by Jance, J. A.
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For Loretta, my lovely friend from Lyons
Prologue
Folsom Prison, February 2013
When Prisoner #74506 arrived at Folsom Prison in January of 2013, sentenced to life without parole, he came with a certain amount of celebrity. He was a highly esteemed pillar of his community as well as the scion of a wealthy founding family. His mother, a well-known area heiress with whom his relationship had been at times severely strained, would, he hoped, be able to use her considerable resources to make his time in prison less onerous.
After all, his mother’s problems with him were never really with him—they were with what she called his questionable choices, first to divorce his first wife, of whom she had very much approved and loved as well, just to marry again. His mother referred to his second wife as “that bimbo,” who, it turned out, managed to fleece him and then drive him into the arms of yet another piece of what his mother called “trailer trash.” She considered these women beneath him intellectually, educationally, and, most important, socially and a poor reflection on herself, too. But now that neither was “in the picture,” he hoped that he could become closer to his mother—and thereby closer to her seemingly unlimited funds.
Another thing on his mind, or rather in his gut, was a burning desire to avenge himself on those who’d put him away. He wanted all of them dealt with, all four of them—Leo and those three bitches as well. He wouldn’t rest until they’d gotten the punishment they deserved, just as he’d been given his. Their names were etched in his brain, and he thought it would be a nice touch to etch them on his skin as well. As soon as possible, he was going to give himself a lasting and visible declaration of war—a tattoo.
Upon arrival, Prisoner #74506, a disgraced physician, soon discovered there was a thriving economy inside the prison with any number of products to buy, sell, and trade. That was especially true for inmates with salable skills, and he just happened to have some of those. By virtue of his having hired a hit man to dispose of his wife, the outside world might have stripped him of his professional credentials, but on the inside, people gave him the respect that his professional standing warranted. They also wanted to make use of his skills.
As a personal preference, the “Professor,” as he came to be called, didn’t smoke or do drugs, but cigarettes and drugs were highly regarded as common currency. For a package of smokes or a line of coke, he was more than happy to assist his fellow prisoners with their various health problems and issues. Thanks to his extensive knowledge, he was able to help them work their way around the system, and his ability to read people meant he could tell which guards might be bribable and which weren’t, which ones might have weaknesses in the areas of gambling, drugs, alcohol, or sex that would make them suitable targets for exploitation.
Within weeks of his arrival, he was ensconced in what amounted to one of the prison’s junior suites—a cell with a removable brick in the wall that allowed for keeping all kinds of contraband—hard, cold cash included.
As one of the so-called elite, he was quick to recognize others of his ilk, one of whom turned out to be a guy named Luis Ochoa, Folsom Prison’s undisputed kingpin. Early on in Luis’s life-without-parole sentence, he had plied his trade as a talented tattoo artist who’d transformed countless sweet-faced young kids into tough guys by covering them with walking catalogs of MS-13 tats. Over time Luis had made his way up through the ranks. His reputation as a wheeler-dealer allowed him to have a table of his own in the mess hall, where petitioners could come asking for help or favors.
When it came time for Prisoner #74506 to start on his tattoo project, he approached Luis Ochoa’s table and sat down across from someone he knew to be a very dangerous man.
“What can I do for you, Prof?” Luis asked, delivering the last word in a mockingly derisive tone. Ignoring the sarcasm, Prisoner #74506 slid several packets of highly prized contraband, in this case fentanyl, across the table. He knew he was paying more than was necessary for an informal consultation, but he wanted to get Luis’s attention.
“What’s this?” Luis asked, while at the same time taking the packets and slipping them under his jumpsuit.
“I want some tattoos,” the Professor replied. “If I’m going to do this myself, what does it take and how do I do it?”
“You’re sure you don’t want someone else to do the job for you?”
“Nope, I’m DIY all the way.”
“All right, then,” Luis told him. “You’ll need india ink, needles, a candle, cotton swabs, and rubbing alcohol for sterilizing. You’ll also need a guard who’s willing to look the other way.”
“Can you round up all of that?”
“Sure.”
“How much?”
“For the supplies, three more of what you already gave me should just about cover it. To pay off the guard? That depends on the guard. Some of ’em cost more than others.”
In the end the guard had cost a bundle, but he’d been happy to take his bribe in the form of a fistful of oxy. It turned out he preferred oxycodone to coke, which worked well. Pills were a hell of a lot easier to hide than cash would have been.
On the appointed night, watched over by his personally paid-for guard, the Professor did his work by candlelight, which, Luis had assured him, was unlikely to attract the attention of the cell block’s security cameras. Because needles tend to grow dull with repeated use, he’d coughed up extra product for a dozen brand-new syringes, still sterile and still sealed in their original packaging. Possessing a candle or matches was also prohibited, but Luis had provided both as part of the deal.
