A Checklist for Murder

by Anthony Flacco

  But here she had just heard herself discussed as if she were a bug on a microscope slide; the specimen had been pronounced flawed. She had been judged to be damaged goods, perhaps beyond repair.

  Was she? she asked herself. Tasha tried to run a quick self-check, casting her mind’s eye around inside. But it was like sifting through the remains of a house burned to the ground. Was anything left inside of her that could be salvaged? She wondered if she could ever rebuild herself out of the rubble.

  She turned inside herself completely, sorting through the scorched debris like a homeowner on her knees sifting ashes with her fingers. And as she worked, the dark gray cloud slowly settled down over her again like smoke from an arson’s fire.

  The cloud was a lot thicker this time.

  Fisk arrived back at the station from Victoria Doom’s office at 5:30 P.M., just in time to take a call from Sonia Siegel’s next-door neighbor. The neighbor reported that Robert Peernock had just called him and had been pressuring him for a phone number where Sonia could be reached right away. The neighbor was aware that Sonia was at her aunt’s house, but he hadn’t given Robert the number. The neighbor had made some excuse about not being able to locate the number at the time. Robert had said he would call back after waiting for ten minutes while the neighbor “looked for it.”

  There wasn’t time to set up a trace on Peernock’s return call, but the report confirmed one of Steve Fisk’s suspicions: either Sonia Siegel was actively helping Peernock or else Peernock was frantically attempting to induce her to cooperate.

  Another piece dropped into place on the rapidly expanding game board.

  CHAPTER

  12

  On July 28 at 8:30 P.M., Lead Investigator Steve Fisk was still at the Foothill Station, far into his overtime hours as he interviewed Louise, Claire’s longtime friend. She was quick to point out that she was a friend to Claire and the girls but had never been close to Robert, whom she described as rude and obscene underneath his surface charm. Louise had broken off contact several years ago, except for private visits when Claire could come by alone, sometimes bringing Natasha and her sister along.

  Louise told how in the last ten years of those visits, Claire had been slowly opening up, revealing stories of Robert’s increasing violence inside the home. Occasional slaps during fits of anger had been escalating into repeated punches and choking.

  Louise had begged Claire to leave Robert, but Claire had been afraid that she couldn’t make enough money to keep the girls away from Robert in a custody fight. Louise watched Claire begin desperate attempts to upgrade her earning potential in preparation for making a break from Robert. Claire went to real estate school, got her license, and attended continuing education programs to bolster her skills. When the real estate market went soft, she used her clerical skills to get the highest paying jobs possible in that field and booked all the overtime that she could.

  Louise hadn’t heard from her since the previous November, just before Claire went to find Victoria Doom and again begin divorce proceedings, determined to make them stick this time. Claire had told her that she was now more frightened of Robert than ever, because since she’d begun threatening once again to divorce him, he had abruptly changed; he’d begun acting much too nice, in a conspicuously facetious way.

  Claire told Louise she was certain he would try to kill her before she could get out of the marriage with her daughters.

  Louise had assured her that Robert wouldn’t dare. Too many people already knew about Robert’s temper.

  “No, Louise,” Claire replied. “I think he will make it look like an accident.”

  “But, Claire,” Louise countered, trying to swallow her own fears for her friend, “Natasha would know. She’s seen his violence. She’s been a victim of it herself.”

  “But that’s just it, don’t you see?” Claire replied. “He will have to go after her too. I tell you, Louise, if I don’t get out of here very soon, you are going to read about my death in the newspaper.”

  Louise, as it turns out, contacted the Foothill Station, hoping that she could be of some help, immediately after her husband called her attention to an article in the newspaper about the Claire Peernock murder investigation.

  At 9:30 P.M., Fisk requested copies of the picture of Robert Peernock from the photo lab, wondering how many copies he might need to facilitate Robert’s arrest.

  He ordered two hundred and fifty.

