A Checklist for Murder (15 page)

On July 25, 1987, the
Los Angeles Times
used fourteen inches of type to reveal that the autopsy had been conclusive—the cause of Claire Peernock’s death was homicide—and that detectives believed that whoever arranged the crash had tried to make it look as if Claire had been drinking and had wrecked the car. The police established that Claire Peernock had been known to dislike driving on the freeway at night and that no one close to her could find a reason for her to be in a remote section of town at that hour.

Police Lieutenant Bernard Conine explained that the car had been rigged to explode, but that the clumsy explosive apparatus had failed. He also revealed that the dead woman’s estranged husband, an expert pyrotechnic engineer, was the prime suspect in the crime and was being sought for questioning.

Victoria Doom, Claire’s former divorce attorney, saw the article. The headline read
MURDER PLOT SUSPECTED IN FATAL CRASH IN SUN VALLEY
. But she only glanced at it, so she never spotted the name of the victim, a woman she had met once, seven and a half months before. Three more days would pass before the attorney began her journey of self-doubt about the advice she had given Claire back in December.

At 12:32
P.M.
on the twenty-fifth, Robert Peernock registered at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. This time he signed the registration card as “Robert Thomas” from Amarillo, Texas. “James Dobbs” had apparently vanished into the Twilight Zone earlier that day, leaving “Robert Thomas” to occupy room 2323 and give an expected checkout date of two days later.

The following day “Robert Thomas” would come down and pay cash for the room, starting a pattern of visits that he
would repeat every few days to settle his bill, always in cash. It was a pattern he would keep up for weeks to come.

At noon on July 27, Steve Fisk again went to see Natasha at Holy Cross Hospital. By now the investigation had taken on an even greater urgency. The crime scene was cooling and the possibility of Peernock’s escape was heating up.

“Try, Natasha.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t try?”

“It hurts to think. I can’t think anymore.”

“Please, just a few more questions. He’s still out there. You want us to catch him, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then. What kind of gun was it?”

“A little one.”

“A pistol?”

“A pistol. My head hurts. It hurts to think.”

“What color was it?”

“It was a
gun
!”

“Right, but was it silver or dark blue or—”

“Black. A black pistol. The bullets go around in a thing.”

“A revolver?”

“I don’t know. This hurts.”

“Just a little more. Did you see bullets?”

“It was a
gun
!”

“Yes. But in a revolver you can see the tips of the bullets. In an automatic they’re all inside the—”

“No, it’s a revolver. A black one. With a wooden handle.”

At 5:30
P.M.
that July 27 evening Detective Castro waited at Foothill Station for the arrival of Sonia Siegel as he had arranged with her. He planned to have her tailed once she left the station, in order to see if she was in contact with
Peernock. But that wouldn’t happen. Sonia Siegel failed to show up.

It was dark outside the hospital-room window. The television played softly in the background. Patty wandered out to stretch her legs. Tasha stirred as the sound of familiar music suddenly came out of the TV. She struggled to focus on the screen, but the images were a blur. Still, as the show came on, she realized that this was an episode of
St. Elsewhere
, a television drama that she had taken an interest in a few years before. The stories on the show appealed to her. And the doctors and nurses seemed more interesting than the real ones she’d met as a thirteen-year-old while lying in traction in the hospital after her father had thrown her against the kitchen wall.

And now as the episode began she quickly felt drawn into the pleasant sense of escape, while the familiar world of the show took over. She knew the characters well enough to identify them by voice, even though she couldn’t see them on the screen.

In this episode one of the doctors was nearly killed. The camera entered his mind as he went through a near-death experience. The few images that Natasha could make out, combined with the voices on the sound track, caught her up in a fascinating experience. It all seemed so glorious: rising up over your body, looking down upon the scene while others fought to save your life, then floating up and away into a long tunnel that opened out into a huge ball of light at the gateway to a fantastic new world.

