Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

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?”