California Fire And Life by Winslow Don

Author:Winslow, Don [Winslow, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Thriller, Crime
ISBN: 9780307279859
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 1999-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

56

Incendiary origin, opportunity and motive.

Also known as the Tripartite Proof.

Whatever it’s called, you need these three elements to prove arson by an insured in court. And if you deny a claim based on arson, you’d better be able to prove it in court.

Same with the murder, Jack thinks. To deny the life insurance claim, I need to prove that it was a homicide, and that Nicky had motive and opportunity.

Incendiary origin is just a fancy way of saying that someone intentionally set the fire. What you need to satisfy this one are such things as traces of accelerants, the remnants of an incendiary device, maybe a timer. You also want the indicators of a hot, fast-moving fire: big V-pattern, alligator char, deep char on the floor, crazed glass, a pour pattern.

Most important of all these is traces of accelerants, and now he has them. Dr. Bambi will come into court and testify that he found heavy traces of kerosene in the flooring and the floor joists. He’ll show the jury his charts and graphs and the jury will go back into the room believing that someone poured kerosene around that bedroom.

So Jack checks off incendiary origin and pushes it out of his mind. Opportunity — that is, did the insured have a chance to set the fire or cause to have it set? It goes a little deeper than that. The actual standard is “exclusive opportunity” — was the insured the only party to have access to the house during the critical time when the fire was set?

Opportunity is a tricky mother. It’s why you look to see if doors and windows were locked. It’s why you talk to neighbors to see what — and whom — they might have seen. It’s why you take recorded statements to pin the insured down to where they were at the time of the fire.

It’s elusive.

One reason being that arsonists — unless they’re really stupid — tend to use timing devices. For one thing, there is a matter of getting out of the place without setting yourself on fire. You pour some gasoline around and strike a match, you stand a good chance of becoming a human torch. What a lot of amateurs don’t know is that it’s the fumes that ignite, not the liquid. So they pour the gas, step back, toss the match and then run out flaming into the night.

For another thing, a good timing device gives you the time to establish an alibi. You were somewhere else at the moment of ignition, so you didn’t have the exclusive opportunity to set the fire.

A timing device can be very simple or very sophisticated. As simple as a series of twisted sheets tied together to form a giant wick, which gives you the chance to light it and get away by the time it hits the big pool of gas and goes PHWOOM. Or it can be a simple timer wired to strike a spark into a well of accelerant at a certain time, and that gives you even more space.

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