Don’t Look Behind You

something happened. I think so. My mother and sister were not murderers—but there was a man my sister knew. I can’t think of his name right now. I want to say Tony. I know he was Italian. He had a meat business in Anchorage. He came down to see Renee a couple of times, and he left a car there. But no one ever heard from him again.”
    “Do you think Nick is capable of murder?”
    “I think he’s a psycho,” Cassie responded. “I know not to push him too far. He’s my brother, and he comes to see me a lot, but I’m afraid of him.”
    It was clear that Cassie wasn’t in on the family secrets, nor had she wanted to be. She thought the
victim
in Puyallup—probably the man she called Tony—was dead. She even allowed that he might have been murdered by someone she didn’t know. She wasn’t even convinced there had ever been a homicide on Canyon Road.
    “How close are you to Nick?” Benson asked.
    “Not close. He slept one night on the floor of my house in Anchorage right after Vickie was killed. Before that, I hadn’t seen Nick for years.”
    “You didn’t enter into a pact with Nick never to talk about the incident when the person was killed in Puyallup?” Benson prodded. “You and your sister?”
    “I have never had a pact with him concerning murdering anybody!”
    Cassie was upset, but she was more angry. She was furious that Nick had tried to draw her into a murder plot—something she knew nothing about.
    Both Denny Wood and Ben Benson felt Cassie was telling the truth. She hadn’t been part of the tight circle formed by Geri Hesse, Renee, and Nick, rarely being close to them geographically or emotionally.

Chapter Fifteen
    March 24 was turning out to be a very long day. Denny Wood and Ben Benson returned to Henry’s Bail Bonds to talk to Renee Curtiss. She told them that she had an appointment with a doctor at the University of Washington Medical Center. “He’s treating my husband—Henry—who is very ill with heart failure.”
    Henry Lewis was scheduled to have a heart pump installed the next day. The two detectives offered to accompany her and wait until she had talked with Henry’s doctors, but she said she preferred to talk to them first. They then agreed to interview her at the bail bonds office rather than take her to the precinct.
    As Benson already knew, the woman who spoke with them was nothing at all like her brother; she was expensively dressed in a black dress and matching sweater. Although she used thick makeup and had a hard edge to her, she was still attractive. If Renee and Nick had colluded in a plan to kill Joe Tarricone, that seemed bizarre. Benson and Wood could easily visualize Nick as a murderer. Indeed, they knew he had already killed at least once before Joe died.
    Renee was calm and friendly. For the first minutes of this interview, they made small talk and asked easy questions. She gave her birth date as August 1, 1953; she was fifty-four but didn’t look it. She seemed to feel that she was the one in charge of the interview.
    “We’re investigating a murder with ties to Alaska,” Ben Benson said.
    “Oh, yes,” Renee said, “You mean my brother’s wife—”
    “No,” the Pierce County sergeant said flatly. “We’re investigating the murder of Joseph Tarricone.
    “Okay, Renee,” he began, “we’ve explained that we have your brother Nick in custody for his murder. We need to talk to you. I think I’ll start with you explaining to us what your relationship with Joseph Tarricone was.”
    At the first mention of Joe Tarricone’s name, Renee’s demeanor changed. “First, she gasped,” Benson recalled, “and then her chest and neck flushed scarlet. The redness rose up into her face and even her ears. She was shocked.
    “Denny told me later that he expected her ears to burst into flames—she was that red. After thirty years, I don’t think she expected us to be wondering about any relationship she might have had with Joe, or that anyone would come asking about him so long after.”
    Renee listened as Benson read her her Miranda rights, and she nodded that she understood them and signed on the bottom of the card. Recovering some of her composure, she agreed to have their conversation recorded after Ben Benson explained that he believed she might be guilty only of offering “criminal assistance” after Joe was murdered. And he did believe that. At the time.
    “But that was twenty-nine years ago,” Benson said, “and the statute of