A Checklist for Murder (5 page)

The next sound seemed out of place, surprisingly harmless in the midst of this horror show. The squeaky pump of a spray bottle reminded her of cleaning windows in the summertime, or cleaning the glass doors leading out to the patio where her father had been when she failed to get out of the house on time. Cleaning the patio doors wasn’t one of the chores Tasha was supposed to do that afternoon, but it didn’t matter anymore. The other chores weren’t going to get done either.

She could hear it easily, right in front of her. But it wasn’t
pumping window cleaner; Tasha tasted alcohol dribbling through the tube and into her mouth. She thought it must be some kind of hard liquor, but she didn’t drink hard liquor and couldn’t tell what kind it was. The taste was strong, harsh. She coughed and tried to spit it back out, gagging it back onto the fabric of the hood.

“Swallow it, Natasha. This is the best way. Just swallow it.”

He pushed her down onto her back again and held the tube firmly in place as the harmless little pumping sound continued. Squirt, squirt, squirt, the alcohol ran down the tube and into her mouth, slowly enough for her to swallow, not so fast that it would run out and leave evidence on the carpet.

“Just swallow it,” he kept repeating, trying to persuade her that accepting the alcohol he was force-feeding her was the best way.

He didn’t specify if it was the best way for her or for him, but by openly assuring her that she was about to die he was showing entirely new behavior from Tasha’s past experience. She tried to think of anything at all that he might do to get himself out of the trouble he would be in if anyone ever learned what he had done here today, but she realized it would be impossible for him to explain it. In just these few minutes, things had already gone too far for explanations.

She thought again of his matter-of-fact tone of voice when he’d answered her trembling question by confirming that, yes, he was going to kill her all right. Try as she might, Natasha couldn’t think of a single reason to disbelieve him. Not during the next two or three minutes while he continued to force the alcohol into her, and not when he decided to go to the next stage of his plan of activities to make her feel better and dragged her to her feet, forcing her to stumble blindly down the hallway. When she felt him turn her to the
right, Tasha knew that they had entered her mother’s bedroom. The one with the pleasant mess scattered around on the dresser, testimony to Claire as a working mother with little time for cleaning off a dresser no one else was supposed to see anyway. The photo of Natasha’s beautiful smiling face sat in its elaborate wooden frame, reflected in the mirror next to the little ceramic Doberman puppy and the tiny man made of silver wire, swinging forever back and forth on his balancing bar.

Natasha imagined herself reflected in the mirror as he shoved her down into a seated position on the bed. Her cuffed hands braced her from tipping over backward. Her fingers could feel the familiar touch of her mother’s bedspread. It was the only thing familiar to her in this haunted-house nightmare of distorted sensations.

Her father pumped a little more alcohol into the tube, but this time the pumping didn’t last long. Robert Peernock was a list maker, an itemizer of objects and activities; at this point he still had plenty of items yet to check off on his list of objects and activities designed to make Natasha feel better after being strangled.

His hands left her body. Briefly, the hope ricocheted through her that he would leave the room, maybe leave the house. But the hope never had time to fully form. All he did was lean over and turn the radio on. An FM station was preset to play classical music, the way Claire liked it. Robert left it tuned to that station. Now Tasha’s encounter with her father in her mother’s bedroom had some refined musical accompaniment.

He got up, but he still didn’t leave her. A moment later Tasha heard her mother’s closet door open. She tried to quell the panic, struggling to think clearly. What could her father be looking for inside her mother’s closet? The answer came flashing back: of course. The closet wasn’t only her mother’s.

Though Robert had moved out years before, he still kept
a large presence of himself in the house. His files, office records, tools, clothing, and personal objects were scattered everywhere like voodoo tokens guarding the house from another man’s intrusion. The bedroom may have been used only by Claire now, but as a wave of nausea twisted Natasha’s insides she remembered that Robert had things in the closet too.

