From a drawer, he took a padded envelope, not the one at home, but one Pete had passed to him years ago without quite understanding what it was. Maya had left it in the car the day she drove to the test track, addressed to the facility safety office. He had read it once and put it away. He handed it to Dana. She read it slowly.
When she finished, she looked up with the face of someone assembling something they wish they hadn't found. Maya's letter was addressed to Thomas Ashcroft, dated the morning of the day she died. She described three anomalies from the previous week's test runs. A heat warning she had been told was a calibration error. A steering pull that appeared only on the fourth lap, and a discrepancy between the post-run data reports and her own recorded notes.
She had written, in the careful language of an engineer, "I believe there is an unresolved structural issue with the third coolant loop that poses a direct safety risk to test drivers. I am requesting a formal review before any further runs." "Thomas received this," Dana said. "He read his emails the morning they came in," Reed said. Dana closed the folder.
He signed your termination. But he kept Maya's letter somewhere Grant couldn't delete it. And he died before he could do anything with it. Reed was quiet. "I need to talk to Vivian Ashcroft," he said.
"Not as a vendor." He sent the message to a number Dana provided. The reply came in 4 minutes. "When and where?" She came to the garage at 10:30, alone, driving herself.
She stood in the open bay door and looked at the space around her. The tools on the pegboard, the engine on the stand, the coffee machine Pete had owned since the early 2000s. Then she looked at Reed. He told her everything in order. The position he had held, the safety review, the 6 weeks between filing the complaint and being handed the NDA, Maya, the accident, the official conclusion of driver error, what he had known the conclusion to be when he looked at the data.
The 3 years in Pete's garage, Thomas's signature on his termination notice, and the 3 weeks between Thomas receiving Maya's letter and Thomas dying at his desk. Vivian sat through all of it without interruption. Her hands were flat on the workbench in front of her. He could see toward the end that her jaw was set in the particular way of someone using muscular effort to keep their expression from doing something they don't want it to do in front of a person they barely know. When he finished, she was quiet for a moment.
Then, my father got a letter from your wife the day she died. And 3 weeks later, he was dead. He didn't fire you because he agreed with Grant. He fired you because he was trying to protect you from something and ran out of time. Reed had reached this conclusion himself about an hour earlier.
"I don't know that for certain," he said. She looked at him directly. "I'm going to find out." She went back to the Ashcroft building at midnight. In a folder of administrative records not reviewed since Thomas's death, she found a handwritten note in her father's hand addressed to Edmund Carr, a founding board member who had been to Thomas's closest colleague.