Merry Christmas, Alex Cross (Alex Cross 19)

36

THE PHONE RANG AGAIN.

This time Fowler took it. “We’re fine!” he yelled and hung up. Then he looked at his children, who’d stopped singing.

“Again!” their father yelled. “Louder! It’s got to be heard way up the mountain in the Grinch’s cave!”

Fowler was really getting into it now; he’d launched into a second chorus when I stood up and shouted, “Counselor!”

The former civil defense attorney stopped and looked at me dumbly while his children’s terrified singing dwindled to sniffling.

“What?” he said. “Don’t like Dr. Seuss on Christmas morning, Cross?”

“I love Dr. Seuss on Christmas morning, or on any morning. It’s just time for a little cross-examination.”

For a moment there was indecision in Fowler’s face, then he set the rifle against the fireplace and said, “Sorry, trial’s over.”

“Call this an appeal, then,” I said.

“No appeals!” he shouted, reaching into his pocket and feeding something into his mouth. “There are no appeals in this courtroom.”

“But judgments can be overturned,” I said, moving toward him.

“There will be no stays of execution.”

I looked at him and said softly, “Was it the Huntington’s drug case…or the vaccine for hepatitis A?”

CHAPTER

37

“YOU NEVER TOLD HER?” I ASKED FOWLER. “DIANA DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT those two cases?”

I could see the rage in him building toward release, the rhino about to run. He put the tip of his shotgun right under my chin.

“What don’t I know?” Diana cried. “Henry?”

Fowler winced at her voice and then stepped away from me to point the weapon at her. “Shut up, Diana.”

“No,” she said with withering anger. “I will not shut up. And if my husband is going to die, and my children, I think I deserve to know why.”

“It was the lawsuits, Henry,” I said. “Wasn’t it?”

Fowler said nothing, just stared at his wife as if she were a black hole he would never really fathom.

“What about them?” Diana asked. “Henry? What about the lawsuits?”

Fowler just stood there, a man unhinged, chewing on the source of his own destruction, unable or unwilling to describe its bitterness.

I said, “In one or maybe both of those lawsuits, I believe your husband came into possession of evidence that might have changed the verdicts.”

“What?” Diana said, frowning, still looking at her ex-husband. “Is that true? What kind of evidence, Henry?”

He wouldn’t look at her.

“Data, medical records, who knows?” I said. “But Henry knew something, and he never revealed the evidence to the people suing the companies he represented. He violated ethics. He broke laws. He destroyed lives. But in the process, he became a very, very wealthy man. And that was good.

“So he tried to compartmentalize, to bury what he’d done, but the problem is that deep down, your ex-husband is a good man, a man of conscience, and it began to eat at him. So he started using liquor and drugs to calm the guilt, and it all went to hell and self-loathing. Is that about right, Henry?”