“How did we not know about the fire alarm?”

  We’d gone and grabbed lunch at an upscale French-style bistro right next to the court. I’d invited our next witness to join us and eat on the firm’s dime, but the fire marshal decided he’d spend another hour working and just meet us at the courthouse instead.

  “It wasn’t something that mattered, was it?” Fatima answered Julio’s question with another question. “The building was on fire, the building burned down, the firefighters all said it was on fire by the time they got there. It didn’t affect our case at all. We didn’t care because we didn’t have to care. What did it matter which of the three defendants was most wrong? All we cared about was the yes-or-no, and that’s a pretty obvious ‘yes’, here.”

  “But now we care because we’re expanding our scope,” I said, picking at the side salad that came with my steak frites. “And I don’t think we’re gonna get a Perry Mason moment, not for lack of trying, but still. Means if we want to point the finger, we’re gonna have to do it the hard way. So, fire alarm not going off. Any ideas?”

  “Mercury in sprinkler heads harvested for cooking meth, sprinklers don’t go off so no fire alarm,” Casey muttered. “Residents stripping copper wiring on move-out and replacements not hooking everything up right. Defendant wanted to burn the building down for insurance money, pay an arsonist.”

  I’d turned an ear towards Casey when he started speaking, and the rest of me joined when he kept going. He looked up after he was done, finally noticing the attention he’d gotten, and looked down with a slight blush.

  “S-sorry, just… I like crime dramas?”

  “That’s fair,” I allowed. “Thank you for the ideas, Casey, but none of them make much sense. Too convoluted, too much work involved for too little reward. If your two options are a convoluted plan on one hand, and somebody being lazy and stupid on the other, ‘lazy and stupid’ is almost always the correct answer.”

  Ah, Hanlon’s Razor. You saw these situations all the time as a lawyer — I couldn’t even begin to count the amount of times a lawsuit went away because we realized our clients were all gibbering idiots. It was also indicative of one of the hardest habits to break as a new lawyer. After all, you’d just spent three years in law school, where every single fact pattern had x or y amount of issues, and pretty much every errant detail was just another claim for which you could file suit. But once you got out into the real world, you learned the truth: sometimes shit just happened, and people were often quite stupid.

  Casey still hadn’t gotten the memo yet. But that was fine. He would.

  “So what’re we thinking?” Fatima asked, fiddling with her iced tea’s straw as she spoke, and drawing attention away from Casey’s embarrassed blush in the process. “Owner, manager, contractor. We know the building was badly maintained, which is something the contractor does on the owner’s dime and on the manager’s request. We know that the owner was extracting max rent from Section 8, which they couldn’t do without management’s knowledge and help. And we know management threatened the inspector to give them a pass, which is the only one that could theoretically have happened independent of the other two parties.”

  “We still can’t separate it out enough,” I said, ears low in thought. “And I would say ‘follow the money’, because that gets you to the owner, but the corporate landlord is both where the money leads and the least involved in the day-to-day.”

  “... hold up.” Julio set down his knife and snapped his fingers. “The day-to-day. That includes inspections, yeah?”

  “It does. What of it?” I asked.

  Julio didn’t answer immediately. He instead reached around and into the briefcase he’d slung over his chair, and pulled out a tablet. He woke the device up, tapped around for a moment, and then handed it over to me.

  “The fire marshal’s expert report says he can’t determine what caused the fire ‘cause the usual stuff he’d have checked was all fucked, and it shouldn’t have been.”

  “Because the fire only lasted…” I trailed off, the passage Julio had highlighted helping me put the timeline together in my head. “It can’t be the property manager, then. Not as much as it would be one of the other two. This problem has been there since the building was still in construction.” I handed the tablet back over to Julio. “Casey, after court today, remind me to show you how to go digging through public records for what you want.”

  “Okay…?” Casey asked, voice trailing off into a question. “What’re we looking for, though?”

  “Business records,” I told him. “The owner’s and manager’s attorneys are being too buddy-buddy. I think they’re going to try and pin this on the contractor when they sue each other for the damages, and that tells me that one or the other is trying to hide something. And I want us to have a rudimentary idea of what that might be, since we’re slated to call Mrs. King as a hostile witness tomorrow—”

  “Dibs,” Fatima said.

  “Wha — oi, you can’t call dibs on a witness!” Julio squawked.

  “She just did,” I interjected. “Now come on, focus up. We’ve still got a few more witnesses to get through before we can watch the defense trip over each others’ feet.”

  “And if they don’t?” Casey asked.

  “Then we trip them ourselves,” I said with the flick of an ear. “That’s what objections are for, after all.”

  “At this time, the Plaintiff calls Fire Marshal Tristan Marks to the stand.”

