by Jance, J. A.
But that was then—back in the mid- to late eighties. At the time DNA had been little more than an esoteric idea, a minor blip in the consciousness of the general public. Now, however, only a few years after O. J. Simpson’s murder trial, DNA was familiar to everyone. And for Edward Gilchrist, that not-guilty verdict had been a wake-up call. Realizing that DNA might eventually be his undoing, he and Dawn had set out that very night to take corrective measures. They’d gone back to the office and purged the filing cabinets of all the pertinent records, including the donor catalogs. At Edward’s direction Dawn had carried them back to the house and shredded every last one of them.
Since then Dawn had watched from the sidelines as DNA technology improved by leaps and bounds. Now it wasn’t much of a stretch to realize that if Alexandra Munsey ever figured out that Edward Gilchrist himself had fathered her son, the clinic’s ability to continue functioning would be blown out of the water.
After that visit to the office and learning that Alexandra Munsey might be on their trail and long before Edward had any idea that a financial firestorm was brewing, Dawn bailed. She didn’t want to wait around long enough for grubby-handed lawyers to start filing malpractice lawsuits or for bankruptcy proceedings to turn up on their doorstep. Instead Dawn decided to grab her money and run.
She went back to the house that very afternoon, packed her bags, and moved out. She filed for divorce the next day, citing that handy-dandy catchall of irreconcilable differences. To her surprise, Edward didn’t raise much of a fuss. For one thing he knew that Dawn had him dead to rights when it came to coming up with suitable grounds. Edward was a serial womanizer, after all. He’d always been one of those, his relationship with Dawn herself included. She had engaged the services of a private detective who’d managed to provide documented proof—a grainy video—showing Edward and Kaitlyn Todd, his latest sweet young thing of a nurse, going at it hot and heavy in the recliner in Edward’s office. That was typical Edward, all right—ready to grab any accommodating piece of tail but too damned cheap to get a hotel room.
Several years had now passed since that fateful afternoon when Alexandra Munsey had first reappeared in their lives, and everything Dawn had feared might happen back then seemed to be coming to pass. With the aid of something called the Progeny Project, Alex Munsey had lined up a whole group of people who were intent on filing a class-action suit against Edward, claiming that he’d committed fraud while serving as his clinic’s primary sperm donor by failing to disclose his late father’s history of kidney disease, which had put all those resulting offspring at risk of also developing kidney disease later in life.
Dawn knew that the statute of limitations mandated that there was no longer any possibility of Edward’s being charged with either fraud or malpractice. With those legal remedies off the table, the affected families had hired a hotshot trial lawyer who, working on contingency, was preparing to file a multimillion-dollar class-action suit based on the premise that by withholding and misrepresenting his own medical history, Edward had endangered the health of the progeny conceived through his sperm donations.
As the trial date approached, Dawn hoped to stay well out of it. At this point Edward was still free as a bird. His practice had remained open for business all this time, and Dawn’s alimony checks continued to show up in her bank account on a regular basis. Her divorce had been final for almost five years. The generous property settlement negotiated by her attorney, and funded no doubt by her former mother-in-law, had allowed Dawn to pay cash for a relatively modest town-house-style condo right here in Santa Clarita. In the intervening years, she had dated some, but she hadn’t remarried, for good reason. Had Dawn tied the knot with someone else, those alimony payments would have come to a screeching halt.
But now Dawn knew that if Alexandra Munsey and her Progeny Project allies prevailed, Edward would be out of business, bringing an end to Dawn’s gravy train as well. So far she’d been able to live on that quite comfortably without having to go back to work, but depending on the outcome of the upcoming trial, that was likely to change.
Twice in the last week, two different sets of strangers had shown up on her doorstep. Some of Dawn’s pals, also divorcées, had shared lessons about spotting potential process servers and avoiding same—mostly by simply not opening the door. One of Dawn’s visitors had been a guy posing as a pizza deliveryman when Dawn knew damned good and well that she hadn’t ordered a pizza. The next one was a pair of young men supposedly selling magazine subscriptions. Process servers or not, she didn’t open the door for either of them.
