Proof (Caroline Auden Book 2)

by C. E. Tobisman

  But suddenly, the screen changed.

  “It dumped us!” Amy said.

  Caroline blinked at the rejection notice on the screen.

  “We got null routed,” Amy said, stating the obvious. “They must have an intrusion detection system in place. They’re probably dropping all packets from my IP.”

  Caroline tapped her upper lip. “So let’s come at them from another IP.”

  “Tor routing?” Amy asked.

  “Yes, that should work.” She’d taught Amy that Tor used so-called onion routing, where communications were encrypted and then bounced through a network of relays around the globe. Tor routing would let her obscure her identity from Oasis. No suspicious IP address. No null routing.

  Bringing up the same admin log-in page that she’d started with, Caroline tried the same SQL injection she’d tried before.

  Access denied.

  Caroline stared at the message. “They’re not just sensitive to my IP address. They must be reacting to the SQL injection.”

  “Really? How would they know you’re doing it?” Amy asked.

  Caroline sat back. She could think of only one possibility.

  “They must have a contract with Signal Sciences or one of the other good security engineers that’ll customize security for clients. I bet Oasis got a security alert and shut down their log-ins. Or maybe they’ve already patched the hole.” She shook her head. “Whatever happened, we’re not getting in.”

  A kernel of dread lodged itself in her gut.

  A contract with a highly sophisticated security engineering firm was unwarranted for an entity that had nothing to hide. It was like hiring armed guards to protect a vegetable garden. Or like hiring a $1,000-per-hour shark like Thibodeaux to represent you in what looked like a nuisance lawsuit filed by a newbie lawyer.

  Amy lifted her phone. “I’m texting Hector to get his old research notes from that Oasis investigation he was doing last year.”

  “Thanks,” Caroline said, her voice flat. She knew Amy was just trying to help.

  When Amy finished her text, she eyed Caroline.

  “I’m sorry I’m going out of town.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” said Caroline.

  “No, I feel really bad about leaving you like this.”

  “I’m fine,” Caroline insisted. Was her consternation so evident? “I’ll be okay. I promise.”

  Liam reappeared in the doorway of Amy’s room. He held a blue elephant under one arm and a stuffed leopard under the other.

  “I’ll be right there to tuck you in,” Amy said to him.

  “That’s my cue,” Caroline said, forcing a smile. She’d have to continue her research on her own once she got home. Perhaps she’d try hacking Oasis’s server again. There was more than one way to beat security, even sophisticated security.

  Amy regarded Caroline with a probing expression.

  “Don’t bite my head off, but I really think you should try your dad,” she said. “That’s what family’s for, right?”

  Caroline didn’t answer. She couldn’t tell Amy that her father had almost gone to prison on her account. She couldn’t tell Amy she’d hacked a hospital firewall but he’d taken the blame. There was no way she could ask her father to risk himself.

  Rising to her feet, Caroline headed for the door of Amy’s room.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Amy called after her.

  “Don’t give me another thought,” Caroline said. “I’m okay, I promise.”

  Caroline’s ears buzzed with anxiety. Stress. The ambient hum of an unsettled mind.

  It was Saturday night, and she wasn’t going out.

  Instead, she was sitting on the couch by her front door, staring down at the phone in her hands.

  What she’d said to Amy wasn’t true. She wasn’t sure she’d be okay on her own. Since leaving tech, she’d become less active on Slashdot and the other hacker havens. The community of lawyers she’d expected to create at a law firm had dissolved, too, with her abrupt departure from Hale Stern. And her friends from childhood were immersed in careers or children. She knew she needed to begin to reach out. To connect.

  She’d spent the day resisting the urge to bother Amy. She knew Amy would be happily chirping around her apartment, waiting to head up to Lake Arrowhead with her boyfriend. She didn’t need her boss calling to obsess about Oasis. And anyway, Caroline knew her assistant didn’t have the key to unlock more information about Oasis. Only one person that Caroline knew did.

  With her pulse throbbing in her ears, Caroline dialed.

  “What’s wrong?” Caroline’s father asked when he heard his daughter on the phone.

  Caroline hadn’t meant to alarm him, but her voice must’ve sounded a discordant note.

  Taking a breath, she told him about the theft of the watch. She told him about her efforts to discover whether Oasis was preying on the elderly. She described her campaign against a many-tentacled specter that no one else seemed to care about. Except perhaps Amy, who had to care, because Caroline was her boss.

  When she finished, she exhaled, feeling some of the tension leave her shoulders.

  “I’m glad you called,” said William Auden. “This sounds like a lot to be dealing with on top of Grandma’s passing.”

  “It is.” A sob threatened to rise in Caroline’s throat. She hadn’t realized how raw her emotions were. The kindness in her father’s tone seemed to call to that rawness.

  “You don’t have to do this,” William said. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” he added quickly, “but you’ve taken on so much here.”

  Caroline weighed how to respond.

  It had been so long since they’d spoken about anything of substance. They’d tried, but things had been strained ever since he’d moved back east with his new wife. A year ago, she’d seen glimmers of reconciliation. She and her father had edged closer together. But those tentative steps had ended after she’d left Hale Stern. She didn’t know if the distance was his fault or her own, but it didn’t matter. The effect was the same: she missed him.