  From the first row of the gallery stood a man that could only be described as ‘grizzled’: stocky, swarthy, somewhere between three and five days’ of growth across the entire bottom half of his face, and skin with the texture of rough leather. He wasn’t wearing a suit, and had instead come to court in comfortable, durable work clothes. The only thing that identified him by his rank was the jacket of his formal uniform, the kind that they trotted out for award ceremonies or funerals, which clearly marked him as both being with the fire department and holding a high rank.

  “Thank you for joining us today, Marshal,” I said as I approached my witness, angled so that he would be looking at both the jury and me.

  “Just make it quick,” Marks said with a scowl. “I was across the city this morning and have another spot to check out after this.”

  “Out of curiosity, would one of those be the Navy Yard apartments that burned down on January 6?” I asked.

  “Objection!”

  “Withdrawn,” I said, not bothering to let the defense state their reasoning.

  “Counselor, please don’t play those games,” Judge Friedman admonished, then looked past me to the six seated behind where I stood. “That question is stricken from the record, and the jury will disregard it.”

  Except that no, they wouldn’t. The jury never disregarded anything, and as an ear swiveled towards the sound of pen scratching across paper, I could tell that this jury was not about to be the exception.

  “Very well,” I said, stepping forward. “Marshal Marks, how long have you served the DC Fire Department?”

  “Twenty-eight years,” he said. “Been an officer for twenty-three of them.”

  And so began the process of impaneling an expert witness. You had to go through the witness’s work history, their qualifications, their certifications, everything and anything that would qualify them as an expert in whatever field you wanted them to speak in. The more experience they had, the better, and you wanted as much of it as possible on the record and relayed to the jury.

  This was because your average juror didn’t have the slightest goddamn clue what did and didn’t make for an effective expert witness. Now, as an attorney? If opposing counsel put a witness on the stand and they testified to being an expert in… I don’t know, let’s say 27 different things? Well, I knew immediately that they were full of shit.

  But for a juror, it depended on how it was phrased. If the lawyer read off a list and asked for confirmation only at the end, then a juror was going to be unconvinced. But if the lawyer read the items off a list one at a time, and each time the witness confirmed that yes, they were an expert in that thing? Well, shit, the average juror would buy it, hook, line, and sinker. It was all a matter of volume: call yourself an expert enough times, and eventually somebody would believe you.

  The only thing better than that was actually proving that your witness was, in fact, an expert. And that was more difficult, because as expertise increased, so too did granularity. But once again, you could get around that issue with the firehose method… which was ironic to bring up, given the context, but still.

  Basically, you utterly barrage your jury with proof that This Person Knows Their Shit. The wilder and wackier the thing you wanted the jury to believe, the more you had to throw at their face before actually getting to the important part.

  In this instance, thankfully, I didn’t have to do as much of that. I wanted my guy to say something that was already believable, which was also something that they wanted to believe. So I got through all of my witness’s qualifications in fifteen minutes, and because opposing counsel didn’t really have any way to attack his credibility, they didn’t try.

  And once the judge finally agreed that my expert was, in fact, an expert, I still had momentum on my side.

  “Are you aware of the events of December 27th, 2019?” I asked, perking up my ears from a more relaxed posture to pointing straight at the fire marshal, hanging off of his every word. At least two of the jurors had been following what my ears did, and this meant that their attention was squarely on our witness.

  “Thirty-year-old apartment building in Southeast burned down,” Marks said, his ever-present frown still fixed in position.

  “Did the office of the fire marshal conduct an investigation?”

  “I did the investigation myself,” he said. From both the jury box and the gallery came the unmistakable sound of people shifting from a slouch to sitting upright.

  “And what did your investigation find?” I prompted.

  “Closest firehouse got word at 3:28pm, sent three engines en route,” Marshal Marks began. “Firefighters on the scene described that smoke was visible from five blocks away, and they arrived to find the building already on fire, with the first floor already engulfed and the second starting to burn. Attempting to extinguish the fire with water had only a short-lived effect, as the flames dimmed then surged further.”

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “I thought water was supposed to put out fires,” I said, signaling my confusion both with my tone of voice and by lowering one ear. “What could have caused that?”

  “Electrical or oil fire. Most likely the former; you usually see oil fires at restaurants.”

  “And how would that have worked, exactly?” I asked.

  “Water conducts electricity,” Marshal Marks said. “And if there’s impurities or minerals in the water, even more so. Water’s decently hard in DC, even more so the further from the Hill you get, which means lots of minerals. Water conducts the electricity to something flammable, sets it alight. You handle an electrical fire by cutting the power.”

  “And how about here?”

  “Too little, too late.” He shook his head, his scowl worsening. “By the time the power got cut, the fire had spread too far for that to do anything.”

