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The Clean Flag: How Four Fires Fed One Man's Fortune · True Crime: Killer Secrets

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The smell hit Gordon Brooks before he saw anything. It
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: was 7.42 in the morning on July 9, 2009, and
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: he was cutting across the vacant lot behind Harmon Street
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: on his way to set up folding chairs for a
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: church breakfast. The Simansky printing warehouse was still smoldering, and there,
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: three feet from a collapsed rear wall sitting upright in
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: a field of wet ash, was a small yellow surveyor's flag. Clean,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: wire stake perfectly perpendicular. Not a smudge on it. That
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: flag should not have existed. Everything around it had burned
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: or collapsed or melted into the rubble. But the flag
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: stood there as if someone had planted it after the
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: fire died down, which, it would turn out, is exactly
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: what happened. Brooks called the non-emergency line.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: He did not know it.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: But that single phone call would unravel a scheme that
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: had been running quietly through the small industrial city of
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Delard for the better part of three years. Four buildings,
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: four fires, one company collecting the cleanup contracts every single time,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: and an insurance adjuster accelerating payments before the fire marshal
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: had even classified the cause. What made the Delard arson
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: racket difficult to see was how ordinary it looked from
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: the outside.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: That is what this story is about.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: The mechanics of a small city fraud that hid inside
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: legitimate commerce, and the narrow chain of evidence that finally
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: exposed it. To understand what Scott Bauer was looking at
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: when that call came in, you have to understand what
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Dellard was in 2009. It was a second-ring industrial city,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: the kind that had shared manufacturing jobs steadily since the
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: 1980s without ever quite collapsing. Old brick warehouses sat vacant
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: along the Port District, and on the numbered blocks off
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Harmon Street, their owners carrying insurance policies they could no
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: longer justify and couldn't easily unload. Demolition was cheaper than renovation.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Debris removal was a steady, unglamorous business.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: Nobody paid it much attention.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Scott Bauer, 38 years old, had joined the Dellard Police
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Department's organized crime unit six years earlier. after a prior
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: career as an insurance investigator. He understood both worlds. How
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: claims moved, how contracts got awarded, how money traveled through
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: industrial service work without attracting notice. When the Simonsky fire
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: came in, it landed on his desk almost by accident.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: A patrol supervisor flagged the location because it was the
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: fourth commercial fire in the corridor in just under three years.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: Four fires, same general zone, same type of structure each time. Unoccupied, insured,
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: commercially distressed. Bauer pulled the previous files before lunch. The
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: first fire had consumed a machine shop on Olin Road.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: The second, a textile finishing plant on Brecket Avenue. The third,
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: a cold storage facility in the Port District. The fourth
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: was the Szymanski Warehouse. A three-story brick building on the
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: 1600 block of Harmon Street, bankrupt for 18 months before
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: it burned. All four buildings had been unoccupied at the
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: time of each blaze. No injuries, no fatalities. In each case,
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: a debris removal contract had been awarded within two business
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: days of the fire report. Every single contract had gone
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: to Slater Site Services. Terry Slater was 44 years old.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: and had run Slater Site Services out of a yard
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: on Dunbar Road for 11 years. 17 employees. A solid
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: regional reputation. His bids ran roughly 12% above the regional average,
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: which was unusual but not disqualifying. Site work in Dellard
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: carried liability exposure, and some clients paid for reliability. Slater
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: was active in local contractor circles. He coached youth baseball
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: on weekends. Nothing about him flagged a threat. But Bauer
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: had spent years in insurance investigation. He knew what a
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: pattern looked like before it had a name. The Dellard
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: case has been filed under fraud, conspiracy, and negligence, simultaneously
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: satisfying none of them completely. This was not a desperate
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: man committing a crime of necessity. Slater was already running
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: a functioning business. What the evidence would eventually show is
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: that the racket began as opportunism and then became habit,
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: which is in many ways the harder thing to explain.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: The question Bauer was sitting with that morning was not
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: yet about motive. It was simpler and more immediate. Four fires,
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: one contractor, two business days each time. Either Terry Slater
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: was the luckiest demolition operator in the county, or someone
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: was making sure the work came to him. And if
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: someone was making sure, There had to be a mechanism.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: There had to be a person inside the insurance process
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: who was moving faster than the rules allowed. Bauer did
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: not have that name yet, but he.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: Knew where to look.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: The solicitation for debris removal at the Olin Road machine
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: shop went out on a Monday morning. Thirty hours later,
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: Terry Slater submitted a bid. That timing was already on.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: The fire marshal's tape was still on. No contractor had
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: legal access to the site. Yet Slater's measurements came back
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: accurate to within 2% of the post-demolition actuals. 2%. On
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: a building he had never legally entered. Bauer pulled the
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: bid documents and set them side by side with the
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: fire marshal's access log. The numbers did not align.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: They could not align.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: Not honestly. For Slater to achieve that level of accuracy
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: from the street... from photographs, from guesswork, would have required
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: either extraordinary luck or prior knowledge of the interior. Bauer
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: wrote one word in the margin of his notes. He
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: circled it. The word was inside. But inside what, exactly?
