I slid into the low bucket seat, keyed the ignition, and eased the clutch out. The cold flat-six engine rumbled with a deep, muffled bark that rattled the metal shelving inside the stall. I crept across the drainage grate, clearing the frame with two inches to spare on each mirror, and cut the engine directly over the sunken hydraulic pit. The bay smelled of mineral spirits, gear lube, and the dry, paper-and-iron scent of David’s old workspace.
Nolan slammed the rolling door down behind us. He threw the sliding deadbolt into the concrete jamb and dropped the manual lockout pin. Outside, the autumn wind vanished, replaced by the hollow hum of a single fluorescent tube flickering above the workbench.
"You have six minutes," Nolan said, checking his watch under the white light. "Aris was probably at the Sunoco on Route 32. He doesn't speed for Victoria, but he doesn't ignore her either."
I dropped to my knees on the cold concrete beside the driver’s sill, pulling David’s leather work pouch from behind the passenger seat. My hands were stiff from soapy water, but the work was muscle memory. Beneath the dashboard, where David had spliced an auxiliary harness behind the factory fuse block, the black plastic module was secured by two heavy nylon zip-ties. I clipped them with my wire cutters and pulled the unit free.
It wasn't a standard fleet tracker. David had rebuilt it inside the casing of an industrial multiplexer, wiring a micro-SD card reader directly to the secondary serial bus.
"Where is his Toughbook?" I asked.
Nolan walked over to the six-foot Snap-on roll-cab David had kept in the corner since the plant opened. The top drawer was secured with a brass Master Lock. Nolan reached into his pocket, pulled out a small steel key, and unlocked it.
"He gave me the spare the week before he went to Temple University Hospital," Nolan said quietly. "Told me if anybody came in here with a corporate inventory clipboard before the estate cleared, I should leave the drawer open for you."
He lifted the heavy black Panasonic laptop from the foam tray and set it on the steel bench. I powered it up. The machine took thirty seconds to bypass the enterprise boot sequence, loading directly into an encrypted Linux partition David had mirrored from his personal workstation.
I slotted the micro-SD card into the side port.
The screen mounted three directory trees. The top directory was labeled with the Cayman’s VIN. The second was labeled AUDIT_TRAIL_REQUISITIONS. The third was a raw packet capture dated between August 14 and September 2.
"Look at the network addresses," I said, tapping the screen.
Nolan leaned in, his reading glasses perched low on his nose.
The forty-two thousand dollars in "unauthorized parts requisitions" Victoria had cited to the board were not automotive components. The line items listed commercial servo motors, high-pressure hydraulic pumps, and replacement control boards for the regional freight sorters. But the shipping manifests did not route them to Bucks County. Every pallet had been delivered to a commercial storage unit on River Road in Upper Makefield—the same facility registered to Sterling Asset Management LLC.
"David never ordered these," Nolan whispered, tracing the authorization code. "This is the warehouse maintenance budget from the second quarter."
"Keep reading," I said.
Below the equipment descriptions sat the authorization timestamps. Every transaction had been submitted after 11:00 PM on Friday nights from an internal IP address assigned directly to the third-floor executive suite—Victoria’s private terminal. And the digital signature attached to the approval was not David's token; it was an administrative proxy override requiring the master credentials of the firm’s compliance officer.
Victoria had skimmed the maintenance funds through David’s department while he was undergoing radiation treatments, knowing his signature authority would take the blame if auditors flagged the shortage.
Then the laptop’s internal speaker emitted a sharp double beep.
On the screen, a red command window flashed open: REMOTE SYNC INITIATED. FIRMWARE PURGE IN PROGRESS VIA HOST 192. 168. 1. 1.
Across the bay, the yellow warning light on the wall-mounted router began blinking at triple speed.
"She’s in the system," Nolan said. "IT in King of Prussia just pushed an enterprise wipe to the local bay server. She’s trying to clear the router cache before anybody can dump the packet logs."
"Can she wipe this laptop?"
"Not if it’s disconnected," Nolan said, reaching behind the router and ripping the blue Ethernet patch cable from the wall jack. The yellow beacon went dark. "But she killed the local archive. Whatever is on that SD card is the only surviving copy of the network handshake."
The sound of heavy tires rolling across gravel vibrated through the steel door.
Two vehicles. The first had the low, rhythmic idle of a Ford Interceptor utility cruiser. The second had the heavy, pneumatic wheeze of a flatbed commercial wrecker.
Nolan stepped over to the pedestrian door’s wire-reinforced window. "Chief Aris is here," he said softly. "And Victoria brought Miller’s Towing. She isn't waiting for court, Claire. She’s having Miller hook the car right now."
I pulled a blank 64-gigabyte thumb drive from David’s drawer, jammed it into the second USB slot, and cloned the partition. The progress bar jumped across the screen: 34%... 58%... 81%... Complete.