But after the second set came and went, Dawn did some serious thinking. She probably wouldn’t be able to dodge the process servers forever, and maybe she shouldn’t. She had followed the story in the local paper and knew the name of the high-powered L.A. attorney who was handling the case. In the news he was alleging that patient files critical to the case had supposedly gone missing. As Edward’s former wife, Dawn couldn’t be compelled to testify against him, but considering the fact that she had donated some of her own eggs, maybe she should call up the lawyer, cut herself a deal, and offer to testify on the plaintiff’s behalf. It would be fun watching Edward squirm when she told an enthralled and crowded courtroom that she knew exactly what had become of those missing files. After all, hadn’t she been the one who’d spent hours on end shredding the damned things?
And if she did testify against Edward and he lost—if he and that little blond bitch of his went down in flames—wouldn’t it serve both of them right? And wouldn’t it be something if Dawn herself had the pleasure of pounding that final nail into their coffin?
There was a downside, of course. If Dawn’s alimony ground to a halt, she’d eventually have to get a job for the first time in years, but even that might end up working to her advantage. After all, hadn’t that been a hot topic of discussion during tonight’s dinner—the importance of divorcées’ accumulating Social Security credits in their own right?
It had been one of her customary girls’ nights out with a loosely organized group of women who referred to themselves as the Seconds—divorced second wives as opposed to divorced first wives. One of them—Frannie, short for Francine—had come away from her marriage with a property settlement that required her ex to continue funding her membership fees at Santa Clarita’s tony Grapevine Golf and Country Club. The group gathered there on a biweekly basis, using Frannie’s membership for the reservation but going strictly dutch as far as food and drinks were concerned.
They sometimes referred to themselves as the “Broken Babes Club” and gave each other a safe place to compare notes and vent about dickhead ex-husbands, double-dealing divorce lawyers, and missing alimony payments. And they almost always had fun, including tonight, although when the subject of ex-husbands getting their just deserts came around, Dawn Gilchrist hadn’t exactly mentioned that she was pretty sure Edward was about to be run over by a Mack truck or that maybe Dawn herself would be behind the wheel.
Before driving home, Dawn had imbibed a couple of drinks—actually several more than a couple. She knew she’d had too much, so she was overly cautious on her way home. Not wanting to pick up a DUI, she was relieved to finally turn in to her own driveway and tuck her BMW into her town house’s two-car garage.
After pushing the remote to close the garage door, she cracked open the car door with one hand and was reaching over to the passenger seat to collect her purse when the door was forcibly yanked open behind her. Before she could object, a small but powerfully built man, dressed all in black, reached into the car, grabbed her by the arm, and bodily dragged her out of the vehicle. Before she had time to scream, he slammed her down flat on the garage’s polished concrete floor.
Momentarily unconscious, Dawn came to just in time to see the blade of a knife arcing through the air above her. She tried to scream and dodge out of the way, but before she could, the knife sliced into her throat, silencing her instantly by severing both her carotid artery and her larynx.
She died without uttering a single word.
The man stood over Dawn, staring down at her as her lifeblood ebbed away. “Guess what?” he growled. “I’ve got a message for you from your ex. He wanted me to tell you that you won’t be testifying against him anytime soon.”
He walked out, leaving the garage door open and the light on. The timer kicked in a few minutes later, and the light went off, leaving the garage bathed in darkness while the clicking of the gradually cooling car engine was the only sound to be heard. Early the next morning, the guy coming to deliver Dawn’s paper turned in to the driveway. Through the open door he spotted a body lying next to her black BMW. He was the one who called it in.
When the cops showed up, Dawn Gilchrist’s killer was long gone. He left behind not a shred of physical evidence—no fingerprints, no DNA, and no footprints either. However, cops canvassing the neighborhood soon discovered that Dawn’s next-door neighbors had recently installed a set of very high-end security cameras. Footage from one of those showed a clear image of the presumed suspect, wearing dark clothing, a hoodie, gloves, and lurking just outside Dawn’s garage door. When the door opened and she drove inside, he’d entered the garage just as the door closed behind him. A few minutes later, the door opened again, and the video footage captured the suspect’s hurried exit. This time, however, he was facing directly into the camera, and the resulting image came through with remarkable clarity.
