A Checklist for Murder (33 page)

But sometimes the hope of all that seemed like nothing more than an illusion, another shell game from a legal world she had learned to distrust through all of the years that she watched her father use the system. Even though she had never clearly understood her father’s methods, the very fact that he managed to use the courts to get his way made courtrooms seem like suspicious places to her.

Still, there was nothing to do but place her faith in Victoria Doom and hope that her mother had chosen wisely when she went to Doom’s office in the first place.

•   •   •

As February drew near, Craig Richman got the word from his boss. From that moment until completion of the Peernock trial he would be relieved of any other duties, to afford him every opportunity of hitting the ground at full speed when the trial began.

He was grateful for the chance to focus entirely on the baffling case. To Craig Richman, Peernock was clearly guilty when all the evidence was taken together, but throughout the pretrial hearings Peernock had always offered explanations for every single piece of it.

Richman knew that all Peernock needed was for one juror to buy his conspiracy story. The question kept dogging him: what if one of the jurors turned out to have been the victim of some conspiracy at work and still held a grudge about it? Would he be able to differentiate between his personal experience and this case? All it took was that one juror to listen to Peernock’s story, to hear the evidence and find he couldn’t shake away that old reasonable doubt.

The trial had been postponed countless times, but was now scheduled for April, or early summer at the latest. The excuses for pushing the date back were running out and the feeling of inevitability was beginning to settle in over everybody concerned with the case.

Richman started finding himself getting to the gym later and later in the day as he pushed himself to uncover every angle that he could. His certainty of Peernock’s guilt was based upon countless hours spent going over an avalanche of evidence time after time. He was far less certain that the same evidence could be passed in front of a jury once or twice and remain coherent to all twelve.

In the year and a half he’d spent sifting that evidence, he still hadn’t found the twist that his senses had told him from the beginning must be there somewhere, something that
would snap ail the pieces of the giant puzzle cube into place.

And Peernock had gotten his statement straight so cleverly that Richman knew this twist might be vital in his quest to convince the jury. If Richman failed to do that, he could then stand back and try to tell himself that the disasters virtually guaranteed to result for Natasha and Victoria were none of his doing.

The trial judge was finally selected as the inevitable confrontation moved closer. Judge Howard J. Schwab would marshal the case through to completion. Out of all the judges in front of whom Robert Peernock had appeared since the day of his arrest, the selection of Howard Schwab could have been a lucky break for Peernock.

In fact, the arrival of Judge Schwab in Robert’s life should have been his luckiest day. One glance at Schwab’s resume makes it plain that this is not someone who will throw away his career on a bribe so that mysterious higher-ups can silence one of the government’s endless list of gadflies.

As a history major at UCLA, Howard Schwab graduated with honors. After graduation from UCLA Law School he rose quickly through the ranks as deputy city attorney of Los Angeles to become California’s deputy attorney general. In that capacity he argued and briefed what the notorious Charles Manson murder case and other related cases of Man-son’s family members.

As co-counsel to former California Governor George Deukmejian, he argued the landmark decision upholding the constitutionality of capital punishment in California.

He personally argued and briefed what was then the longest criminal case in California history,
People v. Powell
, the subject of Joseph Wambaugh’s
The Onion Field
. He also argued and briefed the William and Emily Harris case, concerning the infamous Symbionese Liberation Army.

As for his personal style, Schwab’s love of history, philosophy, books in general, and the law in particular shines through his demeanor in the courtroom. He astounds attorneys for both sides with an ability to cite specific case law on obscure rulings entirely from memory. His remarks in the courtroom are sprinkled with historical references and his rulings reflect the historical context from which he derives them.

Howard Schwab is absolutely the wrong judge for an unprepared attorney to try to bluff. Anyone planning to frame up an innocent defendant in Schwab’s court had better approach the task with the highest intellect, unlimited research sources, and a vast supply of luck.

And so Robert Peernock could not have done better in his quest for a judge who would deal with his case strictly on the merits brought by the prosecution and by the defendant himself. This was just the judge to blow any manipulated conspiracy wide open, to resist any prosecution attempts to frame an innocent man, and to see to it that Robert Peernock got exactly the justice he deserved.

HON-EY-MOON
—noun. [fr. the idea that the first month of marriage is the sweetest] A period of unusual harmony following the establishment of a new relationship.

—
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary

Honeymoons are short by definition. Conflict is inevitable.

By spring, Peernock was claiming that Donald Green had been bribed by Judge Schwab with offers of future lucrative courtroom assignments on behalf of indigent defendants. These cases can make appointed lawyers rich if they stay at the top of the court’s assignment roster.

Peernock figured that Green’s refusal to subpoena witnesses
from old union struggles of a decade ago, plus Green’s unwillingness to allow Robert to commandeer his California bar license and more or less run his own case, all served to prove that Donald Green was a puppet of government forces like the five attorneys before him. This would be despite the fact that Peernock himself had sought out both Filipa Richland’s and Donald Green’s services, despite the fact that Green had come recommended to Peernock by former defendants, and moreover that they had vowed from personal experience that Green would not respond to intimidation and that he could not be bribed.

None of that impressed Robert Peernock anymore.

The honeymoon was over.

CHAPTER

25

A
s summer of 1991 began, the case was finally proceeding to trial.

By this point Tasha couldn’t make herself put the effort into settling into an apartment by herself. For the last few months she had resorted to staying with friends and acquaintances around Los Angeles. As the trial approached, she went to spend some time with Louise, her mother’s friend of so many years, but though the familiar face was comforting she couldn’t make herself open up to the woman. Tasha really only felt okay when she could keep herself busy and distracted, preferably with people who knew little or nothing about her background. Staying with Louise was a difficult reminder of the unfinished business she was about to confront in court for the third time.