  Then, just to be sure every stone was being turned, he began preparing two more search warrants, one for the Peernock house and one for Sonia’s condo. He worked far into the night.

  Tasha could hear the nurse clearly, right outside the door to her room. She wondered if the woman really didn’t know that Tasha was aware of her. Or was she deliberately letting Tasha in on her opinion?

  “Patricia,” the woman was saying, “you aren’t even supposed to be here after hours. If you interfere with our procedures again, we can take away your visiting privileges. So you just go back in and tell her that all that thick hair of hers is clotted with dried blood and it can infect the wounds on her head.”

  “Hey, I didn’t interfere with anything!” Patty retorted, exasperated. “She’s the one who said she didn’t want you cutting off the rest of her hair, I’m just trying to explain that she’s always been kind of funny about it. I mean, she has all this great hair and she’s really proud of it and—”

  “Honey, her hair has already been shaved four inches back off the hairline. What does she care if the rest goes now?”

  “Look. What if she washes it? Like really clean?”

  “That’s what started all this! She won’t let me touch it, says it hurts too much. But if those wounds get infected, it’ll hurt a lot worse. Now, since you two are the great all-time buddies, maybe you should let her know that either we wash it or we cut it off. And I mean today!”

  “Okay, okay.” Patty came stomping into the room in frustration, muttering over her shoulder, “You don’t have to get so hyper about everything.”

  She stopped, glanced back toward the doorway, then turned toward her friend and dropped her voice. “Tasha …”

  “I heard. They’re not taking the rest of my hair,” Tasha protested, as if she had the strength to stop them.

  “Hey, look. What if we wash it?”

  “We?”

  “Well, I will, I mean. We’ll work together. Your job is to not scream.”

  “What if it hurts too much?”

  “Then they’re coming back in here and shaving your head.”

  “… Get the soap.”

  Half an hour later they were still at it, with Patty washing and rinsing a strand at a time, working as gently as she could to avoid tugging the hair.

  Tasha did her part and stayed busy with not crying out even though the pain was worse than anything she had endured since waking up in the intensive care unit. But somehow the removal of the rest of her thick hair was a loss she just couldn’t accept. All day long she had slowly chewed on the knowledge that her life had exploded on every level and just about anything that had ever been familiar to her was gone. She wasn’t letting anybody take anything else away from her now.

  And she just didn’t give a damn if her need to keep the rest of her hair sounded crazy to the staff or not.

  On the morning of July 29, Fisk was back on the job extra early. He began by finishing off the search warrants, picking up where he’d had to abandon them the previous night, when gritty fatigue had built up in his eyes to the point that it became hard to see. By 6:30 A.M. he had already finished that task and also verified that the tailing unit was in place over at Sonia’s condo.

  By 9:30 he was at one of the police impound yards, Black & White Towing, to meet with Highway Patrol officers Ed Carlow and Walt Rose. The officers had gone over to the impound to check Peernock’s car for mechanical defects. Alignment problems, for example, might explain why the car had run off the road before hitting the dead-end wall.

  Whe
n the alignment theory turned out to be an empty lead, Fisk wasn’t surprised. According to the profile he was building of Peernock, the guy was shaping up as being much too thorough to forget to ensure that his alignment was good, the way most people do: checking to make sure the car drives straight at high speeds. Even with no hands on the wheel.

  The full-blown investigation began to roll on many different fronts and the days were speeding up for everyone involved. By noon Fisk was back at his office moving on half a dozen leads when a phone call came in from an attorney named Larry Samuels. Fisk’s chronological log shows that Samuels claimed to be Robert Peernock’s “domestic attorney” and that he had just received a long-distance call from Peernock himself.

  Peernock told Samuels that Peernock’s wife and daughter had been in a hit-and-run accident and that Peernock had heard that his wife was implicating him. Attorney Samuels said that Peernock wanted him to call the Foothill detectives and check on the status of the investigation. Peernock had arranged to call Samuels back in two days.

