A Checklist for Murder (44 page)

And surely she has never spoken with Sonia Siegel.

Many women are attracted to lifers for reasons an entire squad of psychiatrists would have to explain. It may be safe to say that most of these women have also not seen the chilling evidence that their jailhouse hubbies have often left behind like monster spoor. But a woman in love can be very handy to an inmate stuck inside. She brings things in, she takes things out. She runs all kinds of errands the prison system has no way of monitoring.

And while their jailhouse partners wait behind bars, the women are safe from harm at hubby’s hand, for the time being. They do not have to fear such things as the blunt end of a steel bar. For the time being.

Therefore when a convict has help on the outside and when he is allowed to roam free among other killers on the inside, when he has a bank account and access to the telephone, and when he is already serving time for trying to hire killers to do his dirty work,
is it unfair for others to be just a bit suspicious of his intentions?

How cheaply can a man have the death of his daughter and her attorney/mentor arranged, when he has a whole range of felons to chose from and when he has spent several years getting to know the ropes of the jailhouse code? Would a man have discretion enough to avoid mentioning that the girl is his own flesh and blood, just in case another assassin is squeamish about such things?

As for Robert Peernock, he continues to jeer at the system, crowing that he is steadily working his way back out. He has a list of sworn enemies reaching all the way up to Judge Schwab, whom he openly threatened in a letter sent from behind bars shortly after his sentencing. Given Peernock’s history, no one takes his threats lightly. He remains completely unbowed and is still doling out threats and accusations, forming them into the strongest terms legally allowed to him as a convict, and then sending them out in letters from his Vacaville cell.

Peernock has other dark connections. He has kept at least one private investigator (one of those who allowed themselves to be used in Peernock’s criminal case) constantly on retainer even after he went to jail. During the months of Peernock’s murder trial, when the investigator was ordered to gather the name and address lists, he cooperated.

Consequently, did Robert Peernock know that his daughter had been living in Laguna Beach that summer?

Tasha kept up a running dialogue with herself as she steered her car out of California and began to head north. The Canadian border was a long way off. She knew she would be doing a lot of self-talk to keep up her courage for the trip.

Among all the people she had met in Laguna Beach, among all the young men who might have been attracted to the lovely young woman who kept to herself and radiated a strange mixture of charm and isolation, she had never felt connected even to one.

“I wasn’t stabilized inside myself yet,” she says. “People don’t prevent you from feeling lonely if you’re not stabilized. They just sort of rub you the wrong way and keep you reminded that things aren’t okay.”

It took her a long time to decide to approach her mother’s family up in Quebec. The idea of seeking out a group of French-speaking strangers in another country seemed impossibly foreign. But the sense of isolation was killing her. Whatever might happen next in her life, Tasha knew that she couldn’t keep trying to fly solo.

But while she drove onward the highway seemed to stretch out farther and farther in front of her. It was almost as if the car itself were fighting her, as if she had to press the accelerator harder just to keep up the same speed.

The trip seemed necessary but it felt wrong.

She asked herself what the problem could be. The plan was so simple: drive for days to a place where you don’t
speak the language and the climate is about the same as Alaska’s, barge in on a bunch of strangers you’re supposedly related to and then use pidgin English to join their clan when you’re not at all sure that you want to do that anyway.

“Vicki?”

“Tasha, is that you?”

“Yeah …”

“Well, hi! How are you doing?”

“Oh … Not too good.”

“What’s wrong?”

“… Nothing.”

“Mm-hm. Where are you?”

“Well, I’m in Arizona.”

“Arizona. Okaaay.
Why
are you in Arizona?”

“It’s kind of a long story. Listen, could I come and visit you for a little while?”

“Just you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sure. Sure you can. In fact, that would be really nice. Richard and I finished the house, so you can have the mobile home all to yourself. How soon will you be here?”

“I’m going to drive straight through.”

“Well, there’s no hurry. You know, you’re allowed to eat and sleep on the way if you want.”

“No. I’m going to drive straight through.”

