She was trying to understand it fully, which was a different kind of rigorous and in some ways more demanding. She spent 40 minutes on the acquisition documents alone, reading slowly, asking about specific language, cross-referencing with the shipping manifests. At the end of 2 hours, she put her notebook down on the workbench and looked at both of them. "You know what you have here," she said. It wasn't a question.
"We know what the evidence suggests," Cole said. "I'm going to be direct with you. " She looked at the car, what remained of it on its stand, stripped and marked and photographed from every angle. "This is not a story about a rare car. This is a story about a corporation that accepted a legal liability for an asset it knew existed, watched someone steal that asset, and then spent years trying to suppress the evidence rather than disclose the problem. That's the story. " She paused.
"The car is the evidence. It's important, but the story is what happened to it and why. " Cole looked at Victoria. Victoria looked at Cole. "That's our understanding," Victoria said. "I'll need to contact Stratton Group for comment before publication," Dana said.
"Standard practice. Once I do that, you have maybe 48 hours before their legal team moves. " "We know," Cole said, "which means when the formal report lands, you need to be ready to move immediately. " She picked up her notebook. "Is there anything else physical in the car I should know about? Any evidence you haven't shown me? " Cole looked at the chassis. He'd been thinking about this for the last week.
The thing he hadn't shown anyone yet, not even Victoria, because he'd wanted to be certain before he made it part of the documentation. "There might be one more thing," he said. Victoria looked at him. "I found something last week that I haven't fully processed," he said. "I want to show you both at the same time. " He led them to the rear of the chassis tub, crouching down beside the left rear corner where the suspension pickup points were.
The area was clean. Cole had been careful with this section precisely because of what he'd found. He reached in with a gloved hand and directed Dana's recorder light toward a recess in the inner surface of the tub wall, a cavity that had been part of the original structural design, a hollow section that existed to save weight, sealed on all sides, accessible only through an opening barely large enough for two fingers. From the cavity, Cole carefully withdrew a small object wrapped in a double layer of heat-resistant composite cloth. The kind used as fire protection in racing applications.
He set it on the edge of the tub and unwrapped it slowly. It was a titanium plate. Not welded, this one was loose, sized to fit exactly inside the cavity. Engraved on its face was a full technical designation string, project name, build number, completion date, and below that, a sentence. Cole read it aloud because Dana was recording and because Victoria was reading it at the same time with an expression he'd never seen from her before.