Proof (Caroline Auden Book 2)

by C. E. Tobisman

The hum of a half dozen laundry machines vibrated the walls, obscuring any other sounds beyond the room. She had no way of knowing whether Amy’s assailant waited outside the door. Or in the apartment.

  With a shaking hand, Caroline pulled the Mace canister from her key chain. It wasn’t much, but perhaps it would give her a chance to flee. If it came to that.

  Taking a deep breath, Caroline opened the door of the service porch.

  There was no one in the hall.

  Exhaling, Caroline stepped onto the well-worn carpet. She commanded herself to walk like a normal person. A friend. A random visitor to someone in the apartment building. Not a freaked-out lawyer who’d just come from seeing her half-dead friend in a hospital.

  She hurried up the five flights of stairs to Amy’s floor.

  When she reached the door of her friend’s apartment, she paused one last time.

  She glanced down the hallway.

  Seeing no one, she opened the door and slipped inside.

  She froze, listening.

  The blinds were down. The curtains, drawn.

  It was dark but quiet—the kind of hush that felt solitary. A relief.

  With a scarcely audible puff, Caroline released the breath she’d been holding.

  But when her eyes adjusted to the dim space, she gasped.

  Drawers lay all over the floor, their contents spilled out in puddles of belongings.

  Winter clothing from the storage bins.

  Silverware and tablecloths from the sideboard.

  Even jars and cans from the recycling bin.

  Amy had always been disorganized. She’d prided herself on being able to find anything in her creative chaos. But whatever slapdash organizational system Amy had once imposed no longer existed. In the carpet of objects, Caroline could feel the malevolent energy of the intruders who’d probed the private corners of Amy’s domain.

  Caroline’s throat tightened.

  Her arms chilled, prickling with fear.

  Run, her mind shouted, almost drowning out rational thought.

  She forced herself to think. How long ago had the apartment been ransacked? She’d seen no one coming up the stairs. She’d heard nothing out of the ordinary. Trashing Amy’s apartment couldn’t have been a quiet endeavor. Whoever had done this must have finished some time ago and gone. There would’ve been no reason for anyone to stay. And no reason for anyone to return. She had time to look around. She was safe. More or less.

  Despite the flawless logic of her internal pep talk, Caroline remained frozen.

  Somewhere in the building, something thumped. A metallic sound. A vibration.

  Caroline’s fingers tightened on the canister of pepper spray.

  Closer now, laughter in the hallway.

  The rise and fall of voices approached, then receded.

  Neighbors. No one dangerous.

  Caroline repeated the words to herself until her pulse slowed.

  Exhaling, she scanned the defiled apartment again. Get the ninja and get out. Don’t linger.

  Up ahead, she saw Amy’s bedroom. Bathed in light, the small room glowed even from across the living room. The windows of the bedroom faced the side of the building, and perhaps for that reason, the intruders had not bothered to pull down the blinds.

  Tiptoeing through the field of debris, Caroline moved carefully toward the light.

  But when Caroline arrived in Amy’s bedroom, her face flushed with disappointment.

  A shaft of light lit the desk . . . a desk devoid of a computer.

  Where the high-speed computer had once been, there was now a small mountain of files. Car lease information. Frequent-flier miles. Old tax returns. All yanked haphazardly from the file cabinet and thrown onto the desk.

  Moving closer, Caroline tried to fathom the destruction. She’d been in this very room so recently, watching Amy pack for her trip. She’d sat at the desk, researching. Hacking. Now the space barely resembled the place where Caroline had accepted the gift of a picture from Liam.

  Poor Liam. He was probably still at his grandparents’ house, worried about his mother.

  With a bolt of recognition, Caroline spotted her firm’s name on a tax return, sitting atop the pile of papers on Amy’s desk.

  Whoever had trashed the apartment knew where Amy worked. And for whom.

  Caroline’s hands tingled, cold and slippery with nervous sweat.

