A Checklist for Murder (18 page)

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.

These features went beyond the mere similarities of the vise teeth as they came from the factory; they included the nicks and wear marks that give each vise its own particular “fingerprint.” Lewellin found three major dings on the clamping surface of the vise, plus a couple of smaller striations. Their size, shape, and orientation to one another formed a metallic “fingerprint,” and they were the basis of his conclusion that the metal bar found under the Cadillac had undoubtedly been made in Peernock’s vise.

At 10:30
A.M.
Fisk’s men observed Sonia Siegel leave her aunt’s house and load suitcases into a blue Toyota that she had rented the day before, after the police went out to her place and impounded her car. She drove back to her condo.

Later that day she drove to Century City, a prestigious business community adjacent to Beverly Hills. The COBRA unit tailed her to an attorney’s office inside the gleaming white Twin Towers, a matching set of designer skyscrapers housing dozens of prestigious law firms. More big-time corporate legal work gets done in Century City in a single day than many small towns see in a year.

Sonia asked her attorney, Paul Moore, if she should be helping Peernock by paying his bills.

“That’s a personal decision,” he answered. “I can’t advise you on that.”

“I just feel that I should be loyal,” Moore remembers her reply, “—that I’ve been in love with this man for a period of years. I don’t want to, you know, be his friend and because of the circumstances just remove myself from him.”

Robert Peernock, however, was not sitting back and passively relying upon his girlfriend to find out things for him.
As Tasha lay in her “safe house,” she had no idea how close by he really was.

Deanna Bello shared a common wall with the condominium of Natasha’s future in-laws. But Bello had no idea that Natasha had just taken temporary refuge there while she tried to get some balance back into her life.

Bello had decided to put her condo on the market and had recently hung a “For Sale” sign out on the balcony. It was a good spot for the sign, clearly visible to any potential lookie-loos who might be cruising the neighborhood in search of a good deal on a place to live. The balcony was right above the garage and faced directly onto the street.

As Deanna Bello later recalled for detectives, it was at the very end of July or the beginning of August that she was at home on her hands and knees scrubbing the wall-to-wall carpet. She had just put her small child down for a nap and while working she kept the door to the garage open to get some cross breeze. Bello was so busy scrubbing that she didn’t hear the man approach her until after he had entered through the open garage door and stepped inside.

He quickly identified himself as a realtor, offering her a card with a Latino surname that she didn’t really focus on. But she did notice that when he handed her the card his hand was shaking.

She also noticed that his Latino name didn’t seem to fit his Anglo features.

Despite her eagerness to sell the place, this just wasn’t sitting right with her. She tried to stop him, suddenly nervous about this intrusion. She was annoyed at him for presuming to enter uninvited and at herself for not having taken the sign down until her cleaning was finished. Besides, being alone there with her little boy sleeping upstairs made her feel even more vulnerable. She explained that she wasn’t really ready to show the place today because the rug was wet.

But the white-skinned realtor with the Latino surname was already sweeping his eyes all around the room. “That’s okay,” he replied without looking at her, then proceeded to walk in uninvited. She didn’t stop him as he passed, but she trailed close on his heels.

The mysterious visitor went straight for the back sliding glass door of the condo and peered out at the adjoining lawn, toward the place next door where Natasha was staying. From this vantage point he was able to see the other place over the wood fence separating the backyards.

He stood for several minutes, not doing or saying anything, just looking out the window. Bello kept herself between him and the room her child was sleeping in while an uneasy feeling grew inside her. Finally the man turned abruptly and walked toward the kitchen. Once again he focused on looking out the window, but from there Natasha’s temporary home could not be seen, just a truncated view of the people living on the other side. This didn’t seem to interest the realtor as much; he stayed at that window for only a few seconds. She watched him nervously and tried to think of ways to get him out of her house without appearing frightened.

He then moved to the sliding glass door. He seemed to have forgotten Bello completely and didn’t bother asking the constant patter of realtor-type questions that she had come to expect from professionals who dropped by to evaluate the prospect of a sale.

The sliding glass door had a curtain on it. He moved the curtain aside in order to look out at the yard. Again, that view didn’t seem to tell him what he wanted to know. He spun around and walked upstairs without bothering to ask for her permission.

She followed nervously as he walked right into her master bedroom and looked out the sliding glass, once more toward
Natasha’s temporary home. He remained there about a minute.

Suddenly he turned to her and muttered something about his clients, that he would “have to get back” to her. Bello was so grateful he was leaving that his comments didn’t even register.

