Free A Checklist for Murder by Anthony Flacco

struggled to her left and felt the steering wheel. Her fingers traced down the steering shaft. Her fingertips brushed the key, a single key still in the ignition, taunting her with the possibility of freedom like smells of spring wafting through the bars of a prison cell.
    A train passed by. Like the nearby traffic, the train sounded close, but not right next to the car. Wherever the Cadillac was parked, there was enough distance involved that the people in the trucks and the people on the train were most likely speeding by without ever knowing that two women lay trapped in that big black car over there at the side of the road, in desperate need of someone to call the police. If a phone call was made quickly enough there still might be a few minutes, a couple of final moments, if somebody noticed and became concerned and decided to risk getting involved.
    But it is at this point, just as she was about to make her move, that her memory of the crimes ends. The memory gap is as sharp, as final, as the last foot of film rolling off the spool with no more images to display, flapping around on the gears of the projector. Even though the human brain recordsevery sensation relayed to it by every nerve ending in the body, access to memory is sometimes mercifully denied.
    Teams of experts later offered bits and pieces of crime-scene facts and expert opinion as to the events of the night, the speeding crash, the fire in the trunk, and the burning rope wick.
    Using forensic medicine’s reconstruction of the methods by which invisible killers do their hidden work, investigators can take a physician’s detailed descriptions of wounds and reveal the manner in which those wounds were inflicted. Logic and science shine unrelenting lights, sweeping across endless midnight countryside. And with the power of these illuminations, the force of simple logic can then direct its own beam of light down gloomy valleys, flashing into hillside caves and offering glimpses of the games played by monsters in the dark.
    The attacker seized her and set upon her like a wild animal. The tire iron slammed into her face. That first blow could have easily torn away the canvas face mask, revealing Tasha’s attacker to her as he hovered and raised the steel bar to strike again.
    Natasha knows that she was struck with the tire iron first, because she had no sense of her mother being attacked once they left the house. She knows that she was still wearing the tightly laced hood and the handcuffs when the attack began, because she cannot remember them being removed while she was still conscious. And although her injuries looked essentially like her mother’s when the authorities found them later that morning, there is one crucial fact that explains the thin margin of difference between her injuries and her mother’s fatal wounds. This difference was just enough to grant Tasha the barest shot at survival.
    Her mother’s head injuries were inflicted, the coroner andhis investigator said, with the edge of a metal bar wielded by someone standing directly over her as she lay on her back. Someone struck her, standing in a face-to-face position, swinging from the upper right to the lower left, using full arm blows. Claire’s injuries were all concentrated in one small area of her head, because she was already out cold as her attack began. She endured it in an utterly helpless state.
    Natasha was almost, but not quite, as helpless. Her wounds later showed that she was also struck while lying more or less on her back, by a face-to-face attacker swinging the metal bar with full-strength blows. But since Tasha was initially conscious as her attack began, she was able to do one thing that her mother could not. And the slightly different pattern of her injuries offered proof of it.
    She could thrash her head from side to side, in the only defensive motion left to her. This way her injuries were dispersed over a wider area of her head. The puncturing and crushing effect on the