A Checklist for Murder

by Anthony Flacco

  Besides, Maurice had entrusted Natasha to Victoria for no other reason than that Claire Peernock had believed in her; Victoria was determined to search for every justification the law would give her for stacking the deck on Natasha’s behalf, in any way that she could, without apologies.

  She would soon need that determination. Dern, Mason and Floum was about to make her worst fears about taking the case come to life. This multipartner firm had enough resources to assign a full roster of corporate attorneys to it, plus all the administrative backup needed to research every move they made.

  The paperwork began to flood through the door of her solo law practice.

  As fall deepened, Tasha finally began to feel as if a tiny rainbow of hope might be opening up on the Pacific horizon. She could almost peer through it, gazing across the distance from her gray-clouded present situation to sneak a keyhole glimpse into a more colorful future.

  Her fiancé had come home for a few days of leave before rushing off to his assignment in Hawaii. All the plans were made for her to join him there and for the young couple to get married early in October. Steve Fisk had found enough money in a small victim’s relief fund to pay for her ticket and also arranged for her to travel under a false name to avoid her father’s private investigators, who were rumored still to be attempting to locate her and determine her movements. Although publicity was beginning to die down around the case, she remained appalled at the prospect of some eager reporter slapping her scarred face on a TV broadcast.

  And so the safety of anonymity and the promise of a new beginning in an exotic location promised to burn away the cloud that seemed to have become a permanent resident around her heart.

  Most of the expressions of concern that greeted her in the days following the crimes came from distant adult relatives and former friends of the family. They arrived horrified by the story and eager to offer support, but their commiseration seemed in large part just good-hearted pity. For someone as independent as Tasha the sense of people feeling sorry for her was like sandpaper on a sunburn.

  But her fiancé was her age, one of her old group. He looked her in the eyes as they made their marriage plans and told her that he loved her. And so even though the clouds still covered her whole world, she clutched at that image of hope. If it took a hasty marriage to cement that hope into place, she thought, then so be it.

  Tasha couldn’t blame Patty for leaving; her friend had stuck it out for as long as she could. As grateful as both of the young women were for having had a place to stay together while Tasha worked on her recovery, Patty had been forced more or less to squeeze herself into the leftover spaces between everybody else in the house. She’d had to remain supportive of Natasha while staying in a home to which she had no connection except the two young women’s friendship.

  Finally, when Patty came in late one night after a particularly long recess from her caretaker duties, she was told by the owners to conform to household conduct or leave immediately. Patty was nineteen now and even as a youngster had never been one to bow to authority easily, especially the authority of strangers. The rebellious streak was part of what had attracted the two girls to each other when they first met.

  So when Patty finally left, Tasha knew she couldn’t blame her. No one else had rushed to be with her as quickly as Patty had or had devoted as much energy to pulling her through those first dark days.

  Tasha knew that if things had been reversed, she would have had a hard time standing as much as Patty did. Her friend had her own life and her own problems to attend to. So now Tasha tried to match her reaction to Patty’s leaving with the loyalty her friend had shown her. And the only way to do that was to let her go without objecting.

  But it felt like another door closing in a long hallway filled with closed doors. She thought about the hope of escape that her coming marriage offered. The thick gray cloud that had become her most consistent companion was nothing she would miss.

  Thus when the ninth of October rolled around and Tasha got word that Steve Fisk had finally arrested Sonia Seigel and charged her with helping Robert dodge the police, it seemed that somehow the loose ends were tying themselves up. She had no idea whether Sonia had really taken any part in the crimes, but at least it could all get sorted out now.

  She rode to the airport glad to assume the false identity, feeling it would be a sort of dress rehearsal for dropping the Peernock name altogether. A few months before, if she had considered marriage at this early age at all, she would probably have kept her own name. Now it would be a relief to shed this final tie to the man who had brutalized her so badly.

  She had a vague sense of the work Victoria was doing on her behalf, but the long legal explanations were confusing. The upshot was simple enough: She was dead broke and could not work. She had no chance at getting any of whatever money might be left in the insurance policies or the remaining family estate until after all the dust had settled from the civil trials and from her father’s criminal case. That could be months. More likely, Victoria had warned her, it could be years.

  So when the big jet picked her up and carried her high over the ocean and beyond the huge waves thundering into the shoreline where she had stood watching the crazed loners paddling out to do battle with waves anyone else would flee, it felt almost as if her life were fastened to the tail of the airplane, being pulled through that imaginary rainbow on the horizon like thread through the eye of a needle.

  It’s just as well that Natasha kept distant from the action in Victoria’s office; if she had known how badly her lawyer was being swamped, her sleep pattern might have been worse. Dern, Mason and Floum had been whipped into a frenzy by Robert Peernock. He peppered them with instructions from his cell, demanding that they protect his estate.

