A Checklist for Murder (19 page)

Patty smiled, relieved that Tasha seemed to know how much strain she was under, living for days at the hospital and now crammed into whatever spare space they could find for her there in Natasha’s temporary home.

“Maybe I could go out for just a little while.”

“Honest, it’s okay. I can pee by myself and everything.”

Patty laughed. “Hey, I know that.”

“Go on, then.”

“You sure it’s okay? You won’t run away from home while I’m gone?”

“I might. You’ll find out when you get back.”

Patty left reluctantly, but Tasha knew her friend needed the breather. Patty just didn’t have Tasha’s experience handling bizarre experiences. Growing up in the monster house, she had become an expert.

So she lay in the quiet of the room and listened to people padding around downstairs and talking quietly as they tried to keep it light and not be paranoid about her father being at large. This was about as bizarre as anything she had ever imagined. But who else was there who could handle it along with her? None of them had Tasha’s expertise with weirdness either.

She knew that Patty had about come to the end of her rope, had given all that she could. It wouldn’t be fair to keep her hanging on. Uncle Maurice had made it plain that Tasha could return to Canada with them, or join them there later after all the probate stuff had been handled here. But even
without bothering to reason it through, Natasha knew that this wasn’t the avenue she was going to take. Canada was an unknown world to her. The huge family her mother had left behind in Quebec was essentially a group of strangers.

No, Tasha had grown up right here. What little familiarity existed for her now existed here. She could feel intuitively that the answer wasn’t going to lie in running off to some foreign country to live with strangers. Her fiancé was due back from his advanced training at the end of September. So if her father didn’t kill her first, it would probably be a good idea to just go ahead and get married.

It really was touching that he seemed to still want her. It would have been nice to be in love. But she wondered if that was a luxury she just couldn’t hold out for now, or even if something had happened to her feelings that would prevent her from ever being able to feel love again.

On August 3, early in the afternoon, Victoria Doom met Natasha Peernock for the first time. Up to that moment Natasha had only been a name listed on Claire’s dissolution form under the heading “Children of the Marriage.” Victoria arranged the meeting after Maurice had told her that he couldn’t remain in town much longer. There were matters that would not wait.

Victoria was concerned that as long as Robert Peernock remained at large he had the ability to dissolve away any remaining assets that might give his daughters a basis on which to rebuild their lives.

She quickly sized up Natasha as the young woman entered with her uncle. Her new client’s eyes were clear. The sharp gaze told Victoria that despite all the damage done to her, Natasha Peernock would be able to communicate clearly. Up to that moment she hadn’t really believed that anyone could come through such an experience and not be a complete basket
case. She wondered where her strength of spirit came from.

But Natasha’s physical state was still a mess, ten days after the attack. While her wounds had been stitched and repaired by plastic surgery to some degree, not a whole lot of healing can take place in so little time except for some of the swelling to go down. Her new client was very quiet as the introductions and opening small talk were conducted between Maurice and Victoria. She wore a scarf tied softly over her head wounds, but angry surgical scars spilled down from her forehead and zigzagged across her face. She appeared extremely uncomfortable and more than a little self-conscious.

“I explained what we needed to do about the estate,” Victoria later said, “and I also talked to her about a civil lawsuit against her father for wrongful death on behalf of the estate which would also benefit her little sister, plus a separate lawsuit on Natasha’s behalf for the personal injuries her father inflicted. There wasn’t anything else we could do that first day.”

But these actions gave Victoria the power to begin taking steps to lock up the estate before Robert could dissipate the rest of it. If he was never caught there was a danger that he would liquidate everything somehow through an intermediary. If he was caught and then charged with the crimes, he would certainly spend much or all of it on expensive criminal lawyers. Either way his daughters would be left out in the cold completely.

Victoria realized that if she lost in court on these actions, or if some opposing law firm simply outfoxed her because she didn’t absorb her crash course in probate law fast enough, then Claire had made an awful mistake in coming to her in the first place. And Victoria would have compounded Claire’s mistake by not sending Maurice away to some other lawyer.