There was a problem, however. No matter how clear the image was, the cops had no suspects and nothing to use as a comparison. The case stayed hot for a while, but eventually new cases came online and the homicide investigation into the death of Dawn Lorraine Gilchrist went completely cold.
2
Sedona, Arizona, June 2017
It was a sunny Sunday afternoon in early June when Ali Reynolds came outside onto the front porch of her Sedona, Arizona, home carrying two large mugs of coffee. Her good friend, Sister Anselm Becker, was leaning back in one of the pair of Adirondack chairs that occupied most of the porch’s available floor space. Ali placed one cup on the wooden surface of Sister Anselm’s chair arm and then took her own cup to the other chair.
“I’m so glad you stopped by today,” Ali said. “The last few weeks have been way too busy for both of us.”
“Yes,” Sister Anselm agreed, “way too busy. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to just have a quiet moment to enjoy the view.”
And the view from Ali’s house on Manzanita Hills Road was indeed worthy of enjoying. Beyond a lavender valance of dripping wisteria blooms, Sedona’s iconic red rocks loomed large against a cloudless blue sky. In the foreground was the lush garden Leland Brooks, Ali’s former majordomo, had designed for her as a final gift before taking his retirement and returning to the UK.
Leland had wanted to create a typical English garden, but since Sedona wasn’t in England, the garden couldn’t be typically English either. He had been forced to substitute a variety of climate-appropriate plants, which, although not traditional, provided a lush profusion of colors that lasted from early spring to late fall. So not only were the garden’s flowers not English, neither was the garden’s centerpiece—a life-size statue of a bighorn sheep, a rustic piece crafted by welding together pieces of rusty sheet metal and discarded auto parts. That oddball combination of the rustic metal sheep presiding over a riot of colorful flowers created exactly the kind of quirky serenity that both Ali and her husband, B. Simpson, enjoyed.
“I never look at this garden without thinking of your wonderful Mr. Brooks,” Sister Anselm said. “Have you heard from him recently?”
“I heard from him a week ago,” Ali answered. “He called to let me know that Thomas is through with chemo and currently undergoing radiation. So far they’re keeping their fingers crossed.”
Thomas Blackfield and Leland had been an item back in their youth, before Leland’s homophobic family had driven him to join the Royal Marines and go off to fight the Korean War. It had taken decades for Leland and Thomas to reconnect, and now that Thomas was dealing with a third-stage cancer diagnosis, Leland had gone back home to serve as his primary caregiver.
“If you speak to him again,” Sister Anselm said, “please let him know I said hello and that I’m thinking of them and wishing them both good health.”
“I will,” Ali agreed, “but speaking of health, how’s Bishop Gillespie doing?”
Francis Gillespie, the bishop of the Catholic archdiocese in Phoenix, was the primary reason Sister Anselm was in Arizona. Sister Anselm’s father, Hans, had immigrated to the States from Germany in 1934. By the time World War II rolled around, he had yet to obtain US citizenship status. As a result he was taken into custody and eventually shipped off to a multinational war-relocation center in Crystal City, Texas.
Because Hans had come down with TB and because the camp had limited medical care, Sophia, his wife, had petitioned that she be allowed to join him there to help look after him. The only way US authorities would agree to that was on the condition that she surrender both her own US citizenship as well as that of her two daughters, Rebecca and Judith. Once at the camp, while Becca and their American-born mother tended to Hans, Judith had been free as a bird. She had taken herself outside to play with the other kids in the neighborhood. An outgoing child, she’d made friends with everyone and had come away from Crystal City with the ability to speak passable Italian and Japanese in addition to her mother’s English and her father’s native German.
