It was good work. Dense and careful and slow. He was building a case and he knew enough about how cases worked to know that the organization of evidence mattered almost as much as the evidence itself. Around midnight, he found something he'd photographed 3 weeks earlier and not fully processed. A notation on the interior of the tub's rear bulkhead partly obscured by a support bracket.
He'd photographed it at the time without being able to read it clearly. Now, with better lighting in the image and a closer zoom on his laptop screen, he could make out the characters. It was a name. Handwritten, not stamped. A technician's personal mark.
The kind people left on final assembly sometimes. A habit from old-school manufacturing. Four letters and a date. GM December 17th, Gerald Marsh. December 17th, 2017.
8 weeks before the project was officially terminated. Cole stared at the photograph for a long time. Marsh had been there at the end. Had signed off on the completed car himself personally in the way you sign something when you wanted your name on it forever. Whether it was pride or possession or something else entirely, Cole couldn't say.
But the man had stood inside this chassis and written his initials with the date the same way you'd sign a painting. He took a screenshot of the photograph, labeled it carefully, and added it to the documentation packet. Then he sat back and thought about what it meant that Marsha's name was literally written inside this car. Mhm. Victoria arrived in Tucson on a Sunday for the first time.
Her previous visits had all been weekdays. She came with two boxes of printed documents she'd pulled from the Westfield archive and a focused, slightly worn energy that Cole was coming to recognize as what she looked like when she was running on fewer hours than she needed. Emma was at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal and her deep-sea creatures book when Victoria came in and she looked up and said, "Hi Victoria. " With the casual acknowledgement of someone who'd decided a person was acceptable and saw no reason to keep reassessing. Victoria seemed mildly surprised by the directness. Hi Emma.
Their cereal, it's the kind with the little oats. Dad doesn't buy the good kind. The good kind has more sugar than cereal, Cole said from the counter. That's the point of cereal, Emma said and went back to her book. Victoria set her boxes on the kitchen table and accepted the coffee Cole poured without comment on the exchange.
They worked at the kitchen table that morning rather than the shop, which felt different, more domestic than Cole was entirely comfortable with, but the documents Victoria had brought needed space to spread out and the kitchen had the best light. The documents were shipping manifests, not the manufacturing records they'd been working with. These were logistics records, freight documentation, international shipping from the UK to the US, running from January 2018 through August 2019. Victoria had cross-referenced the cargo descriptions, weights, and dimensions against the known specifications of the prototype. "He moved it in pieces. " Victoria said, laying the manifests out in sequence.