A Checklist for Murder (30 page)

After a few minutes to restore order, Judge Rimmerman called for the defendant to be returned. This time there were two armed guards kept in position at the main entrance.

Five more were positioned in a semicircle around Robert Peernock.

CHAPTER

22

D
uring the time Tasha spent between trips back to L.A. to testify, Hawaii began to feel more like a trap than a paradise. Her appearance kept her from wanting to socialize and her artistic nature couldn’t find much in common with the military wives of her husband’s friends. She didn’t feel able to attempt working yet, and a new sailor’s salary doesn’t leave much money for a young couple’s entertainment.

Shortly after she’d returned home from her testimony in the juvenile case she began seriously to fear for her marriage. Even though it had been more an act of need than true love, it still felt wrong just to let the marriage go without a fight.

This was when Tasha realized she might have an opportunity to let her father be of some actual positive value after all the trouble he had caused. Perhaps the very real threat that he posed to her safety, plus the judge’s slip of the tongue in court when he’d mentioned her home state twice in a row, might offer her a way to use her witness-protection situation to maneuver a transfer out of Hawaii for her husband. A change of scene might be just the thing.

She called Pam Springer to complain of her fears now that her father surely knew where to send his private investigators to look for her. The complaints didn’t fall on deaf ears. Springer knew that Robert Peernock still had much to gain from his daughter’s untimely death before the case came to trial. And Springer feared that Peernock’s girlfriend, Sonia, might still believe in his innocence. It didn’t take much of a stretch to imagine a scenario whereby Peernock somehow
managed, with outside help, to hire another attempt on his daughter.

When Tasha began to sense that the system was going to try to help them, she was elated. She checked Navy base locations around the world and dared to hope that the DA’s office might persuade the Department of the Navy to work out a transfer to some exotic faraway place. Someplace far from the courtroom madness, far from the reach of her enraged father and yet a place like Hawaii, sunny and inviting.

In April the orders came through for a transfer to Adak, Alaska.

She rushed to a map. She looked, looked some more, took turns looking with her husband, nearly ruined her eyes searching the map, then finally found it: a tiny spec of an island off the Alaskan coast, near the Russian mainland. Close to the mainland. It has a population of about five thousand military personnel and dependents, living on a chunk of frozen tundra.

The perfectly linear reasoning of military intelligence had indeed answered the call to find someplace safe for this young woman whose father seemed bent on destroying her. The army had simply marched in step with the witness protection program’s main philosophy.

They can’t hurt you if they can’t find you.

The rules at Adak, as it turned out, were pretty simple. The guard/escort filled them in as soon as they arrived, talking fast to get his points across before the couple developed that glassy-eyed look people tend to take on as soon as they have the chance to walk around and see where they are.

“Relax,” he told them. “Not a problem. We’re a long way from Stateside; we don’t stand on a lot of ceremony here. Hey, how much trouble can you get into, wandering around on frozen grasses and fifty-seven varieties of moss on a seabound hunk of tundra?

“Oh, and pets? Not a problem. Just keep the eats inside. We have a lot of bald eagles around here and they love to carry off cats to feed their young.

“Dogs are a little tougher, although still not a problem. That is, if you can find one. Don’t get many strays here. In fact, if your dog escapes you only get one freebie from the dog catcher. Second time, they put the dog to sleep. Have to. Can’t risk having them wander onto the airstrip. Tend to cause plane wrecks, very tough in a location where everything you eat, drink, and wear is imported by air. Definitely a problem.

“Hey, other than that, not much else to do but work on your tan. Heh-heh. We like to say that around here.

“… You guys okay?”

By summertime Robert Peernock was on his third attorney. He had accepted no suggestions that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial or that he plead insanity. He maintained that any encouragement for him to do so was of course motivated strictly by orders from the state in their attempt to sabotage his defense. He remained confidant that at trial he would prove his innocence and expose the plot to frame him, to destroy his family and neutralize the threat he presented to the vast corrupt structure of the state government.

As for his daughter, Tasha was having such difficulty in her marriage that she managed a plane ticket back to Los Angeles for a visit and stayed for two months, agonizing over whether she should try to keep working at the marriage or throw in the towel and take her chances alone in California.

She contacted Victoria from time to time, hoping for news of some progress in the probate case that would allow a little of her mother’s life insurance money to be released to her for living expenses, or even allow the sale of one of the houses. But Victoria had to keep repeating the difficult fact that while there was indeed some money in the family estate,
it was tied up and would likely stay that way until Robert’s trial was heard. What Victoria didn’t tell Natasha was that she had been keeping up on the progress of the criminal case and things could have looked a lot better.

Because Robert’s position appeared defensible.

Victoria had learned much about him and was convinced that whatever whistleblowing Robert had genuinely done, it did nothing to explain the crimes. This was insight gained from bits and pieces of personal history she had picked up by helping to sort through the household goods and getting them into storage for Natasha. Most of it was stuff the jury would never see.

Robert had explanations for the explosive rigging under the car, and since juries are inclined to believe in corrupt government officials and tend to side with the noble notion of a little guy against the system, Peernock actually appeared to have a real chance of getting away with his crimes.