She gladly followed as he moved down the stairs and stepped outside, where he stopped and stood for another moment in front of the garage, looking around.

As the realtor got in his car and drove away, she noticed that it was, in her words, a squarish blue car.

Robert Peernock’s Datsun F-10 was small, blue, and built with a “squarish” design.

It is an interesting coincidence, as such things go, that Deanna Bello was a nurse at Holy Cross Hospital, from which Natasha had just checked out. But at this point she didn’t yet know anything about her new neighbor’s dance with the grim reaper, so she had no reason to go next door and mention anything about what had taken place. She was just glad the strange episode was over.

Bello would later identify Robert Peernock from a police photo lineup called a “six-pack,” where his image shared the page with those of five other men. Whether or not any of them were actually employed in the real estate market, none had the Latino name on the business card that she later turned over to the police.

Steve Fisk blinked back the burn in his eyes and struggled to concentrate. You can only put in so many eighteen-hour days before they start catching up to you. But as he sat interviewing Jeanette, a longtime friend of Claire Peernock, he found that what she was telling him dissolved away the fatigue. She later repeated the story for this book.

“It was about three years ago,” she said, her voice shaking slightly under the weight of the memory.

“Claire had made a left turn at a yellow light. An oncoming car ran into her and she ended up with a broken ankle. But the thing is, and she was so upset when she told me this, Robert was furious with her. Claire thought that it was not for wrecking the car, but … for surviving the impact.”

Jeanette inhaled and continued in a softer voice, in which the pain and the anger were nevertheless plain. “She told me he seemed disappointed she didn’t die. It would have made everything easy for him, don’t you see? Nobody wanted to believe her, of course, when she called several of us and begged us to make sure that if she was ever killed in a traffic accident, to see to it that it was investigated. I mean, I grew up in Louisiana where human respect, basic decency, it still means something, you know? Because even those of us who knew Bob, and knew what he was like, we never wanted to believe he would actually …”

Lead Investigator Steve Fisk left Jeanette’s place knowing it was going to be a while longer before he got any decent sleep.

He knew that the Foothill Homicide Division had received a rash of calls in the past day or two, from former neighbors of the Peernocks as well as former co-workers. They claimed to have seen Robert driving around his old neighborhood and in the area where Natasha was now staying. He was said to be driving a blue car, but there was some disagreement whether it was his Datsun F-10 or the blue Toyota Sonia had rented a few days earlier.

It was August 1 and Natasha tried not to think about anything going on outside the room. She wouldn’t have been physically strong enough to endure Claire’s funeral that day, even if the cops had allowed her to risk exposure there. Her father was still at large, still sending messages through various attorneys that at some unspecified point he would be getting ready to turn himself in.

She tried not to wonder where her father was. She tried not to hope that the cops downstairs were very, very good at their jobs and wouldn’t be killed in an ambush by her father, because to hope for that was to admit there was a chance that they could not protect her.

She was learning that in situations like this the trick is to get small in your thinking. Avoid the big picture. Focus on moment-to-moment victories, things like getting out of bed by yourself then sneaking into the hallway so that you can practice walking to the bathroom without somebody rushing up to help you.

It took several tries, but she finally made it without anyone having to carry her. Leaning on the wall, walking slowly, she was able to keep just enough balance to walk to the bathroom by herself.

The Elephant Man with bad legs.

While Natasha was trying to make it down the hallway without falling over, Steve Fisk attended Claire’s funeral in the faint hope that something would come up that could help lead him to the suspect. Claire’s husband, as it turned out, failed to show up for her last rites.

“Tash,” Patty ventured softly, “everybody wants me to pressure you into going for therapy. Do you even want to try it?”

“I did at the hospital.”

“No, I think they mean more like a long-term type of thing.”

“Come on, Trisha, you know I’m not the type to spill my guts. This whole southern California thing about everybody telling you to get therapy every time anything goes wrong … I mean, people go to therapists like it’s shopping or something. Sometimes I get the feeling that saying ‘Get into therapy’ to somebody has just become like another way
for people to tell you they don’t want to deal with whatever’s going on in your life. You’re just supposed to go tell it to somebody who’s being paid to listen.”

“Okay.” Patty sighed. “I figured your answer would be something like that, but I just thought—”

“Hey, why don’t you go out somewhere? You’ve been on duty ever since this all happened. Get some sun. You’re not as allergic to daylight as I am.”