By now the story seemed to come out by itself. She had lost track of the number of times that detectives and prosecutors and doctors had asked her about the night of the crimes. She would just go into her witness mode and let them pummel her with their endless questions, always with the implication that if they twisted a question around and asked it in enough different ways, maybe she would slip up and say something different. But this new guy Craig Richman had started to get all intense about the coming trial. And that was making her notice her own nerves.

He gave her portions of her preliminary hearing testimony from nearly four years before and asked her to read over it, to refresh her memory just in case there were any details she
might have gotten fuzzy about during all the time that her father was dragging the case through the courts.

She protested that she didn’t feel like reading about the crimes anymore. The whole thing was such a drag to have to dive into all over again. But Craig kept calling her and calling her, asking if she had read it yet, if she had any questions, if she had any new memories to add.

Finally he confronted her. It startled her to see how strongly he felt about the case.

“Natasha, I know you hate to go through this again, but the other side wants you to get up there and screw up. Don’t you realize that? The preliminary hearing where you were on the stand for three days, the civil trial where your father grilled you for four days, all of that was only a rehearsal for this.
This
is the real thing. You’re the only one who was there, so they want you to look like a liar. They want you to contradict yourself. They’ll probably make a big deal out of the fact that when the ambulance picked you up you didn’t know what you were saying. Now, we have doctors to explain to the jury how blows to the head can work on short-term memory, but it really all comes down to you.”

Then Richman dropped the bomb on her.

“If the other side can portray you as some nasty little teenager who had it in for her father, and who somehow is doing all this against an innocent man, Natasha … he’s going to walk out of that court free as a bird. Tell me, what do you think that means?”

Richman knew that his question had hit home. It showed in her eyes. The question punctured all of her resistance to having to get up and defend herself one more time. It got through to her where nothing else did because she had little doubt about the answer.

“He’ll find a way to kill me,” she answered softly. “And make it look like an accident.”

She went home to study the transcript and make sure her memory was fresh on every detail.

On the eve of the trial, Craig Richman found himself alone in his office building, long after regular working hours. He already knew that he wasn’t going to make it to the gym for his workout today. As the trial closed in on him, he couldn’t shake the feeling that stones were still unturned. Even though he had no doubt, not a single doubt, that Robert Peernock was guilty of all the crimes, he also didn’t doubt that there was still a chance that the guy could actually skate past the jury.

But the question kept haunting him—
what
could he have missed? He had flown up to Sacramento and interviewed the Department of Water Resources people who had worked with Peernock, as well as with people in Los Angeles from Network Electronics where Peernock had last worked as VP in charge of the testing of their pyrotechnic devices. Richman talked nonstop to anybody who could shed any light at all on Peernock’s background and his efforts as a whistleblower.

He spent countless hours dealing with medical experts and toxicological experts and crime scene experts of every description. He pored over every bit of testimony from every pretrial hearing.

Richman would have loved to have the chance to cross-examine Peernock, but the defendant had been routinely disruptive in most of his hearings and was dragged out of the courtroom on several occasions. Because of that it seemed inconceivable that the defense would allow Peernock to take the stand. Richman would have to mount his case strictly on legal skill, even though he lacked crucial evidence to clinch a conviction. Still, there was little left that he could do to prepare for the most important trial he had ever undertaken.

So it was more out of his own work habit than anything else that he sat down at the large work table in the office
copy room and prepared his little make-work assignment: going through a large box of papers that Steve Fisk had confiscated from Peernock’s Datsun shortly after the car had been impounded. He told himself that it was just a bunch of junk, really. Hardly worth the effort. But Richman knew he would sleep better if he’d personally glanced over each piece of paper before he left the building for the night.

He opened the box and started picking up one piece at a time, turning it over to check both sides, and setting each one aside carefully before going on to the next.

It was soon clear that he was going to be there for quite a while. Peernock was a chronic, habitual list maker who catalogued reminders for every mundane activity in every day of his life. Grocery lists, laundry lists, hardware-store lists, banking lists, personal reminders. Many of them were dutifully labeled “To-Do” at the top, sometimes dated, sometimes not.

The chore began to capture Richman’s interest. Peernock was compulsive, scrawling the lists on any scrap of paper, large or small. Some were in numbered order on blank pages; others were simply scribbled across corners torn from something else.

Fisk’s investigators had just scooped the papers out of the Datsun and dumped them into the box, so they weren’t in any particular order. But as Richman sorted them, a funny kind of structure began to emerge. Peernock’s style was to make the list and run a line through each item as it was taken care of until the entire list was checked off. Then he discarded it and started another. Sometimes there were several for a single day.

Richman picked up one of the papers labeled “To-Do” at the top. It had been divided into two halves. The first half had four numbered entries and the second half had ten. They all looked like regular chores, each item dutifully lined through in pencil. “Hook up wire for sprinklers,” scratched
through, “Pick up all tools,” scratched through, and farther down the page: “Call Meyers,” followed by a phone number, scratched through.

Then something caught Craig’s eye.

Under that last phone-number entry, item number four was a little drawing. It was followed by the word
stock
.

The little drawing looked like a large, hollow L, but the L had been turned backward, then laid over on its side.

The large, hollow, L-shaped drawing was sharply pointed on the long end. And that was all. A drawing of a sharpened, pointed, bent thing, followed by the word
stock
.