We looked up US Patent number 3631982. It was a utility patent issued in 1972. There were two patent holders: Tobias Hawthorne and a man named Vincent Blake.
Who am I? the man on the phone had said. And when I’d told him to tell me, he’d said that he already had.
“Vincent Blake,” I said, turning to the boys. “Did your grandfather ever mention him?
“No,” Jameson replied, energy and intensity rolling off him like a storm rolling in. “Gray? Xan?”
“We all know the old man had secrets.” Grayson’s voice was tight.
“I got nothing,” Xander admitted. He wedged himself in front of me to get a better look at the computer screen, then scrolled through the patent information and stopped on a drawing for the design. “It’s a mechanism for drilling oil wells.”
That rang a bell. “That’s how your grandfather made his money—at least at first.”
“Not with this patent,” Xander scoffed. “Look. Right here!” He pointed at the drawing, at some detail I couldn’t even make out. “I’m not exactly an expert at petroleum engineering, but even I can see that right there is what one would call a fatal flaw. The design is supposed to be more efficient than prior technology, but…” Xander shrugged. “Details, details, boring things—long story short is that this patent is worthless.”
“But that’s not the only patent the old man filed in nineteen seventy-two.” Grayson’s voice was like ice.
“What was the other patent?” I asked.
A few minutes later, Xander had it pulled up. “The goal of this mechanism is the same,” he said, looking at the design, “and you can see some elements of the same general framework—but this one works.”
“Why would anyone file two patents in the same year with such similar designs?” I asked.
“Utility patents cover the creation of new or improved technologies.” Jameson came to stand behind me, his body brushing mine. “Breaking a patent isn’t easy, but it can be done if you can weasel your way around the claims to uniqueness made by the prior patent. You have to break each claim individually.”
“Which this patent does,” Xander added. “Think of it like a logic puzzle. This design changes just enough that the infringement case isn’t there—and then it adds the new piece, which forms the basis of its claims. And it’s that new piece that made this patent valuable.”
This patent had only one holder: Tobias Hawthorne. My mind raced. “Your grandfather filed a bad patent with a man named Vincent Blake. He then immediately filed a better and non-infringing patent by himself, one that made the first completely worthless.”
“And made our grandfather millions,” Grayson added. “Before that, he was working on oil rigs and playing inventor at night. And afterward…”
He became Tobias Hawthorne.
“Vincent Blake.” My chest tightened around my racing heart. “That’s who we’re dealing with. That’s who has Toby. And this is why he wants revenge.”
“A patent?”
I looked up to see Eve. “I texted her,” Grayson told me, preempting any suspicions I might have had about her sudden appearance.
“All of this,” Eve continued, emotion palpable in her tone, “because of a patent?”
Who am I? Vincent Blake had asked me. But that wasn’t the end of this. It couldn’t be. I’d thought the riddle was who took Toby—and why. But what if there was a third element, a third question?
What does he want?
“We need to know who we’re dealing with.” Grayson sounded nothing like the shattered boy from the wine cellar. He sounded more than capable of dealing with threats.
“You’ve really never heard of this guy?” Thea asked. “He’s rich and powerful and hates your family’s guts, and you’ve never even heard his name?”
“You know as well as I do,” Grayson replied, “that there are different kinds of rich.”
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.
