The police finally found Mrs. Leslie King at 8:47pm that evening, at an Amtrak station in Kingstree, South Carolina. We’d been assured that she would be extradited back to DC and delivered to the courthouse tomorrow, accompanied by law enforcement personnel at all times.

In the meantime, though, none of us on the plaintiff’s side wanted to waste an afternoon, not when we had momentum on our side. So Julio went ahead and called Miguel Arroyo to the stand.

The man arrived with his sister’s urn again, which he paired with pictures of his nieces, who were currently in the burn ward at GWU Hospital, and would probably still be there a few months from now. He told the jury all the same things he’d revealed to us during discovery: that he hadn’t inspected the Hillside Courtyard in the past eight years; that he’d marked the building as having passed its inspections, with the occasional remark or criticism pulled from thin air to help the false report pass muster; that he’d only started doing this after the head property manager for WCS’ DC Section 8 properties, Mrs. Leslie King, had threatened to evict his sister and nieces from Section 8 housing.

The last time Mr. Arroyo had gone to perform one of these inspections hadn’t actually been at the Hillside Courtyard, much to our chagrin. It had been on a different property out in Northeast, near the end of the DC metro’s Green line. But on the bright side, he’d gone and done the one thing that had gotten us to drop him from the suit entirely.

He’d gotten a recording.

And we played that recording to the jury, over the loud, vociferous, and overruled objections of the defense team.

The defense’s cross examination was a bit of a shitshow too, really, particularly because Mr. Arroyo was very quick to remind the lawyers that he had a pending lawsuit against their clients, too, and whether it even had to go to trial or not depended entirely on how this one went.

Ah, issue preclusion, I love you so. Also known as collateral estoppel, issue preclusion was one of the most evil and nasty cheat codes you could get for a situation like this. To explain in layman’s terms: when the defense lost here, then every single matter we argued about would be considered as already decided. So once we had it on the record that his main target, Property Management Solutions, Inc., was at least partly to blame?

Well, they will have already had their day in court and lost. We all only get one bite at the apple.

If anything, the news that Mrs. Leslie King had apparently boarded an Amtrak train half an hour into Mr. Arroyo’s testimony was a godsend. Judge Friedman may have stricken that statement, ordered the jury to disregard, and then dismissed them for the day, but that didn’t matter. The jury will disregard? Not fucking likely. The jury never disregards gossip like that.

Anyway, with the news that our next witness was partway down the eastern seaboard, court adjourned until the morning, so that the witness could get dragged back up to DC.

And then, before the trial continued the next morning, we arrived at Judge Friedman’s chambers at half past nine so that we could briefly argue a new motion to exclude testimony. The inability of a defendant to prevent their witness from running away was something I very badly wanted on the record, and for all the same reasons, the defense wanted it excluded. Thankfully, Judge Friedman saw reason and ruled that we could use it — after all, if the defense didn’t want us pointing out that the witness tried to run away, maybe they should’ve paid more attention to where she was in the first place.

Now, though, it was 10:15 in the morning. The jury was seated. The gallery was full up again.

And Fatima was practically shaking in excitement as she stood from her chair.

“At this time, the plaintiff calls to the stand Mrs. Leslie King, in her capacity as former property manager of the Hillside Courtyard.”

I turned around to look at the gallery of the court, and saw movement in the back. Two police officers stood up, pulling a woman out of her seat as they did so. There was no fight in Mrs. Leslie King as the cops half-dragged her to the bar of the court and handed her off to the bailiff, who seated our recalcitrant flight risk upon the bench and only then undid her handcuffs.

Now that the witness was sitting front and just-off-center, the court at large finally got a good look at the older woman. Gone was the clear and deliberate attempt to put forth a disarming ‘harmless grandma’ image. Her hair was unkempt, and even though it was tied back in a severe bun, there was still enough grease in it to dull the blonde almost to a brown and give it an almost waxy sheen. She wore no makeup, which showed just how heavy her face was with frown lines and angry wrinkles. And let’s not forget that she was currently dressed in sweatpants and a kitschy tourist schlock t-shirt, probably because the police hadn’t let her grab her stuff when dragging her off the Amtrak train down in the Carolinas.

