Whitaker. He said, "You may speak." She had written notes. She did not use them. She looked at the panel and she said what she knew in the order that she knew it. Starting with the day she had first noticed the discrepancy in the maintenance records during her employment with Crane's company and ending with the morning she had arrived at Sila Abun's ranch before dawn and found a wagon prepared to kill its driver on a mountain road.
She spoke for 20 minutes. When she finished, the room was quiet. Harmon looked at the notebook. He looked at Martha. He said, "You believe these records establish that the accident which killed Robert Aldrich was caused by equipment substitution rather than design failure.
I believe these records establish that hardened steel was specified and standard iron was installed." Martha said, "What caused the accident and who bears responsibility for the substitution are matters for this panel to determine, "I'm telling you what the records show." Harmon looked at her for a moment. "That's a careful answer," he said. "It's an honest one," she said. Crane's lawyer made his argument. It was competent and smooth, and it offered alternative explanations for the purchasing discrepancies that range from clerical error to supplier substitution without Crane's knowledge.
And Martha listened to every word of it with the focused attention of someone who needed to understand exactly what she was up against. Then the panel asked Crane directly had he been aware that standard iron fittings were being installed in place of specified steel on Crane Company wagons. Crane said he had not. The panel asked was he aware that his name appeared on the authorization line of all 14 repair orders specifying hardened steel. Crane said he signed many documents and could not be expected to verify every detail personally.
The panel asked did he recognize the handkerchief currently in Deputy Holts possession as his property. Crane's lawyer objected on relevance grounds. Harmon looked at the lawyer. The relevance is that a man with these initials was present on a mountain road at night in the same period when M. Boon's wagon was tampered with in multiple ways, he said.
I'll allow the question. Crane said he could not confirm or deny the handkerchief was his. Harmon looked at him for a long moment with the patient weathered expression of a man who had heard most things and could tell the difference between a man who did not know and a man who had decided not to say. The panel deliberated for two hours. Martha sat in the hallway on a wooden bench with Silas beside her and Garrett at the end of the bench reviewing his notes and she did not speak much and he did not press her to and she was grateful for that in a way that she would not have been able to explain to anyone who hadn't spent years having the opposite.
Henry would have held her hand. Silas was holding it now. She realized at some point while she was thinking he had taken her hand the same way he had on the wagon bench quietly and without making a production of it and she had not noticed when it happened because it had felt like something that was already supposed to be there. She looked down at their joined hands. She thought about what Eleanor had said.
She thought about the question she was going to need to ask and the answer she was going to need to hear before she could let herself believe that this was what it felt like. The panel came back that the documentation established a systematic pattern of equipment substitution in Crane Freight Company operations over a 3-year period. They found that the substitutions were documented in purchasing records bearing Crane's personal authorization. They found that the design specifications filed under Henry Whitaker's name were compliant and correct and that the failures attributed to those designs were inconsistent with the documented specifications. They did not use the word murder.