The Other Daughter

  His mother replying, “I didn't mean . . . I didn't know . . . I thought Brian needed some time alone with me. You know how he can be, especially around her.”

  “Well, he's got you all to himself now, doesn't he? He's got that, all fucking right.”

  I'm sorry. I can't even tell you why I was so cruel.

  Nate came up behind him. “You're worried about your sister, aren't you?” he asked, rubbing Brian's arms. “You've been like this ever since you went to see her.”

  “I don't want to talk about it.”

  “Of course not,” Nate agreed amiably. “So how long are you going to hate yourself, Brian? And how long are you going to hate Melanie for daring to care?”

  “I don't—”

  “She came to you for help. You haven't even called her since.”

  “You don't understand.”

  Nate gave him a look. He'd seen Brian at his worst, when he was so filled with self-loathing he could barely crawl out of bed. Nate understood plenty. He said, “Then explain it to me. Give me one logical reason for blowing off your poor sister.”

  Brian shifted uneasily. “She's better off without me. She is.”

  “Hah,” Nate said. “Your sister adores you. First sign of trouble, who does she call? Big-brother Brian. That's because she knows you care. Because you've always looked out for her. She trusts you. She loves you. Why are you being so difficult now?”

  Brian gritted his teeth. “It's different.”

  “Your sister needs help. Not that different.”

  “It's complicated, all right? She doesn't know about Meagan. No one knows about Meagan. Dammit, I don't want to know about Meagan!”

  Nate said quietly, “You know, you're the only person I know who came out of the closet to hide a bigger secret.”

  “I did not—”

  “I've been around the block a few times, I know the signs. I've watched other men come out of the closet, and it isn't easy. But generally there is a moment of relief afterward. You haven't gotten that sense of relief, have you, Brian? Six months later you are just as tense and troubled as before. Why is that? If you are finally at peace with who you are, why are you somehow angrier?”

  Brian couldn't answer. Nate didn't need him to. “Because that wasn't the secret, was it, Brian?”

  Brian didn't answer.

  FIVE A.M. DAWN was just breaking over the horizon, washing Boston's streets in shades of gold. The man finally turned away from the window. He was tired from a long, hard night, but also exhilarated.

  The game was in full motion now, the players not just assembled, but moving around the board. He found it interesting that for a group of people who half hated one another, for twenty-five years they had stayed close together. It made it easy to monitor them.

  Harper was looking over his shoulder. William was carrying a gun. Brian Stokes was suffering from long, sleepless nights. The rest of them were working frantically to keep their secrets.

  A shooter had been unleashed and the first death recorded.

  And Melanie? He wasn't even sure where she was, but assumed she was safe. Otherwise he would've heard.

  Melanie was the king. She was the prize in the game, the one reason it all unfolded and the only thing he had to gain.

  Come on, Melanie. It's all up to you now.

  Time to remember, sweetheart. Time to put the pieces together.

  Time to come home to daddy.

  Time to come home to me.

  NINETEEN

  A LL RIGHT,” LAIRMORE said crisply. “What the hell is going on?”

  At seven A.M. sharp, there was no messing with the supervisory agent. His double-breasted gray suit was impeccably tailored, his white dress shirt sharply pressed, and his military-cropped hair perfectly even. He sat behind his oversized walnut desk, while behind him, the blue FBI seal provided a halo of thirteen stars and a white banner declaring Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity. Even during internal meetings there was always the feeling that Lairmore was conducting a press conference.

  Still, David liked him.

  At nearly fifty years of age, the head of the Boston healthcare fraud squad could tell you what every color and object in the FBI shield symbolized. He'd also go to his grave swearing that Hoover never so much as touched a pair of women's underwear; it was all a horrible misunderstanding. He was conservative, he was bureaucratic, but he also believed that healthcare fraud was the worst crime epidemic sweeping the United States since organized crime—ten cents of every dollar wasted, not to mention shoddy treatment, unnecessary procedures, and the risk of human life—and he worked his ass off to do something about it. A man who believed in his job. In David's mind, a rarity these days.

