A Checklist for Murder

by Anthony Flacco

  Later, as I packed away his bundles of rambling correspondence, hundreds and hundreds of wasted pages generated by a man with nothing else to do to fill the slow drip of the years, I paused to glance again at a small line of print stamped horizontally at the sides of the pages.

  It struck me as a kind of final epitaph to the sincerity of his whistleblower claims.

  “Copied at taxpayer expense.”

  THE GRANDFAMILY

  When Claire Peernock selected Victoria Doom as the one to whom she would entrust her future as well as the future of her children, she wove the first invisible stitch in an unseen network of connected choices. Each of those choices was made by someone determined not to let the forces of evil operate with impunity in their lives, regardless of the degree of sacrifice and determination required to make those choices stick. This invisible network would eventually grow to encompass dozens of strangers. It linked them together, indelibly altering each of their lives.

  When such a web is composed of choices made with the highest levels of courage and moral conviction, made in spite of fear or laziness or countless temptations, then each person behind those choices becomes one more link in a unique human constellation that is described here as a Grandfamily.

  The Grandfamily in this story is the thing that ultimately defeated the dark collective genius of all of the monsters who prowled the darkness unseen during the Peernock family’s night of tragedy. The Grandfamily began with Claire’s moment of choice to visit Victoria Doom and grew to become the engine of the Peernock story itself.

  Claire made a choice of excellence, based in honesty and in fairness. She did not seek out a courthouse shyster to help her rip off her husband; she sought out a woman reputed for fairness who would understand Claire’s position and help her find the strength to pursue an honest half of the family’s property, but nothing more than that. When she avoided the temptation to seek someone who would bulldog the divorce into hateful negotiations of greed and revenge, she set the energy impulse into motion.

  That choice put her in touch with an attorney who combined the ability to fight tooth and nail for the right verdict with a personality that responds strongly to situations in which someone is treated unfairly or is outrageously abused. With Victoria the first full link in this new Grandfamily was formed.

  Detective Steve Fisk was at the crime scene before the car’s engine had cooled, and the absolute wrongness of the situation went straight to his personal desire to keep the streets free of psychopathic killers who behave as if there are no laws but their own. When he met Natasha the next day and realized that what had been done to this family could just as easily have happened to his own neighbors, he began booking unpaid overtime six and seven days a week at a point in his career when many other officers are looking for easy assignments.

  He could have put in regular workdays and never been censured by anyone. He could have let Peernock walk and just chalked it up to the luck of the draw. He could, perhaps, have read later, in the newspaper, a story about Natasha’s being tracked down and killed by an unknown assailant, and shrugged it off as life in the big city. Steve Fisk had never heard the term Grandfamily and never pictured any invisible energy lines linking him with a woman he met only in death and an attorney he would not come to know until later. But Grandfamily connections don’t require anyone to use the term or to see any connections. All anyone needs is the right strength of heart.

  Fisk simply knew that he wasn’t about to tread water on this one and that he stood ready to put whatever energy it took into getting some justice back into this demonically wrong situation. And so another link in the Grandfamily was made.

  No one forced Craig Richman to put in so much extra time and energy; he could have left the job at the office and earned a fair wage and nobody would have faulted him. You win some, you lose some. Except for his strong need to see justice done, he could have stayed out of law enforcement altogether. In his first chosen field of radio broadcasting, he would almost certainly have made better money and would definitely have worked easier hours.

  In his case research, no one was pushing him to search every tiny piece of scrap paper forgotten in the storage boxes until he found what would come to be called the “checklist for murder.” But his own sense of excellence compelled him to chase down the case relentlessly. So another link in the web was formed.

  By this point, actions of the other members were ricocheting back and forth like lightning. A domino effect of action and reaction was altering their lives steadily and changing them forever.

  Howard Schwab was one of half a dozen judges involved in Robert Peernock’s criminal escapade. He could have been Peernock’s greatest ally. He is widely recognized as a judge who does not permit defendants to be railroaded, especially a man noble enough to risk his career to expose massive government fraud and waste. Schwab’s drive for excellence is known throughout California by people who have stood both with him and against him, and it was also evident here. His tendency to do exhaustive case research before coming into his courtroom enabled him to cut through the poses and deal with the facts. Despite Peernock’s constant accusations of courtroom corruption, despite his successful use of the system to subject the judge to examination by his peers for improper behavior, Howard Schwab pursued the case determined to offer a fair trial. After Peernock’s conviction and claim that Judge Schwab had cooperated with a frame-up, Schwab was cleared of any hint of any bias and his handling of the case was fully supported by the court of review.

  But by that point in the story, Robert Peernock was not just up against a legal system; he was up against a Grandfamily of people united in their need to do the right thing even if it seemed the hardest choice, the least popular choice, the most time-consuming choice.

  Thus, in the end, Robert Peernock turned out to be right about unseen connections existing beneath his murder conviction.

  However, he was all wrong about the quality of the energy.

  And he missed out entirely on the excellence.