The spell was broken as a realization hit her. Floating? Ball of light? New world?

She had missed the
whole thing
. For the first time since she’d woken up in the hospital, Natasha felt herself getting mad. She had already tasted the shock and the grief, the confusion and the fear.

But this? Here she had come so close to having her head caved in with a claw hammer or some damn thing and the doctors had told her how she’d almost died and how at first they hadn’t even been sure they could save her, and now
this
?

Nothing. Nothing at all. No floating. No tunnel. No ball of light. And certainly no sage advice from spirit guides sent to escort her onto the next plane of existence. No, if that had happened she would have remembered it for sure.

Whether it was sheer coincidence or whether it had somehow been intended that she come across this particular TV episode right now, something had finally happened that allowed her to get a small taste, a first little inkling, of something deep down underneath all of the trauma.

She was beginning to feel the first sharp nibbles of her outrage.

At 2:30
P.M.
the following afternoon, Lead Investigator Steve Fisk arranged for a high-level COBRA tailing unit to be placed on Sonia Siegel in the hope of locating information on the whereabouts of Robert Peernock, who was now officially listed as the primary suspect in a designated homicide case. Fisk sympathized with Siegel’s dilemma regarding the suspicions directed at her boyfriend, but this business of her not showing up for a vital interview while a suspect was at large was not going to stand.

Then he called Dr. King at Holy Cross Hospital and obtained confirmation that Natasha’s wounds had definitely been caused by a blunt weapon, not by any sort of impact in an auto accident.

He arranged with U.S. Customs to be alert for any attempt by Peernock to leave the country.

He called the lab for fingerprint information and learned that while Claire Peernock’s prints had been found on the
whiskey bottle, they were not on the steering wheel of the car she was supposed to have been driving.

Even though she hadn’t been wearing gloves.

Meanwhile, Natasha had no way of knowing how deeply she had impressed him with her story, and how strongly Fisk’s instincts were being confirmed as the evidence began pouring in.

“No, really, I think some of the swelling’s going down. Right here around your eyes,” Patty assured Tasha as she stroked her freshly cleaned hair.

“You’re just getting used to looking at the Elephant Man,” Tasha muttered.

It was supposed to have been a joking reply, but Patty noticed that most of Tasha’s comments were tending to land like lead sinkers, even when she was trying to show some humor. Her empathy for Tasha’s feelings gave a glimpse inside her friend; the darkness there frightened her. Patty understood why it should be that way, but it scared her all the same.

CHAPTER

11

V
ictoria Doom has a youthful, animated voice and speaks in clipped, precise tones. Her conversation is focused with a good lawyer’s clarity of thought and is sprinkled with a broad base of facts, metaphors, and references.

But she still falters when she discusses Claire Peernock. She replays that one meeting with Claire over and over in her mind, questioning the strong advice she gave at the initial consultation, wondering if there is anything else she might have told Claire that could somehow have changed the outcome of a single night that ended in slaughter.

So while Victoria the attorney can verbally slug it out toe-to-toe with tough opposing attorneys from high-priced downtown law firms, while she can match wits with jaded judges behind closed doors in chambers, Victoria the woman has since given up her Saugus law practice and moved far away. Now she lives with her husband, a retired Air Force colonel, on a large parcel of rural land with a menagerie of exotic animals. Years after that single meeting with Claire, Victoria the woman is sure that she blew it somehow. But hindsight doesn’t help her to isolate whatever she might have done to magically reach into a troubled relationship and hand Claire some bit of advice that might have kept her from disaster.

Giving a wife strong advice had never been a problem for the attorney, until she met Claire Peernock.

“When Claire came in to see me, there wasn’t anything exceptional about it. I have a standard procedure that I run through at the office for everybody who comes in for a divorce.
I tell them about the process, how long it’s going to take, what needs to be done. I answer their questions and, you know, I try to give them a backbone if that’s necessary. I try to make them behave themselves if that’s necessary. I hand out Kleenex.

