Cole felt something cold settle in his stomach. He faked the destruction. That's my conclusion, yes. Why? Because the car is worth a great deal of money to the right buyer.
And because Marsh is not a man who walks away from something he built without getting something back. Victoria picked up her coffee again. He was pushed out without his full severance package after the restructuring. There was a dispute. It was settled privately, but not favorably for him.
And the car was leverage. Or it was his exit plan. I don't know. I never met Marsh. This was before my involvement with Woking.
I've pieced this together from records. She looked at Cole directly. What I don't know is how it ended up at a Nevada salvage auction with fire damage. That part I cannot explain. Someone tried to destroy it and didn't finish the job, Cole said.
Yes. Or someone tried to destroy the evidence that it existed while keeping the car itself elsewhere. Or someone else entirely got hold of it and panicked. She shrugged, a tight controlled movement. There are several theories.
None of them are good. Cole was quiet for a moment. He thought about the shipping manifest she'd flagged, the material batch records, the two years she'd been watching for this. You could have come to me after the auction and told me this immediately. I could have, she said.
And you could have told me what you found under the splitter immediately, but neither of us did that because we're both trying to figure out how much the other person knows before we commit to the conversation. She held his gaze. I'm committing now. Your turn. Cole uncrossed his arms and walked to the far workbench where he'd laid out the printed photographs arranged in sequence.
I worked on this car, he said, directly, for 14 months starting in 2016. Carbon fiber chassis and bodywork. He pointed to the stamps without touching them. These are my marks. Literally.