Merry Christmas, Alex Cross Read online

  CHAPTER

  35

  SWEAT BROKE OUT ON FOWLER’S BROW, MAKING HIM LOOK GREASY. “WHAT IS that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

  I tossed the shirt to the wounded doctor’s wife. “Get the straight pins out of this thing. We’ll use it as a clean dressing.”

  “What the hell are you doing, Cross?” he said, jittery. “Just—just what the hell are you doing?”

  I turned back to Fowler. “However this turns out, it’ll be better for you without a murder charge on your hands. I want to help Barry make it through so that you can atone for what you’ve done already.”

  Fowler narrowed eyes that had turned black and beady. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s your only hope of redemption,” I said, opening the vodka bottle. “The only thing that you can do that will make this all seem, hell, justifiable.”

  “All the pins are out of the shirt, Mr. Cross,” Diana said. “What now?”

  I ignored Fowler and knelt beside her wounded husband. I poured about a cup of the Absolut over and into the entry wound. The sting and burn of the vodka contacting the traumatized area startled the doctor, causing him to groan and come awake for a few seconds.

  Nicholson’s eyes opened but didn’t focus. Diana leaned in closer to him and whispered, “I love you, Barry,” before his eyes closed again.

  She didn’t whisper softly enough. Fowler heard it too, and it destroyed whatever doubt and whatever hope I might have sown in his disturbed mind.

  Fowler lifted the shotgun, and fired…right through the ceiling, almost directly over his head. It was deafening, and it made a gaping hole.

  “Get away from him right now, Cross, or you’re going to have a hole in you.”

  The phone rang. I grabbed it and shouted: “No one is hurt! This is Cross.”

  I tossed the phone and returned to Nicholson, hearing Fowler run the pump action on the shotgun. “Who said you could answer the phone?” he said.

  “Give me a minute with him, Henry, and then the attention will be right back where you want it. Please?”

  I don’t know if it was the word please or the promise of undivided attention, but something brought Fowler back to a few seconds of sanity.

  “Do what you want,” he said, returning to the coffee table and the remaining lines of meth. “Take the bullet out with a steak knife and a fork, for all I care.”

  I poured vodka on my hands, took the shirt from Diana, and ripped it in half. I unbuckled the belt that held the throw pillow to Nicholson’s back, and his wife and I rolled him up onto his side so I could pour vodka into the exit wound; I prayed that the alcohol would kill some of the bacteria that had to be spreading in the doctor’s abdomen. The pillow was wet with blood as well as a yellowish fluid, which couldn’t be good. I hit the area with an extra dose of vodka. Then I drenched the rag, folded it, and pressed it to the wound.

  As I did, I heard Fowler snorting the last of his meth. Good, I thought. He’ll be about as unbalanced chemically as he can be when I try to really unbalance him. We set Nicholson down gently and then dressed the entry wound with the second vodka-soaked piece of the shirt.

  “You think your Boy Scout first aid is going to help him?” Fowler jeered. “You just wasted perfectly good vodka on him.”

  He was probably right. What I’d done was Civil War–era medicine.

  “Why, hello, offspring,” Fowler said, and then started to sing. “‘Welcome, welcome, Christmas Day.’”

  I turned and saw him standing a few feet from the twins, holding the shotgun and one of the semiautomatic rifles. His children cowered, crouched against the fireplace.

  “Don’t be scared, boys and girls,” he said. “We’re all in Whoville. And we need everyone to sing and greet Christmas.”

  “Henry,” I said.

  He ignored me and shouted, “On your feet! We’ve got to sing so the Grinch comes down from the mountain!”

  Crying, the twins stood up. So did Trey, who turned as pale as a ghost when his father fired the rifle toward the drapes and screamed: “Sing!”

  CHAPTER

  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?”

  CHAPTER

  38

  THE ANGER BOILED AGAIN IN FOWLER, SETTING OFF A TWITCH AND A TIC THAT seemed to ripple through his entire body. “You’re off by twenty or thirty degrees, Cross.”

  “Put us straight, then.”

  He shot Diana a venomous look. “Don’t think you’re not responsible, don’t think that you won’t be held accountable for what you’ve done.”

  “Henry,” I said. “Tell us the truth.”

  Fowler said, “I won the first suit fair and square. But afterward…a year after we won the suit involving the Huntington’s drug, I came across data that I’d never seen before, and case files that had
never made their way into the proceedings. There was sufficient evidence that the drug accelerated mortality.”

  “But you never told anyone?”