All in all, I couldn’t have asked for a better way to introduce the witness to our jury. Nothing screamed “I’m hiding something” quite so loudly as trying to run away.

“Permission to approach?”

“Granted.”

Fatima nodded, and prowled into the well of the court, her footfalls silent in a way that was outright unnerving. Even on carpet, footsteps still carried sound, but Fatima’s every step was slow, careful, and deliberate.

It was the same way a predator stalked her prey.

Fatima then broke one of the cardinal rules of cross examination, the same one that Larry had made when cross examining Barricade: she stood next to the jury, meaning that the witness and jury could look at one another when questioning happened. And ninety- nine times out of a hundred, this was a massive fuck up. But here?

Here, we had a witness who was guilty of something, who had tried to flee. And because of this, Fatima was making the jury look at her, putting her under the collective gaze of her judgmental peers.

“Please state your name and occupation for the record,” Fatima began, her tone cold and callous.

Mrs. King didn’t reply immediately, instead trying to glare a hole into Fatima’s forehead. It was only when Judge Friedman very loudly cleared his throat that she seemed to realize how mandatory her answer was.

“Leslie King,” she answered. “Supervisory property manager.”

“And you hold this position as an employee of one of the defendants, Property Management Solutions, Inc.?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been an employee at this company for twenty-five years?”

“Yes.”

“And in your position as supervisory property manager, you were responsible for overseeing thirteen properties, including the Hillside Courtyard?”

“Well, I was more in charge of their—”

“Ma’am,” Fatima interrupted, “that was a ‘yes-or-no’ question. Either you were, or you weren’t. So which one is it: were you, as an employee of the defendant, acting as property manager for thirteen properties?”

“Well, seven now, but—”

“But at the time of the incident that spawned this case, you were the manager for thirteen,” Fatima filled in, once again not letting her finish.

“… I suppose so, yes.” Mrs. King had her lips pursed, her entire face pinched like she’d been sucking on a lemon for the past few hours. It was plain as day to see that this woman was Not Happy.

“Mrs. King.” Fatima stepped closer to her witness, ensuring that she was between the realtor and retired grandma jurors as she asked her next question. “Drawing on your twenty-five years as a property manager, would you say it’s normal to manage more than one property?”

Members of the jury: welcome to cross examination. More specifically, this was a particular brand that we called ‘hostile witness examination’.

Sometimes, the only proof of wrongdoing, or in our case the key piece of proof, was an individual’s personal knowledge. If they refused to testify, you hit them with a subpoena to force the issue. And if they ran away from the subpoena? Well… if the police couldn’t find them, you just read their testimony into the record from a deposition.

If the police did find them? Well, they dragged your witness onto the stand, and you got to go first instead.

Now, the cardinal rules of cross examination are as follows:

Zero; break these rules as necessary, and sparingly. They are rules for a reason, but all rules have their exceptions.

One; stay on the opposite side of the courtroom. This way, the jury has to look at you, or the witness, and because they tend to look at whoever’s talking, then that should be you. Which leads into…

Two; you should be doing the lion’s share of the talking. Legal dramas love to trot out the ‘counsel is testifying’ objection, but on cross? That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do. You, the lawyer, are testifying, and the witness is there to confirm the veracity of your testimony.

Three; keep it short and sweet. You want to attack the witness on three points, at most. The longer cross examination goes, the less juries like you. We have years and years of fumbled bags and blind-side verdicts to prove it.

And most importantly, four; never, ever, ask a question whose answer you don’t already know.

Which brings us back to Fatima’s question: was it normal for a property manager to be in charge of more than one property at a time?

“Well, that’s a bit of a hard question to answer,” Mrs. King hedged, doing her level best to dodge the question.