  Now, Lairmore stared down two agents who hadn't slept a wink.

  “Oh, for heaven's sake,” he finally exclaimed, “couldn't you two at least have showered and shaved? This isn't a bachelor party.”

  David and Chenney looked at each other. They shook their heads.

  “Watching Sheffield,” Chenney mumbled. His eyes lit up. “Got a big break.”

  “Researched Meagan Stokes,” David said. “Dodged bullets. Talked to Supervisory Special Agent Quincy. No breaks.”

  “You talked to Quincy? At Quantico?”

  “Yeah, late last night. He's always at the office too. What the hell is it with this job?”

  Chenney gazed at David with awe. “Cool.”

  “Ah, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Lairmore stood up from his chair. “In the hallway now.”

  He stormed out. They followed. He plugged the coffee machine with quarters, then handed them the steaming cups that came shooting out. They accepted. Then chugged. Then dutifully followed their disgruntled leader back to his office, where David received a personal lecture on overextending his case team and fracturing a “very important if not critical” investigation. David nursed the rest of his coffee and pulled his thoughts together so he could sound intelligent when he had the chance. It came sooner than he desired.

  “Let's start with the Meagan Stokes case.” Lairmore slapped the Harper Stokes/William Sheffield healthcare fraud case file on the desk. “How the hell did you end up working on a twenty-five-year-old solved homicide?”

  David started at the beginning and ended by stating his growing certainty that the whole Stokes family had bigger secrets than fraud.

  Lairmore half agreed. “Most perpetrators do have a pattern of small-time fraud in their backgrounds. Maybe they cheated on auto insurance, then graduated to doctoring pharmaceutical billings. But in all my days, Agent, I have never heard of a person starting with conspiring to murder his own child for the insurance money and then trading down for white collar fraud.”

  David smiled wearily. “And we don't even know if Harper Stokes is committing healthcare fraud, let alone if he had anything to do with Meagan. Personally, Quincy favors the mother—”

  “Harper's doing it!” Chenney burst in. “I got it. I got Sheffield!”

  Chenney explained his previous night's adventure in one long adrenaline rush: Harry Boer suffered chest pains and was rushed to the ER. By evening he was in ICU, under sedation but appearing to be fine. Then, bam, he had two bradycardic episodes within five hours and was now undergoing an operation for a pacemaker performed by none other than Dr. Harper Stokes. And William Sheffield just happened to be spotted in the ICU ward several times, hours after his shift ended, with no patients in that ward. He was just “around.” Conveniently around, if you asked Chenney.

  “I called a pharmacist friend first thing this morning,” Chenney announced. “She said that if you wanted to make it appear that someone needed a pacemaker, there are two drugs that would effectively interfere with the electrical conduction of the heart. They are propranolol and digoxin. Propranolol's a beta blocker, it's used to slow a racing heartbeat. Digoxin can also slow down the ventricles, but it might also accelerate the heart to lethal rates. Kinda risky, she said. Most likely, Sheffield's using propranolol.

 
“So,” Chenney concluded with a flourish, “Sheffield sneaks into the ICU wards at night, that's why he's at the hospital so much. Injecting propranolol just once would cause concern but probably not lead to a cardiologist immediately recommending surgery. However, if a couple episodes happened right in a row . . .”

  “Then the patients appear to have a circulatory disorder and need surgery,” David said.

  “Brilliantly simple,” Lairmore said. “Must take Sheffield two minutes for each injection. Then they're all set for an hour-long procedure that garners Harper two thousand dollars for the surgery and another four thousand in royalty dollars as he uses his own custom-designed pacemakers. If they do a couple a week . . .”

  “Sheffield has no problem paying off his gambling debts and Harper can spend all he wants.” David sighed. “One thing we are learning about Harper Stokes, he likes a nice lifestyle.”

  Lairmore was nodding thoughtfully. Chenney had resumed looking troubled.

  “But even if we can now prove Harper Stokes is making money from illegal surgeries, how does that tie in with what happened to Meagan Stokes twenty-five years ago?”