  “And tarnish my stellar reputation?” he asked caustically. “Ruin the family fun? Decrease the speed with which my bitch of a wife was spending the fortune they were paying me? Two million that year. Two million!”

  He looked at Diana like he wanted to throttle her. “Every single day I’d come home and hear the gargantuan list of crap she’d bought from this shop or that. Or from a catalog. Or off the Web. Or I’d hear about the cabinetmakers she’d had in. Or the granite-countertop guy. On and on and on!”

  Fowler glared at me. “I was trapped.”

  “But it got worse when you began to represent the hepatitis A vaccine manufacturer?”

  He set his jaw and nodded. “That case was almost like you described it, Cross. We were well into trial, and I get this report from an investigator I’d hired to find people who’d taken the hepatitis A vaccine but who weren’t part of the class-action suit.”

  “And?”

  “It showed an anomaly among teenagers who’d had the vaccine,” he replied. “They seemed to have suffered mild but permanent brain damage because of it.”

  Diana gasped. “And you didn’t tell anybody?”

  “And lose?” he screamed. “I couldn’t lose. You wouldn’t let me lose. The kids wouldn’t let me. The firm wouldn’t let me. And then you start screwing Barry, and the whole thing went to—”

  He flipped off the shotgun’s safety. “Happy now, Cross? Ready to see the ultimate repercussions of my shredding that private investigator’s report?”

  CHAPTER

  39

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK KILLING EVERYONE IN THIS ROOM IS GOING TO DO FOR you, Henry?” I asked, glancing at a clock on the mantelpiece and seeing that it was a quarter past seven. “Erase what you’ve done?”

  “Among other things.”

  I gestured at the phone on the floor. “They’ve been listening.”

  He swung the shotgun at me now. “I really don’t like you, Cross.”

  “You can make it right, Henry,” I said.

  “I’m going to hell for what I’ve done. I’ve made my peace with that.”

  “My grandmother’s in her nineties, and she likes to say that every Christmas is a time for rebirth,” I said. “I can tell you how you can do that, if you’ll let me.”

  His meth eyes hopped all over me. “You trying to sell me some twelve-step program?”

  I made a show of looking at Diana and Dr. Nicholson and the children and then said, “I think you’ll want to hear this alone, Henry. You can decide later whether to tell them. We’ll go somewhere. The kitchen. Have a cup of coffee. I’ll tell you what I think.”

  “How stupid do you think I am?” Fowler asked. “Yeah, we’ll go talk, and then these bastards’ll take off.”

  “Don’t be crazy, Henry,” Diana said. “I would never leave Barry.”

  Sadness mixed with loss flickered across his face. Fowler looked at me, reached into his pocket, fed himself something again.

  “You taking a visit to the OxyContinent?” I asked.

  “So what if I am?”

  “Let’s go talk,” I said, thinking that it was good he was taking a narcotic.

  Fowler blinked, then gestured toward the center hall. “My den.”

  I didn’t want Fowler in the den, which was on the opposite side of the house. I wanted him in the kitchen, which was at the rear and overlooked a walled-in garden.

  “I could really use some coffee.”

  The narcotic was hitting Fowler, taking the edge off his high anxiety.

  “Sure. We aim to please,” he said, then he cracked up and poked me forward with the gun.

  We walked to the living room entranceway. Fowler stopped there and spun around. He held his shotgun in the air. For a moment I thought he might fire at the ceiling again. Instead, he spoke to his family with quiet contempt. “I swear to God, if any one of you moves, I will paint the walls with your blood.”

  CHAPTER

  40

  “WHICH WAY?” I ASKED, KNOWING FULL WELL WHERE THE KITCHEN WAS FROM blueprints Nu had shown me but wanting to seem ignorant and let Fowler think he remained in control.

  “Right,” he said.

  I pivoted and walked down the narrow hallway lined with framed family pictures, my mind whirling with all the ways this move could go bad. What if Diana defied Fowler and tried to get her kids out? What if she tried to run?

  We passed the formal dining room on our right. The table was decorated and set like Martha Stewart was coming over for Christmas dinner. I could see the kitchen straight ahead, a light, airy space with lots of windows that looked out at the now leafless ancient oak trees that graced the backyard.

  I stepped into the kitchen. Fowler stopped short in the hallway and said, “I took that photo. I used to call it the most beautiful picture in the world.”

  I wanted Fowler to come into the kitchen, but he was transfixed and I had to see why. The moment I saw the picture I sensed another dimension to Fowler’s madness. One picture, it seemed, was worth a thousand rants.

