Don’t Look Behind You

himself because Renee rejected his proposal. I don’t think he proposed to her at all, but they definitely were involved in some kind of a relationship. I believe that. I think Renee led him on because he had money. She was only in her twenties and she already had a boyfriend.”
    When Ben Benson read this old report years later, he shook his head. Why would a man
walk
away from the home of a woman he’d apparently been in love with when he had a brand-new expensive car, and, quite possibly, a truck and camper, too?
    Sure, he might have been disappointed—even devastated—if he had, indeed, proposed marriage to Renee and shown her the tickets and reservations for their honeymoon trip to Rome—only to be turned down. But Joe sounded like a tough and rugged man, a man who had survived wars. He had taken hits before, and gotten up to regroup.
    Renee Curtiss had offered a lot of information back in the late seventies, but it had come out in peculiar segments—disjointed recollections that seemed to contradict things she had told people earlier.
    Even before the DNA match came in from the FBI, Ben Benson and his partner, Denny Wood, had no doubtthat the remains found on the Canyon Road property were those of Joseph Tarricone. Any reasonable person would feel the same way. And they believed that any reasonable juror would agree. It seemed completely implausible that Tarricone would
walk
away from the semirural property and abandon his Mercedes and the rig he used for his meat delivery business.
    More than that, from what the detectives had learned so far, Tarricone was an excellent father, one who kept in touch with his children and grandchildren. And he was the son of aged parents who depended on him, lived for his phone calls, and looked forward to his visits to New York every year.
    It would have been totally against his grain to disappear into the moonless night, leaving behind his obligations and those who loved him, no matter how besotted he’d been with the mysterious Renee Curtiss.
    Over the last part of 2007, the Pierce County detectives were almost positive that he was the homicide victim. However, they had to wait for the FBI lab tests to come back.
    And the more they investigated Renee, the more suspects they uncovered.
    By that time, they had learned a great deal more about the violent background of Nick Notaro, Renee and Cassie’s adopted brother.

Chapter Ten
    Nick Notaro , who was thirty at the time, had had a remarkably busy week in late September 1978. If he had been all the places people said he had, his activities between September 18 and September 23 would have required a superman. Nick was a huge man, well over six feet, and closer to three hundred pounds than two hundred. The old records from Alaska showed that he entered the Fairbanks Memorial Hospital on Monday—the eighteenth—to have his festering appendix removed. Dr. J. K. Johnson was the surgeon who operated, and Nick recovered without incident. He was released earlier than the hospital advised, on Thursday, the twenty-first.
    And Nick was also one of the family members who witnesses remembered being at the birthday barbecue Renee threw on Saturday, September 23.
    Ben Benson traveled far in his search for Joe Tarricone’s last moments: New Mexico, Maryland, Oregon, and now—Alaska. The Alaska State Police in Anchorage hadassured him on the phone that their old records on Nick Notaro still existed, and they believed there was physical evidence, too.
    When Ben Benson arrived in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 28, 2007, he had practically memorized the 1978 homicide case in which the Jane Doe victim turned out to be Nick’s first wife.
    Not surprisingly, most of the Alaska investigators of Vickie Notaro’s homicide had long since retired. Luckily, Benson found Marjean Denison in the state police office, and she was of immeasurable help in locating contact information for the former troopers.
    Benson found the Alaska State Police detectives quite forthcoming in talking with him about Vickie Notaro’s bizarre murder. The original investigators agreed to talk with him, recalling that her body was discovered twelve miles north of Nenana along the Parks Highway on October 15, 1978.
    “How long had it been there?” Benson asked retired Alaska state trooper Detective James McCann. (McCann had been on the force from 1972 to 1999, and he was one of the first investigators into Vickie Notaro’s murder.)
    “Probably two—maybe three