  “That's what I want to know.” David leaned forward, planted his elbows on his knees, and though he was dog tired from a night spent poring over documents and weathering aching muscles, he got into it.

  “I went through the entire Houston PD case file last night and a few key findings about the Meagan Stokes case emerged. One, in 1972, the Stokeses were in dire financial straits. They lived in a big house, but it was a gift from Patricia's father, not anything Harper could afford. He was just a resident, barely making ten thousand a year and scrounging to maintain the lifestyle to which his wife was accustomed. He'd taken out a second mortgage on the home and was already behind three payments when Meagan disappeared. Bottom line is that from a financial point of view, Meagan's murder was the best thing that ever happened to Harper and Patricia Stokes.”

  “So we have motive,” Lairmore said.

  Chenney was not convinced. “If it was only about money, couldn't Harper have dreamed up his little operations back then?”

  “No, residents are salaried, not paid by the procedure. One pacemaker surgery a week or a dozen, it would have been the same to him.”

  Now Lairmore was the one with an objection. “Still, Dr. Stokes could have done other things—sold drugs from the hospital, sought kickbacks from pharmaceutical representatives. We all know there are many ways for healthcare providers at any level to abuse their positions for money. So I believe Chenney's point still stands. We have established that Harper and Patricia Stokes needed the money, but you haven't convinced me yet that they are the type of people to cold-bloodedly murder their little girl to get it.”

  “All right, fair enough. That brings me to my second key finding. Not only did Harper have motive, but just about everyone in the family was having problems back then. To hell with having one suspect, in 1972 the police had four: Harper Stokes, Patricia Stokes, Jamie O'Donnell, and, believe it or not, Brian Stokes.” David nodded at their startled expressions. “Exactly. This family doesn't just have skeletons, it has graveyards. So if you don't like Harper for the murder, let's look at everyone else.

  “Patricia Stokes. Long before she met Harper, she was rich. Born into oil wealth, raised by a fairly domineering father, and the apple of his eye. Doesn't sound like her father liked Harper much, thought he wasn't good enough for his daughter—but that didn't stop him from giving his little girl a dream wedding and a mansion up on the hill. Unfortunately, when Patricia settled down to a future as a doctor's wife, she discovered she didn't like the scenery. Even before Brian was out of diapers, she was acting restless and bored. She took to spending lots of money. Went out partying. And she started spending more time with Jamie O'Donnell than with her husband, though her husband seemed to be spending more time with twenty-something nurses than his own wife.

  “According to friends of the family, they did make an attempt at reconciliation. Harper started coming home more often, and they made a decision to have a second child, Meagan. This time it seemed to work. With two kids at home, Patricia gave up the party scene and finally settled into motherhood. She took up charity work, joined a few organizations, but mostly appeared content to dote on her children. According to the housekeeper, she and Harper shared a bedroom again, but the housekeeper never had to change the sheets, if you get my drift.”

  “A lot of marriages turn into that,” Lairmore said mildly. “If that's a sign of criminal activity, we'd have to arrest all husbands and wives married more than five years.”

  David smiled. “Sure, but we're not done with the Stokeses yet. So now we have Meagan Stokes in the picture. We got Harper and Patricia and the two children and happily ever after. But then, six months before Meagan's murder, Patricia and Harper start fighting every night. One maid apparently said something to friends of the family, and Patricia fired her the next day. And wonder of all wonders, Jamie O'Donnell starts hanging around again.”

  “He and Patricia have a thing,” Chenney said.

  “Seems that way. Police couldn't prove it, but you can't believe he's hanging around the house for the cooking. And Patricia is already starting to hit the gin. Everyone says it was the murder of Meagan that sent her over the brink, but the police can trace it back to before Meagan's death. Right before, which means whatever was going on, it had put Patricia in a questionable state of mind. Who knows what women do in a questionable state of mind?”

