Merry Christmas, Alex Cross (Alex Cross 19)

9

FOWLER’S EARLY DAYS OVERFLOWED WITH PROMISE. BORN INTO A MIDDLE-CLASS family of teachers, he’d attended New Trier High, apparently a good public school in the Chicago suburbs, then gone to Georgetown for his undergraduate degree, and Georgetown Law after that. The MPD had even managed to dig up Fowler’s college yearbook photo. He had graduated third in his class, and it sure didn’t hurt that he looked like he could be Tom Brady’s brother.

After law school, Fowler landed at Fulton Holt, one of the best white-shoe law firms in the nation’s capital. Fowler quickly became well known. He had the perfect combination of traits for a civil defense lawyer: unrelenting stamina, classical eloquence, and a killer attitude.

There were fawning pieces on him in the Post and the Times. Reading them, I realized that I had heard of the man. Years ago, nine hundred women had joined a class-action suit against a national retail chain, charging the chain with noncompetitive wages and workplace harassment.

Bree and I had talked about the case on one of our first dates. Hardly romantic, I know, but my yet-to-be wife had followed the case almost obsessively because she’d worked at the company before entering the police academy. She believed the women had been unfairly treated because she herself had been unfairly treated at that job.

Fowler had represented the retail chain in the suit, however. And Fowler had won. But the articles all noted that Fowler’s forte was not workplace law; he specialized in wrongful-death pharmaceutical cases.

Prior to the workplace lawsuit, he’d represented a California biotech company being sued by relatives of people who’d participated in a trial of a new Huntington’s disease drug and died shortly after treatment. Fowler had argued convincingly that the patients in question had been terminal at the time of the study, that they’d been hoping for miracles, and that his client could not be held liable for not delivering miracles.

Fowler went back to pharmaceutical litigation after the big workplace decision. He was hired to defend a member of Big Pharma against charges that its new hepatitis A vaccine caused neurological damage in 10 percent of patients.

Fowler won again. The drug stayed on the market.

“He must have made a fortune from that,” I said.

McGoey nodded. “Paid a million in taxes that year. Do the math.”

“He’s flush at that point,” agreed Nu, who was looking at his own screen. “But then a few years ago, something happens. It all starts to unravel.”

CHAPTER

10

“WHERE ARE YOU SEEING THAT?” I ASKED NU. “DIVORCE RECORDS?”

“That’s sealed,” the SWAT lieutenant said. “But have you looked at the rap sheet yet, Alex? This guy doesn’t hit the skids slow. He walks right off a cliff.”

I went back, found the sheet, opened it, and quickly saw what Nu was talking about. About a year before his wife filed for divorce, Fowler was arrested on a drunk-driving charge. Prior to that, he’d never been in trouble with the law. That changed in a big way over the course of the next six months.

During that time he was charged with two more DUIs and lost his license. That didn’t stop him. He was spotted buying drugs in Anacostia at one point; stopped and arrested with meth and black-tar heroin in his possession at another. A month after that, he was arrested on charges of beating a hooker; he’d done it while wasted, blaming her for who he’d become.

At least seven times, Metro police were called to the Fowler residence by neighbors complaining of domestic disturbances. Nine months into his radical new behavior, Fowler lost his job, voted out by his partners. Two months after that, Fowler’s wife changed the locks on the house, got a restraining order barring him from contact with her or her children, and filed for divorce.

That action had only driven Fowler further away from his former self. Not a month went by without something interesting to report about the counselor. Charges of attempting to intimidate a witness in his divorce trial. Charges of child abuse by his wife. Illegal possession of firearms.

The night his divorce became final, Fowler broke into a former friend’s house and stole whatever he could lay his hands on. He was arrested and spent ninety days in jail, his first real stretch, but not his last.

His ex-wife announced her intention to wed Dr. Barry Nicholson, an old friend of the family, and a week later, Fowler showed up at the optometrist’s office high on a handful of substances and carrying a knife. He threatened Nicholson and terrorized the staff at the doctor’s office for almost an hour before being arrested and subdued.

Nicholson had refused to press charges, stating that he believed Fowler was mentally ill and that his radical change in behavior was the result of something organic rather than environmental. The court ordered Fowler held for a psychiatric review, but nothing conclusive was found and he was ultimately released.

Next, Fowler tried to disrupt his ex-wife’s wedding. Guards caught him and escorted him out, but he could be heard shouting that Barry Nicholson was doomed and that his ex-wife was doomed. Since then, Fowler’s life had turned even more squalid and desperate.

To support his habit, Fowler tried to become a drug dealer. He was not successful and lived on the street for a while, the usual elegant lodgings—dumpsters, abandoned houses, public restrooms. Then a third-rate hooker who called herself Patty Paradise took him in. Patty was a pathetic druggie herself, afflicted with the shakes, rotted teeth, HIV, the whole catalog of problems that accompany meth addiction.

Fowler had recently spent four months in jail in Montgomery County, Maryland, on burglary charges.

“He got out the day after Thanksgiving,” McGoey observed. “Which gave him a solid twenty-eight days to get ready for this.”

“Unless he was preparing before that,” I said, rubbing my temple. “As an old boss of mine used to say, ‘There’s no rest for the wicked and no snooze button on the human time bomb.’”

CHAPTER

11