Present tense. Like she might know something, too. He pulled out his phone and looked up her business portfolio. Hale Automotive Group, investment and acquisition. Current holdings, three classic car dealerships, two restoration firms, a partial stake in a carbon fiber component manufacturer in He scrolled.
Woking, England. Cole set the phone down on the workbench. He stared at the wall for a while. Then he put on a fresh pair of gloves and kept working. Okay.
Over the following 2 weeks, the car gave up its secrets in stages. He worked nights mostly, after Emma was asleep. The two open bays of the shop lit white overhead while the city noise outside diminished and finally went to that 3:00 a. M. Nothing that Tucson did well.
Not silence, exactly. Just the big empty desert breathing. Emma came to the shop after school sometimes and did her homework at the desk in the corner, occasionally looking up to ask questions that were either about homework or about the car. And it was sometimes hard to tell which was which. "What's carbon fiber made of? " she asked on day three.
Carbon atoms in a crystalline structure bound with resin. "Why is it so strong? " The fibers run in directions that match where the stress is. Like how a bone works? Cole looked at her. That's actually a good analogy.
"I know. " she said and went back to her reading. He removed the surviving bodywork panels systematically, photographing each one before and after removal, logging the stamps where he found them. He found seven total on the bodywork, each one matching the coding system he remembered from Woking. The codes were internally consistent, same project prefix, same build phase designation, different component locations. A forgery would have required knowledge of that coding system that almost nobody outside the original nine-person team possessed.
The chassis tub, when he got to it, was the revelation. The outer bodywork had taken the fire damage, but the tub, sealed beneath it, the carbon fiber construction of the kind you used on racing vehicles, the kind where structural integrity under crash loads was the whole point, was in remarkable condition. Heat stained on its outer surfaces, but when Cole worked around to the interior faces, he found clean carbon, undamaged epoxy bonds, and markings. So many markings. On the interior of the tub, visible only once you were inside the structure looking outward, was a record of manufacture that was effectively a fingerprint.
Production dates, material batch codes, engineer initials beside signed-off inspection points, all of it in the shorthand he recognized. He sat inside the gutted shell of the tub on a Thursday night with a flashlight in his teeth and his phone camera in his hand and photographed for 40 minutes straight, and when he was done, he sat back against the roll cage remnant and looked up at the ceiling through the open top of the car and thought, "This is real. This is actually real. The car had existed. The car had been built, fully built, not just partially assembled, and then someone had set it on fire and sent it to a salvage auction in Nevada, which meant someone had been trying to make it disappear without leaving the kind of paper trail that comes with actually destroying a vehicle properly.