Jameson tossed me his phone, and I skimmed the information he’d pulled up on Vincent Blake. “He’s from Texas,” I noted. This state suddenly felt much smaller. “Net worth just under half a billion dollars.”
“Old oil money.” Jameson met Grayson’s gaze. “Blake’s father hit liquid gold in the Texas oil boom of the nineteen thirties. By the late nineteen fifties, a young Vincent had inherited it all. He spent two more decades in oil, then pivoted to ranching.”
That didn’t tell us anything about what the man was really capable of—or what he wanted. “He must be in his eighties now,” I said, trying to stick to the facts.
“Older than the old man,” Grayson stated, his tone balanced on a knife’s edge between icy and cool.
“Try adding your grandfather’s name to the search terms,” I told Jameson.
Besides the patent, we got one other hit: a magazine profile from the eighties. Like most coverage of Tobias Hawthorne’s meteoric rise, it mentioned that his first job had been working on an oil rig. The difference was that this article also mentioned the name of the man who had owned that rig.
“So Blake was his boss,” Jameson spitballed. “Picture this: Vincent Blake owns the whole damn company. It’s the late sixties, early seventies, and our grandfather is nothing but a grunt.”
“A grunt with big ideas,” Xander added, tapping his fingers rapidly against his thigh.
“Maybe Tobias takes one of those ideas to the boss,” I suggested. “The gutsy move pays off, and they end up collaborating on the design for a new kind of drilling technology.”
“At which point,” Grayson continued with deadly calm, “our grandfather double-crosses a rich and powerful man to claim a fortune in intellectual property for himself.”
“And said powerful man doesn’t sue him into oblivion?” Xander was dubious. “Just because the second patent doesn’t infringe the first doesn’t mean that a wealthy man couldn’t have buried a nobody from nowhere in legal fees.”
“So why didn’t he?” I asked, my body buzzing with the adrenaline that always accompanied finding the kind of answer that raised a thousand more questions.
We knew who had Toby.
We knew what this was about.
But there were still details that ate at me, pulling at the edges of my mind. The disk. The three characters in the story. What’s his endgame here? What does he want?
“Someone must know more about Blake’s connection to your grandfather.” Eve looked at each of the Hawthorne brothers in turn.
I thought through our next move. Tobias Hawthorne had married Alice in 1974—just two years after the patent was filed. And when Jameson had asked Nan about friends and mentors, her response had been that Tobias Hawthorne had never been in the business of making friends.
She hadn’t said a word about mentors.
CHAPTER 55
This time, I went to see Nan alone. “Vincent Blake.” I placed the metallic disk on the dining room table, where Nan was having tea.
She snorted in my general direction. “That supposed to be a bribe?”
Either Nan had no more idea what the disk was than we did, or she was bluffing. “Tobias Hawthorne worked for a man named Vincent Blake in the early seventies. It might have been before he and Alice started dating—”
“It wasn’t,” Nan grunted. “Long courtship. The fool insisted he wanted to make something of himself before he gave my Alice his ring.”
Nan was there. She remembers.
“Tobias and Vincent Blake collaborated on a patent,” I said, trying to tune out the incessant pounding of my heart. “And then your son-in-law cheated Blake out of a development that was worth millions.”
“Did he now?” For a moment, it seemed like that was all Nan was going to say, then she scowled. “Vincent Blake was rich and fancied himself more powerful than God. He took a liking to Tobias, brought him into the fold.”
“But?” I prompted.
“Not everyone was happy about it. Mr. Blake liked to pit his protégés against each other. His son was too young to be a factor back then, but Mr. Blake had made it very clear to his nephews that being family didn’t get you a free pass. Power had to be earned. It had to be won.”
“Won,” I repeated. I thought of that first phone call with Blake. I’m just an old man with a fondness for riddles. All this time, we’d thought that Toby’s captor was playing one of Tobias Hawthorne’s games. But what if Tobias Hawthorne had taken his cue from Vincent Blake? What if, before he’d been the orchestrator of those Saturday morning games, he’d been a player?
“What happened?” I pressed Nan. “If Tobias was in Blake’s inner circle, why double-cross him?”
“Those nephews I mentioned? They wanted to send a message. Mark their territory. Put Tobias in his place.”
“What did they do?” I asked.
“There was no Mrs. Blake in those days,” Nan grunted. “She passed away when their little boy was born, and the child couldn’t have been more than fifteen when Mr. Blake started inviting Tobias over for dinner. Eventually, Tobias started bringing my Alice along. Mr. Blake took a liking to her, too, but he was of a certain type.” She gave me a look. “The type who believed that boys would be boys.”
“Did he…” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. “Did they…”
“If you’re thinking the worst, the answer is no. But if you’re thinking that the nephews came at Tobias through Alice, that they harassed her, manhandled her, and one went so far as to pin her down, force his lips to hers—well, then.”
Nan had strongly implied on more than one occasion that she’d killed her first husband, a man who’d broken her fingers for playing the piano a little too well. I deeply suspected she would have castrated Vincent Blake’s nephews if she’d had even half a chance.
“And Blake didn’t do anything?” I asked.
Nan didn’t reply, and I remembered how she’d characterized the man: as the type who believed that boys would be boys. “And that’s when your son-in-law decided to get out,” I guessed, the picture becoming clearer.
“Tobias stopped dreaming of working for Blake and set his sights on becoming him. A better version. A better man.”
“So he filed two patents,” I said. “One that they’d worked on together and then a different one—a better one. Why didn’t Blake sue him?”
“Because Tobias beat him, fair and square. Oh, it was a little underhanded, maybe, and a betrayal, certainly, but Vincent Blake appreciated someone who could play the game.”
A rich and powerful man had let a young Tobias Hawthorne go, and in return, Tobias Hawthorne had eclipsed him—billions to his millions.
“Is Blake dangerous?” I asked.
“Men like Vincent Blake and Tobias—they’re always dangerous,” Nan replied.
“Why didn’t you tell Jameson and me this earlier?”
“It was more than forty-five years ago,” Nan scoffed. “Do you know how many enemies this family has made since then?”