  Why hadn’t she gotten the name of the investigator handling Amy’s case? Why hadn’t she talked to him more at the hospital? She should have told him everything . . .

  No. Caroline imposed the word like a dam against the torrent of doubt.

  No.

  She needed to remember why she’d come: the ninja.

  Her eyes swept the bedroom. The intruders had taken the computer, but Amy’s clutter of figurines and knickknacks and snow globes and souvenirs from vacations still littered the space. The ninja didn’t look like a thumb drive. So long as it hadn’t been plugged into the laptop’s USB port when someone grabbed the computer, it might still be somewhere in the apartment.

  Caroline didn’t need to look far. There, beside Amy’s tambourine and finger drum—treasures from her trip to Cuba—the little black shape lay on its side punching a maraca.

  Crouching, Caroline lifted the ninja drive from the mess.

  The silly figurine held data, every bit of which could be an answer. An indictment.

  Pocketing the drive, Caroline fled the violated space.

  CHAPTER 13

  Caroline didn’t go home immediately. Instead, she walked.

  She wandered through Little Tokyo, hoping the crammed storefronts and scents of udon would distract her from the foreboding that had settled around her. The destruction in Amy’s apartment had confirmed every paranoid suspicion she’d ever had about Oasis. There was nothing accidental about what had happened to Amy and Hector. Oasis was a killer.

  Wind blew swirls of napkins in the hot air. Food. She knew she ought to find some sustenance, but her stomach rejected the thought of eating while panicked.

  Her office address. Those who’d invaded Amy’s apartment knew where she worked.

  She couldn’t go back to her office. At least not until she talked to the police.

  But could she talk to the police? The detective at the hospital had been plying her for information, hadn’t he? Or were his questions innocent? She had no way of knowing.

  Walking east, Caroline found herself standing at the Los Angeles River. Paved almost completely from source to mouth, the “river” was always misleadingly drawn in some cheerful shade of blue on maps. The concrete reality resembled no river anywhere in the world. Spray-painted tags blighted the walls on both sides of the concrete trough.

  Beyond the barbed wire separating the city streets from the river, Caroline saw a man with a shopping cart. He pushed it down the center of the bone-dry channel. Every so often, he crouched to gather something from the ground. Cans? Bottles?

  His deliberate, unhurried movements soothed Caroline.

  No one knew where she lived. Other than a lease and some utility bills, there was no record anywhere of her address. She didn’t need to run away and check into a hotel.

  She watched the man until he’d disappeared under a bridge, probably to find a place to sleep.

  It was getting dark, Caroline suddenly realized.

  She needed to head home.

  She needed to figure out what to do.

  But who could she talk to? Who could she trust?

  Five blocks and four flights of stairs later, Caroline stood inside her apartment.

  She paused at the threshold, scenting the air for danger, trying to determine whether all was just as she’d left it. She listened hard for some wrong note, some sign that the dark forces that had ransacked Amy’s apartment had found their way into her private sanctum.

  In the silence, Caroline found nothing amiss.

  She exhaled.

  Her apartment was safe. Empty.

&nb
sp; Before some new fear could seep into her consciousness, turning every shadow sinister, she flicked on the lights.

  Her eyes swept the familiar contours of her possessions.

  The couch beside the front door beckoned. That she’d left her laptop charging on the coffee table seemed an omen. She needed to go no farther to access a USB port.

  Slipping off her shoes, Caroline sat down and tucked her legs underneath her.

  She pulled her phone from the back pocket of her jeans. She had a call to make before she opened the thumb drive that now burned like a radioactive isotope in her other pocket.

  Thumbing her phone, she dialed the number. Tracy Garber. Amy’s sister.

  As expected, Tracy didn’t answer. Caroline left a message. She told Tracy what had happened to Amy’s apartment and warned her of the danger. She urged Tracy to impress on her parents the importance of keeping a close eye on Amy. Caroline realized her message would be cryptic, but she had to try to explain the threat.

  After imploring Tracy to keep Amy safe, Caroline hung up.

