All digital and documentary evidence to be copied and lodged with an independent forensic archive under court seal, while the physical vehicles remained at the hangar under a court-supervised arrangement with a neutral monitor. Both Clay and Serafina agreed. While they were working through the documentation the following morning, Clay noticed something behind the forward insulation panel of the Silver Wren. A flat rectangular device, roughly the size of a thick hardback book, secured against the airframe with industrial adhesive that had yellowed at the edges. It was a position logging unit, older in design, storing coordinates on a memory card rather than transmitting them.
And the card was still present. The data showed a complete movement history for the Silver Wren in the final weeks before the registered date of its destruction. Maintenance flights, a transfer by ground transport, and a final log entry recorded 6 hours before the moment the official accident report stated the aircraft had gone down. In those 6 hours, according to the coordinates, the Silver Wren had been moved by truck to a private facility 80 miles from the accident site and secured inside a locked structure. The authorization code attached to the transfer log was assigned to the executive office of Hollis Wickliffe.
Serafina arrived at her uncle's home without calling ahead. Hollis Wickliffe received her in his study with the practiced equanimity of a man who had been preparing for this conversation for longer than she had been preparing to have it. He acknowledged, without significant hesitation, that he had authorized the movement of the Silver Wren on the evening before Augustus's flight. He described his reasoning in careful terms. He had received information suggesting that someone within the company intended to tamper with Augustus's aircraft, and he had moved the helicopter as a protective measure, and arranged for a different aircraft to be made available.
He said Augustus had agreed to the substitution, and that the accident was an outcome no one had anticipated. And he said he had carried the weight of it for 17 years. Clay had not been present, but Laurel had pulled the maintenance records for the substitute aircraft and shared her analysis with him and Serafina by the following morning. The logs for the aircraft that went down showed it had been prepared with a full complement of passenger configured interior fittings and a standard fuel load appropriate for a direct routing flight to the meeting location. It had not been configured as a test aircraft.