A Checklist for Murder Read online

  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

  It 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.

  “My mother was with me.” As Tasha spoke the word mother it caught in her throat. She didn’t know why. She knew, but she couldn’t focus on the thought.

  “Where’s my mother?” She kept her voice quiet, almost timid.

  The nurse was well trained and her smile hardly wavered. “You can see your mother later.” She started for the door. “Rest now. You’ve just come out of surgery. We were concerned about you there for a while. I’m sure your mother would want you to rest.”

  “My mother—” she began again, but the nurse was making good her escape. She was nearly all the way out the door as she turned back to offer one last polished smile. “We’ll be coming in and out to check on you,” she chirped as she disappeared.

  But those last words and their artificial assurance didn’t matter anyway. Natasha barely heard them. Distant images, sounds, and voices suddenly overwhelmed her: a revolver’s chamber spinning next to her ear, over and over and over … crashing sounds of a violent struggle coming from the other side of a bedroom wall … the cold feel of steel handcuffs … the suffocating panic as thin straps tightened around her throat … ropes being pulled tight around her ankles … a voice assuring her that she was going to be killed.

  The second registered nurse to check on Natasha that evening was just making a routine stop. She didn’t know much about the patient. She knew the young woman was a severe head-trauma victim of an auto accident earlier that morning. She knew that an ER test had indicated that there was a .053 blood alcohol level hours after the accident. The odor of alcohol had still been on her breath. Traces of some form of narcotic had also been in her bloodstream. Most likely another drunken car wreck.

  The nurse also knew the hospital had been notified that shortly before 11:30 that evening a neighbor named Carl Rowe had come down to the coroner’s office and positively identified the fatality as being this patient’s mother. But the RN wasn’t about to be the one to get stuck with breaking the news.

 
So she walked into the room determined to do no more than make sure the patient was awake and remaining alert. The nurse would check the IV drip rate, the vitals, assure that the patient’s orientation was returning. She would leave the emotional confrontations to somebody else.

  But the moment the RN stepped inside, the patient turned to her and began to display great anxiety. It’s common for head-trauma patients to register inappropriate levels of emotion as a side effect of their injuries, so the nurse began her routine and answered the questions with matter-of-fact professionalism.

  “Where’s my mother?” The young woman moaned. “Where—”

  “You can see her later,” the nurse replied in the prescribed line that had been carefully crafted to tell the truth even while concealing it.

  “My father, then. Where is he?” The young woman’s voice was still thick from anesthesia, from the trauma. Clearly she was forcing herself to speak, showing great concern. Still, the symptoms were common enough, not at all unusual for a head-trauma victim.

  “I don’t think your father was involved. No one said anything to me about a male victim being at the scene. Don’t worry. Try to get some rest. You took a real—”

  “No. My father … the police … my father—”

  The nurse had finished her brief check. There were a lot of other patients left to go. The work load left no time for chat.

  “Try to rest. You were in a serious accident.”

  The RN remained in the doorway for a moment longer than her schedule permitted. The patient was so distraught that the nurse paused to offer more reassurances, telling her not to worry about her father for the time being, reciting the line about how she could see her mother later. There wasn’t much else she could do to ease the patient’s agitated state. Strong tranquilizers can’t be given to head-injury patients so soon after surgery and the nurse couldn’t stay any longer to offer personal comfort. So she just made a mental note to add a few extra stops to this room on top of the usual schedule of every fifteen minutes that the patients in critical recovery normally get at Holy Cross.

  And then she was gone. In the back of her mind she was already reviewing the history on the next patient.

  Even though Natasha lay helpless, unable to take any physical action, old mental skills that she had honed with years of practice went to work automatically. She struggled to focus her mind, to force herself to remember everything and glue it all into place. She ran through the memories as if through a piece of film, staring hard at the mental images just as she had learned to do years ago, back when some inner wisdom had told her that the very first resource of those who refuse to be willing victims is to remember. Remember everything. Remember with a vengeance.

  Part of her wondered fearfully where her father was at that very moment. Was he nearby, trying to get into the hospital? Would she even know him if he appeared in the room? Without her contact lenses, she couldn’t see as far as the door frame; shapes were blurred so badly at that distance, she wouldn’t even know if the person coming in was wearing a hospital uniform.

  Natasha had no idea how much longer she might survive, but enough of her memory had returned so that she knew without a doubt that there was somebody out there with a very strong motivation to kill her before she could remember all of the details. And before she could get someone to listen to her. So as each minute dragged by, she labored to retrieve every scrap of memory and set it in proper order among the others. To remember.