  She exhaled. It was time to find out what the thumb drive held.

  Flipping open the laptop, Caroline inserted the ninja into the USB port.

  She found one file: “Oasis.”

  A flurry of goose bumps rose on her bare arms.

  “Okay, Amy. What’d you find?” she murmured as she opened the file.

  Her computer seemed to slog.

  Finally, the contents of the Oasis folder appeared on the laptop’s screen.

  Caroline’s eyebrows knit. The first batch of documents contained Hector’s notes from his investigation into whether Oasis had secured a no-bid contract to restore the County Law Library. He’d collected the names of disgruntled general contractors who’d found themselves frozen out of the bidding. He’d recorded their gripes that the city had cut sweetheart deals for Oasis, circumventing union rules on the basis that Oasis was putting the homeless back to work. He’d also made a memo to himself to try to find the full name of a worker who’d been injured on the County Law Library job and who was rumored to be planning to sue Oasis.

  Caroline reread the notes to find the name of the injured worker but found a reference only to the man’s first name: Jessie.

  The second batch of files came from Amy’s own hack. Apparently after dropping Liam off at her parents’, she’d found an unpatched database vulnerability and accessed Oasis’s server. She’d zeroed in on a set of files describing Oasis’s construction projects.

  The contracts that Amy had downloaded onto the thumb drive showed that Oasis crews were, indeed, being used on city jobs. Among those contracts was the one between Oasis and the city to reconstruct the County Law Library. Its terms were fairly standard. The public-private partnership allowed Oasis to hire contractors as it saw fit and to run the project in its discretion, so long as it stayed on time and within budget. A final accounting for the job showed Oasis had performed well and earned a modest profit. Nothing that raised any red flags, certainly.

  A juicier, separate document detailed problems on the jobs. OSHA violations. Union threats. Plus, the injury on the County Law Library job to a worker named Jessie Tuttle.

  Caroline glanced back at Hector’s notes.

  While Hector hadn’t found the worker’s full name, Amy had. The name Jessie Tuttle had appeared in an e-mail chain Amy had found. Unfortunately, other than the name, the e-mail had contained little information. Tuttle was a fairly common name. It could be difficult to find the right person. But at least it was a lead.

  The last file from Amy’s hack was a directory of city employees. Parole officers. Beat cops. Court clerks. It read like a who’s who of government jobs. Some had asterisks or other cryptic notations beside them.

  Then, apparently, Amy had gotten null routed, and that had been the end of it.

  The only other files in the Oasis folder were two title reports. After getting locked out by Oasis’s security, Amy had fallen back on her skills as a title officer. She’d chased down Oasis’s property holdings. The first report reflected Oasis’s ownership of its downtown campus. Nothing surprising there. But the second title report was interesting. It showed that Oasis owned property on Parrino Court, on the edge of the Los Angeles River. Oasis had purchased it a year ago.

  Caroline cocked her head at the screen. As far as she knew, there were only warehouses in that industrial stretch to the east of downtown. Why did Oasis own property there?

  She hit “Print.” The property purchase wasn’t proof of any wrongdoing, but it was weird—and weird, in Caroline’s experience, usually meant something.

  A whirring at the other end of the hallway, in the kitchen, told Caroline the printer had spat out the title report. She’d retrieve it later to study more closely.

  Leaning back on the couch’s cushions, Caroline considered what she’d found.

  After Amy’s breathless plea to find the thumb drive, Caroline had expected bombshell evidence of wrongdoing. Two title reports, a directory of city employees, a contract to restore the County Law Library, and a vague reference to an injured worker didn’t exactly qualify.

  Even so, Caroline stashed virtual copies of the documents at the retrieval spot. Then she closed her laptop and rose to her feet.

  She needed a break from research.

  At the end of the hallway, the kitchen beckoned, its familiar contours faintly visible in the ambient light cast from the neighboring buildings.

  Tucking her phone in her back pocket, she left the laptop on the coffee table and headed down the long hall.

