A Checklist for Murder

by Anthony Flacco

  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.

  Still, as I reviewed Peernock’s habit of tape-recording practically every aspect of his life, I wondered how she managed to keep the past from haunting her more than it does. For example, many of the family belongings are now in Tasha’s hands by court order. Among the things she hasn’t thrown away are stacks of those tape recordings, accumulated over the years by her father. One tape was made when Tasha was a baby, at two and a half months of age. The tape consists of her infant sounds as Robert pesters her endlessly to “say something” for the microphone. With a music box playing Brahms’s “Lullaby” in the background, he begins with a sickly sweet cooing, urging her on. But when she doesn’t speak (at ten weeks), he badgers her to say something, say something, with growing intensity until she eventually begins to cry. He refuses to pick her up and comfort her until she “says something,” leaving her to cry louder and louder until the child is eventually wailing at the top of her lungs. Robert leaves the tape rolling, on and on. It is apparent on the tape that he does not pick her up. Little Tasha’s mouth stays right next to the microphone while Robert can be heard moving around in the background, doing nothing to comfort her because the infant won’t “say something.” Her punishment for saying no to Daddy had already begun. After a long time Robert’s angry voice finally says, “I don’t think I like that,” and the machine snaps off. He nevertheless saved the tape as a souvenir, for all those years.

  I mentioned the tape to her and told her it was only one reason why I was having so much trouble finding the source of her quality of spirit. There were countless others. She sighed and her voice grew quiet, but she began to explain. We talked about my question over the course of several days and the answer slowly came forward as she offered her understanding of herself.

  Natasha Peernock grew up in California, in an environment rife with spiritual viewpoints of every kind. She sees this lifetime as one of many she has had in this world. This time, as a little girl, she was given the maximum strain anyone could possibly carry, but as a result now she has the chance to make the maximum growth in herself. If Robert Peernock is indeed simply the end product of a long line of his own family’s abuses that grew in ferocity until a monster emerged, then it has fallen to a spirit with Tasha’s depth of serenity to overcome the power of that evil.

  From her refusal to give in to defeat on the night of the crimes to her stubborn insistence upon taking charge of her own recovery, Tasha took the lead in speaking out for the Peernock family women and in restoring what measure of justice she could.

  It’s just that it took everything she had, that’s all.

  Tasha finished by saying that she is determined to reap the peace and contentment due to her now, but given her past in this life, she hopes that this might be her last goaround on this particular planet. Even though she has a strong taste for adventure, she would like to try someplace else next time.

  After I had already spent months interviewing her for this book, night owls burning up the long-distance lines at two in the morning, I made my last trip out to see Natasha in person. We had become familiar with each other, comfortable in one another’s company. And so, as we sat up one night going over some of the hardest personal issues in the story, she took my hand and brought my fingers up to the side of her face, gently running my fingertips over the bones that were shattered around her eye socket, her cheek, her forehead.

  “Can you feel that?” she asked softly.

  She didn’t need to ask. It is the track of the monster, left behind like a horror story written in Braille. It must be an indication of the plastic surgeon’s skill, that her face can look so good while the bones feel so broken under the flesh.

  We left it at that and went on to other things. I can feel those bones under my fingertips every time I think of it, as clearly as if I were touching them again. Yet even though the monster track will be there all her life as a reminder of the monster’s passing, Tasha readily agrees that her survival itself is a larger reminder of the track of the Grandfamily that formed around her when everything might otherwise have been lost.

  The people in Tasha’s Grandfamily only knew that they had found a time and a place where doing the right thing in the best way they could was the only alternative acceptable to them. For all they knew at the time, they were making those choices alone and they would never see a moment of victory from it. But each one found that he or she had to do it anyway.

  Someday some genius in an attic lab somewhere will make special goggles that let the wearer see the millions of lines of glowing energy flashing back and forth among the Grandfamilies of the world like magical webs of light. Until then we can only track their invisible presence by the healing they create, by the strength they give, by the lives they change for the better.

  If that mad inventor had had his magic goggles ready back then, any one of us might have been able to put on a pair and see the energy lines of this story’s Grandfamily connections flashing through the air. As the actions of all its members reacted upon one another, they snatched power from demonic hands and restored a measure of justice in the aftermath of evil. Having seen it then, we could have gone on to watch the same process every day with the connections linking our own lives to the lives of countless like-minded people, whether they are strangers or not.

  But maybe imaginary goggles work as well. Seeing it in our mind’s eye might be enough to encourage any one of us to make the tough choices when lesser parts of us would rather take an easy way out. It might be enough to give us heart.

  Because we all know the monsters are out there. If we are to believe the toxic news coming nonstop over the media tubes, the monsters are growing in number, prowling the streets with impunity, tapping at the door, scratching at the windows. Nobody needs to invent special goggles to see the monsters. We all know that they are walking free among us, loud in their contempt, bold in their disrespect.

  But if we could just get Tasha’s flying saucer repaired and take it for a joyride, high up over the stratosphere, out there where the cold-eyed engineer/astronauts have those life-changing spiritual revelations that cause them to land, grinning ear to ear, talking crazily about the Big Picture, and if some beautiful mad scientist actually did issue sets of those magic Grandfamily goggles right before our own takeoff, then we could peer out of the view port and gaze back down toward the little ball hanging in space and see millions of lines of glowing energy flashing back and forth over the surface of one lonely planet as it rolls through the endless darkness.

  The aftermath of the Peernock story is proof of how strong that power is, whether we can actually see any Grandfamily connections around us or not. It is proof that although a society whose values appear to be crumbling in all directions can never endure without a return to higher levels of personal responsibility, the true believers are quietly making their stand. And so there is good reason to dare to be full of hope, to dare to be strong in the determination that we can yet make the world as we know in our hearts it ought to be.

  Meanwhile it probably couldn’t hurt to keep those goggles handy.

  SELECTED REFERENCES

  Brazelton, T. Berry. Families: Crises and Caring. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1989.

  Fontana, Vincent J. Save the Family, Save the Child: What We Can Do to Help Children at Risk. New York: Dutton, 1991.

  Layman, Richard. Child Abuse. Detroit: Omnigraphics, Inc., 1990.

  Moran, Richard (Special Editor). The Insanity Defense. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 477. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, Inc., 1985.

  Noguchi, Th
omas T. Coroner at Large. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1986.

  Sarason, Irwin G. Abnormal Psychology: The Problem of Maladaptive Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1984.

  Strean, Dr. Herbert and Lucy Freeman. Our Wish to Kill: The Murder in All Our Hearts. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1991.

  Swanson, David W. The Paranoid. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970.

  Willwerth, James. Badge of Madness. New York: M. Evans & Co., Inc., Philadelphia: distributed in the U.S. by J. B. Lippincott Co., 1977.

  and if nothing else works …

  Pawlicki, T. B. How to Build a Flying Saucer. New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1981

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The names of certain individuals who are not central to this story have been changed to preserve their privacy. A few small details that have no bearing upon the story’s truth have also been altered, once again in the interests of protecting the privacy of those who have done nothing to warrant the dangers of public exposure.

  Concern for this level of privacy is based upon the fact that elements of lethal threat behind this story remain all too real at the time of this writing.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The emotional courage of those who agreed to be interviewed on the record for this book is truly admirable. Others spoke only on condition of anonymity, with reservations that were either personal or due to legal restraint. But they also served to round out the truth of the story.

  Mark Renie from the American Film Institute gave invaluable commentary upon the early drafts.