Looking for Rourke

Cascade Therapeutics occupied two floors of a glass building near the water, and Nora had been its outside counsel for four years, which meant she knew where the bodies were buried and had helped bury two of them legally. She had never once been invited upstairs to the clean room.

What she had, that January, was a will.

It had come to her the way such things do — a courier, a signature page, a partner's sticky note that said review, no rush. Adrian Voss, sixty-one, founder and chief scientist, unmarried, no children, leaving a portfolio of patents, a house on the ridge, and a controlling block of stock. And a clause on page nine that she found frankly insulting: if Voss went missing for three months — absent, unheard from, unreachable — everything he owned went to a man named Dexter Rourke.

She read it three times. Ninety days was not a coincidence. Ninety days was a wall someone had built around a door.

The address she found for Dexter Rourke was on Aurora Avenue, above a tire shop, behind a door that had been painted so many times the layers had gone soft as bread. She had not knocked yet. He opened it anyway, and stood in the doorway as though he had been waiting behind it.

He was younger than Theo had said and older than the voice he used. Pale in a way that had nothing to do with the weather, and dressed well, in the way of a man who has read about dressing well. He looked at her the way a landlord looks at a leak.

"Miss Bellamy," he said. "Counsel for Cascade. I know who you are. Come in and have coffee, it's cold out there."

The room had one chair, a mattress, a hot plate, and an enormous mirror, the kind that comes out of a hotel bathroom. The mirror was clean. Nothing else was. He made coffee by pouring boiling water through a filter bag held in his bare fingers, and he did not flinch, and he watched her waiting for him to.

"You're here about the clause," he said.

"I'm here about a check."

"Ah." He smiled at the wall. "That was clumsy of me. Six hundred dollars. I'd have written six thousand, but the mother looked like the sort to call the news." He drank his coffee. "You want to know what I am to Adrian. Everyone wants to know what I am to Adrian."

"I want to know what Adrian is to you."

"He's the house," Rourke said. "I'm the weather that gets in." He set down the cup and looked at her with real, unembarrassed interest, and Nora understood, in a way she would not be able to explain later, that she was being studied for a weakness. "He's careful and I am not. He's spent thirty years being decent and I've spent six weeks being free, and between the two of us, Miss Bellamy, only one of us is having a good time."

She left before she finished the coffee. In the stairwell she stopped and took out her phone and looked at the photograph Theo had shown her, the slanted signature, and then at her own hand, which was steady, and she noticed that it was steady and could not decide whether that was good news.