But this case had already struck a deep chord with her,
just as it had with Steve Fisk. Although neither she nor Fisk had any way of knowing it yet, similar notes had been struck within a small group of unrelated people which would motivate them to fight this situation with all their abilities and with every ounce of energy they could muster. They were the first of an expanding group of people who would have had no reason to come together except for this case, and who would all find in it some reason to reach within themselves for their strongest powers.

Membership in that group would not come cheap for any of them.

For Victoria, doubts about her advice to Claire had already begun to wear away at her, night and day. Maybe it was just as well that she had hardly been able to sleep in the days since Maurice broke the news to her; sweating out the beginnings of a legal strategy on Natasha’s behalf gave her plenty to keep busy with while she paced the floor at night.

“Natasha, the crime lab called at three o’clock. There weren’t any traces of opiates in the Seagram’s bottle. Why were there traces in your blood?” Fisk tried not to push her. She had just come in from meeting with her attorney and looked drained.

But Robert Peernock was still out there somewhere and Fisk needed to know anything she could tell him. Anything at all.

“I don’t know. It must have been that pill. It hurts to think. I have to go to sleep.”

“You can sleep, but tell me. Did the alcohol taste funny? Do you think there was something crushed up in it?”

“I told you before, I don’t know. Can’t we do this later?”

“Yes. We can do it later. But if you can help me figure out where he got the pill from, maybe I can track down the source. If it was a drug dealer, then maybe the dealer knows
something. Maybe the dealer’s still in touch with him, you know?”

“I just … I don’t know. He takes all these pills for his back. I don’t know. It hurts to think.”

“Okay, Natasha. Okay. Take a nap. I’ll come back and see you later.”

Her eyes were already closing.

But on that same afternoon Peernock was back in Las Vegas, finishing up his initial consultation visit to Dr. Edward Kopf, a local plastic surgeon.

Peernock was again “Robert Thomas,” no longer the Caucasian realtor with the Latino name from Los Angeles. He gave Dr. Kopf’s staff at the front desk a fake address, fake phone number and fake social security number, while making arrangements to pay in cash. He claimed to have been an employee for the last three years at a company called Har-Tec Carburetor. Dr. Kopf’s staff had no reason to check “Robert Thomas”’s place of employment. But if they had, they might have learned that Har-Tec Carburetor had gone bankrupt fourteen years before.

At his consultation, “Robert Thomas” told Dr. Kopf that he needed a fresher and more dynamic appearance to go along with a new promotion. He said he hoped that the surgery could help him avoid the envy of co-workers who might tend to be jealous of his success. He didn’t explain how looking better was supposed to help quell his colleagues’ envy.

When Dr. Kopf asked whether “Robert Thomas” had any medical problems the doctor should know about, he replied that he had no allergies and no medical problems of any kind. As Robert Peernock, however, he had complained of sleep disturbances in the past. Peernock’s condition, called sleep apnea, causes the sufferer to stop breathing spontaneously while asleep. “Robert Thomas” didn’t seem inclined to
worry about that, though, as he began the process of arranging major surgery in a strange town under a false name.

On August 4 there was nothing in the house for Natasha to turn to for relief as the pain tore through her like waves of flame. The hospital had warned her that it was still not advisable for her to take strong pain relievers. So she resorted to sneaking doses of Nyquil whenever no one was looking, trying to quell the fire in her head. The pain blocked out everything.

But she knew that her mother’s remains were being cremated over in Long Beach that day.

On the morning of the fifth, Natasha was back at the hospital signing forms releasing her medical information to the investigators. Travel was still hard for her, but things seemed to come up every day that required her to venture out of the house, and she wanted to do anything she could to aid the investigation. Her father seemed to have vanished like a ghost. So she dragged herself out of bed once more, all the while praying for a break in the case.

The first break came that night. It was now August 5.