During an ill-fated “prisoner-of-war exchange” the family was supposed to be shipped “back home” to Germany, even though Sophia and her daughters had never before set foot outside the US. Hans died on board the ship and was buried at sea during the transatlantic crossing. Subsequently Sophia and her girls were offloaded in France and left to wander as displaced persons in war-torn Europe. By then Sophia, too, had developed TB. They were taken in by a Sisters of Providence convent in southern France, where the nuns cared for Sophia until her death. They tried to look after both girls as well, but Rebecca had rebelled. After running away from the convent, she got caught up in prostitution and ended up stabbed to death in an alley in Paris prior to her seventeenth birthday. Judith, on the other hand, stayed on at the convent and added three additional languages—French, Spanish, and Latin—to her growing collection.
At age eighteen Judith Becker could have returned to the US and reclaimed her American citizenship. Instead the girl who’d been raised as a good Lutheran back in Milwaukee converted to Catholicism and joined the convent, where she became Sister Anselm. At the suggestion of her first mother superior, she trained as a nurse and earned a doctorate in psychology. When an urgent call went out for translators to assist with Vatican II, Sister Anselm had been dispatched to Rome, where she came to the attention of a US-based priest named Father Gillespie.
Years later he was the one who helped arrange her eventual return to the United States. Later still, after being installed as the archbishop of the Phoenix diocese, he had brought her to Arizona and stationed her at St. Bernadette’s, a small convent in Jerome. Designated as Archbishop Gillespie’s special emissary, Sister Anselm traveled all over the American Southwest functioning as a patient advocate, often for undocumented and non-English-speaking immigrants who, when hospitalized, needed assistance in communicating their needs to medical personnel. That was how Ali and Sister Anselm had first met, in the hospital room of a badly injured woman at a Phoenix-area hospital.
“Oh, he’s sick all right,” Sister Anselm said, finally answering Ali’s inquiry, “but you can bet that ornery old coot isn’t going to hang up his miter until he’s good and ready. In the meantime he’s trying to put me out to pasture.”
Ali spluttered over a sip of coffee. “He’s what?”
“He says I’m too old to be driving all over hell and gone—his words not mine—by myself. He’s in the process of importing a young woman—a relatively young woman—to come ‘ride shotgun’ with me and ‘learn the ropes,’ although
what he really means is for her to drive, with me in the passenger seat.”
The visible air quotes punctuating Sister Anselm’s words indicated that she wasn’t at all pleased with this turn of affairs.
“He thinks he’s going to replace you?” Ali demanded.
“That’s the plan.”
“With whom?”
“Her name’s Sister Cecelia Groppa,” Sister Anselm replied. “It turns out her story is a lot like mine. She was born in Argentina and was three years old during what was called Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ back in the mid-seventies. Her parents were dissidents, members of ‘the Disappeareds’—who went missing at that time and never returned. Both Cecelia’s mother and her aunt—her mother’s sister—had originally emigrated from Brazil to Argentina. After Cecelia’s mother and father disappeared, the aunt took care of her for a while. A few years later, when the aunt died, the child ended up in an orphanage. By then she was fluent in both Portuguese and Spanish. Eventually she joined a convent and became a nurse.”
“Which is why Archbishop Gillespie wants her here?” Ali asked.
“Presumably,” Sister Anselm agreed, “but I’m none too happy about having to take on a trainee at the moment.”
“Still,” Ali said. “You need to give her a chance.” It was odd for her to be giving the nun advice, and for a time neither of them said anything.
Finally Sister Anselm shook off the silence. “Enough about me,” she said. “What’s going on with you? Are you tired of listening to graduation speeches yet?”
Ali smiled. “Very,” she said. “All the same, I was glad to go.”
For the past three weekends, she’d been on the road, attending one graduation ceremony after another—NAU, ASU, U of A, and even a completion celebration at the Cordon Bleu branch campus down in Scottsdale. As a senior in high school, Ali had been given a full-ride scholarship by the Amelia Dougherty Askins Foundation which provided help for needy girls from the Verde Valley to further their educations. Years later, when Ali finally returned to Sedona, she’d ended up being put in charge of running the very scholarship program from which she herself had once benefited.