  When she arrived in the kitchen, Caroline opened the refrigerator and removed the large bottle of water she kept there. She held the moisture-beaded glass to her forehead for a long moment before uncorking it and drinking half.

  As she closed the refrigerator door, her eyes fell on the printer.

  The title report was still warm to the touch. Under it, Caroline found a second document. The Spreadsheet of Death. That had been the last time she’d deigned to use expensive ink to print something out in hard copy.

  Lifting the spreadsheet, she considered what to do with it. She’d have to create a Redweld file to preserve the materials she’d printed out. But even more than that, she’d have to find someone to give it to. As a civil litigator, she had no power to bring criminal charges. She had to find a federal prosecutor to do that for her.

  Caroline’s stomach knotted around the cold water she’d just consumed.

  If Oasis’s service agent was the guy who’d run Amy and Hector off the road, Oasis had shown itself to be far more sinister and far more deadly than a monster of benign neglect by nursing home administrators. Finding a prosecutor brave enough to take on slaying that monster with her could prove difficult.

  The logistics of finding the right person were thorny, too. Sending an e-mail to her law school classmates seeking a referral would prompt another flurry of questions about why she’d left her job at Hale Stern. Though packaged as good-natured curiosity, the root of those questions would be prurient interest—the same prurient interest that made people slow down to get a good look at a car wreck. In the year since she’d left her first law job, Caroline had avoided those questions. She’d have to dodge them again—a prospect she didn’t relish.

  Best to get started now, she decided. Her best friend was in the hospital. Hector was dead. A little embarrassment was nothing in comparison.

  Replacing the bottle in the refrigerator, she tucked the spreadsheet into her front pocket. She’d create a hard-copy file of the materials she’d found. Something she could hand to a prosecutor.

  But before she could move, Caroline heard an engine in the distance.

  A motorcycle. Approaching slowly from somewhere down the street.

  It stopped outside her building, its engine shutting off with a guttural purr.

  Caroline looked out her kitchen window, the one that fronted the apartment building.

  Four stories below, a man clad in lea
ther climbed off a Ducati. His long leg easily cleared the top of the bike as he dismounted. Straightening to standing, he hunched his shoulders in the habit of those accustomed to shrinking slightly to fit through doorways not built for height.

  He took off his helmet, and long blond hair fell to the middle of his back.

  Even before he turned enough for the streetlights to reflect off his pale skin, Caroline knew who he was: Oasis’s service agent. Mark Roe, or whatever his real name was. The man who Amy said had run her and Hector off the mountain road.

  Caroline’s arms prickled with warning.

  She watched in fascinated horror as he approached the apartment building’s outer gate and cocked his head at the buzzer panel of names.

  Using the flats of his hands, he pushed all of the call buttons for all of the residents.

  A chorus of hellos erupted from the intercom, audible to Caroline even four stories up.

  Then some careless resident buzzed the gate open without waiting for an answer.

  The hit man was inside the building.

  Backing two steps away from the window, Caroline tried to think.

  She needed to get out. She needed to run.

  But if she fled into the hallway, she’d run into the hit man.

  She had to call the police.

  There was no time. The police couldn’t respond fast enough.

  Caroline’s eyes raked the kitchen for a weapon.

  A cooking knife?

  The man who’d gotten off the motorcycle had to be close to six feet five inches. She couldn’t beat him in a knife fight.

  She grabbed at the nearest drawer, yanking it open with so much force that the contents skittered to the back as if trying to escape her hand. Tape measure. Pens.

  She couldn’t fight. She had to escape.

  She lunged toward the other window, the one that faced the fire escape. Below Caroline’s landing, a rusted staircase extended two stories down to another landing, and then to a ladder, and then, below that, to the alley.

  She flipped open the lock and pushed hard at the frame.

  It didn’t move.

  Caroline heard a distant thumping. Heavy footfalls. Man size. Moving with purpose down the hall outside her apartment.