The A List

by Jance, J. A.

  From Hannah’s point of view, Kaitlyn was almost as bad as Dawn had been, and it was a crying shame Eddie hadn’t already gotten rid of her, too.

  22

  Folsom, California, September 2013

  The Professor read his copy of A Mother’s Tale with a rising sense of outrage. Despite what he did for a living, he had always thought that the downside of having kids of his own had far outweighed the upside. That had been a bone of contention between him and his first wife. Jeanette had wanted kids; he hadn’t. She’d gotten them, too, with her second husband. As for Edward’s second wife? On that score he and Dawn had been on the same page. She hadn’t wanted kids any more than he did.

  But the people depicted in Alexandra Munsey’s book—that miserable collection of Edward’s former patients—had all been hell-bent on having kids. For whatever reason, they hadn’t wanted to go the adoption route. They’d wanted kids of their own. Those desperate childless couples had come to Dr. Edward Gilchrist with their sad faces and their tales of woe, begging him for help which he had gladly supplied. But then, after he’d helped them conceive the little brats they wanted so badly, were any of them grateful? No, not in the least! Alexandra Munsey was a prime example. The woman had devoted the past ten years to trying to destroy both Edward’s life and his livelihood. What kind of thanks was that?

  Alexandra and her husband, Jake, had come to Edward’s office in search of viable sperm, and he had provided same. What did it matter if the sperm involved was his or someone else’s? Why complain about that? Maybe his father had died at a young age of a heart ailment, but Edward himself was healthy enough, wasn’t he? And if it hadn’t been for the fact that he’d used his own sperm more than once, chances are that harridan of an Alexandra never would have located that half sibling with his matching kidney who’d saved her son’s life. So not only had Edward Gilchrist’s actions given the Munsey kid a chance to be born in the first place, he’d also kept him from dying. And what did he get in return? An evil woman out there spreading garbage about him far and wide.

  The whole time he’d been in business, there had never been a single malpractice suit filed against him. In the book Alexandra kept referring to herself and the other parental units involved as “defrauded families.” But he’d never had a fraud charge filed against him either, and when those same supposedly “defrauded” families had tried to sue him for damages in a class-action suit, the judge had tossed the case, saying more or less that they didn’t have a leg to stand on. Now, though, with him in prison, Alexandra Munsey could go public with this kind of crap, and there wasn’t a single damned thing Edward could do about it. It was infuriating!

  And what about that nosy, interfering bitch from the TV station? Ali Reynolds—what was the deal with her? What gave her the right to come around stirring the pot? As soon as he’d seen them together on that TV show when Alexandra was asking for help in locating a matching kidney, Edward had suspected that the two women spelled trouble for him. He’d assumed it would blow over eventually, but of course it never had, all because of Ali Reynolds who had conspired against him from beginning to end.

  As the deputies had led him into the courtroom for the sentencing hearing, he noticed that the vaguely familiar woman seated next to Alexandra Munsey was someone who hadn’t been in the gallery during the trial itself. Now, though, after reading the book and seeing the photos, he knew exactly who she was and why she was there. After trashing his life, the two women had teamed up again, standing in celebratory triumph on the courthouse steps while he was cuffed and marched back to his cell. Insult to injury.

  Edward was somewhat surprised by the piece at the end of the book that focused on children born as a result of his having used Dawn’s eggs. How had Alexandra made that connection, and how had she talked the ME into providing tissue from Dawn’s autopsy to obtain a DNA sample? Then he remembered from reading the book that one of his so-called offspring was now an LAPD detective. That probably explained the ME connection.

  Statistically speaking, fertility procedures where donor sperm was used outnumbered those utilizing donor eggs. So far Alexandra and her pals had located eighteen kids attributable to him as opposed to only six for Dawn, but Edward was pretty sure there were more of both types out there. He also knew that each and every time another one surfaced, it was likely to unleash yet another media storm.

  Finished with Alexandra’s book, he turned immediately to the second one, Lacey Dutton’s Tell No Tales, which wasn’t much better. Who the hell was Lacey Dutton anyway, and what had made her decide to write a book about Dawn’s murder? Edward studied the cover photo. Lacey wasn’t someone he knew personally, but he recognized her as someone who’d been a regular attendee during the course of his trial—another interested bystander who had come to savor seeing him go down in flames.

  Reading Tell No Tales cover to cover reinforced Edward’s fury with both Leo Aurelio and Kaitlyn Todd, while A Mother’s Tale had done the same as far as Alexandra Munsey and Ali Reynolds were concerned. They had all turned on him, and his determination to make them pay burned as brightly as the flame on a welding torch.

  And who was Edward’s only ally in all this? His mother, someone he would have thought to be the last person on earth to back him to the hilt. When he had shown her the tattooed letters on his arm and explained what he intended to do, she barely batted an eyelash. In fact, she told him that she would help no matter what, that she loved him no matter what. She had uprooted her life in Santa Clarita and moved to Folsom for no other reason than to be close to him. For the first time in Edward Gilchrist’s life, he was actually humbled. His mother loved him far more than he loved her and far more than he deserved. He might not have respected her back when he was growing up, but he sure as hell respected her now.