He had guns in the closet: a shotgun, a revolver. He kept plenty of ammunition in the closet. And as he emerged he didn’t keep her guessing about what it was he had been rummaging around to find. She heard it, right next to her ear: click-click, snap … click-click, snap … that would be the revolver, the black six-shooter with the wooden handle.

Her father was holding the barrel of the gun at her head and pulling the double-action hammer back, rotating the bullet chamber, pulling the trigger. She didn’t know if the gun had any bullets in it right now or not. But she knew there were bullets in the closet. Plenty of them.

Up to this point Robert had been a man of few words, but now he apparently felt it was time to speak again.

“Natasha …”

Click-click … snap.

“If you don’t cooperate with me …”

Click-click … snap.

“I’m going to—”

Click-click …

“Blow your brains out.”

Snap.

Tasha couldn’t answer; the tube was still in her mouth. But she did the next best thing. She sat quietly and offered no resistance. Robert didn’t like resistance. Things had been great between them when she was still a little girl and accepted his authority unquestioningly. She had always told her friends that he didn’t begin to hate her until she developed
into a willful young woman—and started putting up resistance.

And now her plan worked, in a way. He didn’t begin beating her. He just went to the next item on whatever checklist he was working from and took steps to make sure she wouldn’t be offering any resistance, whether she felt inclined to or not.

He pushed her onto her side, knocking the tube out of her mouth. He pulled her feet up onto the mattress and quickly tied her feet together with rope. She couldn’t see the rope but she could feel the bristles against the skin of her ankles.

And now it would seem that the next item on Robert’s list was to hog-tie Natasha like an animal being prepared for slaughter. A moment later she felt her father roll her over onto her stomach and yank her feet behind her, all the way up to her wrists. Then he tied the rope that was binding her ankles to the chain between the handcuffs.

And still Robert was at no loss for ideas. Tasha felt the stiff tube jammed through the mouth hole once more and again forced between her lips, far back into her mouth. She heard the friendly little pumping sound, tasted the harsh liquor as it began to dribble into her mouth. By now she knew better than to try to spit the alcohol out. He was in no mood for resistance.

“Swallow it, Natasha,” Robert commanded, no doubt feeling sure that here at last was a teenager a parent could deal with. “Swallow it. It’s the easiest way.”

She had to swallow some of it now, but still she tried subtly to let some of it leak out around the edges of the tube and onto the fabric of the hood. At first Robert didn’t notice, he was busy giving her further orders.

“You need to cooperate, Natasha. It’s very important.”

Click-click … snap.

“You and your friends like to get high? Well, I’m going
to get you drunk. In fact, I’m going to get you and your mother both drunk.”

Click-click … snap.

“Then she’s going to sign some papers. And if you’re a good girl, Natasha, and if your mother does
exactly
like she’s told, then I’m going to finally be able to get out of your life forever. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Hey, don’t spit that out! Swallow it!”

Click-click …

“Or I’ll blow your brains out right
now
.”

Snap.

Tasha began to swallow the alcohol. All of it. There was no more resistance left in her.

CHAPTER

4

I
t was 6:00
P.M.
on the day the crimes began when Tina Nussbaum left for the evening. She didn’t know that Claire Peernock’s daughter was already bound and gagged inside Claire’s bedroom, but as Claire’s boss at a property management firm in West Los Angeles, she knew that Claire was staying behind at the office to catch up on some late work. That was nothing unusual. Claire always tried to book as much overtime as she could; Tina had known that about her when she hired her as a secretary five months earlier. Since that time, Claire had often been the last to leave at night, but she never seemed to abuse the overtime privilege. Once the work was caught up for the day, she always locked up and went home.

They had become friends of a sort, and over time Claire had gradually confided her marriage difficulties to Tina. Speaking in her soft voice and delicate French accent, Claire told how she had nearly gone through with the divorce before Christmas, but Robert had urged some kind of a six-month “cooling-off period” for reasons of his own.