At first the Professor thought he’d put his A List—A for “Annihilation”—on his upper thigh, but when it came time to actually do the deed, he had reconsidered. He wanted his declaration of war to be out there in the open, not only for him to see but for all the world to see as well. So rather than shaving his upper thigh, he shaved his left forearm. Then he penciled in five initials in all, in carefully printed capital letters.
First came a D, for the “bimbo.” Dawn was already dead by then, but in terms of his kill list and for completion’s sake, she had to be there right along with the others. He didn’t know for sure that she would have testified against him, but he hadn’t been willing to risk it. Then came L, for Leo, the punk gangbanger who’d taken his money and then thrown him under the bus by accepting a plea deal and turning up in court to testify against him. Next was a K, for Kaitlyn, his onetime lover, who was right there in court, spilling her guts to the prosecutor and pointing an accusing finger. Next was an A, for Alexandra, the ingrate woman who’d spent a decade trying to tear his life apart. It had worked, too. Here he was. The last letter was another A, for the news broad Ali Reynolds who’d aired the ungrateful bitch’s charges far and wide, turning something that could have been handled quietly and discreetly into a cause célèbre.
Once the penciled list was complete, he sterilized the area with rubbing alcohol. Then he opened one syringe package, wrapped the needle in cotton thread, dipped it in the bottle of ink, and quietly went to work.
The first time he plunged the needle into his own flesh, he was surprised by how much it hurt, but every poke after that was a little less painful. Each subsequent prick wasn’t quite as bad as the one that preceded it, and as t
he inked letters came into focus, the pain turned into a perverse kind of pleasure. He was giving himself something to remember them by, and he smiled as he went along. He wasn’t sure of exactly how he’d accomplish his goal, but accomplish it he would.
He’d need worker bees to do the actual wet work, but finding hired help wouldn’t be that tough, not if his mother would throw a little money his way. Much to his surprise, she’d been a brick ever since his arrest, through the trial and his subsequent conviction. If he was halfway nice to her, he was pretty sure he could charm her into helping him with this, too. And why wouldn’t she? After all, the woman was in her seventies and had already survived one bout with cancer. Besides, he was her only son, her “fair-haired boy,” and since she was clearly living on borrowed time, she just might enjoy the challenge.
As for the Professor himself? He was doing life without parole for first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit. So what if one of his hirelings got caught or decided to rat him out to the cops? No big deal. The death penalty was still legal in California. If he was convicted in another case, a judge and jury might hand out a death sentence, but these days no one actually received the death penalty. Odds were they’d pile on a few more life sentences, just for good measure. Well, lots of luck with that, guys! Have a ball. Knock yourselves out.
The process took most of the night. Before the doors clattered open in the morning, his contraband set of tattooing equipment was safely stowed behind the removable brick in the wall under his stainless-steel sink.
In the mess hall, Edward went straight to Luis Ochoa’s table to show off his handiwork.
“Good job,” Luis said, examining his forearm. “So what is this?”
“I call it my A List. It’s also my kill list.”
“So you’ve got problems with these guys?”
“With these people,” the Professor corrected, “one guy and four women. Make that three females still living, that is. These are the people who put me here, and I’m planning to take them down one by one.”
“How do you expect to do that from in here?” Luis asked.
“I’m not sure,” the Professor replied. “I’m working on it. I’ll probably need some help.”
According to in-house gossip, the Professor knew that running an outside murder-for-hire network was one of the many services Luis Ochoa was able to provide—for a price, that is.
“You will need help,” Luis agreed, “and help costs money. You say your mother’s loaded?”
“She is,” the Professor said with confidence. “Even after paying off my defense team, she’s still got way more money than she’ll ever need.”
“And she’d be willing to pay the freight for this little project of yours?”
“If I ask her, I think she will.”
Luis replied with a wolfish, gold-toothed grin. “I might just be able to help you, then, my friend,” he said. “If your mother’s got the money, honey, I’ve got the time.”
They shook hands on it then and there, and that was the beginning of a beautiful and very successful alliance. From that moment on, Prisoner #74506’s life in Folsom Prison improved immeasurably, because everyone—guards and inmates alike—now understood that he was one of Luis’s “inner circle,” and they left him the hell alone.
Two weeks later, once the original tattoos were mostly healed, he gave the guard another batch of oxy in order to do an “addition and correction” to his tat.
That night, after lights-out, he retrieved his candle and his tattooing kit. He knew how to do the job now, and it didn’t take long for him to ink a black X across the face of that letter D at the top of his list.
“One down,” he told himself with a confident smile, studying the deadly scorecard on his forearm. “One down and four to go.”
1
Santa Clarita, California, April 2008
Dawn Gilchrist was beautiful if not particularly bright. Back before her ex-husband divorced his first wife and before Dawn and Edward married, she’d worked as a nurse/receptionist in his fertility practice in Santa Clarita, California, just north of L.A. As a consequence, she had firsthand knowledge of Edward’s secrets and lies, especially the ones she personally had helped him create.