  Lairmore nodded slowly, pursing his lips. “Interesting. So we have a materialistic workaholic doctor, an unhappy alcoholic wife, and a love triangle with the family friend. Exactly what is Jamie O'Donnell's connection with the Stokeses?”

  “Old friend of Harper's from college days, not that O'Donnell went to school. He's strictly self-educated and self-made. Started out working in the oil fields and took it from there. On the surface he and Harper make an unlikely pair, but they're both driven. Of course, they took entirely different routes to the top. Harper is now Mr. Community and Mr. Family, whereas Jamie O'Donnell knows people. Interpol has a file on the man.”

  “What?” Now he had Lairmore's attention. David waved it away.

  “Interpol has been desperate to prove that he runs guns but has never found a thing other than he keeps interesting company. Otherwise he runs a legitimate import business, pays his taxes every April 15, and puts his pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us.”

  “The rest of us aren't sleeping with Patricia Stokes,” Chenney said dryly.

  David shrugged. “Sure. So now we have the money motive and the love triangle. Maybe Harper was so angry at his wife, he decided killing Meagan would be a great way to spite her and solve his financial woes. Or maybe Jamie O'Donnell thought Patricia would never leave Harper as long as they had children together, so he tried to do something about it. Or maybe when Patricia was strung too tightly, had a little too much to drink, Meagan chose that moment to act out, and boom, bye-bye Meagan. Now we come to possibility number three—Brian Stokes.”

  “This family just gets better and better,” muttered Chenney.

  “Not exactly the Waltons,” David agreed. “Brian in particular has a very troubled history. According to the Houston police report, he frequently broke items in the house and was known to reduce his mother to tears on almost a nightly basis. The interviewing officer wrote that the nanny had standing orders not to leave Brian alone in a room with Meagan. Apparently, he'd gone out of his way to destroy some of her toys. Then just to make it a slam dunk, Brian was seeing a therapist in 1972. It seems that Brian already had a history of playing with matches.”

  “You're kidding me.” Lairmore sat up straighter. “Don't tell me he's also a bed wetter and an animal torturer.”

  Lairmore was referring to the violent triad developed by the profilers. For whatever reason, serial killers always had at least two legs of that triangle in their past. But not Brian Stokes.

  “Just
petty arson,” David said. “Now, to make matters even more interesting, he and Patricia have no alibi for the day Meagan disappeared. Patricia told the cops that she took Brian to his therapist. The cops confirmed that, but the appointment was over at ten A.M. The cops got the call from the nanny at two P.M. that Meagan had disappeared from her car. At five Patricia and Brian drove up to the house, where they were both supposedly surprised by the news.”

  “What about Harper Stokes or Jamie O'Donnell?” Lairmore asked. “Do they have alibis?”

  David shook his head. “Harper claimed to be at work, but no one could ever vouch for it. O'Donnell said he was out of town but never produced any proof. Better yet, the police aren't even convinced the nanny was telling the truth about when Meagan was taken. She barely spoke English, refused to meet their gaze when answering questions, and spent most of the time sidling closer to Harper. They thought she might be a little involved with him, or at least wanted to make sure he liked what she was saying. In all probability, Meagan could've been taken at any time from any place that day. One day Meagan Stokes is simply gone. The next day the ransom note appears at the hospital where Harper works, and nothing is seen or heard from the kidnapper again. Then eight weeks later Meagan's body is found by a man and his dog out taking a walk.

  “Quincy is right. Everything about the Meagan Stokes case reeks to high heaven, and every single member of the family carries the stench. If Russell Lee Holmes had not confessed, the police would've investigated the Stokeses and O'Donnell until the cows came home. And as long as the investigation was active, the insurance company would not pay out the policy. Basically, Russell Lee's last-minute confession to Larry Digger earned the family the end of a very embarrassing investigation and one million dollars.”

  “How convenient, then,” Lairmore murmured, “that Russell Lee Holmes confessed.”

  “Exactly,” David said. “Exactly!”

  “Quincy is going to reopen this case?” Lairmore asked.

  “That's what he said. But I don't think he needs to officially reopen it. We're looking into it as part of our case.”