Don’t Look Behind You

think you asked Joe to go downstairs and that you’re the one who shot him. And that would have had to be a really big freezer to fit a large man into.”
    “Yes,” Nick admitted, he had shot Joe Tarricone. “But Renee was in Hawaii when it happened.”
    “What happened after you shot him?” Wood asked.
    “We went to K-Mart and bought a chain saw—and a tarp. Mom held the tarp while I used the chain saw. I cut off Joe’s legs, his arms, and his head. My mother took the head away and got rid of it separately.”
    “How did you get to K-Mart?” Wood questioned. “You say you didn’t know the area?”
    “I don’t remember. I buried Joe’s legs, arms, and torso in the yard.”
    “But how did you get to K-Mart?” Wood pressed, believing that there was someone present that night other than Geri Hesse.
    “I don’t remember who drove me.”
    “Why did you kill Joe Tarricone?” Wood asked bluntly.
    “He was always trying to get Renee into bed, and he wouldn’t leave her alone. He kept asking her to marry him and wouldn’t take no for an answer. My mother called me in Alaska and she asked me to come and take care of the problem. She said Renee had gone to Hawaii to get away from Joe. It made her mad when Joe kept showing up at the house.”
    “Did anyone tell you to kill him?”
    “Nobody had to tell me to kill him.”
    Nick Notaro seemed almost proud to be the avengingbrother who took care of his sisters. When he was asked about where Cassie was on the date Joe died, he said she was in Anchorage.
    “You can check her employment records up there, and you’ll see she never left Anchorage.”
    Nick had given the details of Joe Tarricone’s murder for an hour, but when he was asked to record his confession, he balked.
    “I fell for that in Alaska,” he said gruffly. “I’m not going to fall for it again.”
    He requested an attorney before they went any further. He was immediately arrested, taken into custody, and handcuffed. Detective Gary Sanders and Deputy Erik Clarkson transported Nick Notaro to the Pierce County jail where he was booked for first degree murder.

Chapter Fourteen
    Beginning with a case that seemed certain to be a “loser,” and after nine months of steady, cautious, and intuitive investigation, the avalanche had finally begun. Suspects were about to tumble like dominoes. Although it had been frustrating to wait until all of their ducks were in a row to make solid arrests, Denny Wood—and especially Ben Benson—were seeing it all come to fruition.
    With Nick Notaro on his way to jail, they contacted Cassie Martell and Renee Curtiss (Renee never took Henry Lewis’s last name) where they were both at work at Henry’s Bail Bonds. Renee gave no sign that she recognized Ben Benson from the time he had dropped in the previous summer and asked her about bailing out his “nephew.” She probably didn’t; she must have seen a lot of faces come and go since Benson had been in the previous July.
    Benson told Cassie and Renee only that their brother was in a little trouble, and that he and Wood needed to talk to them over at the Seattle police precinct.
    “We can’t both leave at the same time,” Renee said, apparently neither surprised nor disturbed that Nick was introuble—again. Cassie Martell said she would go first and then come back so Renee could talk to them.
    From the beginning of the interview with Cassie Martell, it was obvious that she didn’t know what had happened to Joe Tarricone; she had been living in Anchorage from 1977 to 1980, and had come outside to the lower forty-eight states only once.
    “I came down for Christmas that first year I lived in Alaska,” she said. “That would have been in 1977.”
    Asked if Nick had ever lived with her in Anchorage, she shook her head. She had really been closer to Vickie, who had lived with Cassie for two or three weeks shortly before Nick killed her.
    “He never gave me a reason why he did that,” Cassie said. “You know, I finally asked him just a few months ago. First, he said that he did it because our mother didn’t like her. Then he said he was in the hospital with appendicitis and he believed Vickie was fooling around on him. I don’t think she was. I knew that
he
was seeing someone else—a woman who had children—and he just wanted to get rid of Vickie.”
    “We think someone was murdered in that house where your mother and Renee lived in Puyallup,” Benson said.
    “That might have been where