Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

CHAPTER 21

For a second there I wondered if I’d gone too far, been too direct, too confrontational. But then Fowler smiled icily at me.

“You want to know the straw that broke the camel’s back, Cross?” he asked, reaching into his jacket and coming up with a glass vial.

“Wouldn’t hurt to understand your side of things,” I said.

Fowler squatted by the glass coffee table, tapped white powder onto it, and started laying the powder out in lines with a hotel-room key card. “I suppose that’s a reasonable request, but I’m going to have to get my head on straight to tell that story.”

He rolled up a dollar bill and snorted two of the five lines. Shuddering, he closed his eyes, then he shivered and said, “Now, that’s more like it.”

“How long have you been up, Henry?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m seeing things clear and for what they are, Cross. So I’ll tell you what you want to know about me going off the deep end.”

“Okay,” I said, noticing the slight tremor that was visible in his fingers. If he had been shooting and snorting meth for more than, say, thirty-six hours, the rhino could be paying us a visit at any moment.

“So it’s Christmas not that many years ago,” Fowler began. “And we’re home. We’re happy. We hold a party the afternoon of Christmas Eve. It’s been a big-money year for me, and Diana’s spared no expense. Catered. The whole nine yards. And I don’t know why, but it was one of those years when people stayed in DC for the holidays. Nearly everyone we knew came. Even Barry, an old friend from Georgetown, who arrived dressed as Santa Claus. Even dear Melissa and her husband, Congressman Brandywine, made an appearance. Anyway, about an hour into the festivities, I’m working the room. A potential client asks for a business card and I go to my office. Door’s locked. I knock. No one answers.”

Fowler paused, snorted two more lines, then got to his feet and shrugged. “Locked door. It happens. I’ll get it open later. But anyway, long story short, I go back to the party, apologize to my potential client, and promise to contact him after the New Year. I get a drink. I’m looking around. The party’s right at its peak. I get this weird feeling. So I go out the back door and around to the bulkhead below my office window. I look in and what do I see?”

Fowler walked over to stand by Dr. Nicholson. Then he booted the man hard in the ribs. Over the doctor’s groaning, Fowler said, “This one’s sitting in my Georgetown law school rocking chair. Dear Diana, my lovely wife of many years, is kneeling before him, and-” He broke into song. “‘I saw Mommy sucking Santa Claus, underneath the mistletoe so bright!’”