  It had been just after five o’clock on the afternoon on which the crimes began, when her best friend, Patty, pulled the white Ford Festiva to a stop in front of Natasha’s house and parked with the engine idling. The July sun was still high over the horizon. It wouldn’t be dark for over three hours.

  “Sure you don’t want me to come in, Tasha? Your dad’s car is here.”

  “No,” Tasha replied, getting out and closing the door. She leaned back into the open window. “I was supposed to do some laundry before we went to stay at Jennifer’s last night. And I have to mow the lawn before we go back out. Besides”—Natasha teased her with a grin—“these are the same clothes we had on yesterday. You’re not going to Magic Mountain in that outfit, are you?” They been friends for a long time; it was never hard for Tasha to get a rise out of Patty. And Tasha knew just how far she could get away with pushing her.

  “Hey, I don’t have to go change right this second.” Patty scowled, annoyed. But she glanced at Robert Peernock’s car and made no move to turn off the engine.

  “Go on.” Natasha smiled wanly. “I’ll call in a couple of hours. My Fiat’s still dead, so if Mom won’t let me use her car when she gets home from work, you can come back.” She noticed that Patty didn’t look pleased. “Hey—okay?”

  Patty sighed and met Tasha’s eyes with a resigned smile. “Yeah, okay. But I’m sure your mom will just fork over her keys after the way you trashed her car before. Look, it’s not like I’m afraid to come in if you want me to.”

  “I know, I know. I’ll call you.” Natasha pushed away from the window. “Remember to call Eric and Jeff and make sure they’re still going to meet us.” She waved and Patty nodded, then drove off.

  The front door was locked. This caught her by surprise. She had to pause for a few moments and fish around for her key. The house was usually unlocked when anybody was home, and right now both of her father’s cars were in the driveway. He hadn’t lived with the family for the last four years, spending nearly all his time at his girlfriend’s condominium thirty miles away. But although Tasha had been hoping to get her chores done before her mother came home from work, it was clear that she wasn’t going to be alone there today.

  Her father was somewhere inside the house.

  She got the door open, stepped in, closed it behind her. It had been a long time since she had come home to find him there. For years now, if some errand required him to be at the house, he had always made it a point to be gone before her mother got home. That policy suited Natasha fine; she didn’t need to listen to the fighting. Now she paused on the tile section inside the doorway and listened for just a moment. The house was totally quiet. It seemed empty.

  Tasha hoped she was going to be in luck.

  She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until she heard herself sigh heavily as Robert Peernock appeared from the backyard and opened the sliding glass door to come inside. She had a straight view to the back of the house while he stepped in. Their eyes met through the glass. If she stayed in his line of vision they would have to talk, but if she didn’t talk he might take it as an insult. So she broke off the gaze and headed down the hallway to her bedroom just as he stepped inside and shut the sliding door behind him. Tasha tried not to hurry. She knew that if she rushed, it might provoke him.

  The words would pepper her like bullets. What are you running from? What did you do this time? So she hurried, the way she had learned to do: keeping her moves casual but quick.

  The escape was good. A few seconds later she was in her room, hoping for the sound of the front door closing and for his car to start up in the driveway. She wondered, why was he here so late, anyway? For the past month or so he had been coming around much more than usual, nearly every day, picking up personal items, paper files, clothing, tools. And whenever she happened to come in while he was there, he never failed to berate her about something: her friends, her schooling, her style of dressing, the cost of utilities in the house. Name it.

  “The same old yelling story,” she called it. There was no use fighting it. Instead she became skilled at avoidance.

  Tasha puttered around the room, killing time. She changed into more casual shoes to mow the lawn in and decided not to put on fresh clothing until her chores were done. And still there was no sound of him leaving. Finally she ran out of ways to kill time and gave up in exasperation. She couldn’t hang up the rest of the day by hiding, so she decided to just go on out. Carry out her business as quietly as she could. Work on her invisibility.
r />   She didn’t see him when she walked back down the hallway and went into the kitchen, so she relaxed a little and began making herself something to eat. It was just a snack before going out. Her plans for the evening didn’t include having dinner at home. She hadn’t started eating yet when Robert walked into the kitchen from the family room. At first everything seemed normal enough. He leaned against the door frame and watched her for a moment. Then he casually asked if she had any plans for the evening.

  But she wasn’t about to open that can of worms if she didn’t have to. She told him she wasn’t sure.

  He asked if Patty was coming over. Robert knew they were inseparable. Patty had lived there for several weeks recently while she was having trouble at home. She stayed until it got worse there than it was at her place and her own home didn’t look so bad anymore. But Robert hadn’t taken a liking to her and Tasha knew he wouldn’t be thrilled to hear that they were planning on staying out late with friends tonight. So she played dumb on that one too.