A Checklist for Murder (2 page)

Given the severity of her injuries, they moved her out as quickly as they could. But like the woman on the driver’s side, the passenger had suffered massive trauma about her head and face. It took extra precious seconds to handle her with extreme care as they got her strapped to a backboard with her arms and legs fixed in place and a cervical collar stabilizing her neck. Such precautions are standard under the circumstances, but careful handling of the surviving female became more urgent when they found what appeared to be brain matter on her clothing. The paramedics didn’t know yet if the brain matter was hers.

They rushed the surviving passenger away on the gurney to begin first aid at a spot behind their ambulance, which had been parked away from any possible flow of gasoline from the wrecked car. They knew it would be a fight to stabilize her enough for the ride to nearby Holy Cross Hospital. With an apparently severe skull fracture and the resulting possibility of coma, the traumatic shock of moving could kill her.

The surviving female groaned softly and muttered a few delirious words. Head-injury patients tend to go in and out of consciousness, so whenever a victim seems alert enough to speak, paramedics will take the opportunity to attempt a few basic questions to determine if the patient is oriented. Clyde asked her name, but got no intelligible answer.

All three paramedics were struck by the fact that even
away from the accident scene the young woman’s clothing still reeked of gasoline.

While Clyde directed the treatment and the gentle questions, he noticed an engine company arriving in response to his call. Fire fighters used a two-and-a-half-gallon water gun to soak down the smoldering rope under the car. Then they pulled a hip line over to spray off the accumulated gas under the car, reducing the danger of explosion. Amid the flash of emergency lights, the typical noise of an accident scene was beginning to drone in the predawn darkness. Idling engines rumbled under the crackles of dispatch radios.

Todd and Paul continued with the surviving passenger while Clyde asked the fire fighters to leave the deceased woman in place after the fire danger was controlled. He knew that police investigators would not want anything disturbed more than necessary.

Meanwhile Todd and Paul were unable to orient the survivor. She couldn’t identify herself, tell what had happened to her, or even say if she knew where she was. Her breath smelled slightly of alcohol, but it seemed unlikely that alcohol could be the cause of her incoherent condition.

Natasha Peernock was in the place dreams come from. Dreams, or nightmares. Her eyes could register forms moving. Her ears could register sounds. But her conscious mind had been knocked aside and the messages coming in through her senses were getting lost somewhere deep within her. They mingled with the rest of her unconscious, with memories, with hallucinations. Whatever was taking place in the three-dimensional world around her, or even in that tiny part of the world right outside her own skin and bones, it would all have to go by without her help, without her attention, without her even taking notice.

•   •   •

Arson investigators Michael Camello and Derrick Chew responded to the 8600 block of old San Fernando Road between 5:00 and 5:30 that morning. They saw a fire engine, a patrol car, and a paramedic ambulance already there, plus a handful of onlookers.

The hood and trunk of the car were open. Fire Captain Gene Allen told them that when he had arrived on the scene he’d found both lids closed, but that his men had had to open the hood to check for possible sparking. The fire fighters had also taken the trunk key from the ignition in order to open the trunk and make the same check there.

Camello and Chew had been summoned to determine if this was a crime scene. Had someone intended this car and the people inside of it to explode in flames? In those first moments they learned that a surviving passenger had already been removed from the car and was being given preliminary treatment in the ambulance, but that she was in no condition to offer them any information.

The heavy car was built like a battle tank. Despite a collision severe enough to tear down a telephone pole, most of the damage to the car was in the area of the right front fender. Other than having the one front wheel collapsed, the car was, incredibly, almost drivable.

Inside the passenger compartment, Camello and Chew shared the reactions of the others, amazed that there was no observable damage to the interior other than a minor ding in an air-conditioning vent and a thin crack in the lower right portion of the windshield. Even that small fracture was a single stress crack, not the sort of spidery impact lines that distinguish a blow to the glass from the inside. They observed the deceased woman still in her original position on the driver’s floor of the car. Camello spotted a single brown work glove on the floor next to the body, and a capped bottle of Seagram’s 7. In his experience, it seemed odd for anyone to drive with a large bottle of such hard stuff. But he also
knew that people are completely unpredictable in their drinking habits.

Camello and Chew noted a large amount of blood on the dash and on the floor. Camello suspected that some of the residue was brain matter. Like the paramedics, he and Chew agreed that the deceased woman was in terrible shape for being in such a well-preserved automobile.

Camello looked inside the open trunk. He saw a gas can, scraps of paper, rags, and a wooden stick. It appeared that they had all been burned recently; the rags still felt warm to his touch. He directed photos to be taken while he checked to see if there were any exposed wires that might have ignited the trunk contents in some accidental way. But although he knew that anything is possible with explosive liquids, the trunk fire had already struck Arson Investigator Camello as being incendiary in nature.

The sight under the vehicle was also consistent with a crime scene. He noted that the rope “wick” near the gas tank was wrapped around some type of metal bar. The bar had a sharpened edge and was pointed toward the gas tank with the tip of the point about half an inch from the fuel supply. The other end of the bar was secured to the car’s undercarriage by a single screw. Even though everything under the car was dirty, the single screw holding the pointed bar was shiny and clean. Camello noted some darkening on the underside of the gas tank, appearing to be a hydrocarbon burn residue. The location of the partially burned rope added to Camello’s suspicions of attempted arson. But with a dead woman in the front seat and a delirious female pulled from the wreckage, the scene left no doubt in his mind that it revealed arson for the purpose of murder.

Somebody had gone to a great deal of trouble to turn this car into an elaborate, self-destructing death machine.

