Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

CHAPTER 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.”