Chapter 19 - THE FIRE BELOW BUILDING FOUR
The fire began inside an electrical cabinet.
Rosewood’s alarms worked.
That fact saved lives.
Residents entered the courtyard in coats, pajamas, and bare feet as firefighters moved into Building Four.
Jordan carried Caleb outside.
The boy clung to his father’s neck and stared at the smoke.
Nobody was seriously injured.
The fire remained contained below the first floor.
But the electrical cabinet should not have burned.
It had supposedly been replaced three months earlier by Lone Crest Restoration.
Fire investigators found old wiring behind a new metal panel.
The contractor had installed a clean cover over equipment more than thirty years old.
A remote switching device had been added to the cabinet.
It could overload one circuit on command.
The device matched the sensors owned by Voss Civic Capital.
By sunrise, Voss’s attorneys issued a statement expressing concern for residents.
They argued that the fire proved Rosewood required immediate professional control.
Anchor filed an emergency supplement with the court.
The lender requested authority to evacuate Building Four and place all trust operations under its receiver.
“They set the fire,” Jordan said.
“We cannot say that until investigators confirm it,” I told him.
“My son was in there.”
“I know.”
“No, you know documents. I know what his face looked like when the alarms started.”
He stepped closer.
“They were willing to burn the building.”
Caleb stood behind him wrapped in a blanket.
I wanted to tell Jordan he was right.
Instead, I said what evidence allowed.
“Someone installed a device capable of causing the overload. Voss’s company owned devices from the same system. We will prove who activated it.”
The sensor network stored data on a remote server.
Voss refused access, claiming proprietary security protections.
Then the Bus Fund records gave us another path.
Marla’s laptop had connected to both systems through the same device-management account.
The outside Bus Fund server preserved an authentication token.
Using a court order, investigators obtained the account logs from the cloud provider.
At 11:39 p.m., a user issued a command to the Building Four electrical device.
The command came from Marla’s account.
The location data placed her phone inside a hotel near Dallas Love Field.
Police reached the room at 8:10 a.m.
Marla was gone.
On the desk, they found a laptop with its hard drive removed.
Inside the trash bin were burned fragments of documents.
One fragment contained the Anchor logo.
Another contained Daniel’s name.
A third contained a flight itinerary for Mexico City departing that afternoon.
Marla was arrested at the airport.
She requested an attorney and refused questions.
Voss immediately denied knowing anything about the fire.
Then investigators examined the payment used to purchase the switching device.
The card belonged to Civic Renewal Research Group.
The approval email came from an address registered to Voss’s executive assistant.
We had the connection we needed.
Naomi filed the evidence at 2:43 p.m.
At 3:06, the court clerk called.
The judge would review our emergency motion Sunday morning.
The auction remained scheduled.
We had stopped pretending the danger was only financial.
Someone had endangered sixty-three families to make their homes look uninhabitable.
The first time Rosewood was attacked, the criminals tried to create poverty and blame the residents.
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This time, they created danger.
Then offered to rescue everyone from it.