“Oh. Okay. Can you find Las Vegas? It’s the one in New Mexico, you know.”

“I’m just lonely, I’m not retarded.”

“That’s right. I remember now.”

“So it’s okay?”

“It’s absolutely okay. You don’t even have to drive straight through. It will still be okay whenever you get here.”

“No, I’m driving straight through.”

“… I’ll stock up the fridge.”

•   •   •

Either Tasha managed to arrive at dinner hour or Victoria managed to have dinner ready upon her arrival, but there was just enough time for Tasha to dump her bags in the mobile home parked twenty yards behind the house and then come back down for their first meal there together.

She explained the aborted Canada trip and about her need for some peace and quiet. Victoria said the mobile home was stocked up, the extra pickup truck was full of gas, and Tasha could come and go as she pleased. When she asked Tasha how long she planned to stay, Tasha replied she wasn’t sure. Victoria told her to get comfortable and stay as long as she wanted to. Then she and Richard added the magic ingredient.

They left her alone.

Meals were usually held with everybody together around Victoria’s kitchen table, but Tasha often stayed inside the mobile home for whole days at a time. She read voraciously from the large collection of books that overflowed the main house and were kept stashed in the new “guest house.”

She marveled at the private zoo, cages full of gibbons and monkeys and exotic birds, huge kennels full of Irish wolfhounds. Horses ran free all over the grounds, thundering around the place like wild animals but tame enough to nuzzle up to the back door and nicker for carrots. Horses from the fantasies of a girl who had grown up loving horses and riding them every chance she got.

The wind across the mesa tops was musical. Animal sounds carried through the night. She still sat up late by herself, but her heart began to rest easier.

One of the dogs, a Labrador retriever named Black Dog, was as big and as capable of being scary as any other Lab can be, but he bonded with Tasha instantly. She still breaks into a fond smile and gets a goofy tone in her voice when she talks about him. She and Black Dog began to explore the countryside in earnest.

They walked for miles, day after day, up in the hills beyond
the large mesa that guards the back of the ranch. For the first time since Niko and Queenie had been torn out of her life, Tasha had the chance to give over her affection to the unconditional love of an adoring dog who was generally enthusiastic about anything Tasha might feel like doing at any hour of the day or night. Their unspoken deal was that Black Dog could take the exercise if she could take the slobber. Their endless hill hiking required different muscles than Tasha’s dancing but it burned calories just as well. She began to feel ready to have a dog of her own again.

Before long she found her way into town to attend a pet fair in search of a nice potbellied pig, one of the few kinds of animals not already at the ranch. The girl at the pig booth had the sad duty of explaining that all the pigs had been snapped up by local pig connoisseurs, who apparently had earlier sleep habits than Tasha’s. But did Tasha want to see a really cute puppy?

“… A puppy?”

Tasha arrived back at the ranch deep in major-league love with a six-week-old Rottweiler male. She had already named him Magic. It fit. The relationship was perfect from the moment they laid eyes on each other, from the first slurp of a sloppy puppy tongue no bigger than a slippery postage stamp.

The tiny dog had taken one look up at this giant human female and felt the soft, buzzy cloud of her energy enveloping him. He seemed to know instantly, deep down in his heart, that he had just stumbled into Jackpot City.

Little Magic may not have realized that the huge female human he was staring up at had never been able to consider owning another dog since that time when she’d been too young and too badly injured to stop Niko and Queenie from being torn out of her life; but some ancient canine instinct seemed to tell him that he had just latched onto a bodyguard who had absolutely no intention, ever, of letting
anybody
separate them. Tasha never stood a chance with Magic; he was a pro. He had all the right moves. He looked up at her with huge puppy eyes and made inexplicably cute little yipping sounds. Magic whined beautifully, but not too much and not too loudly. He struggled around, puppy style, just enough to invite help but not so much as to appear pitiful. He was utterly shameless about letting her feel his fat tummy as much as she wanted to. He even had that extra, magical little something that only a gifted few young animals have: the ability to urinate all over you and somehow communicate the fact that, hey, its nothing personal.