“She was concerned about her share of community property. It seems that her husband was one of those men who like to control the purse strings and keep the little wife in the dark about the finances. She wanted to keep the house they were living in, reasonable child support and spousal support, and whatever else she might be entitled to under the California law. She didn’t sound money hungry.

“Robert was served in early December of 1986 with a petition for dissolution and order to show cause, to set temporary child support and temporary use of the property, with a hearing date set for that coming January eight.”

At this point in Victoria’s story, there is a shift in her voice. The confident tones leave her as she steps away from her recital of the facts and evaluates herself. Victoria had indeed given Claire some strong advice. But the attorney leaves the woman to finish the thought in a slightly softened voice, a much more hesitant delivery.

“And unfortunately … you know … when it came to Claire, I missed the mark. Totally.

“That was the first and last time I ever saw her.”

In fact, when Victoria had last heard from Claire Peernock, she thought the matter had been dropped. Claire had left a phone message at her office advising that Robert had shown surprising resistance to the idea of getting divorced. He wanted a few months to try to work things out. If the relationship wasn’t going to survive, he wanted at least to make a venture into some kind of business using their jointly held properties. Robert even voluntarily signed an “Agreement” assuring Claire of continued support payments
through August of 1987. And if, by that time, he and Claire had not arrived at an arrangement that suited them both and gave her reason to reconsider her demands, Claire could reactivate her divorce proceedings. By the time Claire left the message telling Victoria this, it was Christmas Eve of 1986. She had already signed the “Agreement.”

On the same day that she received Claire’s message, Victoria wrote back and acknowledged that the divorce would be stalled as requested. She advised Claire very strongly not to sign any more documents without at least letting Victoria read them over for her. Then she closed the letter with the expressed hope that once August arrived, if divorce was still necessary, Robert and Claire would be able to proceed with an uncontested dissolution.

She knew it is rare that a husband and wife can divorce and divide a small fortune without hotly contesting each other’s position. But having met Claire only once and having been told that she had already decided to take this course, Victoria decided to accept her portrayal of the home situation as being one that would be resolved in a civilized fashion.

She put Claire’s legal file back in the cabinet and made a note on the calendar to check with her on the first of August. As an attorney this was all she could do for Claire at that time. She made no further attempt to contact her.

Seven months later, less than a week before Victoria was scheduled to call Claire and see whether she intended to go forward with the divorce action on the August 1 deadline, the first step on Victoria’s journey of self-doubt began. It was three days after the first newspaper article appeared regarding the crimes.

On July 28, a man walked into her office and identified himself as Claire Peernock’s brother, Maurice. He had just arrived from Claire’s homeland of Quebec. Speaking in a thick French-Canadian accent, he told how he had found Victoria’s letter to Claire inside the Peernock house, along with
some other papers. The letter guided him to her; he didn’t know who else to call upon for legal advice. Maurice assumed that Victoria already realized Claire had been beaten to death, that Natasha had been brutalized, and that police were searching for Robert. He asked Victoria to meet with him to discuss what should be done about Claire’s estate and the protection of the children.

Victoria stood in stunned silence and tried to absorb the news. In the nearly five years since she had become a sole practitioner, she had never been confronted with such blunt evidence of the deep rages inside the divorces she was hired to handle.

Maurice also informed her that he had just come from a brief visit with Natasha in the hospital. The young woman was going to survive and was expected to recover, physically at least. Although her sister would be taken into foster care in order to be able to stay in America, Natasha was going to need somebody to look after her interests, to help her deal with the family belongings, sort the property, protect the estate.

Maurice told her regretfully that he did not have the means to remain in California long enough to look after so many complex legal details, and an eighteen-year-old was not qualified to walk that minefield by herself. He added that since Victoria had been Claire’s attorney, Claire must have trusted her. On that basis, he appealed to Victoria for help.