  Samuels was informed that so far there was no arrest warrant on Peernock, which was true. But he was also told to make sure Robert Peernock understood that the police very much wanted to talk to him.

  Samuels promised to relay the information.

  Throughout the day of July 29, the scene at Sonia’s house was one of deepening fear and chaos. Robert was making sporadic attempts to reach her. Sonia was aware that she was being followed by the authorities; whatever she had told the police didn’t seem to have satisfied them. She began making frantic attempts to locate attorneys who could and would be of help to the most important man in her life, the man she had shared her home with for years and who claimed to be at war with corrupt forces in the government establishment.

  To Sonia, it seemed that she and Robert were both under attack from nearly every direction.

  • • •

  Tasha had a strange dream only a few days after they’d put her in the hospital. She dreamed that her old boyfriend had come home on emergency leave from the Navy. He walked into the room and told her that he had tried to get leave to see her earlier, but the Navy refused until his mother got on the horn and raised a fuss. Now here he was, with his hair all short and everything. Tasha was glad it was only a dream; she would have been mortified if he could really see her puffed up and torn and discolored, feeling like some kind of circus freak. Like the Elephant Man.

  In the dream the guy really was sweet. He told her that he still loved her, whether he actually did or not, and he told her that he wanted to marry her right away, just as soon as he had finished with his advanced training following boot camp. Then they could go away to his first assignment together.

  These were not the conditions of proposal and marriage that every little girl dreams about. But Natasha had never been particularly conventional, and she had recently lost her taste for the traditions associated with marriage, such as being carried over the threshold.

  After this pleasant dream was finished and the guy disappeared, she dreamed about something else. When she awoke it was hard to tell where one dream had left off and the other begun.

  It wasn’t until later that the remarks other people were making caused her to realize that it had all been real and that she was now engaged to be married.

  It would have been nice to be madly in love, she thought, head over heels in love. But nobody gets everything she wants.

  At 2:45 P.M. on the twenty-ninth, Fisk arranged to have Peernock’s Cadillac moved from Black & White Towing to the crime lab for a thorough analysis and fingerprinting of the interior and exterior.

  He then contacted the California Highway Patrol and made sure they were available to reconstruct the accident at the scene as soon as possible.

  At 4:30 that afternoon he hit Judge Luros for yet another set of search warrants on the Peernock house and on Sonia’s condo. He accompanied the search officers to Sonia’s place first, since the Peernock house had been sealed and there was less danger of evidence being tampered with in that location.

  Later that evening he accompanied Criminologist Lawrence Joiner, who performed a luminol test on the walls of the Peernock house. Joiner verified that blood had dripped onto both sides of the hallway at heights of between two and three feet. Blood was also smeared on the light switch next to the glass doors leading out to the patio. Blood was also spotted on the vanity in the master bathroom of Claire’s bedroom. All the bloodstains were verified as having occurred at the same time.

  Fisk noted that some anonymous kindly neighbor had been dropping off food to the two dogs, who still padded about the backyard, frightened and confused. He contacted the Department of Animal Care and arranged for them to be taken to a shelter. He hoped that somebody could be found to adopt the dogs before their time ran out and the county had to destroy them. There had already been too much evil fallout from whatever had taken place inside this house.

  It was 1:00 A.M. when Fisk and his team finally cleared the crime scene. He didn’t have to be back at work for five whole hours.

  CHAPTER

  13

  July 30 was the day Tasha was to be released from the hospital with cooperation from the police. Uncle Maurice helped to finesse the release on the pretext of a transfer to Kaiser Hospital, but the plan was to take Tasha and Patty directly to her fiancé’s family home and to immediately place her under twenty-four-hour guard until Robert Peernock could be located.