Further, after the battle she had been waging against his access to the family estate, Victoria knew he was madder at her than ever. Any slip-up on the part of the court could result in Peernock’s being free to come after her and Natasha once again.

She knew that Pam Springer had originally thought the case could be wrapped up in a year at the most. But that year was now ended and the trial was nowhere in sight.

Only Robert’s daughter could connect him to the awful crimes, and Natasha had already endured six days of testimony during the preliminary hearing and the Juvenile Court hearing. She had been repeatedly attacked on the witness stand and made out to be a liar. As for Victoria, it could go much worse for her if Peernock’s trial attorney decided to pursue Robert’s pet theory about Victoria Doom.

Word had filtered back to her that this theory now entailed Robert’s claim that when Claire came to Victoria for divorce advice and Victoria realized how much money the estate
would be worth with Claire dead, Victoria and Claire’s boss had conspired to create a plan whereby Claire would be snatched by hired killers and set up in a fake car wreck. According to Robert’s theory, although the clumsy explosive apparatus was designed to frame Robert, its very clumsiness showed that Robert wouldn’t have done it that way. He said Tasha had been included in the car wreck to raise the insurance value of the crimes, so that Victoria and Claire’s boss could then use legal means to loot Claire’s estate.

Since the estate would fall under Victoria’s control upon Claire’s death, as indeed much of it had done despite Natasha’s control by name, this would allow Victoria to gain access to the million and a half dollars in insurance money and real estate that the family would be worth if both Claire and Natasha died in a car wreck and earned maximum payment on their life insurance policies.

And so the realization gradually pressed down upon Victoria;
Robert was maneuvering her into position to take the fall for his crimes
.

She had located a number of policies on Natasha, totaling $187,000 on her alone. Claire had numerous policies and one of them paid several times more in value if she died in a car wreck. But Victoria knew she could never prove that she hadn’t known any of this before Claire was killed. In the eyes of a jury, if Victoria were psychopathic enough to kill for greed, she could certainly be portrayed as having the motive.

So the story was evolving that she and Claire’s boss had conspired to murder Claire and Natasha, but had somehow convinced Steve Fisk to program Natasha into repeating a phony handcuff story while she was still in the hospital, drugged and impressionable.

Or else they had terrorized her into giving the story.

Or else they had bribed her by promising her a chance at
revenge against a man who had scorned her for years, plus a hefty piece of the eventual estate payout.

In this theory, Natasha Peernock knew that her father was innocent but was glad to forgive Victoria and Claire’s boss for nearly killing her, for disfiguring her face, and for killing her mother—all in return for the chance to send Robert to prison and to get a share of whatever amount of his money might be left after all the court actions were finished.

Victoria wanted to laugh. It was so horrid even to think such things, it seemed absurd that any twelve people could be convinced of it.

And yet she knew that the prosecution had yet to find Robert’s signature on any of the evidence.

This whole thing is rigged! It has to do with millions and millions of dollars on state contracts!

—
Robert Peernock, moments before
being hauled out of the courtroom

Wouldn’t it be nice if Mommy died in a car wreck?

—
Robert Peernock to his ten-year-old
daughter, according to the neighbor   
who swore that she overheard it
          

CHAPTER

23

I
n April of 1989 Victoria Doom got the word that Robert Peernock had hired yet another law firm to help him try to pull money out of the estate funds to pay for building a defense. So far she had kept the accounts frozen, but now, twenty-one months after the crimes, she found herself back in court once more to answer Peernock’s assertion that the funds were
his
money and could not constitutionally be kept away from him and that to do so deprived him of the right to his best defense.

It is a compelling argument for any defendant to raise. And it was the same issue he had put forth at his preliminary hearing.

“The court,” he protested, “the State of California, has taken away all my property, all my possessions. I have not been convicted of any crime and yet every single thing I own in the world has been taken away from me. I
do
have enough money in my accounts to pay for attorneys. They have frozen all my accounts, yet I’ve not been convicted of any crime.

“This is a civil rights violation, and the state has done everything possible to make things as tough as they can for me.

“Now the court is choosing what lawyer I can have to represent me, even though I have money in my accounts to choose the attorney I want. Now, that’s certainly improper and illegal, a civil rights violation.”

Victoria found herself in Judge Rimmerman’s chambers with Robert’s new attorney, Marshal A. Oldman, who was
there to formally request the funds. Victoria knew this was her cue to again take protective action in the hope that whenever the criminal case concluded, Robert Peernock’s two daughters would have something left.

But this time she walked into the chambers more convinced than ever that if this new law firm successfully opened the floodgates, Robert would spend every penny of his daughters’ future before he was through. After nearly two years behind bars, he had motivation to employ every available resource to get himself out.

No matter who suffered as a result.

And somehow after Natasha’s testimony against her father, Victoria had a hard time visualizing Peernock doing anything to help his daughter get back on her feet, even if he actually managed to beat the charges against him.

The sticking point was that no matter how aggressively any attorney would try to defend Natasha’s interests, Robert Peernock had the intelligence and skill to utilize every protection the constitution has to offer, right down to fine-print interpretations and subtle aspects of case law which most citizens wouldn’t comprehend. The pretrial courts knew that if they took a position which truly denied him any of his rights, a conviction would be worthless; they would simply be setting the stage for a mistrial or reversal upon appeal.