Leese was sitting behind her desk, staring at me with wide eyes. She yelled something, but I couldn’t hear what she said because her mouth was gagged shut. Her ankles were tied to the chair and her hands were tied behind her back.
I rushed forward, hands out, reaching for her gag, wanting to help, wanting to find out if she was okay, when strong male hands grabbed at me from behind.
“Don’t move,” growled a deep voice.
Chapter 18
I kicked and struggled and bit and clawed, but his strength soon overpowered me. He pulled my wrists behind my back and quickly looped duct tape around them.
“There,” he said, panting a little from the exertion. He shoved me forward, making me stumble, and I discovered that it’s remarkably hard to recover your balance when your hands are tied behind your back.
He pushed me again, this time into a chair, taped my wrists to the chair’s back, then held my kicking legs down as he taped my ankles together. As he crouched to tape my ankles to the chair, he started talking. “What were you doing out there anyway? I thought I was going to die of old age in here, waiting.”
I stared at our captor. This was the guy with the walker who had practically bitten my head off when I’d offered to help. He was the guy who had sat near Ash and his mom and me at the Three Seasons. Bob Blake. He must have heard everything we’d said. At some point we’d talked about the Lacombes, but had this guy been there for that part of the conversation? I couldn’t remember.
Leese was making noises through her gag of duct tape.
“Now, now,” said the man. “None of that. Your loving brother and sister will be here soon enough and then we can all have a nice long chat.”
I stared at him. “You’re Simon Faber.”
“Nicely done, Miss Librarian!” He stood and clapped a few times. “Miss Lacombe here had no idea who I was. She was expecting Bob Blake and that’s who she saw coming in her front door.” He laughed. “You’d think an attorney would be more aware of the potential for personal danger, but there she stood and welcomed me into her home. If I’d known this would be so easy, I would have done it years ago.”
His face suddenly darkened. “She should have recognized me. All of them should have. They ruined my life and now they don’t even acknowledge me. What kind of people are these? How could they not know?”
I didn’t like how his face was edging from bright red to white. His temper had been more even-handed a moment ago, so in hopes of returning to that more pleasant time, I asked a question. “Done what?”
Faber had been limping toward Leese with his hands balled up into fists, but he stopped and turned. “Sorry?”
“You said if you’d known it would be this easy, that you would have done this years ago. What are you planning on doing?”
“Killing them, of course,” he said. “And I apologize in advance, Miss Hamilton, for being the cause of your early death, but collateral damage happens.”
“This isn’t a military operation,” I managed to say.
“Ah, but it is war,” Faber replied with a grin, his good humor apparently restored.
I studied him. A happy Faber seemed much less likely to lash out in anger, and at this point, keeping him happy was the only thing I could think of that had any possibility of bringing this situation to a positive conclusion.
“War?” I asked.
“Certainly.” He limped to the front window and looked out toward the road. “They should be here by now. If they’re Lacombes, I’m sure they’re driving too fast, even on roads with so much snow on them. I hope they don’t have an accident, not at this late date.”
“Why is it war?” I persisted.
He spun. “Look at me,” he ordered. “Just look at me.”
So I did. He stood shifted to one side, favoring his left leg. His right hand was curled up into an odd shape. One shoulder was hitched slightly higher than the other. His unfocused eye, I realized with a start, wasn’t his own; it was a prosthetic. His face, where it wasn’t taut from plastic surgery, was creased with lines and wrinkles and I had no idea if they were the result of aging or pain. Or both.
“I’m not even sixty years old,” he said, “and I look like I’m eighty. I was thirty-six years old when Dale Lacombe crossed the centerline and hit my car. Thirty-six. The prime of my life! My peak earning years still ahead of me. Decades of activity. And what do I get instead? Years of surgeries, years of pain, years of suffering, and half the time I can’t even walk without the use of that thing.”
He glared over my shoulder and I turned my head just enough to see his walker standing in the corner of the room.
“So, yes, Miss Hamilton,” he said, “this is war. They invaded my life the moment of the accident, and they’re all four to blame. Dale Lacombe said so himself. They took away everything I’d accomplished and turned it to dust, and I intend to do the same thing to each of them.”
His face firmed with resolution. I quickly asked, “What had you accomplished?”
“Not nearly enough,” he snarled. “I could have done great things. I was on my way to fame and fortune when this happened. My fiancée left me and my parents went to an early grave trying to take care of me. I’m alone and I know exactly who to blame.”
I suspected I wasn’t getting the entire truth, but I suspected even more strongly that this wasn’t the time to accuse him of telling a one-sided story. “What kind of things were you working on?”
“What kind?” He blinked. “You want to know what kind of things?”
“Sure.” Because I couldn’t come up with anything else that would keep him talking that didn’t have the name “Lacombe” attached to it, and that would be sure to get his temper going. “Tell me about them. I’d like to know.” Sort of.
He pursed his lips. “At the time of the accident, I was top sales guy for the biggest computer company in the country. But that was only temporary. I had plans and they were about to come true.”
“What kind of plans?”
“I was having conversations with venture capitalists,” he said. “I had plans for half a dozen new businesses. All it would take was a little bit of seed money and I’d be on my way.”
And I was growing more and more certain the guy was delusional. If he’d owned a place on Janay Lake with money left over for cars, he must have made a good living as a sales rep, but what he’d said sounded unrealistic.
“Wow,” I said, doing my best not to sound sarcastic. “I’m not sure I’ve ever had one good idea about a start-up business, let alone six. Opening a bookstore is about as original as I’d probably get.”
“Bookstore.” He snorted. “No one reads anymore. I don’t know how you keep your job.”
The verdict was in: this guy was definitely delusional. I smiled politely. “Your ideas were better, I’m sure.”
“Electronics,” he said. “Twenty-three years ago, I knew where the world was going to go. All I needed was capital. Putting songs into digital form and selling them? That was my idea first.”
“Really?” I made my face show surprise. From what I’d been told, a number of people had had that idea, but it had taken a while for technology to catch up with the dreams.
“Count on it. I had dozens of ideas that were stolen from me. Laptops were my idea. Those robotic vacuum cleaners were my idea. Cell phones were my idea.” He waved his arms around. “Look around. Every personal technological device you see was my idea first.”
“Tablets?” I asked. “Was that idea stolen from you, too?”