The whole thing about a cooling-off period or any kind of possible reconciliation seemed odd to Tina, since Claire made no secret of the fact that Robert had been living with his girlfriend throughout that time and that he kept his youngest daughter with him whenever she didn’t have to stay at Claire’s to attend her grade school across the street from the house. Claire seemed relieved that this coming weekend
the girl was to return to her home and get ready for the new school term on Monday.

Tina knew the deadline on the temporary hold in Claire’s divorce action was only nine days away. Then Claire could begin to officially disentangle her life from a man she described as causing her so much fear and unhappiness.

It was good to see Claire determined to get her house in order. Claire had an easy laugh and a playful sense of humor. She never showed any outward signs of depression over her situation, but Tina could guess at the amount of pain it would take to cause her friend to work so many long hours. The overtime was Claire’s only way of creating a financial cushion thick enough to make sure that once her divorce began, she wouldn’t have to fear being unable to provide for her children.

So Tina left feeling relieved to know Claire was finally about to get away from the clutches of a man who seemed to have caused her so much hurt and given her such reason to fear him.

Of course, she had only heard Claire’s side of the story. Tina was a fair-minded person, so as she walked out to her car she reminded herself that there was no way of knowing for sure if Robert was really as dangerous as all that.

Once Robert finally got Tasha to accept the alcohol as it flowed down the tube, he seemed to tire of the game. After another few sprays, she felt him walk away. Then everything got quiet. She didn’t hear Robert close the bedroom door as he walked out, but it felt somehow as if he had. She lay helpless on the bed, hearing only the delicate music on her mother’s bedside radio and the hammering of her own pulse in her ears.

By that point the amount of alcohol he had forced down her wasn’t all that much, so she could still think fairly well despite the liquor and the emotional shock of the attack. But
as she began to try to weigh out the situation, it was clear to her that she was no longer physically able to help herself; the hood was tight around her neck and she was still hogtied. Even if she could somehow make it over to the bedroom window, there was no way to climb out and certainly no way to run. The room had a phone, but she couldn’t move toward it without making noise. It would be impossible to dial. Even if she reached someone, he would surely hear her speak. Wouldn’t he kill her instantly?

She was going to have to hope for some kind of outside help.

Tasha lay quietly while her thoughts screamed through her. She tried to guess how much time had gone by, knowing that it had probably been between 5:30 and 6:00 when the attack began. Perhaps another half hour had passed since then. Her mother could be home from work at any time after six o’clock, but she almost always worked overtime whenever she had the chance. That meant Claire could come walking into the house in a matter of minutes or a matter of hours.

But even if she came home right away, Robert’s idea about forcing them to get drunk and coerce Claire to sign some papers didn’t make much sense. Claire didn’t drink to any degree. If Robert actually thought he was going to get her to sit down and knock back a few stiff ones, he was badly mistaken. To get alcohol into Claire he would have to more or less repeat the situation with Natasha, taking her by surprise. He would either have to do it as soon as she walked into the house, or, by posing as being there late in the evening on some errand, maneuver her into some position for a surprise attack. Tasha knew Robert would never get Claire to drink with him voluntarily. And certainly she would never sign anything simply on his demand, not without putting up strong resistance.

So if Claire came home alone, as she almost always did, what defense would she have against a surprise attack from
the man she still trusted enough to allow him open access to her home?

The classical music pieces on the radio seemed to go on forever, making it hard to gauge how much time was passing. By the time one would end she didn’t have any idea how long it had played. Sometimes another would come on without the announcer ever saying a word and it would play for an entirely different length of time.

But she was sure he hadn’t left the house. He could never risk having his daughter found there like that by Claire or Patty or anyone else. No, he was somewhere nearby. And whatever he was doing in some other part of the house right now, she had no doubt he would be back.

Eventually the edge of the mattress sank down again under his weight. Fingertips played at the base of her neck as he untied the hood, pulling it back up over her face and off her head.