The Other Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

This was where the Stokeses now lived? The rich did get richer.
    God, that pissed him off.
    Digger slapped ten bucks in the cabbie's hand and crawled out of the taxi.
    The sky was clear. He sniffed a couple of times, wiped his hand on his rumpled trousers. Air definitely smelled like flowers. No exhaust fumes here. Rich folks probably didn't stand for such things. Some big park loomed behind him, filled with cherry trees and tulips and, of all things, swan boats. He shook his head.
    He turned away from the park and inspected the row of buildings. They were all stone town houses, three stories high and rail thin. Old and grand. Nestled shoulder to shoulder but still managing to appear aloof. Built by blue bloods, he figured, one hundred years ago, when everyone was still tracing their lineage to the
Mayflower
. Hell, maybe they still were.
    He checked the addresses. The Stokes home was the fourth in. It was currently lit up like the Fourth of July, with two red-coated valets guarding the doorway like matchsticks. As he watched, a Mercedes-Benz pulled up and a woman stepped out. She'd draped purple sequins and white diamonds all over her plump body and looked like a moldy raisin. Her husband, who was equally portly, waddled like a penguin in his tux. The couple surrendered their keys to a valet and sauntered through heavy walnut doors.
    Digger looked down at his old trench coat and rumpled pants.
    Oh, yeah, he could just stroll right in.
    He walked into the park, took a seat on an old wrought iron bench beneath a vast red maple tree, and contemplated the Stokes house once more.
    As the reporter who'd tagged Russell Lee Holmes to the grave, Larry Digger had gotten to know all the families of the murdered children. He'd met them when their grief was still a raw, ragged wound, and he'd interviewed them later, when the horror had leached away and left only despair. By then the fathers had a vengeful gleam in their sunken eyes. They fisted their hands and pounded already beat-up furniture when speaking about Russell Lee Holmes. The mothers, on the other hand, clung to their surviving children obsessively, and stared at all men, even their husbands, mistrustfully. By the time the state got around to killing Russell Lee, most of the families had imploded.
    Except the Stokeses. From the very beginning they had been different, and from the very beginning the other families had resented them for that. Except for Meagan, Russell Lee's victims lived in poor neighborhoods. The Stokeses had lived in a mansion in one of the newly rich neighborhoods of Houston. The other families had had that worn, mongrel look of two working parents. Their kids had had torn clothes and uneven teeth and dusty cheeks.
    The Stokeses belonged on the cover of
Better Homes and Gardens
— the strong, noble doctor-husband, the slender, classy, former-beauty-queen wife, and their two golden children. Gleaming blond hair; perfect white teeth; pink, rosy cheeks.
    They were the kind of people you half
wanted
something bad to happen to, and then, when it did…
    Digger had to look down at the grass. Images from that time still shamed and confused him.
    The way Patricia Stokes's clear blue gaze had softened when she spoke of her daughter, trying to describe to reporters the perfect little girl who'd been kidnapped from her family, begging them to help her find her daughter. Then, the way her face had broken completely the day Meagan's body had been ID'ed. Her blue eyes grew so bleak that for the first time in his life, Larry Digger would've given up a story, hell, Larry Digger would've given up his
soul
to give this perfect woman back her daughter.
    Right after the execution, when Patricia had been overcome by grief and horror, Digger followed her to the hotel bar. Her husband hadn't come. Work, Digger had heard. According to the rumor mill, since the death of Meagan Stokes, all Dr. Harper Stokes did was work. The man seemed to have some misguided notion that saving other