And so at the tender age of only six weeks, a little Magic arrived back at the new guesthouse. Magic didn’t know it yet, but from the moment he succeeded in capturing Natasha, he had discovered Permanent Alpo Recess.

Tasha never got to Canada, of course. Victoria kept her as a guest for nearly three months and describes watching with growing approval and quiet satisfaction as Tasha seemed to change before her eyes with every passing day. That restlessness that had been a part of Natasha Peernock from the day Victoria first met her was slowly dissolving. A gentle, trusting young woman began to appear from behind the facade. The intensity of the urban street scene gradually left her. Her face took on a peaceful, rested look. Her gentle laugh began to come out more and more easily.

Finally one day Tasha came to Victoria and asked if they could travel together to an area far away. She had decided to invest the money her mother had left for her by buying a house and putting down roots to begin a real life for herself.

Victoria was delighted. This was starting to feel like something she had awaited for a long time now. So they got into Tasha’s car and drove for two days until they came to a place where Tasha and Victoria were strangers to everyone and nobody had any idea about Tasha’s background.

They looked at houses until they found one that felt just right to Tasha, where she could see herself digging in for the long term. There was a big fenced yard for Magic and a sunroom for lots of plants. Victoria helped her through the paperwork and soon Tasha was moving her things out of storage in Los Angeles and into her new home.

She joined a local health club and enrolled in the community college. She began working toward starting her own business. She keeps a horse nearby now, has her dogs outside for protection and her cats inside to cuddle. She maintains a constant lookout among the local population for that glint in the eye, that ironic twist to the smile, that might reveal a fellow stranded traveler on the planet. She has begun to slowly gather friends. There is no hurry; she’s in for the duration and fellow tribesmen always seem to know one another, no matter what disguises they are forced to wear.

As for Victoria, by the time she returned to the ranch with Tasha to gather her things out of the mobile home and then make the final trip back to the new house, she realized that something felt different inside. When Victoria saw Tasha’s delight at finding the house and now, at having a home of her own in which to build a solid new life, it put something to rest within Victoria as well. The nagging sensation that had haunted her throughout the years of this case finally began to ease. The relationship with Tasha would continue, but the Peernock case was finished.

And that was it; the damn thing finally felt finished.

I was deep into the research for this story when I called Tasha one night to tell her I was having some trouble. When she asked what was wrong, I told her that despite all the research I had done on her family background, I couldn’t find her. Where did her gentle personality come from?

After all, Robert Peernock’s fate may be regrettable, but it is not that difficult to understand. The field of psychology
is replete with case studies of vicious killers. Much can be inferred from his own family background, about a childhood that produced a man capable of such sustained and murderous coldness. If he is not simply to be dismissed as an incarnate demon, then he, too, has his story of abuse and of neglect sufficient to snuff the humanity in a growing boy and set him on course for actions so horrible that the only service he can now perform for his beloved taxpayers is to offer insight into the mind of a killer and into his methods for attempting to thwart justice.

But where, I asked his daughter, did Natasha come from?

Was she simply her mother’s child? Had she received so much nurturing from Claire that it insulated her from damage at Robert’s hand? But Tasha was honest in revealing that Claire had not been some shielding saint. Indeed, Claire had cautioned her to tell none of Robert’s hurling her across the room, and shattering her bones. The two women got along well enough in a kind of uneasy peace, but clearly this was not where Tasha’s sweet disposition had begun.

Psychological texts predict dark futures for many children with a background of violence and rage coupled with a dominating parent who fills them with fear and suspicion. So, I asked her, where
did
you get your spirit? Why is your energy so fine, why are your mannerisms so graceful? She just laughed.

But some of Tasha’s defense mechanisms are easy enough to see. She learned early in life to separate her self-concept from her troubled family image by thinking of herself as a complete outsider, outside her own family, her school, the neighborhood, the planet. If she sees herself as some temporary visitor here, an alien with a wrecked flying saucer, then she doesn’t have to identify with those years in the monster house. It was just a dark, innermost cave through which she has passed and to which she does not have to return.