  In the photo, a younger version of Fowler’s family sat on the deck of a house that looked to be somewhere on the New England shore, or maybe in Jersey. Five years ago, it must have been, because Trey was a baby in Diana’s lap.

  Fowler said, “See how perfect they all look, Cross, how…how…blond they are. It’s like a catalog…Brooks Brothers…Ralph Lauren. You know where that is? That’s Martha’s Vineyard, Oak Bluffs. See that house? That house cost me sixty thousand dollars to rent for the month of August. Some people don’t make sixty grand in a year. And that’s what I was spending on a damn rental in Martha’s Vineyard. Those were the days, man. Those were the days, my friend.”

  CHAPTER

  41

  I FOCUSED ON THE PHOTOGRAPH THAT HENRY FOWLER HAD TAKEN. HIS FAMILY sat smiling naturally in front of a great big weather-beaten house. All three children, even the baby, were wearing charcoal-blue sweaters. And Fowler was right. They looked good. They were tan. Diana’s hair was shorter. The kids and the light and Diana really did look beautiful. And everyone looked happy, facing the man who was taking the picture. Henry Fowler. I glanced at him and saw that the pain medicine was swirling in him, putting him in another place and time. I thought about trying to knock the gun from his hands, but he kept it out of reach. I’d pushed him, gotten him to reveal his demons, but I remained unsure if I could get him to give up. I glanced at the clock above the stove. Seven twenty-five a.m. Dr. Nicholson had been shot hours ago. He had to get medical attention. Which meant I needed Fowler in the kitchen. Now.

  “God, what a summer,” Fowler said in a whisper, still staring at the photo. “We loved it there, all of us. We had an ocean view and a sailboat. Two college kids crewed for us. Every day we ate lobster and fries and clams and blueberry pie. I burned money. Burned money. Thought it would never end.”

  Tears dripped down his cheeks. “I was the luckiest guy in the whole world, with the best family, the perfect family.” His voice turned bitter again and he gripped his gun as if he meant to club someone with it.

  I took a step into the kitchen, hoping he’d follow. But Fowler just stood there, looking at the picture. “And then I blew it, Cross. I blew the perfect life.”

  A small red dot appeared on his left hip, wavered, then began to travel up his body, toward his chest. The sniper Nu and I had ordered into one of the oak trees in the backyard had finally found Fowler through the window.

  CHAPTER

  42

  WE’D DECIDED BEFORE I REENTERED THE HOUSE ON THIRTIETH STREET THAT WE couldn’t afford to let Dr. Nicholson stay there much past seven thirty. Not if we wanted to have a chance at saving him. If I didn’t get Fowler to surrender, it was my job to lure him into the kitchen, where there were windows.

  Seeing the red dot on his body, I knew Fowler was dead, and his
ex-wife, his children, and Dr. Nicholson had a chance to live.

  Fowler saw the dot on his chest and knew it too.

  Call it something in my DNA, I don’t know. But I couldn’t watch this man get shot down on Christmas morning.

  I launched myself at him, wrapped him up, gun and all, and drove him hard to the floor.

  A rifle shot. Glass broke in a kitchen window. The picture of Fowler’s family shattered as a bullet passed through it and into the wall.

  I threw a forearm against the back of Fowler’s head, bouncing his face off the hardwood floor, and then ripped the gun from his hands. I got up fast and put my boot on his neck, the muzzle of my gun against his temple. “Henry Fowler, you’re under arrest.”

  By the time I finished reading him his rights, the front door was rammed open, and Nu’s men were breaking through the door between the porch and the kitchen. They ran to us, used zip ties on Fowler’s ankles and wrists.

  Medics rushed into the house. The two SWAT officers lifted Fowler to his feet. He was going to have a hell of a black eye from the pounding he’d taken against the floor.

  He stared at me. “Why didn’t you let them kill me?”

  “Like I said, I believe in the redemptive power of Christmas.”

  “Not for me.” Fowler shook his head. “I’ll be in a jail cell. I’ll be tortured by what I’ve done for the rest of my life.”

  “Unless you testify,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Come forward with what you know. Tell the truth about the Huntington’s drug and the hepatitis vaccine. You can still save lives, prevent brain damage.”

  Fowler stared at me as if this had never occurred to him.

  “Merry Christmas, Fowler,” I said. Then SWAT took him away.

  My eyes began to water, and I wiped them on the back of my sleeve. Maybe what my grandmother had always said about Christmas was true.

  “You okay, Alex?” Nu asked.