duties extend to other aspects of the crime as well. Who might have set the fire, the development of forensic evidence from sifting the scene, that kind of thing."
"Do you remember the fire in Alamo Square at the home of Paul Hanover on May the twelfth of last year?"
"I do. I was called to it right away. Very early on, it looked like an obvious arson."
"What was obvious about it?"
"There were two dead bodies in the foyer. They appeared to have been victims of homicide, rather than overcome by the fire. The assumption was that someone started the fire to hide the evidence they'd left."
Hardy raised a hand. "Your Honor, objection. Speculation."
Braun impatiently shook her head. "Overruled," she said.
Rosen ignored the interruption. "Would you please tell us about the bodies?"
"Well, as I say, there were two of them. They looked like a man and a woman, although it was difficult to tell for certain. The burning was extensive, and the clothes on the tops of their bodies had burned away. Under them, later, though, we found a few scraps of clothing."
Rosen gave the jury a few seconds to contemplate this visual, a common prosecutorial technique to spark outrage and revulsion for the crime in the minds of the panel. "Anything else about the bodies, Inspector?"
"Well, yes. Each had a bullet hole in the head, and what appeared to be the barrel of a gun was barely visible under the side of the man. So that being the case, I decided to try to preserve the scene of the crime-the foyer just inside the front door-as carefully as possible, and asked the firefighting teams to try to work around that area."
"And were they able to do that?"
"Pretty much. Yes, sir."
After producing another easel upon which he showed the jury a succession of drawings and sketches of the lobby, the position of the bodies, the location of the wounds-the prosecutor definitely favored the show-and-tell approach-Rosen took a while walking Becker step-by-step through the investigative process, and the jury sat spellbound. According to the witness, the blaze began in the foyer itself. The means of combustion, in his expert opinion, was one of the most effective ones ever invented-ordinary newspaper wadded up into a ball about the size of a basketball. Even without accelerants of any kind, a ball of newspaper this size in an average-size room-and the foyer of Hanover's would qualify as that-would create enough heat to incinerate nearly everything in it, and leave no trace of its source.
"You used the term 'accelerant,' Inspector. Can you tell us what you mean by that?"
And Becker gave a short course, finishing with gasoline, the accelerant used in this particular fire.
"But with all these other accelerants, Inspector, surely they would burn up in the blaze? How can you be sure that this one was gasoline?"
Becker loved the question. "That's the funny thing," he said, "that people always seem to find difficult to understand."
"Maybe you can help us, then, Inspector."
Hardy longed to get up and do or say something to put a damper on the lovefest between these two. Earlier, Hardy had interviewed Becker himself and had found him to be forthcoming and amiable. Rosen's charming act played beautifully here-the jurors were hearing interesting stuff talked about by two really nice guys. Not only were they giving him nothing to work with, if they did get on something worth objecting to, and Hardy rose to it, he would look like he was trying to keep from the jury what this earnest and obviously believable investigator wanted to tell them. So he sat there, hands folded in front of him, his face consciously bland and benign, and let Becker go on.
"All these accelerants, in fact everything, needs oxygen to burn, so whatever burns has to be in contact with the air. But there is only one part of a liquid that can be in contact with the air, and that is its surface. So what you can have, and actually do have in a case like this, is the gasoline running over the floor, sometimes slightly downhill, pooling in places. But no matter what it's doing, the only part of it that's burning is its surface. Maybe the stuff that isn't burning underneath, the liquid, soaks into some clothing fabric, or into a rug. Both of those things happened here, so we were able to tell exactly what kind of accelerant it was."
"And it was?" "Gasoline."
"Inspector, you used the word 'exactly.' Surely you don't mean you can tell what type of gasoline it was?"
Hardy and Catherine were of course both intimately familiar with every nuance of this testimony. Unable to bear his own silence any longer, he leaned over and whispered to her. "Surely he doesn't mean that?" A wisp of a smile played at Catherine's mouth.
"That's exactly what I mean." Becker gushed on, explaining the mass-spectrometer reading, the chemical analysis (more charts) of Valero gasoline, the point-by-point comparison. Finally, Rosen, having established murder and arson-although no absolute causal relationship between the two-changed the topic. "Now, Inspector, if we could go back to the night of the fire for a while. After you told the firefighters to preserve the crime scene as best you could, what did you do then?"
"I went outside to direct the arson team." He went on to describe the members of this team-another arson inspector, the police personnel-and their various functions, concluding with getting the names and contacts of possible witnesses from people gathered at the scene. "And why do you want to do that?"
Becker seemed to have some trouble understanding the question. Suddenly his eyes shifted to Hardy, but he braved a reply. "Well, lots of people tend to come to a fire, and you never know which of them might have seen something that could prove important. Sometimes a spectator might not recognize the importance of something they've seen. We just like to have a record of everybody who was there so inspectors can go back and talk to them later."
The reason for Becker's sudden edginess soon revealed itself. Rosen had obviously rehearsed this part of the testimony to get to this: "Inspector, isn't it true that, in your experience, when arson is involved, the arsonist, the person who set the fire, often comes back to admire his or her handiwork?"
Hardy shot up. "Objection, Your Honor. No foundation. The witness is not a psychologist." This was kind of a lame objection, since the question was more about what arson inspectors observed than what was in the mind of arson suspects, but it sounded good, and the judge went for it.
"Sustained."
Rosen tried again. "Inspector Becker, among arson inspectors is it common knowledge that a person who sets a fire…?"
Hardy wouldn't let him finish. "Objection! Hearsay and speculation."
"Sustained. Mr. Rosen, ask a specific question or drop this line."
"All right, Your Honor." Rosen stood still, all but mouthing his words first to make sure he got them right. "Inspector, in your own experience, have you personally ever identified and/or arrested an arsonist who had returned to a fire he or she had created?"
Hardy was on his feet. "Your Honor, I'm sorry, but I must object again."
But Rosen, this time, had made it narrow enough for the judge to accept. "Objection overruled. Go ahead, Mr. Rosen."
"Thank you, Your Honor."
Hardy caught a bit of a smirk in the prosecutor's face and, suddenly realizing his own blunder, he tightened down on the muscles in his jaw. By objecting time and again to Rosen's questions, he'd fallen for the prosecutor's bait, thus calling the jury's attention to an item they might otherwise have overlooked as unimportant. Now no one in the courtroom thought it was unimportant, and Hardy had no one to blame for that but himself.
Rosen asked the reporter to read back the question, which she did as Hardy lowered himself to his chair.
The answer, of course, was yes. Becker himself had personally had cases where arsonists had returned to or remained at the fire scene at least a dozen times.
"So now you were outside, across the street from the fire? Can you tell the jury what happened next?"