroline echoed.

  “Yes, please tell me what evidence you plan to proffer to prove that Katherine Hitchings didn’t intend to leave her estate to Oasis Care.”

  “Your Honor, with all due respect,” Caroline began, even though she knew that any statement beginning with all due respect usually connoted anything but, “offers of proof aren’t relevant at the demurrer stage. This court must decide only whether my complaint alleges facts satisfying each of the legal elements of undue influence. The answer is indisputably yes. If it’s helpful, I can go through each of the paragraphs of our complaint to explain which element it satisfies—”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said the judge, holding up a hand. “I just want to know if you’ve got an offer of proof you can make here today.”

  “We’re just beginning to conduct discovery, Your Honor, so we can—”

  “I’m not interested in what discovery you’re serving. I just want to get a picture of what kind of showing you plan to make.”

  “But finding evidence is the whole point of discovery. It’s the plaintiff’s means for marshaling evidence to support the allegations in the complaint.” When the judge didn’t respond, Caroline continued, “We ask that the other side turn over documents or respond to requests for admission. The other side’s responses to those discovery requests become the backbone of our evidentiary presentation at trial.”

  “So you don’t have an offer of proof,” said the judge.

  Caroline was mute for a moment, in disbelief she was having to explain this to a sitting judge. “No, but I don’t need one—”

  “I’ve got a busy calendar today, so I’d like to move on,” said Judge Chandler. She turned to the other counsel’s table. “Mr. Thibodeaux, do you have anything you’d like to add?”

  The senior litigator half rose from his chair.

  “No, Your Honor,” he said before sitting back down.

  “Well, okay, then Oasis’s demurrer is sustained without leave to amend,” the judge announced. “Defense to give notice.” She glanced at her clerk. “Please call the next case.”

  Caroline remained standing. Just like that, her case was dead. Unbelievable.

  She was dimly aware of the clerk calling the next case. She watched her hands gather her things. As if underwater, she vacated counsel’s table so that the next attorney could take her spot.

  What had just happened?

  The whole hearing had gone horribly wrong. Somehow, the court had twisted, abused, and shot her case in the head. She’d appeal Judge Chandler’s ruling, of course. An error this egregious might even rouse the affirming machine that was the court of appeal and compel it to reverse. But the appellate process was slow. It would take a year—maybe more—to undo the damage that one incompetent judge had wrought in five minutes.

  Ahead of Caroline, Francis Thibodeaux paused at the short little swinging door that separated the counsels’ tables from the gallery. Someone held the door open for him.

  Vizzi.

  As Thibodeaux pulled his rolling briefcase through the swinging door, Vizzi put a hand on his shoulder, clasping it in congratulations.

  Following the two men out of the courtroom, Caroline watched their interaction as they stopped to chat beside the elevator. This wasn’t the first time these two men had met, she realized. Their body language was too comfortable. Too at ease. They joked with the rapport of old friends, not the semidistant cordiality of client and attorney.

  Perhaps they’d been here before? Perhaps they’d defeated other efforts to probe Oasis?

  Caroline made a mental note to try again to see if any beneficiaries had ever sued Oasis. Some jurisdictions didn’t have their records online. Maybe sending an attorney service down to the courthouse could yet yield evidence of past complaints.

  Thibodeaux’s phone rang.

  Pulling it from his pocket, he stepped aside. He waved for Vizzi to go ahead down the elevator without him.

  Alone in the hallway, Caroline felt suddenly conspicuous standing beside the courtroom’s doors. She had little excuse to linger.

  Steeling herself, she approached the elevator and Thibodeaux, who stood a few feet away from it, talking on his cell phone.

  She pressed the call button and hoped the elevator came quickly.

  But in a continuation of the morning’s bad luck, Thibodeaux’s call ended.

  Pocketing his phone, he came to join Caroline in front of the doors.

  “Nice try in there,” Thibodeaux said, his eyes watching the elevator floor indicator.

  Caroline had no ready retort. He’d won ugly, but he’d won.

  The elevator doors opened onto an empty car.

  More bad luck.

  Caroline entered. Thibodeaux followed, positioning himself as elevator decorum required—in the opposite corner of the back wall, facing the doors.

  As the elevator descended at glacial speed down the ten floors to the courthouse lobby, Caroline prayed to whichever deities would listen that Thibodeaux wouldn’t say anything more to her. She prayed he’d parked in a different parking structure than she had.

  Didn’t matter, she decided. Whichever way he went, she’d go in the opposite direction.

  But when the elevator’s doors opened, Thibodeaux turned toward Caroline, forcing her to meet his eyes. A sympathetic little smile played at the corners of his mouth.

  Caroline braced herself for another dose of condescension.

  But Thibodeaux’s words shocked her.

  “Sometimes who you know is more important than what you know,” he said with an unmistakable smirk.