  An observer searching for some evidence of a Grandfamily connection somewhere in the life of Natasha Peernock during the days following the end of her father’s trial could not be blamed for wondering if it had somehow missed her. A deepening depression that had been making life steadily more difficult threatened to envelop her completely. It appeared that the monsters were not through with her yet.

  When Victoria was finally able to arrange for Tasha to receive her first small check from the estate’s insurance money, minus the staggering sum that her father and his girlfriend had spent before access could be shut down, Tasha left L.A. altogether. Her marriage had ended with her husband stuck in the Aleutians and her stuck in Los Angeles. She hoped now to remedy the last part, and arrived down the coast in the town of Laguna Beach as a completely unknown visitor. Like some solo alien landing her flying saucer back behind the courthouse in the dark of night.

  But even there, amid beautiful scenery, she found herself lost in a community of strangers. Her feelings boiled inside her as if in an overheated pressure cooker. Every time she turned in some new direction for relief, the heat only seemed to intensify.

  How much loneliness, she wondered, how much of a sense of isolation, was considered tolerable? There was just no escaping the sensation that something was going to have to give. In her continued state of isolation, Tasha kept returning to the question of what her next move ought to be. But her thoughts beamed outward, bounced off the stars, and came back again and again with no answer.

  She could only wonder—how much is life on this planet supposed to hurt, anyway?

  As summer ended in the tiny town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, the Old Courthouse Building near the town square was playing host to the new office of Victoria Doom, attorney at law. The move away from Los Angeles had served to restore her zest for work, especially with her new life among all the exotic animals that she and Richard had gathered into their lives. Local cases began to come through her door as
she juggled work between her new office in town and her home office on the ranch.

  The only drag on her line was the nagging doubt about Natasha’s ability to find a life for herself following the resolution of the long trial. Victoria had forced herself to take a step back from Tasha’s life after beginning the first modest estate payouts to her. Victoria knew that her own protective nature could easily run on overdrive, but she kept reminding herself that Tasha was no longer the traumatized teenager she had first met, but an adult in her early twenties with every right to run her life as she chose. And for understandable reasons, the young woman wasn’t big on adult authority.

  But worry nagged at Victoria anyway. It followed her around the ranch as she visited the monkey cages and the birdcages and it stayed with her as she fed the llamas and tended the horses. It nibbled at her as she drove to the office in town, and most of all it snapped at her at night while she lay in bed trying to sleep.

  She realized there was no way Claire could consciously have known that Victoria would be the type to risk her life and her practice to stand by Claire’s brutalized daughter after the awful crimes were over. But the woman seemed to have had clear premonitions about the manner of her death; how much more had she sensed accurately? Victoria couldn’t escape the nagging sense that this leftover feeling of connection to Natasha was part of something Claire had intuitively known about Victoria’s nature.

  But she kept reminding herself that there was nothing else left for her to do. She knew that she had far outpaced her professional and moral obligations, had perhaps lost her objectivity altogether.

  So why didn’t it feel finished?

  She knew she had no right to intrude on Natasha and start telling her how to live her life. Most lawyers would have let it go long before this. Still, she lay in bed at night and fought a sense of concern that she could not rationally explain or justify. If she talked about it at all, she couldn’t say much more than that the damn thing just didn’t feel finished.

  Robert Peernock was also far from finished in his battles with the legal system. It took him until August of 1992, but he finally got himself transferred out of the Pelican Bay SHU. He did it by using court records from lawsuits had filed against employers many years before documenting his longstanding claim that he suffers from “sleep apnea.”

  And so in August of 1992 Robert Peernock blasted off from space station Pelican Bay after snagging a transfer to the much more tolerant atmosphere of the California Medical Facility, located in Vacaville between San Francisco and Sacramento. CMF was built with a design capacity of 2,168 inmates in the far less high-tech year of 1955. By the time Peernock arrived in 1992, the population was running at 150 percent of capacity with 3,293 inmates.

  Whether he truly suffers from sleep apnea and has it severely enough to warrant medical concern is a matter for prison doctors to decide, but presumably they are doctors who will never see the crime scene photos, the autopsy photos, the emergency room photos, the checklists, the cutter bar. They will most likely not read the transcripts of endless hearings in which Peernock jeered at the system’s ability to keep him down. They are surely far too busy to take time to note the long, long list of self-filed lawsuits Peernock has run over many years that demonstrate his ability to manipulate the legal system. They are unlikely to have enough information to weigh against the likely truthfulness of Peernock’s supposed medical complaints.

  Even if his sleep apnea condition is real, it cannot justify the general “walkabout” status he has been given, for inexplicable reasons, inside the overstuffed prison. He now mingles with a population of felons, some of whom are presumably murderers for hire.

  He is allowed access to the telephone.

  Peernock has a small prison bank account. Regular deposits are made into the account by “outside sources.” Despite his claims of concern for his daughters, he settled a small lawsuit with a large life insurance company shortly after arriving at Vacaville but never sent a penny to Natasha. The money is no longer in his prison account. Where did it go?

  He has found a woman in Pomona who is listed as “next of kin” in his prison file and who is allowed visiting privileges with him. Presumably she never saw Claire’s autopsy photos or Natasha’s emergency room photos.

  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.