  The news that his money had been frozen by Victoria Doom’s legal actions sent him into a campaign of demands that his lawyers attack her with every tactic available to regain use of his money and allow him to buy the best possible defense. Bradley Brunon’s $60,000 fee covered only the preliminary hearing. After that, Peernock would have to run his defense at taxpayer expense unless he could get at the family’s money.

  Dern, Mason and Floum responded with equal fervor, using their motions to raise questions about Victoria’s basic honesty and integrity in handling the case. In opposition to her motion to exclude Peernock from his estate funds, they repeatedly referred to her as showing a lack of integrity by not cooperating with them, and of being deceptive in her manner of handling the case by showing a failure to act professionally. These terms were not just annoying insults, they were highly loaded words. If such charges could be proved, she would be liable for malpractice and face possible disbarment.

  As she sat reading the latest attacks on her credibility, Victoria shook her head. It was as if Robert and his big Century City law firm were personally offended that she was fighting tooth and nail to give her client every advantage.

  She knew that the accusations toward her were a silent signal to the court, pressing the judge for some sort of side action to be taken against her that, by forcing her to defend herself, would further bite into her disappearing sleep time. Dern, Mason and Floum was laying siege, burying her under paper, fighting with all the resources at its disposal. The firm was generating opposition at the rate of nearly $30,000 a month in legal fees.

  Meanwhile the small retainer allowed Victoria by the court from the estate’s funds would be eaten up in two months by her office overhead alone, not counting all the court’s tiling fees and her investigator’s fees. And she could forget about any living expenses for herself. As the Peernock case rapidly became a legal black hole, she was forced to begin farming out her other cases. Her entire practice gradually centered on fighting the Peernock case, just as she had initially feared.

  Still, Peernock and his lawyers hadn’t yet found a way to combat the two-pronged strategy she had devised. She divided the damages in Natasha’s case into two groups: anything that had rightfully belonged t
o Claire, and the rest of the money or property that might currently belong to Robert. She had blocked them both.

  Since it was natural for Robert to want to gain access to estate money and insurance money to hire more legal help, she had no doubt that he would dissipate whatever he got his hands on, leaving even less for the girls than whatever now remained after his six-week flight. So she was determined to tie up any money that might be claimed as Robert’s until the court could rule on whether he should be allowed to profit in any way from his wife’s death.

  By this point the case had become as personal to her as it had to Steve Fisk. She couldn’t forget about the sad little “Agreement” Robert and Claire had signed, in which Claire had asked for Robert’s written promise not to beat the women or to attack Natasha verbally. She remembered Claire’s request that he simply pay for basic expenses without making them beg, as well as the passage that guaranteed Robert would not spend away any of the community property without Claire’s permission before August 1.

  But Victoria now knew that he had nevertheless gone through the bank accounts like water. He had converted both of his daughters’ trust accounts to his own use on the morning immediately following the crimes. Bank records prove that he had begun the process before the police attempted for the first time to contact him with the news of the incident.

  That meant that he had raided the accounts before he could have had any way of knowing Claire was dead and that the “Agreement” not to touch them could no longer be enforced.

  Unless he was the one who had killed her.

  And so Victoria strongly suspected that Robert might have slipped up just a tad on that little passage in the “Agreement” about not striking Claire or Natasha.

  CHAPTER

  17

  It was late on her first night in Hawaii as Natasha tiptoed into the single men’s barracks behind her fiancé. She wasn’t sure why they had to sneak in, moving quietly down the hallways until they came to his shared room. She didn’t know whether he had been unable to secure housing for them or was just unwilling to put forth the effort. Either way, the result was that the first few days in Honolulu involved finessing past MP’s whenever they wanted to leave together, then tiptoeing back inside after hours. Most of the time she stayed alone in the room while he was at work. Her appearance kept her from wanting to go anywhere, anyway. Especially in the daylight.

  But the trip had still been an adventure. Not even the muted military surroundings could hold back the thick tropical scents that floated everywhere. The varieties of palm trees put California to shame and the island’s summer colors ran the spectrum. The view was hidden from her while she stayed inside, but she could feel it all out there, close by. All she had to do was bide her time and play each moment as best she could until things started to brighten up somehow. She was alive against all odds, she had successfully traveled far away from her destroyed home. Even the strangeness of seeing the island’s lush natural beauty set next to the stern presence of old war monuments and menacing battleships was nothing that could faze her. Since the Peernock household had equipped her with mental compartments for storing impressions that seemed to cancel each other’s message, she could handle an odd new environment and a bizarre living situation without a blink. Things had to brighten up now. The weirdness of living surreptitiously on a Navy base wasn’t going to steal her sense of savoring the moment. Not for anything.

  She was alive. She had escaped. The rest could be sorted out later.

  On October 23, after a week or so in the barracks, the young couple sneaked away to town and met with a judge in a tiny room of some anonymous-looking official building. The service went by in a blur: a frank, no-frills ritual. Tasha didn’t need the white dress and organ music. It was another step into freedom; the marriage made it possible now for the couple to seek living quarters off base.

