Don’t Look Behind You

child. I was going througha divorce and went to work for my father at Jerry’s Healy Service. That was when I met Nick.”
    “What do you recall about him—when you met him?”
    Geri Lynn grimaced. “I didn’t like him. He was a weird guy. He made me very nervous. He made suggestive comments and I didn’t like being around him—so I tried to avoid him, except if my father asked me to run to town with him on a grocery trip. Otherwise, I basically stayed clear of him.”
    There had been only two or three times when she couldn’t get out of a shopping trip with Nick. As her mother had said, he hadn’t helped at all with carrying groceries, but had gone off on his own to do whatever he needed to do.
    “You said he would make suggestive comments. Would he be making passes at you?”
    “Sometimes passes—sometimes just lewd comments, of a sexual nature. I knew he was married …”
    Geri Lynn was certain that Nick had wanted to have an affair with her, if she had shown any interest at all. She said that when he was arrested for his wife’s murder, she wasn’t the only one in Healy who had been glad to see him go. She said she hadn’t known Vickie well at all.
    The Pierce County detective sergeant found someone who had known Vickie Notaro very well—her friend and fellow employee at the Healy Hotel, Cheri Mueller. Cheri was also twenty in 1978, and she had lived in Healy since 1971. She and Vickie had liked each other from the first time they’d met in the summer of 1978. Employees had afree room at the hotel as part of their pay. Nick had a small room initially because he came to Alaska first, to work on the pipeline. Then he sent for Vickie, who was down in Washington State living with his sister. Not with Renee, but with her older sister, Cassie Martell.* As they were a married couple, the hotel gave them a larger space.
    “Vickie and I spent time together—like hang out after work and stuff,” Cheri said. But she shook her head when Ben Benson asked if Nick Notaro had joined them. “No, we’d just see him at the [hotel] café when we went in to eat or whatever …”
    “Okay. Throughout this investigation that the Alaska state troopers conducted, there were allegations from Nick—in the statement he gave them—that Vickie was having an affair, was seeing another man. Were you aware of anything like that?”
    “No.” Cheri bristled. “She would never do that.”
    “Okay, on the flip side of that, how about Nick? Are you aware of his having any relationships with other women?”
    “No—I don’t remember hearing anything,” Cheri said, adding that Nick had been jealous of Vickie. “He didn’t trust her. I always thought that was odd because she was just a nice, nice person, and he just seemed like one of those jealous-type husbands, for no reason.”
    Cheri could not recall that Vickie Notaro had been afraid of her husband. If she was, she hadn’t mentioned it.
    “Tell me what you remember about Nick,” Benson probed.
    “I cleaned his room and I remember it was thick with cigarette smoke. And I remember he was big. And I thoughthe was kind of weird, kind of different … He had weird books in his room: books—magazines, really—about murders and how they were solved. I thought it was really weird that somebody would be obsessed with murder.”
    “How many of them do you remember being in his room?”
    “He had a lot—he had them stacked up next to his bed and on shelves and stuff. Sometimes there were pictures in them—like graves, and crime scene photos.”
    Cheri recalled the last time she ever saw Vickie. It was the day she was going up to Fairbanks to pick up Nick at the hospital. “She asked me to go with her, but something happened. I can’t remember why anymore, why I couldn’t go, but I didn’t end up going with her.”
    “What do you remember about that trip to Fairbanks?” Benson asked quietly.
    “She never came back.”

Chapter Eleven
    Now Ben Benson had a new question: If Nick Notaro was released from a hospital in Fairbanks, Alaska, on Thursday, September 21, after undergoing an emergency appendectomy two days earlier, and claimed to have killed Vickie somewhere along the way back to Healy the next day, could he then have flown to Seattle to murder—or help to murder—Joe Tarricone in Puyallup, Washington, sometime in the next week? With a fresh appendectomy incision, would Nick have been in any shape to murder his wife on the way home, and then board a