I hadn't known that part of the story. The Harley had been a gift from a man who taught him to ride old motorcycles when he was younger. The red paint was the color that friend had chosen, and the worn leather seat was original to the restoration they'd completed together. The bike wasn't only transportation. It was memory made out of steel.
"You weren't fighting the motorcycle," I said.
"No," Grip answered. "I wasn't."
He asked whether I'd accompany him on a short controlled road check with the inspector present, and I agreed. We followed the approved route and stayed within the limits of the test, the inspector watching for anything the stationary run might have missed. The motorcycle behaved normally. Grip stopped afterward, took off his helmet, and stood beside it for a full minute without speaking.
"For the first time," he said finally, "I wasn't waiting for the motor to die."
I felt that sentence more deeply than praise. The repair hadn't made him invulnerable or erased the accident. It had returned a little trust to a part of his life that had become governed by fear. I knew something about that feeling.
By the afternoon, Miriam Vale had obtained preliminary confirmation that Pruitt's shop had ordered machining services matching the category of work Delgado described. The records did not yet prove what the part had been used for, but they supported the claim that a component of that kind had been made. Another lead connected Pruitt to Vincent Shea, a Visalia-based contractor who provided private security services for several development firms.
"Shea doesn't show up in the motorcycle file," Miriam told us. "He shows up in payments. Consulting fees, security reviews, transportation expenses. Individually ordinary. Together they deserve attention."
Jack asked whether there was enough to confront Shea. Miriam shook her head.
"No confrontation," she said. "Not from you. Not from anybody acting on the charter's behalf. There are investigators who can request records and compare statements. If you want this to stand up, give them the space to do their jobs."
Grip agreed. He hadn't enjoyed the instruction, but he didn't argue. I could see that the temptation to solve matters through sheer force had not vanished merely because a lawyer entered the room. He was a man accustomed to controlling the immediate space around him. Here, the safest thing was to let professionals work beyond it.
The next morning brought another uncomfortable discovery. Miriam had requested records from Valley Iron Works, the Sacramento shop that appeared on Grip's first invoice. Its owner, Patrick Reed, had subcontracted restoration work to Pruitt's business, and Reed had previously performed ordinary maintenance for a company linked to Shea. It was a series of connections, not yet a complete chain of responsibility, but each one narrowed the distance between the machine in my garage and the names emerging from the financial records.