  She still had a few thousand dollars left over from her mother’s small insurance policy following the cremation and burial. Part of it went to help her new husband pay for a single night of honeymoon in one of the beautiful high-rise hotels that line Honolulu’s beach area. The surroundings were the best she had seen in a long time and the private room that the two shared was especially welcome after the complete lack of privacy that she had endured since the night of the crimes.

  A single night in manufactured luxury allowed these two young lovers, both still in their teens, to exist inside a tiny bubble of private sweetness which they knew would end the following day. The bubble enclosed them and wrapped them in its softness just as similar bubbles have hidden lovers from the world and from their everyday lives for thousands of years, even when they know full well that the walls are hopelessly thin and cannot endure.

  It made the thought of waiting for an apartment of their own a little easier as they sneaked back into the barracks on the following day.

  • • •

  “Hi, Vicki.”

  “Natasha! You’re not back in town, are you?”

  “No, I’m still in Hawaii.”

  “Good. When my secretary said you were calling, I thought you’d got some crazy idea about flying back here or something.”

  “No, I just—”

  “Are you calling about the case? I don’t think there’s any news yet. Your father’s just waiting to—”

  “It’s not about that.”

  “Oh. So how are you doing, then? Everything okay?”

  “It’s all right. I just …”

  “You just what? Talk to me. Your voice sounds funny.”

  “It’s just … sometimes we have to go out, you know, and people ask, some of them ask, about my face.”

  “Well, you just ignore them. Or tell them it’s none of their business.”

  “I tried that, but you can’t just offend people, and besides, that doesn’t always stop them.”

  “Mm. I see. What does your husband suggest you tell them?”

  “He can’t really deal with it. I mean, he still refers to the whole thing as an ‘accident.’ He never even says the word murder.”

  “Oh, boy. All right, look. I know you don’t want to have to explain everything to anybody who just walks up and shows some idle curiosity. So why don’t you just tell them it happened in a car wreck? If they ask about your mom and dad, you can tell them you lost your parents in the same car wreck that gave you the scars. That’s close enough to the truth.”

  “Yeah. That sounds good. What if they ask more questions?”

  “Beyond that, just tell them you don’t like talking about it. Anybody who doesn’t back off after that deserves to get their feelings stepped on, you know?”

  They talked for a while longer, trading a little news. But Victoria hung up feeling heartsick. She wondered if her advice to Tasha about hiding the source of her scars had really meant anything to her. This case seemed to constantly call upon her to exhibit abilities she wasn’t sure she had. She could only hope to have given Tasha something she could use.

  “What are you doing here?”

  The barracks guard didn’t look familiar to Tasha. He was glaring at her with his eyes full of suspicion. She knew that plenty of the enlisted men sneaked their girlfriends in for little visits. Apparently the guard knew it too.

  She was dressed in nothing more than a T-shirt and panties and she blushed under his unwavering gaze. Her mind raced, trying to size up how much of the truth she was supposed to tell this guy. The guard flicked his quick gaze around the room and drew himself up to full height, working to impress upon her that she had better not try anything funny.

  “Y’know, you could get your boyfriend bagged for having you in here.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Tasha retorted, then made a quick mental note to keep her voice friendly as she continued, “We’re actually married.”

  “Interesting,” the guard replied, taking a good look at her long legs.

  Her T-shirt felt like it had shrunk about three sizes. Why the hell hadn’t she put on a bra?


  “No, really.” She smiled, trying not to shake. “We just got married and he’s at work now but we already have an apartment and as soon as he gets home we’re moving in over there because this is our last day here and I’m just—”

  “Your last what? You mean to tell me you’ve been living here in violation of policy, misusing Navy property in complete disregard for—”

  “Look. We’re married.”

  “Uh-huh,” the guard replied, not actually calling her a liar but getting his point across all the same. He ran his eyes down the clipboard in his hand. Finally he seemed to see something that relieved his suspicion a bit.

  “Well, I see he’s moving out, all right. But he’s listed as being a single male until seventeen hundred hours today.”

  “Hey, I can’t help what—” She stopped, dropped her voice, and started again. “I don’t know what’s on that list, but we got married last week and now we have a place to stay and he got permission from whoever. So can’t we just—”

  “I suppose you must have some kind of proof, since you’re all legal and everything?”

  “Well …” Tasha looked up at the small bag she had just finished packing. The marriage papers were in it, all right. And she had stowed it away neatly, high up on the top shelf of the tall wall unit.

  “Well?” the guard asked, following her gaze.

  “It’s way up there. Can you get it down for me?”

  The guard put the situation together fast. Only a hint of a grin flashed before he replaced it with his special interrogator’s maybe-you’re-a-spy scowl. “You want me to climb up there and give you a chance to run off?”

  “Why would I run off? This is all our stuff. And I haven’t done anything—”

  “Y’know, I don’t have to stand here and argue with you.” He ran his eyes along her bare legs again. Slowly. Tasha felt the T-shirt shrink another couple of sizes.