Don’t Look Behind You

that crime because double jeopardy would attach.
    He said he no longer drank alcohol, and he proved to have a remarkable memory when it came to his family. Although he didn’t seem particularly intelligent, Nick recited their ages, where they all lived, and how he was related to them.
    “Cassie and Vickie—my first wife—were working together in a nursing home in Spokane,” he said. “They were sharing a house, and that’s where I met Vickie. She lost her mother when she was ten. She became the mom because she was the oldest. She never got to be a kid, you know. The main thing my mother and Renee had against her was the way she kept house. To me, it was good—but they’re clean freaks. My mom smoked, too, like Vickie, but there was no such thing as a dirty ashtray in
her
house.”
    Geri Hesse had never liked Vickie, and Nick felt it was because she thought no one was good enough for her son.
    On the surface, they almost sounded like a typical family. If the two detectives didn’t suspect the grotesque things they had done, they might have accepted the folksy meanderings. But they did know, and it seemed almost eerie listening to Nick, who became more voluble with every sentence. Oddly, he seemed to have no regrets about the sad and premature death of his first wife, even speaking of her with affection.
    Nick said that he had always been closest to his sister Renee. Cassie and his mother had friction between them, and he often had to play the middleman.
    “If I prefer one of those [sisters], the reason is because Cassie is Italian,” he explained in a seeming non sequitur. “My dad and mom adopted me, but Mom left my adopteddad not knowing that she was pregnant with Cassie by her lover. Cassie didn’t learn about that until she was in high school. I believe it was my uncle who introduced her to her [real] dad—and she was the spitting image of him. He paid for DNA tests [that] proved he was her biological dad.”
    “So you say Renee is the sister you’ve always been the closest to?” Benson asked.
    “I’m not so sure anymore … I’m finding now that Cassie and I have a lot more in common. Cassie is definitely opinionated, and Renee is a person that is easy to take advantage of,” Nick said, adding how he treasured both his sisters. “You can do anything you want to me, call me anything you want, but don’t mess with my sisters. And like Merle Haggard said, ‘You’re walking on the fighting side of me.’”
    Nick was garrulous, emphasizing that he couldn’t wait to get his life back and be a law-abiding citizen. He could afford to live in Arkansas on his disability payments—but not in Seattle. Still, he didn’t want to move away from Renee and Cassie, so he’d been applying for local jobs—principally as a flagger on highway construction projects. So far, he hadn’t been successful.
    “I just wanna get this over with, and go back to my life. I just wanna be left alone—nobody mess with me and I ain’t gonna mess with them …”
    It seemed abundantly clear that Nick no longer thought about what had happened to Joe Tarricone. In his mind, he was in the clear. After all, Joe had been gone for thirty years.
    The Pierce County detectives’ questioning had begun to change direction so subtly that Nick didn’t sense a shift in the wind. Ben Benson and Denny Wood were asking more about his sisters than they were about his plans for the future. Ben Benson told Nick that he’d done some “research” on his past.
    “I believe you’ve been truthful with us to this point,” Benson said. “I did review some of the case file from Alaska in your wife’s case—that’s all public information. The one thing that stands out in my mind in talking about Vickie is her having a boyfriend who wanted to take her to Rome.”
    “Oh. Okay. Yeah …” Suddenly Nick was wary.
    “What was that about?”
    “Okay. That was a gentleman that had a meat company and he delivered [meat], you know, to different places in Alaska.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “And he was Renee’s partner—business partner.”
    “What was his name?”
    “Oh—Joe.”
    Nick Notaro’s answers came haltingly now. He explained that he had seen this guy—Joe—down in Washington when he came down after he left the hospital in Fairbanks. Before that, Vickie had told him she was going to Italy with Joe.
    “Where did this guy named Joe come into play?” Denny Wood asked.
    “Well, he stopped in the restaurant there [in Healy] and