be on their way again. The decision to open the bay would later become a legal issue. Silas understood that before he made it and would not pretend otherwise when questioned. He ordered that the condition of the locks and the time of entry be photographed, then allowed Decker to remove a lock and raise the least damaged door.
A smell of damp concrete and old oil drifted out. Inside, the workshop stretched farther back than Nolan expected, a place that had once handled serious repair work. Hoists stood idle, their chains coated in dust; pegboards showed pale outlines where tools had been removed years earlier. A calendar still hung from a nail in the office corner, frozen on a month no one had bothered to turn.
Nolan walked through the workshop with the alert affection of someone who recognized the history of labor in abandoned equipment. A worn tool cabinet had been repainted twice. The floor near the second bay was dark from decades of oil seepage, and one side wall held marks where shelves had been moved and rearranged. He thought of his father working here at night, surrounded by machines and documents that might destroy powerful men.
Decker assigned a few riders to observe the road while a smaller group inspected the building. They were searching, not dismantling; most of the men had spent years in shops and knew how much damage careless curiosity could do. Nolan remained close to the office wall, studying a difference in the way old paint had aged around the shelving.
"That panel was put in later," he said.
Cord came over with a flashlight. A section of drywall looked newer beneath the grime, and its vertical seam failed to line up with the adjoining studs. Beneath the baseboard, a narrow strip of exposed wood showed a curve worn into it, as though the wall had moved repeatedly. Nolan pressed gently at the edge. It shifted inward a fraction of an inch before settling back. There was a concealed latch at a height convenient for someone who already knew where to reach, and after a little care the panel swung open to reveal a narrow storage recess.
The space was deeper than the wall should have allowed. Sealed plastic bins stood on metal shelves, each labeled in neat block letters with dates and categories. Some contained files wrapped in archival sleeves; others held envelopes, photographs, and old accounting books protected against dust and damp. Silas stepped into the recess and stared at the labels. They were written in Elias's deliberate hand, a fact he recognized without being told. The same handwriting appeared on old birthday cards and shop notes kept in the club's scrapbooks, and twenty-two years had not erased its familiar shape.
"He planned for somebody to find it," Silas said.
Nolan reached toward a bin marked MERIDIAN TRANSFERS and stopped. He remembered Ruth's insistence that documents needed careful handling and provenance, and his father's own warning against turning suspicion into accusation. This was the place where the evidence might either be preserved or ruined by the people most desperate to use it. Cord began photographing labels and contents before anything moved. Nolan read out the inventory while another man wrote it down. The first bin contained correspondence linking Pike's investment entities to several property management firms; the second held copies of old ledger pages and bank deposit records from the Iron Ravens fundraiser.