When she’d stopped by the office to see him on a May afternoon back in 2003, her husband’s relatively new blond-bombshell receptionist, a dim bulb named Kaitlyn, told her that he was with a patient but that he’d be right out. As Dawn settled in to wait, Kaitlyn chatted with her boss’s wife, mentioning in passing that one of the practice’s former patients, Alexandra Munsey, had come by earlier in the day asking for her records so she could be put in touch with her son’s sperm donor. It seems her twenty-one-year old-son, Evan, was deathly ill and in need of a kidney transplant.
Hearing the words, Dawn—who’d once held the same position Kaitlyn now did—had felt a sudden clutch in her gut. She knew far too much about Evan Munsey’s sperm donor, even if the boy’s mother did not. If he was in his twenties now, that meant he’d most likely been born in the eighties. “What did you tell her?” Dawn asked, trying to hide the concern she felt.
“That those records are entirely confidential.”
“Yes, they are,” Dawn agreed quickly in an attempt to cover her alarm. “And they need to stay that way.”
She had dropped by to let Edward know that one of her girlfriends had turned up in town and they were going out for dinner. Rather than wait around to talk to her husband in person at the end of his appointment, Dawn left him a note and then fled the office. Out in the parking lot, she sat in the car and gripped the steering wheel in hopes of quelling the shaking in her hands.
Kaitlyn had no idea that the confidential files Alexandra Munsey sought—along with those of any number of other patients—no longer required protection for the simple reason that they no longer existed. Dawn herself had personally destroyed them. It was also likely that Kaitlyn had no idea about how the clinic had operated during some very tough times back in the eighties, but Dawn did. She knew where all those bodies were buried, and she was pretty sure that if the jig wasn’t up right now, it would be soon. If the fact that Alexandra Munsey’s requested records had gone missing was ever leaked to the public, Edward’s hugely successful fertility practice—one that had up to now supported a very lavish lifestyle for both of them as well as for his previous wife—would come crashing down around their ears.
In the years since that first divorce, Edward had developed a five-star reputation as a wizard when it came to doing fertility procedures. People from all over Southern California flocked to his door, making long pilgrimages up and down the I-5 corridor searching for answers to their complex reproductive issues. At this point Dawn was reasonably confident that sperm and egg donors were currently being handled on an up-and-up basis. Prospective donors went through an extensive screening process, and the profiles and photos in the records shown to prospective recipients were all completely legitimate. The problem for Dawn was that back in the old days, when she’d been the one running the outer office—serving as Edward’s nurse, receptionist, and lover—things had been very different.
It was never quite clear how or when Jeanette, Edward’s wronged first wife, had become aware of her husband’s dalliance with Dawn, but once the affair came to light, all hell had broken loose. Ed’s widowed mother, Hannah, who was very well-off in her own right, had been more than happy to pay her son’s way through school, premed and medical school both, and once he was ready to set up a practice in his hometown of Santa Clarita, California, Hannah had been delighted to help out there as well. But when it came time to bail him out of the dire financial ramifications from a divorce settlement, she’d drawn a line in the sand and refused to lift a finger.
After all, Hannah had adored her first daughter-in-law. Any court-ordered funds due to Jeanette, from the property settlement to alimony, would be payable strictly on Edward’s dime. At the time the divorce proceedings were initiated, both the office building housin
g the practice and the family home had been essentially free and clear. The cost of cutting Jeanette loose had been steep. Edward not only had to hand over half the value of both the office building and their home, but he’d had to pay off her half of Jeanette’s interest in the net present value of the practice itself. In order to buy back his own properties, he’d had to mortgage everything to the hilt. Strapped for cash but wanting to maintain his position in the community, Edward and Dawn had started cutting corners inside the practice, corners that should never have been cut, including relying less and less on the expense of private contractors for their supply of sperm and egg donations.
During most of that time, Edward himself had functioned as the supplier of their supposedly “donated” sperm while Dawn had been more than happy to supply the occasional egg. He and Dawn both had treated it as something of a lark—their own private joke. They had worked together to create the “catalog” containing the fictional profiles of their “stable of donors”—a collection of handsome young men and stunningly beautiful young women. At Edward’s direction Dawn had culled pictures of good-looking young students out of various high school and college yearbooks, mostly from institutions located on the East Coast. They had used those photos in conjunction with impressive but entirely fictional profiles to create a catalog from which prospective parents could choose the donor who would “be the best fit” for their individual families. The fictional bios always described the donors as being top-drawer students or impressive athletes, all of them purportedly in excellent health.
Dawn was one of those women who’d never wanted children of her own, so it was odd for her and her husband to be the biological parents of who knows how many living, breathing offspring. As for the parents who managed to conceive through Edward’s efforts? They were always so overjoyed with the result of finally having a baby of their own that none of them bothered hanging around and asking too many questions.
