Don’t Look Behind You

the Puyallup house she shared with her mother and her daughter. A number of their relatives had attended the party.
    Dean confirmed that Renee had had at least
two
boyfriends at the time of the party. She had lived for a while in Alaska, working, they thought, for Joe Tarricone. The other man was also living near Anchorage, Alaska. That man’s name was Curt or Kurt. Dean recalled that he was a cook and that he’d come from Germany.
    With the pipeline going in, Alaska had been the place to go for high-paying jobs if one was willing to work hard for weeks without time off. Kurt had practically lived on the job. Renee’s cousin Dean said that Renee was very helpful in recommending him to Kurt and that had helped him get a job on the North Slope.
    “Renee was like that,” Dean Isaak told Ben Benson. “I mean, she’s one of these ladies that likes to help family and stuff. She knew I was down and out … so she told me to come up to Anchorage. Kurt was living at this house they rented and I talked to him. They had me fill out an application and he said he’d take me in until I got on the pipeline. I was there a couple of weeks. I went and got a job in a bar as a bouncer. I wasn’t there very long when I got called to work up there on the Slope.”
    Dean described the bleak pipeline construction site far up in the northern part of Alaska. “Ketchikan and Barrow. I think Barrow’s the tip of the world.”
    Ron Isaak agreed with his brother about his cousin Renee. She was a “good egg” who tried to help her family. In fact, it had been for Ron’s birthday on September 23,1978, when Renee threw the big barbecue that Dean had described.
    She wasn’t normally a party giver, but she went all out for Ron’s special day. Benson’s ears perked up when Ron Isaak said that Joe Tarricone had attended that party.
    “My cousin [Renee] told me that he kept calling from Alaska and wanting to come down, so she finally says to bring a bunch of steaks and stuff ’cause we were having my birthday party. And he came down.”
    “Did he bring a lot of steaks?” Benson asked.
    “Oh, yeah,” Ron said, explaining that Tarricone’s business was traveling around Alaska selling meat out of his truck. “He brought a whole case of them.”
    “Remember anything else at that party between you and Renee and Joe that day?”
    “Being as it was my birthday and I had a bar I’d built a couple of years earlier, she wanted to help me stock it. She told Joe to go down to the liquor store and get a gallon jug of rum. He came back with just a small one, and she told him, ‘No, I want a
gallon
jug’—so he comes back with a gallon of vodka. She was handing it to me, and he got upset,” Ron said. “So she took it back and whispered to me that once he left, I could have it.”
    Asked if Renee had seemed happy or annoyed when Joe showed up at her house, Ron Isaak remembered that she had seemed irritated with him despite his generosity with all the free prime steaks. “She mostly ignored Joe that night,” Ron said.
    Ben Benson realized that the night of the barbecue could well have been the last night that Joe Tarricone was alive: September 23, 1978. Or had the barbecue taken place on some other night—some night that was only close to Ron Isaak’s birthday?
    According to both of her cousins, Joe had done everything he could to please Renee at the birthday barbecue. He’d cooked all the steaks. There were so many that people at the party had even tossed the expensive cuts to the dogs.
    But nothing Joe did had any positive effect on Renee.
    Renee had bragged to her cousins that Joe had already given her a black Mercedes convertible, and she kept it—although she stored it at her aunt Lillian’s house until it was repossessed by an Alaskan finance company a few years after Joe disappeared.
    Renee couldn’t seem to say anything nice about Joe Tarricone. She had even hinted to several of her relatives that she believed Joe was involved in something crooked—possibly with the Mafia. She said it was likely that Joe’s meat company was only a front for some illegal operation, and that could be dangerous.
    Neither Ron nor Dean had seen Joe since the night of the birthday barbecue. They had asked Renee about him.
    “She said that he disappeared and that maybe he even got thrown in the ocean or something by the mob,” Dean Isaak said. “But she really didn’t know.”
    Their aunt—Geri Hesse—had seemed to be very worried about