Just sitting. She set a folder on the bench. Inside was the termination documentation from Reed's separation from Ashcroft, sourced from public filings, and two former employees who had agreed to speak on background. Reed picked it up and read it. He got to the third page and stopped.
The signature authorizing his termination was not Grant Holloway's. It was Thomas Ashcroft's. Reed set the paper down. He looked at the surface of the bench for a long moment. "Did you know this when you came here?"
"No," Dana said. "I found it this afternoon." Reed was thinking about Thomas Ashcroft, who had died of a stroke in his office 4 years after Reed's termination. 3 months after Vivian had taken over. Reed had met him twice.
Both times Thomas had said safety engineering was the conscience of the industry. If I flagged the coolant fault, Reed said, it went to the executive safety committee. Thomas chaired that committee. Then why did he sign the termination? Reed stood up and went to the far end of the workbench.
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.