And in doing so, she set Fatima up for the next one, which would make the first of her three points.

“And that would be because your company only assigns one manager to multiple properties when all of them are Section 8, isn’t that right?”

“Objection!” Moe yelled as he stood. “She, t-that question prejudices the jury, your Honor!”

“Really, counselor?” Fatima asked, walking towards the witness before turning her back to Mrs. King, ensuring that the jury could see her face as she addressed the opposite side’s lawyer. “All testimony, all evidence, everything said in a courtroom is prejudicial to one extent or another. So unless you have a better objection than ‘this looks bad for my client’, stop wasting everyone’s time.”

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

Ooh, that was a risk. I really hoped Fatima had as good a read on the judge as this suggested, otherwise…

“Your Honor—!”

Judge Friedman raised a hand, and Moe quieted down.

“Objection overruled,” he said, then glanced towards a defiant Fatima. “Ms. Osmani, you are the lawyer, and I am the judge. Please stop trying to do my job for me. That being said?” He turned towards Moe and raised one eyebrow. “Counselor is correct. Mr. Munroe, your client’s employee here has already set my trial calendar back by an entire day. So unless you have a properly meritorious objection, sit. Down. The witness will answer the question.”

Okay. Phew. That was… that was aggressive. That was the exact kind of aggression that had lost Fatima the case she’d tried against Amir, and it was probably because we were on the other side here.

See, the demeanor of the attorneys had a major effect on how the jury saw their client. If jurors saw the defense attorney being angry, no matter the reason, they immediately thought worse of the defendant. But when they saw the plaintiff’s attorney being angry, the opposite assumption existed: that the anger had to come from

somewhere, that it had to be justified.

And, well… one of the jurors, the forensic accountant, was currently glancing between Fatima and the urn holding our client’s ashes.

“Thank you, your Honor,” Fatima said, stepping away from the witness stand before turning around and looking down her nose at Mrs. King. “As I was saying: the company you work for, Property Management Solutions, Inc., only assigns a single property manager to multiple apartment complexes when those properties are designated as low-income housing. Isn’t that right?”

“Well, that’s because it’s a better allocation of labor!” Mrs. King protested.

“And yet, it remains true that standard industry practice is to have one dedicated property manager per building, does it not?” Fatima pressed, not letting the witness get out of answering.

“Yes, for—”

“Moving on!” Fatima interrupted, raising her volume and turning away to cow Mrs. King into silence. “In your position as property manager, you only visited the properties under your purview at most once a month?”

“Well, they didn’t need more than that, you see! These, ‘underprivileged housing’ buildings, the occupants are all just so thankful to have a place at all, see? Not like our tenants over in the luxury buildings, they’re all so fussy.” Mrs. King did answer the question this time, but in doing so, she volunteered information that we had already planned to ask her.

In all fairness, she made one of the most common mistakes in the book. It’s hard to fess up to anything without giving an explanation. We all wanted to justify ourselves in some way. But as I was keen to inform the few criminal clients I took on, you only ever wanted to provide the bare minimum needed to answer a question. You only provided bonus info if it was specifically not answering the question. Doing anything more than that was just giving your questioner more ammunition.

And in this case, that was exactly what had happened.

“So, you would agree that a ‘luxury’ apartment building in Navy Yard produces several times the complaints of any two Section 8 complexes combined?” Fatima asked, laying the trap.

“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?” Mrs. King responded with a scowl.

“Yes or no, ma’am.”

“Fine!” the witness spat. “Yes!”

“I see.” Fatima paced sideways a little bit. “And when you receive these complaints, they are either physical documents, which are then scanned and emailed; call logs, which are emailed to all relevant parties; or directly emailed to begin with?

“Yes?”

With that, Fatima turned on a heel and stalked back to our table. As she approached, Julio held out a hefty stack of papers, which was really just three copies of the same sheaf of documents. The stack laid in front of a trio of piles, each smaller than the triple stack, but larger than any of the individual piles that Fatima took from Julio’s outstretched hand.

