Part 6
Rourke did not like the plan.
He said that first, then said it four more ways with increasing police vocabulary. Reckless. Unnecessary. Hard to control. A prosecutor’s nightmare if mishandled. I let him finish because a man with a badge deserves room to state the obvious.
When he was done, I placed Nora’s journal on his desk.
“Read the marked pages,” I said.
We were in his office downtown, a cramped room with two metal chairs and a window that looked at a brick wall. Morning pressed gray light against the glass. Rourke had not shaved. Neither had I.
He read in silence.
He read about Nora testing residue from my discarded pill bottles. He read about Graham’s threats. He read the entry where she wrote that she had met her brother at a motel because he promised to sign papers allowing her to tell me the truth without claiming money.
Rourke stopped there.
“He lured her,” he said.
“I believe so.”
He turned another page, then another. His jaw tightened.
“The recordings from your dinner won’t be admissible cleanly,” he said.
“I assumed.”
“The apartment break-in by his people helps, if we can tie them to him. The staged scene helps. The independent autopsy helps. The DNA and birth records explain motive.”
“But?”
“But murder cases don’t run on grief. They run on proof.”
“Then let’s get proof.”
Rourke leaned back and rubbed both eyes with the heels of his hands. “You’re asking me to let you sit in a room and wait for your son to attempt to kill you.”
“I’m asking you to make sure he doesn’t succeed.”
“That is not as comforting as you think.”
The next step was Elise.
I called her from Rourke’s office. She answered in a whisper.
“Is he there?” I asked.
“No.”
“Can you leave the house?”
A silence. Then, “For how long?”
“As long as it takes to become free.”
We met at a bakery in Lakewood with fogged windows and a line of parents buying cupcakes before work. Elise wore sunglasses though the sky was dark. She held her purse against her body with both arms.
Rourke sat two tables away in plain clothes. She noticed him immediately.
“It’s all right,” I said. “He knows.”
That nearly broke her. Her mouth trembled. “I didn’t know at first.”
“I believe you.”
“I knew he was cruel. I knew he lied. I knew there were women.” She swallowed hard. “But Nora came to the house once. He told me she was extorting him. She looked so frightened, Walter. She kept saying she didn’t want anything, and he kept smiling like she had said the funniest thing in the world.”
“What happened the night she died?”
Elise looked down at her hands. Her thumb had a small bandage where the wineglass had cut her.
“He left after dinner. Said he had a board call. Around nine I went into his study to find stamps. His wall safe was open. The pistol he keeps there was gone.”
Rourke’s attention sharpened, though he did not move.
“He came home after two,” she continued. “I heard the safe beep. The next morning the gun was back, but it smelled like solvent. He had cleaned it.”
“Will you say that under oath?” Rourke asked.
She flinched at his voice, then nodded.
“He’ll destroy me,” she said.
“No,” I told her. “He’s been destroying you quietly. This is the part where it stops.”
Rourke worked fast after that. Police do not enjoy being pushed by old men, but they enjoy murderers less. He arranged a controlled operation at St. Bartholomew Medical Center, a private hospital where Mercer Development had built a new wing years earlier. Graham knew the layout, the service elevators, the camera gaps. He would trust that knowledge.
We would let him.
My physician, Dr. Helen Park, admitted me under observation for cardiac irregularities and confusion. She did not lie in the chart. My heart was irregular. I was confused about how one son could hollow out a family and still wear its name.
Elise made the call Graham needed to hear.
She told him I had been drifting in and out, sometimes lucid, sometimes rambling about Nora. She told him I had asked for my estate attorney. She told him I wanted to change my will immediately before any court could declare me incompetent.
Then she delivered the blade.
“Walter says he’s leaving everything to a foundation in Nora’s name,” she told him while Rourke recorded from across the room. “The company, the house, all of it. He said not one dollar goes to you.”
I could hear Graham’s breathing through the phone.
“He can’t do that,” he said.
“He’s doing it tonight.”
“He’s not mentally competent.”
“The attorney says he only needs one clear window.”
“I’m coming.”
The line went dead.
Rourke looked at me. “This is the moment you can still back out.”
“I buried that option with my daughter.”
The hospital room was prepared by ten that night. Hidden camera in the smoke detector. Audio recorder in the wall-mounted television. Two officers in scrubs at the nurses’ station. Rourke in the empty room next door. The IV line in my arm was a prop; under the gauze, Dr. Park had removed the needle and run the tubing into a padded fold where any injected substance would go nowhere near my bloodstream.
Still, when they dimmed the lights and left me alone, fear came.
Not fear of dying. I had made my peace with that years ago. It was fear of hearing my son become fully what the evidence already said he was.
There are doors a father should not have to watch open.
At 1:46 a.m., the hallway quieted.
At 1:52, the service elevator chimed softly.
At 1:55, a shadow crossed the thin strip of light beneath my door.
I closed my eyes and let my breath turn shallow.
The handle moved.
Graham entered without knocking.
For a while he stood at the foot of the bed. I felt his gaze travel over the monitors, the IV, my face. He smelled of rain, scotch, and the metallic sweat of a man who had run out of better choices.
“You always did know how to make things difficult,” he whispered.
I did not move.
He came to my left side. His coat rustled. A small plastic cap snapped loose.
The sound was tiny, but in that dim room it landed like a hammer.
“I was going to let the guardianship happen,” he said. “Clean. Quiet. You could’ve had a nice room somewhere, nurses, a view of pine trees. But Nora ruined that. Even dead, she ruins things.”
My fingers tightened under the sheet.
He leaned closer. “She said she wanted family. Can you imagine? After all those years, she walks in with her cheap shoes and her diner smell and expects me to split my life in half because some dead doctor sold a baby.”
The room around me narrowed to his voice.
“I offered her money. More than she deserved. She said no. She said she was going to tell you before I turned you into a ghost in some memory unit.”
He laughed once, softly. “Stupid woman. Brave, though. I’ll give her that.”
The IV line shifted.
“She fought me at the motel,” he whispered. “Harder than I expected.”
I could hear Rourke’s warning in my head: Wait until the act. Wait until he commits.
Graham’s thumb pressed against the syringe.
“She had your stubbornness,” he said. “That was the problem with both of you.” – He pushed the needle into the rubber port. I opened my eyes…
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