Camello then began searching for the source of the gasoline leak. Despite the strong, persistent odor, he could find
no ruptures in the tank itself. He untied the end of the rope from the pointed metal bar and pulled the bar’s pointed end down, away from the fuel tank. Once the pointed bar no longer blocked his view of the tank, Camello noted that there was a tiny area of the tank’s surface that had been scraped clean. It looked as if the point had momentarily brushed the metal, such as it might do in a collision of insufficient force to actually cause a rupture. Thus, it was possible to speculate that if the big Cadillac had not been stopped by the telephone pole, and if the car’s huge V-8 engine had gone on building momentum until the car hit the retaining wall at the road’s dead-end, the metal bar could have rammed and punctured the gas tank. With the rope “wick” still burning and attached to the metal bar secured under the fuel tank, there could have been an explosive, extremely hot fire. With the amount of gasoline pooled inside the heavy car’s interior, Camello knew that the county coroner would have been lucky to be able to identify the car’s two passengers through dental records.

Paramedic 3 Clyde Piephoff climbed in the back of the ambulance to prepare to load the patient with Paul, the trainee. Todd got in front to drive them to the hospital. After repeatedly asking the patient if she could tell him the name of the other woman in the car, Clyde finally got a momentary response from the young woman. She was able to murmur the name “Patty,” but did not give a last name. Clyde went back to check the car for IDs and found two purses, one with a driver’s license in the name of Claire Peernock. He assumed the other purse must belong to Patty, whom his patient had identified as the deceased woman. If the disoriented woman in his ambulance was Claire Peernock, she certainly didn’t look like she was over forty years old, as the California driver’s license indicated. In fact, neither of the two women looked that old, but their faces were so bloodied and
distorted by the trauma that anything was possible. There was no time to sort it out. One of the paramedics tossed Claire Peernock’s purse into the ambulance while they all got ready to roll.

As the first pale light of predawn began to show, supervising paramedic Clyde Piephoff greeted the day knowing he had just received a hard-core illustration of the need to be prepared to deal with anything, at any time on his twenty-four-hour shift.

“Do you know your name?”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Do you have any idea what happened to you?”

The gentle questions of the paramedics drifted in Natasha’s ears. They stirred reflexes in her brain, even elicited a few partial responses. But those responses, the words and the pieces of words, didn’t come from Natasha as anyone knew her. They didn’t even come from Natasha as she knew herself. They were spatters from her unconscious thought stream, bubbling up through her vocal cords like sprays of some nonsense conversation held with a sleepwalker.

Because Natasha was hovering in a place where things she had done long ago were occurring over and over on a never-ending loop, while things she had only planned to do in the future seemed to have already taken place. Any response that people in the so-called real world would get from her now would only come from far down inside of that place, where dreams and memories and plans and fears all jumble up like brightly colored bits of glass shaken together in a box.

The paramedics did everything they could to get her to fight her way back to a semblance of consciousness, but Natasha was wandering the darkness down where the nightmare factory likes to crank up its assembly line deep in the night. Where familiar shapes can turn into monsters and strike out at you, then snap back into harmless images, all in the blink
of an eye. She was alone in the innermost chamber of some dark cave where the paramedics, the police, the doctors, could not go. They couldn’t even summon her back.

If Natasha returned at all, she was going to have to come back on her own.

CHAPTER

2

I
t was after midnight on July 23, more than twenty hours after the crash was discovered, when Natasha’s consciousness slowly returned. She fought to open her swollen eyelids, but the torn, puffed flesh around her eyes barely let in any light. Overhead lights were on; there was nothing around her to indicate time. Her contact lenses had been removed, leaving a haze she could only see through well enough to realize that she was lying in a hospital bed. She got the impression that she was the only patient in the room, but had no idea yet that the severity of her wounds and the intensity of her treatment had dictated a private recovery environment. In fact, she had awakened earlier, just long enough to be approved for transfer from the ICU to a private room, but she had no memory of that.

Moments later, while she fought back the groggy remnants of anesthesia, she became aware of a nurse puttering about her bedside, adjusting IV drips, monitoring her vital signs.

When the nurse saw Natasha’s eyes flutter open she smiled down at her with a detached, professional gaze. “Do you know where you are?” the nurse asked softly.

Natasha had to struggle to make her lips form a word, to make her throat push out a sound. “A hospital.” Her voice rasped out in a dry whisper.

“That’s right,” the RN said, never dropping her trained smile. “How does your head feel? Do you think you could answer a few questions?”

“What—what hap—what happened?” She pushed the
whisper a little harder, but her vocal cords weren’t ready to come back on-line.

“Well, it seems that you were in some kind of an accident. A car accident. So can you tell me your name?”

“Natasha.” She quit pushing her voice and let the whisper do the work. Her mouth was too dry. Her tongue felt thick and heavy.

“And your last name?”

“Peernock.” The moment she pronounced her family name, Natasha felt a small shock wave go through her. She wasn’t sure why.

“Good, and what year is it, Natasha?”

Natasha’s first name sounded odd, coming from this woman. People who know her usually just call her Tasha, sometimes shortening it simply to Tash. To hear the formality of her full name as she lay helpless only emphasized to her that she was in a strange place.

But a moment later she realized that she couldn’t answer the question. She didn’t know what year it was. At first it felt kind of funny to find a piece of her memory gone. It wasn’t like anything she had ever heard about amnesia. After all, she knew who she was. And when the RN told her that this was Holy Cross Hospital, she recognized the name; she had driven by the place in the past. But her memory had been Swiss-cheesed and little pieces were simply missing. She got her street address right, but she couldn’t remember the name of the current U.S. President. She could picture his face but the name was blank.

And now another shock wave jolted her. This one was stronger. It shot through her like an icy wind and suddenly she didn’t feel like answering any more riddles. Her right hand rose absently to her forehead and sent strange messages to her brain: her hair was gone—there were sutured gouges all across her face and head.

But the messages were too much to deal with at the moment.