Then Serafina filed a motion through her personal legal representative, separate from Wickliffe Aerospace's corporate counsel and paid through her own funds, requesting that the court order a stay on asset transfer until an independent forensic review was completed and that the court appoint a neutral examiner rather than allowing any party to the dispute to conduct the examination themselves. Clay read the filing in the parking lot of a hardware store where he had been buying new locks for the hangar doors. He sat in his truck for a few minutes and then drove back to the property. That same night, just before midnight, he smelled something he had not expected. Aviation fuel has a particular presence, thin and sharp, carrying differently from motor oil or hydraulic fluid.
And Clay knew it the way he knew the sound of a specific engine bearing failing. He traced it to the Silver Wren in 6 minutes, found the connection between the main fuel supply manifold and the tank outlet assembly severed in a way that could not be mistaken for deterioration, and shut the main isolation valve in the dark by feel because he already knew where it was. The hangar's primary electrical system had been cut at the external disconnect panel at some point between 9:00 in the evening and his arrival at the leak, which meant the building was running on its battery backup lighting circuit. And a spark anywhere in the fuel vapor the leak had been creating would have been sufficient to turn the entire structure into evidence that no examiner could recover. He moved every vehicle away from the affected area before he called the county sheriff's office.
And the responding officer spent 3 hours documenting the scene. The perimeter cameras had been deactivated by someone who used the correct override sequence for the security system. A sequence that had not been provided to Clay and was therefore either cracked by someone who had studied it or already known to someone who had worked with the original installation. The ground near the secondary access door showed boot impressions consistent with a specific type of work sole. And Laurel, who arrived the following morning, identified the tread as a pattern used in Wyckliffe Aerospace's maintenance department footwear.
Near the rotor housing of the Falcon test bed, she found a self-locking hex bolt of a diameter and threading specification that appeared in Wyckliffe's internal maintenance tool inventory documentation, but was not a standard commercial part sold through any general supply chain. Serafina came that afternoon and stood in front of the evidence markers the sheriff's team had left. She proposed moving all vehicles to a secure corporate facility where they could be properly protected and environmentally controlled, and Clay told her he respected the offer and declined it because any Wyckliffe facility was also a facility where the materials could potentially be accessed, altered, or lost in transit. He said it as a constraint of the situation that existed independent of anyone's intention, not as an accusation. Laurel proposed a formal solution.