Don’t Look Behind You

conclusive as nuclear DNA. Still, it meant that only one person in hundreds would have the same characteristics in the mitochondrial DNA matches.
    Benson and Dr. Kathy Taylor sent in another bone to be tested shortly thereafter, and this time the odds were much higher that Joe Tarricone was the victim.
    Ben Benson continued to search for evidence and/or witnesses, checking out the backgrounds of all “persons of interest” in Tarricone’s homicide. He still worked alone from the summer of 2007 until the early months of 2008. Denny Wood had been called up as a reserve officer and was on a foreign assignment.
    Ben actually talked to Renee Curtiss in late summer. He had found that she was working—or had been working—for Henry’s Bail Bonds near Pioneer Square in Seattle. He went there and talked to a black man, who introduced himself as Henry Lewis. Ben asked if he knew of a Renee Curtiss.
    “She’s right here,” the bail bonds company owner said, and Benson found himself looking at Renee Curtiss in person for the first time. She was an attractive, well-groomed woman in her fifties who now had some hard edges. She smiled as she invited him to sit down at her desk.
    Benson chose not to let on that he was a detective from Pierce County who was investigating the disappearance of Joe Tarricone, and Renee quickly assumed he’d come to inquire about bailing someone out. He acquiesced—inventing his “mythical sister’s son.”
    “I told her I wanted to know the cost of bailing someone out and how the process would work,” Benson remembers. “She told me everything. She knew the justice system backward and forward and explained to me what would happen. She asked what he’d been arrested for, and I said, ‘Burglary—but it’s kind of a hokey deal.’”
    Benson was impressed that Renee really knew her stuff. She was clearly an intelligent woman. Benson left, without ever revealing who he was.
    As it turned out, he wouldn’t talk to Renee again for months.
    Working solo made him only more determined to find vital information that had scattered like a broken string of beads over the prior three decades.

Chapter Seven
    Geri Hesse’s three children were separated by distance and circumstance over the thirty years since Joe Tarricone disappeared. Her older daughter, Cassie, lived a relatively stable life in Anchorage in a very nice home there. After Cassie’s brother—Nick—confessed to the murder of his wife, she visited him in prison in Colorado only once, and that was when she accompanied her mother, Geri, and sister, Renee.
    Even armed with the many addresses where Renee Curtiss and Geri Hesse had lived since they left their Canyon Road rental in 1979, it was impossible for investigators to trace just what jobs they’d held. They were both intelligent and streetwise women. Renee had worked as a model and an escort a few times, and she made a good impression as she entered parties and dinners and, sometimes, grand hotels on the arms of her clients. She was also a competent office worker. Geri had a variety of jobs—as a salesclerk and in the medical field as a nursing assistant—although she probably slowed down as the years passed and she grew older.
    Renee and Geri had expensive tastes; they preferred upscale clothes and jewelry, and cars that people of wealth drove. Renee, of course, hadn’t been able to keep the new Mercedes that she said was a gift from Joe Tarricone way back in 1978; the loan company picked it up from where she had hidden it at her aunt’s home. Still, she had usually managed to drive a luxury car. It’s quite possible that she wasn’t looking for love when she chose to date men. A lot of them were considerably older than she was, and on a scale of physical attractiveness, could not possibly equal hers.
    When the two women returned to the Northwest from California, and after Geri died, Renee soon met a retired Exxon executive, reputed to be a billionaire, who lived in one of Seattle’s posher suburbs—Mercer Island.
    Luther Wallach* was certainly attracted to her, and she soon moved into his palatial waterfront estate, living with him for quite some time. She encouraged him to throw lavish parties and to travel. She hoped to marry him but, at his age, he didn’t want to become legally entangled with her. He may even have sensed that her affection for him had dollar signs connected to it.
    When the shocking news broke about Renee and her purported connections to Joe