He told her no because a signature on a maintenance release was the one thing in his professional life that could not be taken back or renegotiated after the fact. Brooke said she knew that and that her mother had always said the name Hollis on the hangar door was supposed to mean something a person could trust without checking. And then she told him to eat something because she knew he had not. Nolan arrived an hour later carrying photocopied flight logs from the months before the fire, set the folder on the worktable, and pointed to an entry dated eight days before the hangar burned. Sterling one's flight data system had logged an anomalous signal from the pitch control actuator during a routine approach, flagged by the onboard monitoring system, and then cleared the following morning by Ellis Ward, not by any certificated inspector, and not with a corrective action attached.
Nolan said he had been thinking about that log entry for six months and that he was done thinking about it quietly. The official investigation into the hangar fire had concluded that the ignition source was a failed auxiliary battery pack in the storage area adjacent to the aircraft bay. A finding that fit the physical evidence well enough that no one had pressed harder, partly because the fire had consumed most of the potential contrary evidence, and partly because Preston Hawthorne had placed three separate calls to the regional oversight office in the 48 hours following the incident, calls that were logged without record of their content. Nolan's flight log entry changed the sequence. The pitch actuator anomaly had appeared before the fire, which meant that the component showing degraded performance was already in the aircraft when the hangar burned.
And if the fire had been set specifically to eliminate that history, then someone had planned it with a clear and narrow purpose. Grant drove to the storage facility where he had moved salvageable components after the initial damage assessment before the insurance adjuster completed his report, and he found among the preserved debris a section of wiring harness from the aft electrical bay with a cut end that was too clean for heat damage. The l- had been sliced with a blade rather than melted or brittle fractured the way material behaves when a fire reaches it at temperature. He photographed it, bagged it, and called Dana Keene before 7:00 in the morning without apology for the hour because the hour had stopped mattering sometime the previous evening. Dana reopened the fire investigation within the day, and what her team recovered from the original scene photographs, photographs taken by a contracted firm and filed without extensive analysis, was a sequence of details that had been present all along and simply never read in combination.