  Maurice came into her hospital room alone and closed the door with a grim expression. He started to tell her it was time to talk about Claire, but Tasha quietly revealed that nobody had been fooling her anyway. After an awkward pause he began again, telling her that Claire had let him know years ago that her wish was to be cremated when she died. The coroner’s office was ready to release the body now. They had told Maurice that it was Natasha’s legal duty as Claire’s oldest child to dispose of the remains, so long as the husband wasn’t coming forward to do the job. As a matter of law and as an issue of public health, Natasha had no choice but to deal with the situation right now. He sadly handed her a pretyped coroner’s release form to sign. Then he gave her an authorization form allowing the mortuary to handle the cremation. She signed both, barely reading them.

  Last of all, he handed her an insurance form. As the sole available surviving adult of the family, Natasha may have been required by state law to deal with Claire’s remains, but she was penniless. Maurice had a large family of his own and no financial means to cover the expenses himself. Unless her mother was to be buried in a pauper’s grave by the county, Natasha had no choice but to sign the insurance proceeds over to the mortuary to pay for the costs of cremation and funeral.

  The policy was in the amount of $10,000, enough to cover everything. Natasha would not find out until later that it was the State Farm policy taken out by Claire two days after her visit to Victoria Doom’s office. Claire’s premonition had served her after all, giving her daughter the means to carry out the duty of making final arrangements for her mother.

  The mortuary also wanted to know if they could expect any cooperation in handling the final arrangements from the husband of the deceased, the father of the children.

  Uncle Maurice just told them that it didn’t seem likely.

  Robert’s situation was now coming home to Sonia Siegel with a heavy impact. At 9:30 A.M. on July 30, Steve Fisk had Sonia’s car impounded to go along with the items his team had taken from her condo the evening before, expanding the search for any physical evidence of Peernock’s whereabouts.

  That afternoon Natasha was brought out of the hospital in a wheelchair. Police guards scanned nervously in all directions as she was wheeled up to the curb and helped into the waiting car. She and Patty were then driven to her new fiancé’s family home, a condominium not far from the former Peernock house. A police escort tailed them all the way, having already begun their assignment of twenty-four-hour guard duty.

  Once they’d arrived, Patty was told
she could sleep downstairs near the police guards while Tasha began her convalescence alone in an upstairs bedroom.

  • • •

  Back in Las Vegas, desk clerks at the Stardust Hotel noted that Robert Peernock, alias “Robert Thomas,” had failed to come down and settle his tab in cash as he had previously done on the twenty-sixth, the twenty-eighth, and the twenty-ninth. They checked the hotel’s computer and saw that there had been no activity for his room. No payments, no room service, no messages, no phone calls. Nothing. There was nothing the next day either. Still, at this point they didn’t get too concerned.

  They knew that it isn’t unusual for guests there to take off on little side trips out of town. Maybe even out of state.

  At 6:05 P.M. of July 30, Sonia Siegel and her aunt were tailed as they drove to a restaurant on Ventura Boulevard and had dinner. During that time Sonia was observed making a seven-minute phone call from a public telephone. The undercover stakeout officer meandered by slowly enough to overhear Sonia saying into the phone, “They were out here today,” and moments later, “Maybe tomorrow.”

  On July 31, as the month wound down, events began heating up for everyone involved.

  Early that morning Steve Fisk had a full “Suspect Wanted” bulletin distributed to law enforcement divisions and agencies. He had partial reports that Peernock might be visiting with a former co-worker at a home outside Los Angeles.

  He also contacted L.A. Criminologist Bill Lewellin, a scientific investigator with additional training with the FBI, and had Peernock’s large vise removed from police impound in order to compare the X-shaped marks Fisk remembered on the cutter bar under the Cadillac with the pattern of the teeth on the vise itself. The test method Lewellin used was to take a soft lead plate and clamp it in the vise to get a sample of the clamping marks, then look for similarities of pattern between those marks and the ones on the crime tool. He used the special double-lensed comparison microscope to study each object simultaneously and found identical features on the two patterns.