  “I see,” I said. Then I took the opportunity to shift where I was standing, and took two steps back, positioning myself closer to the back of the jury box, where the actuary sat. “Marshal Marks, are you aware of the testimony from earlier today that the fire alarms in the buildings weren’t going off?”

  “Objection!” Combover — Curly — rose to his feet. “That information is not covered in the report submitted to the court!”

  “And?” I asked, lowering an ear in his direction. “It would be one thing if I’d asked about hearsay, but this wasn’t an out-of-court statement. A witness who was present at the scene shared that information just this morning.”

  “Which is why the objection is overruled,” Judge Friedman said, gesturing down at the witness seated below and besides his position on the bench. “The witness may answer the question.”

  “Sure,” Marshal Marks said, scoffing slightly as he shook his head at Curly. “I know what you’re gonna ask: how did the firehouse know there was a fire if the alarms didn’t go off in the building. That it?”

  “It is,” I confirmed. “Might you be able to offer an explanation?”

  “It’s ‘cause they run on two different systems.” The fire marshal rested his elbows on the witness stand as he held his hands up. He shook his right hand first, and I lowered one ear to match him. “Sprinkler goes off, sends a signal to an alarm panel, usually on the first floor somewhere. From there, another pair of signals are supposed to go out along different pathways, one to the rest of the building.” He lowered his right hand and raised the left instead, which I again mirrored with my ears. “One to the firehouse. Now the firehouse got the signal, but the building didn’t.”

  “And what could cause that?” I asked, ears low and back in curiosity despite my frown at the answer.

  “Few different things,” he said. “The big ones are damage to the wiring or something messing with the box itself. Problem is, I should have gotten an idea which it was, but I ain’t got a clue.”

  “And why is that?” I stalked closer to the witness stand as I said this, drawing the jury’s eyes towards my witness. “Why don’t you know?”

  “The fire safety panels are usually kept in a hardened, fire-resistant room,” Marshal Marks said. “These rooms can usually take at least three hours of hard burn before the fire gets in, and even if it does, the rest of the room would be ash long before the panel box itself even starts to burn. But when I went to go check the panel, it was as fucked as the rest of the first floor, which don’t make sense.”

  “Why not?” I prompted.

  “Because the building had barely been burning for an hour before it collapsed.”

  I let the witness’s answer hang in the courtroom for a few seconds, and took the opportunity to make my way back over towards our table. I counted out the seconds in my head, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, and waited until I hit four to ask my next question.

  “So the panel that would’ve let you know why the fire alarm in the building didn’t go off was supposed to be in a room rated for three hours of burning at least,” I began. “Now, that’s true of construction for today, but what about one built thirty years ago?”

  “The same,” the fire marshal said with no hesitation. “And it’s the kind of thing that would need to be on the blueprints, building plans, the like. You’d have needed that shit approved before you broke ground.”

  “And what do you think is the most likely explanation for why the panel’s room would have been so vulnerable to fire regardless?”

  “Objection!” This time it was the contractor’s attorney, who I’d been referring to as Larry, that took offense at my question. “Your Honor, the question is clearly calling for speculation!”

  “And while normally you’d be right, I’m asking the expert to weigh in on a very specific possibility, your Honor,” I said, answering the defense’s argument. “I did not ask him to spitball. I asked him for the most likely explanation.”

  “Let’s hear the answer first.” Judge Friedman waved on. “Please proceed, Marshal.”

  “Hm.” Marshal Marks audibly exhaled, and brought one hand up to scratch at his beard. “Problem like this, it has to have been there for a while. Since the building was built. Corners cut during construction. But it’s still the kind of thing the inspector should’ve noticed. The acoustics in a panel room that’s built right are completely different, and any trained inspector should’ve caught it. Issue here is, I can’t ask the inspector.”

  “You can’t?” I asked, frowning. “Why not?”

  “Because the inspector who last checked the Hillside Courtyard, Micky Henricks? He swallowed a .45 around this time last year.”

  The courtroom erupted into murmurs. The jurors next to me all began scribbling something down on their notepads, and when I swiveled an ear towards the gallery, I caught the word “cover-up” being said in at least three hushed conversations.

  “Objection, Your Honor.” Larry stood back up. “Tragic as the news of this inspector’s death may be, the prejudice it introduces substantially outweighs any probative value.”

  Or, to translate into layman’s terms: “It makes my client look so incredibly bad that I don’t care if it’s true”. That particular objection tended to only get upheld for such things as prior convictions or other, completely unrelated bad acts, such as if you tried to point out that the defendant in a tax evasion case had previously checked himself into rehab for an opioid addiction. Yes, I’d had that exact scenario happen before, and yes, the objection did get upheld.

  But if I was right, the judge wouldn’t let it fly here, because it was both directly related to and very important to know that the person who was supposed to make sure the burned-down building wouldn’t burn down killed himself less than a month after it burned to the ground.