  “This is real, Dad,” Caroline said. “It’s real, and no one else can see it.”

  “I wish there was something I could do to help you,” William said, dodging the implicit request for validation in Caroline’s question.

  “Actually, there is one thing. I need to see some bank records.” When she’d dialed her father’s phone number, Caroline had told herself she was calling primarily for connection and understanding. But she couldn’t avoid the other reason she’d called, too. “I want to get a sense of how often the banks have cut cashier’s checks to Oasis. I just need to know if this thing is real. Only the banks will have any records of these transactions.”

  William remained silent.

  “You do have bank clients, don’t you?” Caroline asked.

  “Yes. BanCorp’s one of my biggest.” William said biggest in a way that let Caroline know he’d really prefer not to lose that client.

  “You run routine scans and searches all the time, right? This would just be another one.” It was a favor that Caroline didn’t want to ask, but all other paths had been closed to her. She couldn’t do anything about the theft of the watch, the DA’s refusal to investigate, the judge’s misconduct, or Patricia Amos’s disappearance, but she could still investigate Oasis. And as long as she could do that, she could bind the worry that coursed through her limbs.

  “I swear if nothing turns up, I can chill out,” she continued. “But if BanCorp has a bunch of these transactions, it’ll tell me I’m not wrong. Please. If you could just run a search—”

  “I can’t just run a search,” William interrupted, his voice tight. “You more than anyone else should know there are privacy rules.”

  A spasm of guilt ricocheted around Caroline’s chest, but she couldn’t stop. A report showing how often Oasis was receiving bequests would either end her investigation or prompt some branch of law enforcement to do something. BanCorp was just one bank.
But if it had handled an unusual number of affidavit withdrawals, that fact might prod the police to subpoena other banks’ records.

  “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” Caroline said quietly.

  When her father said nothing, Caroline frowned. Once she’d started hunting for information, it tugged at her like a riptide. She could sense the end point. She had to try to get there.

  “I suppose I could try to hack—” she began.

  “No, Caro. Don’t.” William’s voice was sharp.

  Caroline could feel his consternation across three thousand miles. He’d risked going to jail to protect her from an ill-fated hack. In his voice, she heard his fear that he wouldn’t be able to protect her again.

  “Do you really think there’s something going on here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know for sure, but I think so, yes.”

  “And you don’t think you’re displacing emotions about Grandma’s death onto this Oasis thing?”

  “That might be part of it,” Caroline admitted, “but I also think there’s something here. I can feel it. I just need bank records to know for sure. One way or another.”

  Caroline knew that nothing her father gave her would be admissible in a prosecution, but she didn’t care. She needed the information for herself. She had to confirm her suspicions about Oasis or stop her obsession. Because that’s what it had become. Short of resolving whether her paranoia was founded, she didn’t know how to stamp it out and scatter its ashes.

  Finally, William exhaled. “I can’t give you anyone’s names.”

  “Fine. No names,” Caroline agreed quickly. “Just a list of how many times in the last five years BanCorp has cut a check to Oasis based on a death certificate, an affidavit, and a will.”

  “Give me an hour, and promise me, Caro, if you think this is getting out of hand, you’ll go see someone.”

  Caroline knew from his tone that this didn’t mean Oasis. It meant her inability to let it go.

  But William hung up before she had a chance to give him her promise.

  CHAPTER 11

  The phone pinged and vibrated in Caroline’s hand.

  The arriving text surprised her, even though she’d carried her phone everywhere for the last few hours. From the kitchen to make dinner, to the bathroom, juggling to keep her eyes on the screen while she tore off toilet paper, she’d kept it glued to her hand like a new appendage. She’d known that at any moment her father would give her fuel for her investigation or an antidote to her paranoia. Either way, she didn’t want to miss it.

  Caroline read her father’s text: File too big to send via text. Check e-mail.

  When Caroline touched the link to retrieve the file, it began loading. Slowly.

  Perhaps the connection was bad?

  Caroline pulled at her shirt where sweat tickled down her back.

  While she waited for the file to download, she headed down the hallway that separated the couch by the front door from her kitchen.

  When she reached the kitchen, she faced off with the window that faced the fire escape.

  She pushed on it with one hand.

  No luck.

  Placing her phone on top of the printer that lived on a small table beside the refrigerator, she leaned hard into the window frame until it creaked open and she could scramble out onto the metal slats of the fire escape.

  A warm wind blew—soft at first, but then much harder.

  Caroline identified the gust: the Santa Ana winds. Given the name by a reporter in the early 1900s who’d misheard “Santana,” the Devil Winds had been the bane of the city since before the Spanish conquest. Animals bit their owners when the winds blew. Murderous embers sparked to full flare, filling emergency rooms with indirect victims of the winds’ howls. Heat loves heat, and fire loves the Devil Winds. House fires. Brush fires. Car fires. Any small spark fanned into conflagration under the demonic attentions of the winds.

  Only those who weren’t raised in Los Angeles found joy in the warm nights and unseasonable heat. The city-born knew better than to revel in the warmth that could turn dangerous with a shift of the breeze.

