Don’t Look Behind You

weeks,” he answered slowly. “But it gets cold early here, and there was some snow on the ground already, so it’s hard to tell. Her body was frozen.”
    McCann said that his memory had become vague in the thirty years that had passed since Vickie was murdered, but he did recall going to the crime scene and that there was one of many “gravel barrel pits” there where theDepartment of Transportation loaded up gravel for road construction and repair. “Someone may have stopped to relieve himself, climbed up the gravel—it was higher than the road—and down into a depression and he found her there.”
    McCann said that he and other Alaska detectives had photographed the scene, measured it, and taken some physical evidence—which they bagged and tagged.
    Here, James McCann had a sore spot. He had always believed that evidence should be preserved forever, but their headquarters were very small in 1978 and there was barely space for an evidence room.
    “Some of our commanders took it upon themselves to destroy evidence prior to a case being solved—and then some cases
were
solved—and I guess it was just taking up room …”
    Earlier, Benson had called the 2007 evidence supervisor, Diane Lindner, and she had searched, but she had to tell him that they no longer had physical evidence on the murder of Vickie Notaro in their property room. It had been purged. Since Nick had been convicted of murdering his wife, this news came as no surprise to Benson.
    Before the computer age, a lot of the old records in police evidence rooms disappeared. It is something that makes homicide detectives shudder, particularly in the twenty-first century when so many cold cases are being solved with DNA residue that has clung to physical evidence for decades—useless until now.
    Lindner had, however, been able to locate some photographs from the case.
    One photo showed Nick Notaro’s tennis shoes; they were spattered with dried blood. After he read about how Vickie died, Benson thought that her blood wouldn’t necessarily have been on Nick’s tennis shoes. But maybe those spatters had come from sawing up Joe Tarricone’s body?
    Ben Benson pressed on with his questions about Vickie’s murder, which almost certainly had happened within the days before Joe Tarricone disappeared.
    “Do you recall if the gun in the case was ever located?” he asked.
    McCann tried to recall, saying he thought it had been a revolver.
    Benson nodded. “He bought a thirty-eight Special from Gary Tellep when Gary worked at Penney’s up in Fairbanks. Notaro told some of your guys that he threw it in the river?”
    “Yeah. We never did recover that gun,” McCann said.
    “Okay,” Benson said, waiting.
    “Our rivers—our rivers here hold a lot of guns,” McCann said with a sigh.
    Benson talked next to retired Alaska State police detective Bradley Brown—who had been with the force from January 1973 until March of 1999.
    Brown remembered Nick Notaro very well indeed. Brad Brown had been the sole trooper assigned to the Healy, Alaska, post. Healy is a small town just outside McKinley National Park, a popular tourist spot in warmmonths. The park and Healy are roughly 120 miles south of Fairbanks.
    Benson grinned at the thought of a single trooper handling such a relatively large area.
    “So you were like a one-man show at that time—back in 1978?” he asked Brown.
    “Yeah, I had an office in Healy alongside the Parks Highway at the intersection of Healy Road. I knew Nicky—that’s what I called him.”
    “Did you know his wife, Vickie?”
    “Yeah, she was kinda like a maid or worked housekeeping at the Healy Hotel and several other places around here. From my understanding she did some odd jobs on the side, like laundry, just to make ends meet.”
    Although Healy was surrounded by natural splendor, the Notaros weren’t exactly living high on the hog.
    In the late seventies, Nicky Notaro worked as a cook at Jerry’s Healy Service, a gas station/restaurant/store/gathering spot owned by Jerry Hamel. Brad Brown said he had often dropped into Jerry’s late at night when the rest of Healy had pretty much rolled up the sidewalks.
    Even the Road House and the Auto Lake Lodge, the two bars in town, were closed.
    “Maybe there were only one or two clientele inside Jerry’s,” Brown elaborated. “So I would talk with Nick because he did most of the nighttime work. I would just be friends—like everyone was [in Healy]—with him.”
    In the