“Let the record reflect that I am presenting copies of these documents to opposing counsel and to the judge,” she said, casually tossing a binder-clipped copy onto the defense’s table even as she delicately handed a second copy to Judge Friedman.

And then, she stepped closer to Leslie King, held her copy just out of arm’s length, and directed the witness’s gaze to the first page’s header with one finger.

“Mrs. King. This document states that it is a complaint form for one Flats on the Yard, correct?”

“Yes,” she said. “Says it right there.”

“And the date on this first complaint form states that it is from May 4, 2008, correct?” Fatima continued.

“Yes.”

“And the next page,” Fatima began as she flipped the paper up to reveal the next page, “is a response form, with your name on it and a response date of May 5, 2008. Do I have that right?”

“You do,” Mrs. King said, though her tone was starting to show some confusion.

“And if I flip through all of these documents, I get…” Fatima grabbed a random spot in the sheaf of paper, and flipped it up to show another document. “October 1, 2008,” she said, then picked another random spot further on, “then later on March 5, 2009, then June 17, 2011, and so on. Would it be fair to say, then, that these are in chronological order?”

“They are,” the witness admitted.

“And if I go to the last page, we have… a notification to all tenants on May 5, 2012, that you will no longer be the manager for this property, and introducing the new property manager. Correct?” Fatima asked.

“Yes, I was promoted after that,” Mrs. King admitted.

“So you would agree that these are all the complaints you received during the entire time you worked at Flats on the Yard?”

“They are,” Mrs. King confirmed.

“Your Honor, at this time I move that these documents be entered into evidence as Plaintiff’s Exhibit L, titled ‘Mrs. King Received Complaints One’, and that it be published to the jury.”

“So entered,” Judge Friedman agreed. And with that, we had a set of complaints spanning almost five full years entered into the record, in the form of a two-inch-thick stack of paper. A couple hundred pieces of paper… which were no longer useful to us.

Rather than dive into the complaints for some choice examples, Fatima instead returned to our table, handed Julio the stack of complaints, and replaced them with the three larger reams of paper that had all been set out as separate stacks.

Once again, Fatima handed copies to the defense and to the judge, and requested the record reflect that. And once again, she set herself just far enough that Mrs. King couldn’t just reach out and grab the copy from her.

“Mrs. King. The first page of this document is an email sent from my client, Mrs. Destiny Banks, to an email address of ‘peachyking at prop mgmt inc dot com’. Is this your email address?”

“... it’s mine,” Mrs. King groused, though she turned her head away from the jury and microphone while she said it, and muttered those words quietly enough that I doubt most people in the courtroom heard them. I only heard because, well, I was all ears all the time.

“Ma’am, when answering questions, please speak clearly and into the microphone in front of you,” Fatima ordered, which had Judge Friedman shifting slightly. Uh-oh, he didn’t like that… but I hoped he would let it go, given who was on the receiving end. “I will repeat the question: is the email address ‘peachyking at prop mgmt inc dot com’ in fact your email address?”

“Fine!” Leslie King spat out. “It’s mine! Happy?”

“Not yet,” Fatima replied without missing a beat. “Now, this is an email from my client, to you, dated October 29, 2019. The subject line says ‘re: heater broke’. Correct?”

“I can read just fine,” Mrs. King griped, only to wince the moment Fatima turned her head to look at Judge Friedman. “Fine, fine! Yes, it does!”

“Now, let’s flip about a third of the way down, and…” Fatima undid the binder clip this time and pulled about a third of the pages away, turning them sideways so that she could keep them in order, and showed the new front page to Mrs. King. “This one is a call log that was sent to your email address, detailing a call between one Mr. Maurice Taylor from Hillside Courtyard, Apartment 504, calling about the broken disability accommodations in his bathroom, dated November 12, 2019. Correct?”

