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Chapter 16 of 20

Chapter 16 — ODALYS PINTO

By Mavenlus Desk · 2026-08-29

Odalys Pinto is fifty-two and has been a licensing investigator for the Commonwealth for sixteen years and carries her own scanner in the boot of her car because the office one is always broken.

She had been trying to get inside Larkfield for two years.

She told me this in the car park of the Wexler Diner in November, because she would not meet me anywhere with a lease on it.

She had flagged the unfounded rate in 2023. She had written a memo. The memo had gone to a supervisor who agreed with her and forwarded it, and it had come back with a note saying the provider had been contacted and had submitted a corrective action plan.

The corrective action plan was written by Gareth Moody.

"That's how it works," she said. "I flag it, and the person I'm flagging writes the response, and the response satisfies the file, and the file closes."

"So you couldn't do anything."

"I could not do anything." She was very calm about it and it was the calm of somebody who has been angry for a long time in a professional way. "I need one of three things. A police referral. A death. Or a person on the inside who'll open a drawer."

I said, "You've been waiting for someone like me."

And Odalys Pinto said, "Mrs Ashcombe, I have been waiting for someone like Nick, and one turned up, and he did everything right in March and it still took seven months and a broken face in a restaurant."

The state suspended Larkfield's licences on the third of December — emergency suspension, all four houses, effective immediately.

Fifty-one children were moved in eleven days.

I want to be honest about that too. Eleven of those children were placed further from their schools. Four sibling groups were split, at least temporarily. The closure of a bad provider is not a happy ending for the children in it; it is a second upheaval, and the department did not have anywhere good to put them, which is the reason bad providers stay open.

Odalys said, "That is the argument they will make to you and it is not nothing."

I said, "What's the answer to it?"

She said, "There isn't one. You still have to close it."

All chapters
1. Chapter 1 — THE PLATE OF SPAGHETTI 2. Chapter 2 — WHAT THOMAS SAID 3. Chapter 3 — THE BOY WITH THE BRUISE 4. Chapter 4 — THE PARKING GARAGE 5. Chapter 5 — DANIEL COMES IN 6. Chapter 6 — THE DOORS WERE LOCKED 7. Chapter 7 — WHAT I HAD BELIEVED 8. Chapter 8 — EVERY BRUISE HAD A STORY 9. Chapter 9 — LARKFIELD 10. Chapter 10 — THE COMPLAINT LOG 11. Chapter 11 — SIXTY-ONE UNFOUNDED 12. Chapter 12 — NICK'S FILE 13. Chapter 13 — THE NIGHT HE RAN 14. Chapter 14 — WHAT THOMAS FOUND 15. Chapter 15 — THE PER DIEM 16. Chapter 16 — ODALYS PINTO 17. Chapter 17 — XIMENA 18. Chapter 18 — THE HEARING 19. Chapter 19 — WHAT DANIEL SAID AT THE END 20. Chapter 20 — TWO PLATES