“No!” Fowler snorted derisively. “Is that right, Barry? You know everything, don’t you, Barry? Mr. Optometrist-fucking cash-flow doctor of the year.”
A gun blasted. We heard glass breaking and more crying.
Fowler was shouting. “See that? See that, Mr. Optometrist? Shut the hell up, Mr. Optometrist! Or you’re going to look just like everything else under the Christmas tree.” He began to sing: “‘O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum!’”
“Mr. Fowler!” Ramiro yelled into his phone.
“‘How lovely are thy branches!’” Fowler sang, and then he stopped. We heard footsteps. The phone was picked up.
Fowler whispered, “What did old Henry the magic man and his magic wand take out, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? Anyone? Anyone?”
He paused. McGoey, Nu, and Ramiro glanced at me, confused. Before I could even think about how to interpret Fowler’s ravings, he said, “Awww, let’s see. A nice new iPad. Got it right in the apple…and here we have what used to be an Xbox Kinect. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, plaintiff should be thanking me, not suing me. Now my idiot sons will have more time for homework. And my ex-wife’s Tiffany bauble? I mean, c’mon, have you ever seen such overpriced crap? There ought to be a law against Tiffany and Nordstrom. I mean, look at that beautiful blue polo sweater of Barry’s. Cashmere does not stop buckshot, now, does it, ladies and gentlemen?”
Fowler stopped talking. All we could hear was his rushed breath, and I wondered if he was on drugs or drinking or both.
“Hey, Mr. Fowler,” Ramiro said calmly, carefully, almost softly-the way they teach you in the FBI courses about hostage negotiation.
“Who the hell are you?” Fowler shot back.
“My name is Ramiro. I’m glad to hear that the people you’ve got in there are okay. That’s good news.”
Fowler exploded: “What are you, another whiny-ass cop? These people in here are not doing okay, Officer Whiny Ass. Once the sun rises and all the Cindy Lou Whos down in Whoville have sung their song, I’m going to blow their heads off once and for all.”
The children began to cry again.
Ramiro glanced at me. I made a downward motion with my hands. Stay calm. Do everything calmly.
“I understand what you’re saying, Mr. Fowler,” Ramiro said. “How about we talk, work things out?” Good, I thought. Calmly engage him. Establish common ground.
“You some kind of hostage negotiator?” Fowler asked.
Ramiro hesitated. Not a good thing. He said, “I’m just a guy who wants to hear what you have to say, Mr. Fowler.”
“Tell it to the jury, whiny ass!” Fowler shouted. “I am never talking to you ever again. Ever.”
Click.
CHAPTER 8
Outside, the wind began to pick up, slashing the snow sideways. The lawn in front of the Nicholsons’ house had disappeared beneath the three inches that had already fallen.
“How do we handle this guy, Alex?” Ramiro said. “He sounds psychotic.”
“Or wasted on something stronger than pathological rage,” I said.
Adam Nu was on the phone with Congressman Brandywine, assuring him that as far as we knew, his wife was still alive among the hostages inside. I studied the notes I’d jotted down after Fowler hung up, trying to see some kind of pattern to his ravings.
He’d talked to us as if we were the jury and he were arguing his case in civil court. He admitted shooting the Christmas presents. He’d called his ex-wife’s husband “Mr. Optometrist-fucking cash-flow doctor of the year.” He clearly loathed Barry Nicholson. He clearly had deep-seated money resentment. Called Christmas the “high holy day of consumerism.” Ranted about Tiffany. He had even referred to Cindy Lou Who and Whoville, from the Grinch story.
Was that how he saw himself, in some deluded way? As the Grinch? I tapped on the notebook and realized something. I hadn’t heard the two women, had I? Maybe one there, right at the outset, before Fowler started shooting. But from that point onward, no women’s voices at all. Were they dead?
No. He would have made a reference to shooting them. So they were there, but not talking. Why? So they didn’t disturb-
“Alex,” McGoey said.
I looked up. The detective handed me a computer tablet, said, “Guys downtown just sent over the file on Henry Fowler.”
Nu got off the phone with the congressman. The three of us used separate tablets to scan through the police reports, psychological evaluations, and clippings that Henry Fowler had generated on his way to a hostage standoff. I skipped his rap sheet for the moment, wanting to understand who he had been before all this. In some ways, it was like taking a walk with the Ghost of Christmas Past.
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.”
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.