"Not legally, but he built it. He'd have felt that way about it. " "That's not how corporate asset ownership works. " "No, but that's how people work. Victoria looked at him with a brief expression that might have been the beginning of agreement and might have been something else. She didn't respond directly. Emma came in from the back office where she'd been doing homework, poured herself a glass of water, looked at the documents on the desk with undisguised curiosity, and went back out.
Victoria watched her go. "She does that a lot," Cole said. "Does what? " "Comes in, assesses the situation, leaves. She's been doing it since she was four. " He paused. "She gets it from her mother. " Victoria looked at him briefly and then back at her documents.
Cole didn't elaborate and she didn't ask. It was one of the things he noticed about her in those early weeks. She didn't probe into territory he hadn't opened. It should have been a small thing, unremarkable, but Cole had been a single father in a relatively small professional community for 5 years, and the number of people who treated the line between professional and personal as something real and worth respecting was, in his experience, not large. He filed it away without making anything of it.
There was too much else to think about. The work got harder when they reached the powertrain. The engine bay was the seat of the fire damage. That was where it had started. And what remained of the drivetrain was badly compromised.
But the engine itself, a bespoke unit that bore no external markings visible through the fire damage, held a secret that Cole only found because he knew to look for it. On the underside of the engine block, in a location that would require the engine to be partially lifted from its mounts to see, was a small titanium plate. Not stamped, welded directly to the block, a permanent fixture. On it, in precise machined characters, a full project designation string, build number, and a sequential production identifier. Cole photographed it from six angles and sat back on the creeper under the car and looked at the ceiling for a long time.
A welded titanium plate was not a manufacturing stamp. Manufacturing stamps were for internal tracking. Useful, but dismissible as forgeries by someone with the right tools and enough motive. A titanium plate welded to a one-off engine block was a different category of thing entirely. It was the kind of permanent identification you put on something when you wanted there to be no question ever about what it was.
Someone on that team had known the car might need to prove itself someday. Cole was not certain, but his best guess was that it had been Marsh. A man who planned to use the car as leverage would want that leverage to be unimpeachable. He called Victoria from under the car, which was an awkward phone call, but he wanted to tell her immediately. "Titanium plate," he said, "welded to the block.
Full designation string. " A silence, then "That's Cole, if that's confirmed by a materials examiner, that's essentially irrefutable. It's going to need independent verification. I know what I'm reading, but I can't be the only one saying it. No, we need specialists. " Her voice shifted into the register it took on when she was planning rather than reacting. "There's a materials authentication firm in Denver that works with the FIA on historic racing vehicles.