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: The building, certainly. And something else. Slater Site Services offered
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: free pre-demolition.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: Assessments to prospective clients.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: It was marketed as a service. A way to build
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: goodwill and win future work. Property owners let Slater's crew
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: walk their buildings weeks before any contract was signed. The
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: assessments were legal.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: They were documented.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: And they meant that at every one of the four
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: fire sites, a Slater employee had been inside the structure.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: Before it burned. That employee had a name. Craig Sievert.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: Sievert was 40 years old. Give or take.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: And carried the title of site supervisor at Slater Site Services.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: Before that, he had owned a company called Dunmore Excavating,
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: operating out of Fenner, a smaller municipality about 30 miles
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: from Dellard. He had relocated in 2004. He was quiet, reliable,
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: and known in the trade for working fast. Nobody who
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: dealt with him had complaints.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: That is worth.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: Pausing on, because the same description Quiet, reliable, fast applied
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: to everything Sievert did, including the things that were not
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: on his job description. Bauer had not found Sievert yet.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: He had found something else first. He found Fenner. A
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: data pull on commercial structure fires in the surrounding region
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: turned up three incidents between 2001 and 2003. All in Fenner.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: All commercial. All unoccupied. All insured.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: And in each case, the debris removal contract had gone
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: to a company called Dunmore Excaving, Sievert's company, three fires,
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: same contractor, smaller city, six years earlier. The pattern did
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: not prove anything. Insurance investigators understood that correlation was not causation,
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: and the Fenner fires had been handled and closed without
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: criminal findings. But Bauer was not building a case yet.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: He was building a map And on that map, the
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: same shape was appearing twice. There is something worth sitting
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: with in that moment. Not the discovery itself, but the
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: specific quality of the silence it produces. A coincidence, this
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: tidy does not feel random. It feels engineered. The Fenner
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: discovery sharpened the question about Slater's bids. But it also
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: pointed somewhere Bauer had not yet looked, toward the clock.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: The debris removal solicitations for all four Dullard fires had
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: been issued by Hendrick Mutual Insurance. The timestamps on those
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: solicitations showed they had gone out within 18 hours.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: Of each fire report.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Standard industry practice ran 48 to 72 hours. In three
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: of the four cases, the solicitations had been issued before
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: the fire marshal had even classified the cause.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: Clean-up bids were being.
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: Solicited on fires that had not yet been officially ruled accidental.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: That is not a clerical error. That is a structural impossibility.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: Unless the person issuing the solicitations already knew what the
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: fire marshal would eventually find. The commercial lines adjuster managing
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: all four accounts was Rebecca Hoffman. She was 38 years old,
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: had worked at Hendrick Mutual for nine years, and carried
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: a portfolio of roughly 60 commercial accounts. By every external measure,
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: she was thorough and dependable. She had one minor notation
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: in the state insurance database. An improper file documentation finding,
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: years earlier, in a jurisdiction that included Fenner. The notation
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: was minor. It was the kind of thing that could
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: be overlooked in a routine review. Bauer did not overlook it.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: The breakthrough did not arrive as a revelation.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: It arrived as a number.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Bauer requested the full bid submission records for all four contracts.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: He was looking at timestamps, comparing submission windows against access logs.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: When something in the Olin Road file stopped him, Slater
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: had submitted at 2.17 in the afternoon on a Tuesday.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: The solicitation had opened 30 hours before that, but the
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: fire marshal's tape had not been lifted until 40 hours
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: after submission. No contractor by rule could have taken interior
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: measurements before that tape came down. Slater's numbers were accurate
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: to within 2%. That was the number that kept returning.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: The question of how was already answered, structurally. Sievert had
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: been inside each building weeks earlier, during the free assessments.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: He had the measurements. He had the photographs. He had
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: walked every floor. When the building burned, the bid was
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: not a guess.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: It was a recall.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: But that only explained how Slater could bid so precisely.