  Then he turned and walked away, leaving a stunned Caroline alone in a crowded lobby.

  Caroline had planned to return to her office. But she couldn’t.

  Thibodeaux’s words prevented her. They required rumination. They required study.

  Sometimes who you know is more important than what you know.

  Had Oasis’s attorney just confessed to buying the judge?

  Caroline turned Thibodeaux’s words over like a child examining a seashell in the sun. She could divine no other possible meaning.

  The lame demurrer. The terrible judge. The smug, high-flying attorney.

  The whole thing smelled of conspiracy.

  The weight of the debacle carried Caroline down to Spring Street. The court of appeal building was there, just a few blocks away. Someday, her civil suit might rise from the dead in that building. But for now, she had nothing. No criminal suit and now no civil suit. Add to that an icing of potential judicial malfeasance at best, and corruption at
worst, and Caroline could not return to the office.

  She needed to walk. She needed to think.

  As she left the towering buildings of Bunker Hill for the grittier flats east of downtown, Caroline’s back warmed with sweat. She contemplated heading back to the cool refuge of her office, with its calming familiarity. Its familiar light filtering into its familiar spaces. Its familiar hum of office equipment. Its distant rattle and thump of the elevator. Its rustle of tenants in the suites beside hers. All would soothe her, she knew.

  But even though the day scorched and her feet begged for release from her pumps, she ignored the temptation to flee to her office and shut the door.

  She slung her jacket over one arm and kept marching.

  She needed someone to talk to.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Am I crazy to think they bought off the judge?” Caroline asked.

  She stood in the corner of the bedroom, watching Amy pack. The number of dresses alone suggested Amy would be changing outfits three or four times a day in Lake Arrowhead.

  “I’ll admit there have been some times in the last week when I’ve thought you were obsessing a little too hard over Oasis,” Amy said, lifting another pile of clothes into the suitcase on her bed.

  Caroline nodded. She’d suspected as much.

  “But I keep thinking to myself that a lot of people might’ve said you were acting crazy before you pulled off that last win at Hale Stern,” Amy continued. Her eyes flickered up to the picture of her son, Liam, smiling from a frame on the dresser.

  Caroline nodded again. She’d never told Amy the details of how she’d defeated the biotech company whose deadly product almost killed Amy’s son. She’d never revealed the risks she’d taken. The information she’d stolen. None of it mattered to Amy. In her eyes, Caroline was a hero. Liam’s survival was the proof of it.

  “I don’t think you’re crazy to think they bought off the judge,” Amy said, finally answering Caroline’s question. She gestured with her chin toward the computer on her desk. “It’s time,” Amy finished simply.

  Caroline stayed still. She’d put Amy off before when the assistant had suggested hacking. After almost getting caught in high school for breaching a hospital firewall for fun, Caroline was circumspect about invading anyone’s privacy. But she’d run out of options. She’d grown certain not only that Oasis was engaging in criminal activity, but that no one would ever bring the fake charity to justice.

  Wordlessly, Caroline sat down at Amy’s desk.

  Before she could begin, she heard the padding of feet approaching.

  Seconds later, a small boy entered the room. With white-blond hair and large green eyes, Liam reminded Caroline of one of the angels painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In his hand, he held a piece of paper, which he offered to her.

  Caroline smiled down at it. Liam had drawn three bigheaded people standing in front of a building. His mom and himself, standing side by side. Another form stood behind and to the side, wearing glasses, the mouth drawn in a slim, serious line. Hector, Caroline identified him.

  “Is this your house?”

  “Uh-huh,” confirmed Liam. “And my family.”

  “Liam’s hoping if he kisses up to Hector, he’ll get to come with us to Arrowhead the day after tomorrow.”

  The little boy’s head came up fast, his eyes widening.

  “Moms just know stuff, baby,” Amy said, placing her hand on her son’s head. “Now go pack up for Grandma and Grandpa’s house.”

  With a huff, Liam left, casting a backward look toward his mom.

  Caroline watched Liam fondly as he departed. She treasured the drawings he’d given to her during the last year. She knew others did, too. His grandparents. Amy’s sister. Even the landlord.

  It occurred to Caroline that Liam was close in age to Mateo Hidalgo. But unlike Mateo, whose fate would be decided at a hearing in four days, Liam had a stable home. He had a mother who thought his every utterance was worth recording. Every piece of art worth saving. Every fart worth bottling. And he had grandparents. Cousins. Even Hector had taken the boy into his heart.

  Caroline wished Mateo had that kind of support. Instead, he had a distracted lawyer who hadn’t found any solid proof that his would-be guardian was a criminal. Beyond the discrepancy in the shipping records and Rogelio Gonzalez’s ownership of suspiciously expensive vehicles, she’d found nothing casting aspersions on his character, let alone doubt on his story. She’d try her best at Monday’s hearing, but she faced the prospect of another legal failure on the near horizon.