  And if she did follow through on what she’d said—if she did help him go after the people who’d wronged him—what would happen if someone figured it out and the two of them ended up being caught? At this point Eddie was already doing life without. He himself had nothing to lose, nothing at all.

  Hannah had indicated much the same thing on her part. She was old. Her health might go south on her at any moment. She’d given up her home—the home she’d lived in for most of her life—to come here to Folsom to be close to him. She’d told Edward that he was all she had and that from where she was now, she didn’t much care what happened to her one way or the other.

  That declaration certainly leveled the playing field. As Edward saw it, the coming battle would be fought between two very different sets of people—four with everything to lose and two with nothing to lose. The have-nots would be all in, and the haves wouldn’t be. They wouldn’t even know they were under attack until something hit them in the face, and by then it would be too late.

  What could be better?

  23

  Folsom, California, January 2014

  Gradually Hannah Gilchrist settled into her new life in Folsom. Among her fellow residents at Arbor Crest, she made no secret of the fact that her son was a convicted murderer serving his time in the state prison just down the road. That became something of a status symbol for her, and she wore it like a red badge of courage. It was the main reason that once she finished reading the two Tales books, she donated both copies to the community library.

  Over time Hannah’s clear devotion to her disgraced son made her a bit of a legend. Some of the ladies with whom she played bridge began inquiring after Eddie’s health once she returned from one of her regular monthly visits.

  “He’s fine, thank you,” Hannah would tell them. “He’s bearing up.”

  At the Arbor Crest Community Center, bridge was considered a late-morning or early-afternoon activity. Late afternoons and early evenings were devoted to working five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles. Donna, one of the “puzzlers,” as they liked to be called, was openly envious of Hannah’s close relationship to her son.

  “My Darryl shut me out forty years ago, right after he graduated
from college,” Donna complained. “I never knew what it was I did or didn’t do that drove him away. When Darryl married, my ex-husband, his father, was invited to the wedding. I wasn’t. He has a daughter, and she has kids now, too, but I’ve never met any of them.”

  On hearing those words, Hannah’s first thought was that Donna’s Darryl was most likely a jackass, but she was diplomatic enough to keep that notion to herself.

  “Children are like that,” she said stoically. “Sometimes all they’re good for is to break their mothers’ hearts.”

  The truth was, Hannah actually enjoyed the simple pleasures of playing bridge and working puzzles. They were a far cry from the complex duties her social standing in Santa Clarita had demanded of her. And to her surprise she actually relished living on her own. Marco and Bettina had lived in their own quarters, of course, a casita out back, but they’d been in and out of Hannah’s space throughout the day. Here she was blessedly alone. Yes, she was doing without a live-in cook for the first time in her life, but she had figured out a way to cope with that, too.

  As she’d told Eddie, Arbor Crest’s meal plan had proved to be woefully inadequate, and she’d taken her business elsewhere—to the restaurant just up the street. There, with a judicious use of generous tips to both the waitstaff as well as the kitchen help, Hannah soon had them eating out of her hand—the other way around, really. Items that weren’t necessarily on the regular menu would show up as “specials” whenever she requested them.

  Something that really surprised her about life in Arbor Crest was that living in a two-bedroom unit was honestly no hardship. Yes, she’d lived in a spacious mansion, but in reality she’d used precious little of all that space, and she’d held on to only a few pieces of furniture that were more than adequate in Hannah’s current downsized digs.

  Grandmother Alberta’s four-poster bed and matching dresser took up most of the space in one bedroom. That was where Hannah slept. The chintz easy chair and matching sofa from the sitting room along with a wall-mounted TV set filled up the minimal space that was designated as a living room, while the her trimmed-down dining-room needs were handled by the maple kitchen table where she and Bettina Gregory had occasionally shared a cup of afternoon coffee. In the second bedroom, now Hannah’s office, her treasured antique writing table and chair held sway. That was where she sat to work on her laptop. It was also where she penned her weekly missives to Leo Aurelio, the only dark spot on Hannah’s horizon.

  For some strange reason Eddie had decreed that Leo would be the first item of A List business. Determined to be her son’s partner in this enterprise, Hannah kept her mouth shut and went along with the program, but two years in, not only was Leo still alive, he was also still in the Protective Housing Unit. Eddie didn’t seem concerned about the passage of time, but Hannah was. Eddie had all the time in the world. Hannah did not.

  Because her main function was to supply whatever funds Eddie required, her initial worry had been how she’d go about doing just that. She kept a surprisingly large stash of cash in her garage refrigerator, but as Eddie had pointed out early on, getting it inside the walls of the prison was a problem. But then Eddie’s pal and fellow inmate Luis Ochoa had stepped up to the plate.

  Luis was in the business of getting things done, and he was the one who had solved Hannah’s money-transfer problem. Early on, he’d looked into the source of Edward Gilchrist’s plentiful cash. After some research Luis had learned that Hannah Gilchrist was indeed loaded. She lived in a gated retirement community in Folsom called Arbor Crest, drove a brand-new Lexus LS, and had a standing appointment at Arbor Crest’s nail spa for weekly manicures. Realizing that Edward had the potential of becoming one of his top clients, Luis had invited Eddie to join him at his private table in the mess hall and laid out his plan.

