Don’t Look Behind You

“The man went missing about August 1978.”
    “Missing from where?” Benson asked when he called Rhodes.
    “10309 Canyon Road in Puyallup. There may be an ‘East’ on the end of that address. For some reason, your department didn’t take the missing report—so we took it. He’s apparently been missing since 1978, but we didn’t take the report until 1993.”
    Jan Rhodes told Ben Benson that she had been in touch with the man’s daughter, who had stubbornly refused to give up looking for him.
    “What’s her name?” Benson asked.
    “Gypsy,” Rhodes said. “Gypsy Tarricone. Her father’s name is Joseph Tarricone.”
    “Bingo!” Benson thought.
    So the elusive Gypsy had been found. Benson hoped that she might have enough information to help him prove that the bones
were
those of her father.
    “We have dentals on our missing man,” Jan Rhodes said, “but I don’t know if you found a skull?”
    Benson told her that, regrettably, they had found only a few parts of the skull: the lower occiput (back), a piece of chinbone, but no upper or lower jaw.
    And no teeth.
    Even if the King County Sheriff’s Office had dental charts of the father of the woman called Gypsy, they would do no good in identifying him unless the Pierce County investigators searching the property should find more portions of skull and/or jawbones. And that search had been called off due to lack of success after the first bone discoveries.
    Sergeant Ben Benson was about to follow a dizzying trail that would lead him from the baking heat of the Southwest to the frigid temperatures in Alaska and on to the East Coast. And he would realize once again what strangers neighbors can be. It was no longer the way it was earlier inthe century, when neighbors often knew almost everything about families who lived on their block. The extended Carlson family was the exception. But even they knew only bits and pieces of the lives of the tenants in their old yellow house.
    “Jan Rhodes deserves so much credit for the effort she put into a missing case that wasn’t even in her department’s jurisdiction,” Benson recalls. “She went back to old records and found the original missing report that Gina Tarricone, Gypsy’s younger sister, had filed in January 1979!”
    The report had not been filed with Pierce County, and Benson wondered why. It had been filed in the small town of Des Moines, Washington, which is in the southwest part of King County.
    Odd.
    The complainant’s name was Gina Tarricone.
    Benson set out to locate the elusive Tarricone sisters. The Des Moines police department still had the missing report Gina filed, and it was full of information.
    Apparently Gina had gone to the Des Moines police department as she tried desperately to locate her father. She had given all the facts she knew to Detective Jerry Burger.
    Benson found that the entire Tarricone family had been distraught over Joe’s disappearance, but Gina was the official complainant. She was living with her brother Aldo at the time and she didn’t have a car—so she went to the closest police station, even though she believed that her dad had gone missing in Puyallup.
    If it was Joe who was missing, who then was the man known as Isaak? Benson checked missing persons complaints in Pierce County and Tacoma for 1979. He found nothing that seemed to fit. Next, he asked law enforcement agencies in counties north and south of Pierce County.
    With Jan Rhodes’s help, Benson learned that Gypsy and Gina’s missing father was Joseph Anthony Tarricone, who would have been fifty-three in 1978. There was only a blurred photo of him available in the old file, but his daughter had given his description: six feet one inch, two hundred–plus pounds, brown eyes and graying black hair, partially balding.
    In 1979, Gypsy and Gina had said that their mother—Joseph’s ex-wife Rose—lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as did most of their five siblings. On that day in January, twenty-eight years before, Joseph Tarricone had been missing for about four months. He had failed to contact his elderly parents, his ex-wife, or any of his children.
    Benson’s eyes widened as he read further; apparently the last time anyone saw Tarricone, he had been visiting a girlfriend who lived near Puyallup, Washington.
    The girlfriend’s name was Renee, and her phone number was on the report, although it was hardly likely she still had the same number after so long. Chances were that she had married in