A woman sat alone, in the chilly air of a modest wood-heated house. Dawn was just breaking over this corner of France near the Swiss border and Sophie Rollet was once again scanning the screen of her outdated computer. Geney, the hamlet where she lives, is located in an area poorly served by phone networks. It's a little bit outside the digital world. To send a text, you sometimes have to climb the hill. To surf the internet, you have to wait until nightfall, when connections are more reliable. So the former childcare provider would stay up late, very late, at the start of 2016, spending hours tracking down clues on the internet that might support her intuition that defective Goodyear tires were the cause of multiple accidents, including the one that claimed the life of her husband, Jean-Paul, in July 2014.

Upstairs, the three children were still asleep. Soon, they'd have to be woken up and taken to school. It had already been over a year and a half since her husband died in an accident on the nearby A36 freeway. Another truck driver, Pascal Rochard, was the victim of a tire blowout involving a Marathon LHS II manufactured by Goodyear. He lost control of his truck, which collided with Jean-Paul Rollet's. Both died instantly.

On the judicial front, the investigation into the accident was completed before it had even really begun: The front left tire did burst, but what could be deduced from this, other than that "it was all down to bad luck," as the whole village thought? Rollet, on the other hand, had the opposite conviction, and this certainty helped her keep going, even if something had died inside her with the death of her husband. "It was Jean-Paul who balanced me," she said today. "I existed through his eyes. Facing others, getting out of here, all of that is difficult for me." Confronting Goodyear with its errors, or rather its faults, became her sole objective. She chose to fight, not mourn.

One day, she decided to write an email to Le Monde, a message in a bottle of sorts. It was a moving letter, with a hint of dismay but also of wild hope. She told us a little about her world, or at least what was left of it, and her certainty that she had uncovered an unprecedented scandal: Too many accidents, in too short a time, with the same tires. This couldn't be a coincidence. The email, dated February 3, 2016, began as follows: "Hello, I'm taking the liberty of this correspondence to ask you a question: What do the accidents below have in common?" What followed was a list of six pileups that had occurred since 2011, the ones discussed in the first two installments of this series. What they all had in common was the blowout of a Goodyear Marathon tire. "A look, a suggestion would be appreciated from people such as yourself," she finished. She had hired a lawyer, Philippe Courtois, but he was far away, in Bordeaux, and then the courts seemed uninterested. She felt lost.

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