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: It did not explain the timing. Eighteen hours.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: Hoffman was issuing solicitations. Eighteen hours after fire reports, before
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: cause was classified.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: In every case.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: That meant she was not waiting for the fire marshal.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: She was not waiting for standard process. She was moving
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: on a signal that came from somewhere outside normal procedure.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Bauer requested Hoffman's internal communications from Hendrick Mutual's compliance office.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: The request was routine in form and extraordinary in implication.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: When the records came back, he found what he had
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: suspected and something he had not expected. The communications were clean,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: too clean. There were no direct messages between Hoffman and
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: Slater in the company system. No calls logged on her
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: office line to Slater Site Services. Nothing that connected them
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: on paper inside the company's walls. But the solicitations had
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: still gone out 18 hours early. Three times before cause classification.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: Something was moving the clock, and it was not leaving
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: a trace inside the building. It was leaving a trace
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: in a parking lot. Investigators obtained cell phone location data
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: as part of a broader warrant. Sievert's phone placed him
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: near each of the four fire sites on the night
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: of each blaze. not in the neighborhood, near the site,
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: within a block, for intervals consistent with the timeline of
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: each fire. And Hoffman's phone, on three separate occasions in
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: the months preceding the Szymanski fire, placed her in the
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: surface lot behind the Hendrick Mutual office building between 7.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: And 8 in the morning. Her vehicle was there. Her
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: phone was there.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: And according to what she would later tell investigators during
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: four months of cooperations, An envelope was there, plain white,
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: left in her unlocked glove compartment. $ 3, 000 in cash per contract.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: She said she had not known, at first, that the
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: fires were deliberate. By the time of the Brecket Avenue fire,
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: the second confirmed arson.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: She said she understood.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: She continued anyway. She told investigators she had rationalized that
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: the buildings were going to be torn down eventually. that
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: the payout went to insureds who were already holding worthless properties,
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: she said. She believed that for approximately six months. Then
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: she stopped believing it, and she kept doing it. That
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: is not a detail to move past quickly. Picture the
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: Brecket Avenue textile plant. The morning after that fire. Walk
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: the perimeter. The structure is gutted but standing wet from suppression.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Smelling of accelerant and soaked insulation. There is a yellow
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: surveyor's flag planted near the rear wall, clean, upright, wire-staked
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: perpendicular in the ash. The flag had been planted after
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: the blaze, not before. Sievert's pattern at every site was
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: to return at dawn, before the scene was released, and
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: place markers as if beginning preliminary survey work. It was
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: cover for his having been there at all during the fire.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: If anyone asked, he was doing early assessments, he had
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: a legitimate reason to be near every building he had burned.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: Now picture the Ellen Road machine shop bid, landing on
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: the solicitation portal at.
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: 2.17 on a Tuesday.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: 30 hours after opening, 40 hours before legal access, numbers
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: accurate to within 2%. One explanation existed for that accuracy.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: The ledger was never recovered. Both images pointed at the
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: same man. the flag in the bid. And for months
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: during the investigation, investigators were building toward a single theory
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: that Slater had known about the fires in advance, had
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: directed Sievert to set them, and that Hoffman had been
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: recruited as the mechanism inside the insurance process. That version
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: was coherent. It was well supported.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: It had the.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: Timestamps, the flag, the thinner pattern, the cash. Everything pointed
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: to a simple top-down operation. Slater at the center, giving orders,
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: running his crew. Then Slater talked.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: In 2015, four.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: Years after his conviction, Slater gave a full confession to
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: a journalist, and the picture he described was not a
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: boss directing subordinates. It was something more uncomfortable. He said
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: the operation had started as opportunism. A fire happened. He
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: found himself in position to bid. And the thought arrived
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: before the ethics did. He said that by the time
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: Sievert came on, Sievert already knew how to set fires.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: Slater had not taught him. He had hired him because
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: of what Sievert already knew, which meant the Fenner fires
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: were not a coincidence on the map. They were Sievert's resume.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: Slater had not built the machine. He had recognized it
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: in another person and hired it. That reframes the flag entirely.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: The flag was not Slater's system. It was Sievert's habit,
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: a method developed over years before Dellard, before Slater, on
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: three commercial buildings in a smaller city that no one
