A Checklist for Murder (20 page)

At the hotel “Mr. Thomas” explained to the curious front-desk staff that he had recently been in an auto accident and had just had corrective surgery to repair the damage.

He did not repeat his story about wanting to look fresher for his new promotion in a bankrupt company.

Back in Los Angeles, late on that same August 10 night, Natasha’s head pain backed off enough that she could move around without too much discomfort if she was very careful. The police were already asking her about testifying against her father if he should be captured alive. She began to wonder where she would find the strength to publicly tell the story of that awful night of torture and murder. The old family taboo against speaking about what went on inside the house had been pounded into her for years.

But she wondered, what was any such taboo worth now? Ever since things had turned really bad at home a few years ago, she’d never felt a real part of her family. More and more as the years went by, she had come to feel like a visitor in the house. At her school. On the planet.

That, as it turned out, was going to be her source of strength. Somehow as the years had gone by, without really thinking about it, Tasha had slowly converted her feeling of isolation to a sense of uniqueness.

She had absorbed an appreciation for uniqueness in a thousand little ways. As a native southern California girl she had grown up around the beaches and knew that you can hang around there when storm fronts roll in and watch surfers
paddle out to greet impossibly high waves. A few keep it up long after the amateurs come on in and run for cover. Once the winds approach gale force there will always be one or two crazy, beautiful jerks heading out to catch just one last wave, a little higher, a little more insanely powerful than the wave before. Sometimes one daredevil actually catches the killer, the monster. And instead of going under it and getting injured or drowned by its power, he miraculously manages to rocket up to the top of the crest and hang his toes out over the edge of the board and throw his fist high into the air, screaming with pure joy at his own audacity. Confronting the monster and winning.

That’s when the answer hit her: there are all kinds of waves. Somewhere in her past, she had found a reservoir of strength within her isolation. She didn’t know yet if it would be enough to sustain her, any more than the extremist surfers can be sure they will survive the tidal waves that they paddle out to meet. But as of tonight she knew the direction to swim in. She resolved that she would face him down in court. She would tell the story as many times as she had to. By standing away from him in every way that she could, she would work out the poison of ever having had such a man for a father.

She would start by breaking the family taboo and telling the world everything she could about what had happened behind closed doors inside the Peernock house.

By August 12, Victoria had prepared elaborate opening papers in Natasha’s wrongful death suit and taken the first steps to have Natasha named administrator of the estate, all toward the end of freezing Peernock’s access to whatever money the family had. Most of what she did went on without Natasha’s direct involvement, since she now had power of attorney. But whether Tasha was aware of it or not, the upshot was that Victoria Doom and her secretary, Sharie, and her law clerk, Elke, were working long past their regular hours. Even
as Victoria began to have to farm out other cases as she had originally feared, she and her two assistants battled to pull fuel out of Peernock’s tanks and make his flight from arrest as difficult as possible. They attacked on multiple fronts in the civil-court war, slowly freezing Peernock out of the family’s real estate holdings, bank accounts, and insurance proceeds.

While they labored to make it easier for Steve Fisk’s task force to bring Peernock in, they did so with the strong hope that Natasha would still be alive to testify when that day came. But they had no way of knowing how much energy was being expended to see to it that Peernock’s daughter never lived to take the stand.

More calls came into Fisk’s office as August rolled by. Neighbors claimed to have seen Peernock driving through the Saugus area in a new white Cadillac. Fisk didn’t need to ask what Robert Peernock might be looking for. The question was, had he rented the car somehow or borrowed it, and where? He knew that there ought to be some kind of paper trail, but the guy seemed to move around like a submarine.

Sonia Siegel’s attorney was now fully into the fray, making sure Fisk crossed every
T
in dealing with her. Sonia was repeatedly picked up and interviewed by Fisk and his team, but she still refused to help. She made it plain that Robert had terrified her by describing what would happen to him if she let the police know where he was. Everybody who had dealt with Robert in the past knew about his long history of making accusations over corruption in state contracts. This was just the kind of retaliation from state forces that he had predicted for so long. And the search warrants and impoundings hadn’t, up to now, done a lot to build Sonia’s confidence in the police.