  If Eddie wondered how Luis knew where Hannah lived or that she liked having regular manicures, it seemed best not to ask. The very fact that he’d been invited to share Luis’s table had let everyone know his change of status, and the next time Eddie’s mother came to visit, he had dutifully passed along the new game plan.

  “Weren’t you complaining about not liking the way the nail place here does your nails?” he asked aloud through the phone.

  “I was. I’ve gone through three nail techs so far, and they’re all hopeless.”

  “One of my friends in here has a niece who runs a traveling nail-spa operation called Nails to Go. Why don’t you give her a try?”

  Out of sight from both the cameras and the guard, he signed the rest of the message. “She’s Luis’s runner. You give her cash, and she’ll handle the transfers. If she comes to see you on a regular basis, no one will pay any attention to her.”

  Hannah had received that news with a flood of relief. By bribing one of the visitation-room clerks, she’d been able to smuggle small sums of money into the prison, but if it ever came time to pay for a hit, she didn’t relish having to go out on her own and meet up with a potential killer in some dark alley or deserted parking lot.

  Hannah had immediately looked up Nails to Go on the Internet, and Gloria Reece came into her life doing biweekly gel manicures. With the slow passage of time, Hannah may have been losing heart, but in that interval she had also given Gloria thousands of dollars as bankable deposits toward Eddie’s current and future needs. No paperwork was involved, no receipts were signed, but Hannah kept a formal ledger, which was also safely tucked away inside her piggy-bank fridge. By her reckoning, Eddie should already have accumulated more than enough to pay in full for the destruction of the people on his A List—every last one of them.

  24

  Folsom, California, May 2015

  And then at last, just when Hannah thought it would never happen, it did happen. She received a letter from Leo.

  Dear Hannah,

  Good news. I finally got moved to general population. It’s like a whole new life—more yard time, more opportunities to take classes. I can’t believe I’m going to college now—well, at least taking college-level courses. And that never would have happened if you hadn’t encouraged me to get my GED. So thank you for that.

  And surprise, surprise. I even got an A in English 101. Thank you for that, too. And for being my friend all this time.

  Leo

  Leo had been moved to general population? That was such good news that Hannah could hardly contain herself. She could have called Gloria right then and relayed the message through her, but she wanted to deliver it herself. She sat on it for almost a week and a half until her next scheduled visit to the prison.

  “Leo’s out,” she signed gleefully. “They’ve moved him to general population.”

  “Way to go!” Eddie signed, grinning back at her. “I’ll let Luis know that we’re on.”

  Hannah was still giddy on the drive back to Arbor Crest, but then—disappointingly—nothing happened for several long weeks. While she waited, she turned her attention to tracking down Kaitlyn Todd, although Kaitlyn Martin was the name the woman had used when she testified against Eddie in court. These days she was married and living in Mill City, Oregon, under the name Kaitlyn Holmes. It took time to ferret out all those details—her husband’s name, what she did for a living, where she lived, and where she worked.

  While Hannah tracked down all those details, she kept a close eye on news feeds coming out of Corcoran. Almost a month after letting Eddie know about Leo, Hannah found what she was looking for in an online news feed from the Corcoran Statesman:

  CORCORAN INMATE COMMITS SUICIDE

  Leo Manuel Aurelio, an inmate at the Corcoran State Prison, was found dead in his cell early this morning. He was discovered hanging by the neck, and his death is being treated as a presumed suicide.

  A guard from the Protective Housing Unit speaking anonymously, questioned the ME’s decision. “Leo didn’t cause us no trouble. He was a young guy who would have been up for parole in another couple of years. Why would someone like that kill himself?”

  Aurelio
was five years into a twenty-years-to-life sentence for second-degree murder in the 2009 stabbing death of Dawn Lorraine Gilchrist, the former wife of disgraced Santa Clarita physician Edward Anthony Gilchrist.

  Although Aurelio was the one who actually delivered the fatal blows in the Gilchrist homicide, he was offered a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against the victim’s former husband in what was deemed to be a murder-for-hire scheme.

  Convicted of both first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, Edward Gilchrist is currently incarcerated at Folsom Prison, where he is serving life without parole.

  That time Hannah couldn’t wait around for her regular visit. Pleading a health emergency, she managed to make an unexpected visit to Eddie that very day to give him the good news. There was a triumphant smile on her face as she signed, “Time to add another X. Leo is history.”

  “Time to haul out the needles and ink,” he agreed, signing back.

  Early the following week, a pair of investigators from the California Bureau of Investigation showed up at the reception desk at Arbor Crest looking for Hannah Gilchrist. When the receptionist called to announce that some detectives wished to speak to her, Hannah decided against meeting with them in private.

  “Since this may have something to do with my son, it’s probably better that we conduct whatever business they have in mind in public,” she said into the phone. “Have them wait for me in the lobby. I’ll be right down.”