  “Overruled,” the judge said. “If this Mr. Henricks was still alive, he probably would’ve been testifying. The jury should know why he isn’t.”

  “Thank you, your Honor,” I said.

  The questioning went on in that vein for some time. Fire Marshal Tristan Marks told my jury where he determined the fire to have started, listed off the things that should have been present to keep things from getting that bad, and explained how the building fell apart. He explained how the lacking structural integrity of the building resulted in the crumbling stairwell, and how the external fire escapes and window units should have been properly affixed to the walls, but instead just wound up as twisted metal wreckage at the bottom.

  And at the end, I had one final question for him, styled in the same fashion as every final question you posed to an expert witness.

  “Marshal Marks, in your expert opinion as fire marshal and arson investigator, what can you conclude about the root cause of this fire?”

  “In my nearly thirty years with the DC Fire Department, I have seen bad fires, terrible fires, and god fucking awful fires,” he began, and I noted with satisfaction that he made eye contact with a different member of the jury as he listed those fires off. “So I’m gonna be frank: this fire was god fucking awful, the kind of absolute shitshow you usually only see from a condemned building. So given that, I’ll just say this: the Hillside Courtyard was a perfect storm of cheap construction, lazy maintenance, and willful blindness. The building was in such bad shape that I’ll happily go out on a limb and say a fire was inevitable. And the worst part is? There’s no goddamn way it could get to that point without people ignoring it.

  “The root cause of the fire was an electrical issue, per the observations of the firefighters on the scene. But the root cause of the electrical issue itself was the abject failure of responsible parties to make sure everything was maintained properly.”

  “‘The abject failure of responsible parties’, huh?” I half-asked, half-stated, punctuating the witness’s words. “I have no more questions at this time, your Honor.”

  With that, I walked back to my seat, keeping my steps deliberately slow, and sat down.

  Larry, the contractor’s attorney, stood up.

  “Permission to approach, your Honor?” Larry asked.

  “Granted.”

  Larry walked around the edge of the defense’s table and just barely into the well of the court, seemingly unwilling to stray more than arm’s length from the other defense attorneys. However, this meant that, unlike Curly, Larry hadn’t made the grievous mistake of letting the jury decide who to look at.

  The fire marshal was completely out of line of sight when they looked at the defense attorney.

  “Mr. Marks,” Larry said, deliberately leaving out the fire marshal’s rank in a clear attempt to minimize the weight of his opinion. “I’ll keep this quick. You mentioned that an inspector, this Mr. Henricks, was responsible for ensuring the building was up to code.”

  “I did, and he was,” the fire marshal answered.

  “And if Mr. Henricks found reason to not sign off on his inspection, the building would have been condemned, correct?”

  “Not immediately,” Marshal Marks answered. “There’d have been some chance to fix things up.”

  “But he did have that power, correct?” Larry pressed.

  “In essence.”

  “So then,” Larry began, stepping towards the aisle, “by not exercising this power, you are saying that the fire was actually Mr. Henricks’ fault, are you not?”

  “The building was in such a condition that a fire was more or less inevitable,” Marshal Marks said. “That those conditions went unreported was Mr. Henricks’ fault, yes.”

  “So then it’s—”

  “But!” Marks raised his voice. “The conditions that allowed for the fire were not Henricks’ fault. And you don’t get to speak ill of him while he’s not around to defend himself anymore!”

  “… I see,” Larry said. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t mean to speak ill of the dead. Merely make a point that the last opportunity to stop things was Mr. Henricks’ to take or leave. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “The last of hundreds,” Marks said, crossing his arms. “Henricks was the canary, not the coal mine.”

  … God, I loved this witness. I would never have thought of that line on my own.

  “I see,” Larry said with a sigh. “Very well. Nothing further for this witness, your Honor.”

  As Larry sat back down, I briefly stood from my chair.

  “Nothing further for this witness, your Honor.”

  “Very well, the witness is thanked for his time and dismissed.” The bailiff came up and motioned for the fire marshal to step down from the stand, and Marks needed no prompting to do just that. Once the witness had left, Judge Friedman cleared his throat and brought attention to himself.

  “Court will adjourn until tomorrow morning,” he said, then turned to me. “Ms. Ziegler, will the plaintiff’s case in chief be finished after tomorrow?”

  “I believe so, your Honor,” I said. “We do request to leave open the possibility of rebuttal witnesses after the defense puts on its case in chief, however.”

  “So noted,” he said. “Very well. We reconvene for another day at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  The judge brought his gavel down, and the day was done.

  Half of our planned witnesses had testified. And for the other half tomorrow, I’d be taking the back seat. It was time for Julio and Fatima to show what they were made of.

  And woe to the defense should they underestimate this pair.

  really good questions from that.