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: had connected until Bauer found the pattern in a regional database.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: The flag was not evidence of a plan Slater designed.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: It was evidence of a practice Sievert had already refined.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: The clean, perpendicular flag in the Szymanski Ash. was not
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: the mark of a conspiracy. It was the signature of
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: a professional. And it had been there in some form
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: since Fenner. The trials opened in the spring of 2011.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: Slater and Sievert were tried together. The prosecution built its
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: case in three layers. Hoffman's testimony about the solicitation timestamps
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: and the cash envelopes the bid records showing Slater's measurements
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: before legal access. and the cell phone data placing Sievert
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: near each fire site on each night of each blaze.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: Sievert said nothing. He declined to testify. He has never
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: spoken publicly before or since. The jury convicted both men
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: on all counts. Slater received 14 years. Sievert received 19.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: The additional five accounted for by three separate findings tied
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: to the Fenner fires. which prosecutors had folded into the
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: racketeering charge. The Fenner buildings were from a different city,
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: a different era, a different name on the excavating company.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: But the pattern was the same. The flag was the same.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: The jury found that evidence sufficient. Hoffman was sentenced separately.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: She had cooperated for four months, sat with investigators, walked
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: them through the timestamp sequence. and testified for the prosecution
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: at trial. She received no prison time, two years of
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: supervised probation. Her insurance license was permanently revoked. She relocated
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: out of state. She has not spoken publicly since the
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: case closed. The Szymanski site was cleared by a different company.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: It is a surface parking lot now. The yellow surveyor's
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: flag was entered into evidence, photographed from six angles. and
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: transported to the Dellard Police Evidence Facility on Mercer Drive.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: It is still there, still clean, still perpendicular. Slater's appeal
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: was denied in 2013. In 2015, he gave his full
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: confession to a journalist. He described the operation not as
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: a blueprint he had drawn, but as a current he
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: had stepped into, and kept stepping into, he said. The
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: cash envelopes to Hoffman felt like a business expense by
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: the end. He said what he missed most in prison
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: was coaching his son's baseball team. That last detail is
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: not incidental. is the shape of how ordinary this all
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: looked from the inside. A man who thought of arson
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: proceeds as a line item and thought of a Tuesday
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: afternoon baseball practice as the thing worth mourning. Both things
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: were true at once. Scott Bauer closed the case file
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: in late 2011. He remained with the Dillard Organized Crime Unit.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Gordon Brooks, who made the call at 7.42 in the morning,
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: On July 9th, 2009, was never called to testify. The
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: flag was found.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: That was enough.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: The case has been filed under fraud, conspiracy, and negligence, simultaneously,
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: satisfying none of them completely. No one was inside any
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: of those buildings. The fires burned through brick and timber
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: and inventory, not through people. Every building was already emptied,
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: already failed, already waiting for the wrecking ball. That is
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: the rationalation Hoffman used. The buildings were going to come
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: down anyway. She was not entirely wrong about the buildings.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: She was entirely wrong about everything else. What the racket
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: consumed was not property. It was the ordinary trust that
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: holds a system upright. An adjuster who processes claims fairly
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: a contractor who measures a site only after he has
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: earned the right. An insurance process that runs on timeline
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: integrity rather than cash in a glove compartment. Four buildings
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: became fuel. The trust was the actual wreckage. The flag
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: endures as the strangest artifact of all of it.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: A clean yellow marker. Wire stakes straight in the ground.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: Three feet from a collapsed wall. Ash on every surface
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: around it. And nothing on it at all. It was
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Sievert's habit. A practice he had carried from Fenner to Dellard,
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: like a tool he did not think to put down.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: It did not help him. It identified him. There is
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: a version of this case where the flag is never noticed.
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: Gordon Brooks walks a different street that morning. The flag
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: is buried under the debris when the wall comes down.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: Bauer never gets the call. The Szymanski contract goes to Slater,
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: like the three before him. and the next building is
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: already on a list somewhere. That version almost happened. The
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: margin between it and what actually occurred was one man
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: walking to church at 7.42 in the morning and finding
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: something in the ash that should not have been clean.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: The flag is still at Mercer Drive. The case is closed.
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: The buildings are gone, and somewhere in a smaller city
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: to the north, There are three other sites where the
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: same marker once stood, where the same method was practiced,
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: where no one found it in time.
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: This show is made by Obo Media.