Don’t Look Behind You

the years between 1978 and 2007 and probably had another last name now.
    Fortunately, Des Moines detective Jerry Burger had added many details to the missing report. Gina Tarriconehad told him that her father owned a business in Anchorage. She said she and Gypsy had called his girlfriend several times over the years, but Renee had always said she was as mystified as anyone about where Joe might have gone. She did say, however, that she and her mother—Geraldine Hesse—had moved to a town north of Anchorage in the seventies.
    That answered one important question. Geri Hesse had been the renter of the Carlsons’ house. Maybe it was her older daughter—Renee—who had dated Joe. By Benson’s figuring, that young woman would probably be in her fifties now, if she was still alive. But three decades was a long time. The Pierce County detective checked death records and found that Geri Hesse, the mother, had died in 2000.
    No one seemed to know where her daughters were in the summer of 2007.

PART TWO
JOE TARRICONE

Chapter Four
    Joseph Anthony Tarricone had come a long distance from the place he was born to meet his killer. His parents lived in New York—in Brooklyn—and they always would. But not Joe; he had itchy feet and the personality of a natural-born entrepreneur.
    Joe was the Tarricones’ oldest child and only son, and his Italian parents were thrilled with their dark handsome baby son when he was born in 1925. Two sisters joined the Tarricone family in the following years, but Joey was always the star, the innovator, whose expansive personality drew people to him all his life.
    Most Italian sons adore their mothers, and Joe was no exception. Wherever he might travel, he would always keep in touch with her. Her name was Clara, and Joe never failed to remember her with gifts on her birthday and on Mother’s Day. He called home to New York frequently. Among the things that Joe and his wife, Rose, argued about were the huge phone bills that came in. He explained that he wasn’t going to put a time limit on his conversations with his folks.
    As Joe and his sisters were growing up, the Tarricone household was full of music, noise, hilarity, and the redolent smell of ravioli, spaghetti, pasta fagioli, sausages and peppers, and pizza; Joe learned to cook from Clara, and it was to become one of his favorite pastimes as an adult.
    All the Tarricones were devout Catholics. Going to mass wasn’t a choice; it was taken for granted that they would attend on Sundays and holy days. Faith in God was another thing Joe learned in his childhood home and it stayed with him.
    Joe met Rose in the early forties when they were both in their teens. They were soon dating exclusively and they made an extremely attractive couple. He was unabashedly handsome, with thick wavy dark hair, and dark-eyed Rose was very pretty. Her hairdo then was a faithful copy of the upswept, side-parted pompadour with the back tucked under into a pageboy that actresses Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth wore during the Second World War years. Photos of Joe and Rose in their youth remain in family archives: some photos obviously taken in photo booths, which offered four pictures for a dollar; others from school proms. There were shots of them together at Coney Island. Even sixty-five years later, their engagement photo is especially endearing.
    Rose and Joe seem frozen in time, grinning as he hugs her and they look forward to their future together.
    But they were opposites. Rose wasn’t Catholic, which could have been a huge obstacle for them, but they dealt with that. Rose was quiet and a little shy. When Joe took her home to meet his family for the first time, she wasshocked by the life force that ran through the elder Tarricones’ house. There were five Tarricones and they held nothing back. Rose was startled by the arguments that ended in hugs, and the clatter of unchecked emotions, shouting, and loud music.
    “But, you know,” their daughter Gypsy recalls, “my mother told me later that she enjoyed going to her in-laws’ house because she found it ‘exciting.’ She said it was probably because they were ‘so
nuts
!’ Even though Mom was a little overwhelmed at first, she loved her sisters-in-law a lot. If she had had her choice, she and my dad would never have moved away from New York.
    “My dad was outgoing and loud. They were so different, but they loved each other.”
    Joe had all kinds of jobs, spaced between three active-duty