Fisk kept working on her, trying to show her that she had it wrong. He called the hospital for her and spoke with Dr.
Shapiro there, who confirmed that no bandages would have been placed on Natasha’s head, such as Robert had told Sonia he’d seen on his daughter the night that he claimed to have gone to Holy Cross. Peernock had never visited Tasha there, Fisk assured Sonia. He hadn’t even been allowed to get near her. So why would he tell Sonia that he had?

But Sonia’s loyalty still couldn’t be swayed.

Peernock’s parents back East hadn’t heard from him, so Fisk dropped that lead and ordered the COBRA tailing unit to intensify their tracking of Sonia instead. He felt sure that she was in touch with Robert somehow.

Meanwhile, Robert’s Datsun came up on the computer’s linkup to the E1 Segundo police.

Fisk was euphoric. He immediately ordered the car searched by his investigators, knowing that this could be a major break in their manhunt. Two guns were recovered from the toolbox. One was an chromed automatic pistol.

The other gun, just as Natasha had described it, was a black revolver with a wooden handle.

On August 17, Victoria Doom filed a petition for probate nominating Natasha as permanent administrator. Paper doors, stronger than steel bars, were slamming shut around whatever remained of the Peernock family assets.

Robert Peernock/Robert Thomas went back into Dr. Kopf’s office every couple of days during the morning hours to check his progress. His face was healing a lot faster than Natasha’s. By the seventeenth most of the stitches could be removed.

He looked like a new man.

By August 18 another attorney, Don Reynolds, called the Foothill Station. He said that he, too, had been retained by Robert Peernock, but that another gentleman named Mark
Overland would handle the case. Mr. Overland was to call two days later regarding the “surrender of the suspect.”

Steve Fisk had no way of knowing it yet, but with this first wave of attorneys, Robert Peernock’s cavalcade of lawers had just begun.

Records from the Stardust Hotel show that calls were made to PSA Airlines from “Robert Thomas”’s room on August 8, 9, 12, and 14. It would have taken only one call to learn that flights to L.A. depart at constant and regular intervals all day, every day. But Peernock was traveling with a suitcase full of cash and leaving no paper trail, so it cannot be proven that he flew out of town on those dates.

It can only be known for certain that, wherever he was going in those days between doctor’s visits, he somehow managed to find out that his Datsun was no longer available in the E1 Segundo area near Los Angeles International. Because on August 19 Robert was back in Las Vegas, where he bought a used gray Mustang soft-top for $2,800.

Now he had a convertible car to go with the converted face. Nine days after his car was impounded, Robert Peernock/Robert Thomas was back on wheels and ready to roll.

The next day, August 20, Victoria Doom was busily chugging out the legal work to dam up Peernock’s assets when she discovered that there might possibly be a family will outstanding. She immediately sent her clerk to the closed-up house to bring back Claire’s collection of attorneys’ business cards, then called the numbers on every one of them until she found a firm that had prepared a will for Claire and Robert ten years before. Such a document could tell her all kinds of things. It could also help her to permanently exclude Robert as executor and stack the deck on Natasha’s behalf by placing all the family assets permanently under her name.

•   •   •

On August 21 Don Reynolds called the Foothill Station again and said that he still hadn’t heard from Peernock, but whenever he finally did he would make arrangements for Robert to turn himself in. Reynolds didn’t mention and perhaps was not aware that Robert Peernock had purchased another car, and in doing so was not exactly behaving like a man who planned on surrendering to anybody anytime soon.

It was on that same day that the “Robert Thomas” identity evaporated in the Nevada desert. Peernock/Thomas left his room at the Stardust without giving notice and vanished like life savings at a rigged roulette table. The Stardust later sent an invoice for the unpaid balance on the room tab to “Mr. Thomas”’s home address in Amarillo. It came back weeks later marked
Return to Sender—Unable to Deliver
.