  Tying her hair back to keep it from blowing in her face, Caroline looked at her phone.

  Her eyes widened.

  The list her father had sent was pages long. In the last year alone, BanCorp had cut four dozen cashier’s checks to Oasis in Los Angeles County. It had cut thirty-five in Phoenix. Twenty-six in Scottsdale. Eighteen in Las Vegas. And the list continued.

  “What the—” Caroline said to no one.

  The math wasn’t hard. Oasis had harvested millions of dollars from vulnerable nursing home residents over the last five years, with the frequency and number of transactions increasing, especially in the last year. All over the Southwest, the elderly were surrendering their small estates to Oasis. And these were just BanCorp’s records. The same thing was probably happening at other banks that Caroline’s father didn’t have access to.

  Whatever was happening, it was much bigger than one woman named Patricia Amos operating at one nursing home in Los Angeles. The scam was massive.

  And yet the DA had shut down an investigation before it got started.

  Despite the warm night, a cold shiver ran through Caroline’s body.

  Was the DA covering it up? Were the police involved?

  And if they were, who could Caroline talk to?

  Maybe a federal prosecutor from the US Attorney’s Office. Like DAs, federal prosecutors brought criminal suits against people engaged in wrongdoing. While DAs prosecuted violations of state law, federal prosecutors prosecuted violations of federal law. Caroline just needed a federal-law hook to attract the interest of a federal prosecutor.

  She hoped a case involving widespread financial elder abuse triggered some federal racketeering or bank-fraud law. Bringing in the US Attorney’s Office might also bring in the FBI.

  Caroline’s eyes drifted back to the telephone in her hand.

  The affidavit withdrawals desperately needed to be investigated. But what if they weren’t? What if she was dismissed as a meddling crackpot, and the scam rolled on and on?

  Still stung by the DA’s rejection, she needed to make sure the evidence compelled an investigation. What additional information would convince a prosecutor to issue subpoenas to pry into bank records?

  She dashed off a text to her dad: Names, please.

  She hated to ask for more information, but she had to try. If she could give a prosecutor the names of those who’d left their estates to Oasis, the prosecutor could contact the families. Interview would-be heirs. Look for connections to Oasis caregivers at nursing homes.

  Seconds later, her father responded: No can do. Privacy regulations.

  “Damn,” Caroline murmured. She’d expected his response.

  Climbing back through the window into her apartment, she hoped the sheer number of affidavit withdrawals would be enough to spark the curiosity of some earnest federal prosecutor.

  She wandered into her bedroom and perched atop her featherbed. She let the soft cloud of goose feathers cushion her tense shoulders. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  Tomorrow, she’d begin the quest for a federal prosecutor.

  On her bedside table, her phone buzzed with an incoming text. Her father.

  Got time to Skype? Want to talk to you about Xmas.

  Caroline’s brow wrinkled at the bizarre message.

  Okay, she responded.

  Almost immediately, the bubbling tones of a Skype call trickled out of the speakers of her phone. She opened the connection, and there was her dad, sitting in his office at work.

  William Auden wore his usual open-collared button-down shirt. Although others in his security firm favored T-shirts, he insisted on maintaining a certain level of decorum.

  “You’re there late,” Caroline said.

  “Bunch of us got some stuff to finish up before we can leave.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I’m going to be here so lat
e tonight that I think I’m going to have to grab some coffee down at the kitchen. Should take me about five minutes.” He chuckled softly. “At least it’s easier than the old days when I used to walk our old dog down to the coffee shop. Remember that?”

  “Yeah. Lola hated the cold.” Caroline smiled at the recollection of her dog cowering against her leg while her dad tried to cajole the canine out the door to join him for his morning walk to get a latte.

  “I don’t think Lola ever liked New Jersey much. Do you recall what year we moved out to LA?”

  “I do, 1998,” Caroline answered. It had been sixth grade. She’d lost touch with so many friends when she’d moved. But why was her dad asking her this? He already knew what year they’d moved out to California.

  “Anyway, I need to go. I need some coffee, then I’ll stop by a colleague’s office to give him a report. Like I said, I’ll be back in five minutes,” William Auden repeated pointedly. “When I get back, I’ve got a ton to do, so let’s talk about Christmas another time.”

  He stood up and walked out of the frame of the picture, leaving Caroline looking at her father’s empty office. His desk in the foreground. His clock ticking on the wall in the background.

  “Dad?”

  William Auden wasn’t old, but perhaps he was under too much stress at work. This seemed at first like a senile moment.

  Then Caroline noticed what her father had left on his desk: his phone. It sat next to the keyboard, turned toward the camera on her dad’s computer so she could see the small screen. Easily.

  Lunging across her bed, Caroline grabbed her laptop and pulled it onto her pillow. She had to move quickly. Five minutes wasn’t much time.

  She brought up the log-in page for her father’s security company. She knew his username was just his name. And now she knew his password—Lola 1998.

  But that wasn’t enough to get in. The rest of the information would come soon.

  She kept her eyes trained on her own phone, looking at her father’s empty office.

  William Auden’s phone lit up with an incoming text.