Don’t Look Behind You

sold some meat where I was working. He had goodhamburger patties. And because he knew I was Renee’s brother, he came over to the hotel where we were staying a couple of times.”
    “Talk about body language,” Benson recalled later. “Every time we mentioned Joe, Nick involuntarily backed up his chair. He was halfway across the room when I asked him, ‘Nick, where you going?’”
    Nick hastened to explain that Renee and Joe had been only business partners and platonic friends. Renee had been seeing another man, a chef named Keith or perhaps Curt.
    In the meantime, he sold his house on Green River Road and moved to the yellow rambler in Auburn. The 14th Avenue house wasn’t nearly as imposing as the white stucco house Bob had built near the river, but it didn’t matter; he didn’t intend to spend much time in Washington.
    “He was German. He’s the one who got me a job up on the pipeline for Campo Pacific.”
    “What was Joe’s last name?”
    “I don’t remember. Joe was Italian.”
    “Now, you did tell somebody that you saw your wife Vickie and Joe together down in Washington?” Ben Benson probed, seeing sweat bead up on Nick’s forehead.
    “I believe I did. I’m not positive, but I don’t remember [if] I either saw them together or whether I saw just one of them.”
    Nick Notaro was stumbling over his own tongue at this point. He recalled that he and his mother had felt Joe was much too old for Renee—closer to Geri Hesse’sage than Renee’s. He thought Geri or Renee had told him that Renee traveled with Joe only for business reasons, and they stayed in separate hotel rooms. If they went out for dinner, it was also for business. He was positive that Renee had no romantic relationship with Joe.
    “Now, you killed Vickie and you told people she went to Italy with Joe. Where did Joe go? Why wouldn’t people still see Joe around?”
    “I don’t know. He could’ve gone back to Italy,” Nick answered, and the detectives could almost see the wheels whirling in his brain as he struggled to make his story match up with facts.
    “He was from Italy, and Renee mentioned one time that he had talked about goin’ back. Their business was starting to peter out, and he was talking about goin’ back.”
    Nick denied now that he had ever seen Joe Tarricone in Washington State. He had been wrong about that. He was sure he had seen him only in Alaska. Nick had backed his chair as far away as he could from the desk where Wood and Benson sat, far away from the digital recorder. Any farther and he would have had to go through the wall behind him.
    At 11:43 on the morning of March 24, the detectives read Nick his Miranda rights and took a break while Nick went to the restroom.
    Ten minutes later, Ben Benson looked squarely into Nick Notaro’s eyes as he told him that he and Denny Wood were investigating the death of Joe Tarricone.
    “Human remains were found on your mother’s property on Canyon Road in Puyallup, Nick. DNA tests have beendone and the bones are identified as belonging to Joe Tarricone.”
    Benson told Nick that he had been investigating the case for several months. “We have probable cause to arrest you—and your sisters—for the murder of Joe Tarricone.”
    Nick Notaro looked stricken.
When had the conversation gotten away from him? One minute he’d been talking about regaining his freedom, and now he was about to be arrested!
    “We need you to tell us what happened at your mother’s house,” Benson said.
    “Renee—my sisters—weren’t involved. Not one iota.”
    “Then tell me what happened there—because the information I have is that your sisters
were
involved.”
    Nick shook his head. “No. When I came down from my appendectomy, Mom told me she had shot him, and he was in the freezer. I helped Mom put him in the place where you found him. Renee was in Hawaii and she wasn’t involved.”
    “Tell us what happened.”
    “We took him out of the freezer,” Nick said slowly, “and me and Mom used a chain saw to cut him up, and we buried it [the bones] in the yard.”
    Geri Hesse was dead, and had been for eight years. Blaming her for the murder itself—if anyone believed that—would take suspicion off Cassie and Renee, and Nick apparently thought he would get a lesser sentence as an accomplice after the fact.
    “I don’t believe you,” Denny Wood said. “How could your mother—at her age—shoot a man and then carry himdownstairs to the freezer and put him in? I