PART 2:

He worked his way around the car with his measuring tape and his notebook, calling out numbers to himself quietly as he went. Wheelbase, 116 in, maybe a tick over. Overall length, he estimated 210 in minimum, possibly more. The body style was a two-door hard top. The roof line was fastback, not a pure camback, not quite a traditional fastback, but something in between with a slope and a rear deck configuration that didn’t match the standard production runs of any American muscle car he could readily place.

The quarter panels were wide, not aftermarket wide, factory wide, with a character line that ran from just behind the front wheel arch all the way to the tail and had an intentionality to it that you couldn’t fake. This was designed. This was purposeful. He got down on his back on the ground and looked up at the undercarriage with his flashlight.

The frame was He said a word out loud that he rarely said in the presence of other people. The frame was a purpose-built unit, not a standard production frame with modifications. The geometry of the rear suspension pickup points, the way the crossmembers were configured, the sheer weight of the fabrication.

This was not what you did for a standard production car. This was what you did when you were building something for a specific purpose and weight distribution mattered more than manufacturing cost. He stayed under there for 20 minutes. When he came back out, his shirt was destroyed and he had mud in his hair and he sat on the ground next to the car and looked at it for a long time.

He took his notebook and wrote slowly and carefully in the same handwriting he used for everything. Not dramatic, not excited, just his normal handwriting. This is not what it appears to be. Then he wrote underneath, “Who are you?” But the VIN plate was on the driver’s side door jam. Or it should have been. When he carefully pried the door, which moved with a deep groan and a sound like a coffin seal breaking, and shown his light on the jam, what he found was a VIN plate that had been installed and then at some point deliberately

partially obscured. not removed, not ground off, deliberately covered with what appeared to be factory undercoating applied over the plate in a way that preserved the plate itself while making it unreadable without careful work. That was not normal. That was not what you did by accident.

He photographed it from six angles. He touched nothing. He also found on the inside of the door, protected from the elements by the closed door for four plus decades, a small paper tag. the kind of paper tags that were used in factory environments for parts identification that had survived in a state of extreme fragility.

He could make out partial numbers, a date stamp that he photographed three times from different angles to make sure he had it, though the year was unclear. He drove home and didn’t say anything to Maya about what he’d found because he wasn’t ready to say it yet, and because some things, once you say them out loud, become either real or ridiculous, and he wasn’t ready for either.

Um, the research took four months. He worked on it the way he worked on cars, systematically, starting with what he knew for certain and working outward into what he could establish and never allowing himself to fill in gaps with guesses, even when the guesses were tempting. He had a whiteboard in the corner of his shop that his paying clients occasionally glanced at with confusion, covered in VIN decoding charts, production number records, factory option codes, and photographs.

He started with the available VIN digits and cross- refferenced them against the production records of every major American manufacturer with a performance vehicle program active during the relevant era which he estimated from the car’s styling cues and construction to be somewhere in the mid to late muscle car period late 1960s to early ‘7s.

The partial VIN yielded manufacturer and some division information, but the specific sequence didn’t match anything in the documented production records he had access to. That could mean the records were incomplete, or it could mean something else. He pulled the industry literature. He was a subscriber to three different trade publications for classic car historians, and he had a shelf of factory service manuals that he’d collected over 15 years of restoration work.

He also had relationships, careful, professional relationships with a few people in the vintage automotive research community who he trusted to be discreet. He called one of them, a man named Frank Drier, who was 71 years old, had worked as a factory engineer for one of the big American manufacturers for 30 years and now spent his retirement consulting on authenticity disputes for high-end collectors.

Frank,” Ethan said when the old man picked up. “I need to run some numbers by you, and I need you to not ask me too many questions yet.” There was a pause on the line. That’s an interesting way to start a conversation. I know you find something. I don’t know what I found yet. That’s why I’m calling you. He read Frank the partial vin.

He described the frame geometry, the body dimensions, the c-pillar angle, the quarter panel configuration. He described the undercarriage fabrication in detail. Frank was quiet for a long time after Ethan finished. “Where’d you say this was?” Frank said. “I didn’t say.” Another pause. Ethan, the frame geometry you’re describing, the rear suspension pickup point configuration that matches a specific internal engineering project, one that never went to public production.

Ethan’s hand tightened on the phone. He kept his voice even. “Which project?” “There was a program in the early ‘7s,” Frank said, and now the old man’s voice had something careful in it. Almost cautious. Internal designation, performance evaluation, basically factory-built evaluation units, specific configurations, never officially documented for public record.

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