Peernock called Sonia Siegel on August 22 and asked her to rendezvous with him in a supermarket parking lot. She hurried to meet him. The market was not far from her condo, where the couple had lived together for years while she waited for him to arrange his life so that they could be married. She did not yet realize that they would never be married, would never live together again. But for the time being, luck was with her; the COBRA tailing unit was off on another case at the moment, so she was able to arrive at the supermarket alone.

This was the first time Sonia had actually seen Robert face-to-face since he’d left her place a month before, after telling her he was going to visit Natasha at the hospital. In the weeks since that time she had fielded questions from his anxious younger daughter and taken her to the police station to learn that her mother was dead. She had watched the girl snapped up by the county system. She stood by as her condo was searched repeatedly by detectives, and she had been questioned over and over by the police about Robert’s whereabouts. She had done Peernock’s banking for him, paid his
bills, dealt with the tenants at his income properties, and withstood threats from the police that if she were found to be harboring a fugitive on a warrant this severe, she might well be deemed a co-conspirator to murder. In that case she could end up spending the rest of her life in prison. For four agonizing weeks she had spent her nights and days terrified for Robert’s Peernock’s well-being and increasingly afraid for her own.

But Sonia put up with all of this because she believed that Robert Peernock was a fighter against corruption on state contracts and that his efforts had finally enraged shadowy individuals inside the system to the point that they had framed him for the brutal murder of his own family in order to silence him.

She believed that the man in her life was guilty of nothing more than a fierce allegiance to the taxpayers and that he had suffered horribly for it. And she was all he had left.

But she was stunned when Peernock walked up to her. His face looked entirely different. In all of the secret phone calls they had conducted over the past month from public phones scattered around the area, he had never told her anything about changing his face. She had continued to believe in him even as his behavior became more and more suspicious. And now she was confronted by the man she had planned to spend the rest of her life loving, only to find he had removed the face she had kissed so many times and had had another stitched in its place without saying a single word to her about it first.

She didn’t abandon him, she didn’t call the police and give them his new motel address, she didn’t stop believing in him—but she got good and angry.

Sonia had just run face-first into blunt evidence that everything had changed radically in her life and that nothing would ever be the same again.

•   •   •

Natasha was probably asleep as Sonia met Robert in the parking lot. She doesn’t remember exactly what she did on that day, but since it was daylight she figures she was asleep. She had always been a night person by nature, but ever since the night of July 21 she had taken to sitting up all night and did not go to sleep until it began to get light outside. There were a number of reasons for that: her torture by Robert had gone on all night long; she had been delivered from evil just before sunrise.

And she knew it would be harder for him to sneak up on her to finish the job if it was light outside.

Over the next few days Steve Fisk received phone calls indicating that Robert Peernock had been to his income properties to pick up rent. One of the callers, who had rented a house from Peernock two months before, reported that within the past month Peernock had come to the house with another man supposedly to repair the air conditioner. Peernock reportedly had cuts and stitches on his head. Since Fisk didn’t know anything about Robert’s plastic surgery, he wondered if the fugitive had been injured in some way.

As for the rest of it, Fisk couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Peernock was on the lam as a fugitive on a murder warrant, playing “maybe I’ll turn myself in and maybe I won’t” through a series of attorneys while his appearance of guilt mounted with every passing day, and yet the man was driving around his old haunts collecting rent receipts. He was gambling his life on getting away with it despite the armed-and-dangerous tag that was out on him and which could easily cause some hotshot rookie to blow his head off if Peernock was apprehended under the wrong conditions.

Fisk knew the rents weren’t worth all that much. If it was anybody else, he would simply dismiss him as just being stupid. But Peernock was smarter than most people, so what was the deal with the guy? Did he think he was bulletproof?