“... yes.” Mrs. King’s admission was hesitant this time, as half the jury had turned their heavily judgmental gazes upon her.

It wasn’t an accident that Fatima had flipped to that page, after all. We’d gone and folded the corners of several pages on Fatima’s copy a few times, letting her flip to those specific pages with ease.

“And now we have… let’s see…” Fatima again flipped to another page, this one near the back, which she made a show of reading before turning it to face Mrs. King. “This one looks to be an email to you, but containing scans of an invoice dropped off in the leasing office on November 12, 2019, invoicing the landlord for repairs conducted on Apartment 228 of the Hillside Courtyard by its tenant, DeShawn Pryde.” Fatima flipped a few more pages. “It is accompanied by highlighted printouts of emails to you from as recently as November 5, 2019, going all the way back to… wow, March 7, 2019. And I’m not seeing any replies from you here. Do you agree that this was sent to and received by you, Mrs. King?”

“It… was, yes,” she admitted.

“And just to check the date on the last page, we have… an email dated December 23, 2019, from you, to every tenant in the Hillside Courtyard, reminding them that maintenance requests would not be fulfilled between the dates of December 24 and January 2.” Fatima put the stack of papers back together. “And you will agree with me that this pile of complaints is all in chronological order, correct?”

“Clearly.”

“Your Honor, at this time I move for the admission of Plaintiff’s Exhibit M, titled ‘Mrs. King Received Complaints Two’, and that it be published to the jury.”

“So entered,” the judge agreed.

With that handled, Fatima walked back to our table and retrieved the first stack of papers from Julio.

“Mrs. King,” she began, holding the stacks of paper flat upon outstretched hands. “In my right hand, I have Exhibit L, which you agreed is in chronological order from the day you started at a ‘luxury’ building in 2008, until you left it in 2012, and in my left hand is Exhibit M, which is the collected complaints from just the Hillside Courtyard, beginning with my client’s most recent complaint on October 29, 2019, and ending with your email to the whole building on December 23, four days before it burned down. Do you understand?”

“I think so?” Mrs. King’s voice was tremulous, and if the way her face had gone even paler was any indication, she’d figured out what Fatima had been setting up.

“Now, you said earlier that luxury buildings needed a dedicated property manager on the premises at all times because of how many more complaints they had to deal with than Section 8 buildings, didn’t you?”

“O-objection!” Moe forced out as he rose to his feet. “Asked and answered, counsel is testifying, and badgering the witness!”

“I’ll allow it,” Judge Friedman said, to which I rolled my eyes and lowered my ears in annoyance. God, did I hate that turn of phrase. Just sustain or overrule the objection! “The witness will answer the question.”

“I-I…” Mrs. King trailed off, casting one last plaintive glance at her employer’s attorney before slumping. “I d-did say that, yes.”

“And yet, the stack of complaints I have from a two-month period at the Hillside Courtyard is almost twice as large as a five-year period from a building with luxury apartments,” Fatima said, turning both piles of paper so that the jury had a clear view of how much larger Exhibit M was. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“So how exactly,” Fatima interrupted, “do you expect this jury to believe that thirteen of these,” she raised Exhibit M, “is somehow doable by somebody in the same position that found this,” she raised Exhibit L, “to be a full-time position, requiring constant on-site supervision?”

“Objection!” Moe yelled.

“I’ll withdraw the question,” Fatima said.

“Strike that question from the record,” Judge Friedman declared. “The jury will disregard. Counsel, proceed.”

But the jury wouldn’t disregard the question. The jury never disregarded.

And by the way Exhibit L held the gazes of the actuary and the accountant, even as Fatima resumed her questioning, I knew that we’d gotten them. Fatima had already accomplished her goal of utterly dismantling any defense the other side could put up before they even had a chance to go.

Now, we just had to hope that their case in chief turned into the kind of crab bucket that would give us our ultimate answer, and reveal whoever was most to blame.