  “Liam will come back in a few minutes,” Amy said, shaking Caroline from her reverie.

  Caroline understood. If they were going to do any hacking, it needed to happen quickly.

  She placed the drawing aside and brought her fingers to the keyboard.

  She began by routing through a VPN to hide her IP address. Then she navigated to Oasis’s website: www.oasiscareco.org.

  An image of two men in green shirts and tool belts building a house anchored the homepage. A list of Oasis’s good works crawled across the top: Jobs. Support. Housing. Counseling.

  But Caroline wasn’t interested in hearing about how great Oasis was. She was interested in finding out what Oasis knew about Patricia Amos.

  She typed “www.oasiscareco.org/admin” into the URL pane.

  A sign-in panel popped up, asking for the website administrator’s username and password.

  Caroline typed “admin” into the username.

  For the password, she tried the most obvious six-digit passwords—“123456,” “111111,” and “passwd.”

  None of them worked. That meant she needed to find another way to access the site.

  “Could be an old PHP application,” she muttered, cocking her head at the website.

  To test her hypothesis, she typed a semicolon into the username field and hit “Enter.”

  The resulting error message came back instantly:

  Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error ‘80040e14’

  [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server] Unclosed quotation mark before the character string “.

  /target/target.asp, line 113

  Although indecipherable to most people on the planet, the message was a gold mine of information for Caroline. The “SQL” in the code told her it was written in Structured Query Language, the standard language for communicating with a database. Properly manipulated, she could use it to retrieve data from Oasis’s database.

  But first she had to get inside.

  She brought up the log-in panel again. This time she focused on the username field.

  There, she typed in a short line of SQL code: admin’ OR 1=1;

  “I’m going to use SQL injection to trick Oasis’s website into letting us in as though we’re the website administrator,” Caroline said, glancing at Amy.

  “How?” asked Amy.

  “Whenever you log into a website, the site confirms that the credentials you’ve provided match ones it has in its database. To get around the fact that we don’t actually have a password or username, I’m writing code telling Oasis’s website that so long as one equals one, it should let us in.”

  “But one always equals one,” Amy said.

  “Exactly.” As Caroline spoke, the screen changed, allowing her into the site.

  “Now what?” Amy asked.

  “Privilege escalation,” Caroline said, feeling the rush of having cracked the first layer of security. “Once you get access, you find ways to deepen that access. It’s like being an archaeologist. You keep digging down into the information you’ve got available so that you can come up with ways to dig down to the next layer.”

  Caroline hunted around until she found a configuration file on the server with the name “uniform protocol for credentials.” She eyed the admin’s list of how to construct usernames. Beside each employee’s username, there was a long series of numbers.

  “The passwords are hashed,” Amy s
aid, pointing at the numbers.

  “Damn,” Caroline said. The passwords had been mathematically transformed into random-looking strings of characters. There was no easy way to decipher the passwords.

  She’d have to find Vizzi’s password some other way.

  Opening another tab, she searched online for data from the LinkedIn hack. Over one hundred million passwords to the popular business networking website had been compromised in 2012. Although LinkedIn had tightened its security since the hack, there were still lists of old LinkedIn credentials floating around the Internet.

  It took only five minutes to find Conrad Vizzi’s old LinkedIn password on one of the lists. Caroline figured that even if he’d changed his password on LinkedIn, he hadn’t changed it for any other sites. Most people didn’t like to remember more than a couple of passwords, after all.

  Caroline navigated back to Oasis’s e-mail server.

  She inserted Vizzi’s old LinkedIn password into the password field.

  It worked.

  “Let’s find all e-mails containing the name Patricia Amos,” Amy said.

  Caroline heard the excitement in Amy’s voice. She shared it. The open access to information that had been guarded was intoxicating. The sense of power invigorating.

  Her search retrieved a long list of e-mails containing one or both parts of the name.

  Reading the e-mails would take time, but she’d learn whether Vizzi had told the truth when he’d said no one had heard from Patricia in months, that he didn’t know where she was, and that Oasis hadn’t had anything to do with the theft of the watch.

  Caroline moved to exploit the data breach, beginning with the most recent e-mail, a correspondence between Vizzi and Simon Reed, dated a little over a week ago.

  No luck yet, Vizzi had written.

  Tracking backward in time through the e-mail chain, Caroline found the question by Simon that Vizzi had answered: Find Patricia Amos?

  Caroline calculated the timing. Apparently, Vizzi and Simon had lost contact with their nursing home mole soon after she’d quit her job at The Pastures.

  But why? What was Patricia Amos’s reason for disappearing?

  Lifting her hands back to the keyboard, Caroline prepared to open the next oldest e-mail containing the caregiver’s name.