Officer Graham of the E1 Segundo police noticed that a blue Datsun F-10 had parked in a “three-day maximum” zone that was located within easy walking distance of the Los Angeles Airport terminals. It was Graham’s job to spot cars parked overtime. The city of E1 Segundo is one of the countless municipalities that run together seamlessly to make up Los Angeles. It plays host to countless temporary autos visiting the curbsites while their owners are away on short trips. This kind of action is a big revenue source for the city.

Although Graham always passed this spot as a part of his regular route, he hadn’t noticed the Datsun before. He chalked the tire just to be sure. The owner now had three
business days to move or it would be towed. However, the fact that the weekend was approaching actually made it five days before the tow truck would be by.

On August 7 “Robert Thomas” came back to Dr. Kopf for a final preoperation consultation. The doctor pronounced him fit for surgery. “Mr. Thomas” pronounced himself ready for a brand-new face.

On the same day, Steve Fisk ordered L.A. Criminologist Bill Lewellin to perform a test on the flat tire taken from Claire’s car. Lewellin wasn’t told where the tire had come from. He simply inflated it to full pressure and submerged it in water for several minutes. It gave off no bubbles and never leaked any air. Whatever had caused the tire to go flat in Claire’s driveway seemed to have been a temporary condition. There was no hole found in it anywhere and the tire stem worked perfectly.

For the next several days Natasha’s nightmares mostly focused on situations with her father chasing her. But the dreams didn’t reflect the actual night of the crimes and no matter how many times investigators came and asked her to go over it all one more time, the film always ran out just after she and her mother were moved from the backseat to the front of her father’s Cadillac. It ran out before her cuffs and hood were removed, just after the unseen attacker stopped tinkering at the back of the car near the tow bar.

Steve Fisk began to think he was learning to go without sleep altogether, but he didn’t seem to have dropped dead yet. “I’m a family man myself, with four children of my own,” he said later. “Any parent knows that teenagers can drive you up the wall, make you crazy. But I’ve told my kids many times that there’s nothing, I mean
nothing
they could do to make me stop loving them, no matter how angry I might get
at their behavior. One thing just doesn’t have anything to do with the other. Now, for a father to take a blunt instrument to the head and face of his own daughter … I just kept thinking about what an attack like that would do to a girl’s self-esteem. Teenaged girls don’t have nearly enough anyway, you know? For Natasha to know her father did that, and that he destroyed her mother at the same time …” His voice trailed off at that point.

Knowing that such a father was loose out there kept Fisk booking the unpaid overtime when his own family would have much preferred to have him back at home.

CHAPTER

14

A
t 11:15
A.M.
on August 10, the E1 Segundo police impounded the blue Datsun F-10 registered to Robert Peernock, for failure to move from the three-day zone in a timely fashion.

The best-laid plans. Despite his elaborate banking arrangements, despite the help of a girlfriend who was desperately trying to keep her faith in him and help him remain free in the belief that he was being unjustly accused, despite the aid of a talented plastic surgeon who had given him a new face, despite more than one alias in a town of strangers and a slew of bills paid in untraceable cash—

Robert John Peernock had parked overtime.

Within hours the car’s license number was entered in the LAPD computer as a matter of routine, just in case there were any overdue parking tickets or any other little legal matters to clear up before it could be released to the registered owner.

It was also on August 10 that Robert Peernock, still in his alias of “Robert Thomas,” went under Dr. Kopf’s knife. Robert had a face-lift and eye surgery, and also received a chin implant. After surgery he requested Linda Taylor, the head of Dr. Kopf’s nursing staff, to do follow-up visits by attending him in private at his hotel room. He was informed that this was not their policy. So upon completion of his successful operation he arranged to attend follow-up visits at the doctor’s office in the early mornings instead of the usual
time alloted for follow-up in the afternoon. In the mornings the waiting room is virtually empty, but it gets quite full as the day wears on. The staff reluctantly made this unusual exception for “Mr. Thomas,” but at no time in Linda Taylor’s five years with Dr. Kopf could she recall anyone else having this particular concern about needing an empty waiting room in order to come in for simple follow-up visits.