Don’t Look Behind You

point. He told her if I wasn’t with him, I shouldn’t be with anyone.”
    “Did you relay this information to Nick?”
    “I don’t recall.” She didn’t think she had
specifically
asked him to come down to help her with the Joe situation. “Maybe Nick could talk to him—I mean, I’m putting words in my head that I don’t recall.”
    Yes, she knew that Nick had killed Vickie after he’d gotten out of the hospital—learned about it, she thought, a day or so before he came down to Washington. It could have been in her phone call to him. She couldn’t recall. She’d been shocked that Vickie left her poor brother in the hospital with a “burst appendix” and never checked to see how he was.
    “How did you react when he told you about that [killing Vickie]?”
    “The same way most people would. A little bit of horror. I talked to him and he felt tremendous remorse. I think he turned himself in.” (This was not true.)
    “Was there anything to make him believe Vickie was having an affair with Joseph?”
    “Wow, I don’t know. Never heard that one before.”
    As Benson, Wood, and Renee Curtiss worked to bring 1978 into the present, they finally came to the night Joseph Tarricone died. Renee said she was at work when her mother told her to come home at once. It wasn’t a request; it was an order. Geri Hesse had sounded
very
serious.
    “Tell me what happened when you got home,” Benson directed.
    “I remember I was taken downstairs and shown a locked room; the door was unlocked and Joe was inside … dead.”
    “Who took you down there and showed you that?”
    “Both of them. Mom and Nick.”
    Nick had blamed his now-deceased mother for Joe Tarricone’s murder, and now Renee was putting the onus on both of them. She said that Joe was lying on his side, and that she’d been surprised that there was no blood. “I’m sure there had to have been blood, but I don’t recall any blood.”
    She couldn’t remember where her daughter, Diana, was. Renee knew that the ten-year-old wasn’t in the basement with them. The three adults had locked the door where Joe was, and gone upstairs to discuss what to do.
    “Tell me about that conversation with your mom and Nick about what happened.”
    “I don’t remember. We just talked about how to get rid of the body. We talked about burying him in the backyard at the house.”
    Renee said that Nick had dug either two side-by-side holes or one very large one. She couldn’t recall which.
    “It took a long time.”
    “Prior to that, did you and Nick go somewhere together?”
    “Either to a sporting goods section or a hardware store—someplace—to buy a saw.”
    “Do you remember what kind of saw it was?”
    “Not a brand—but it was a chain saw.”
    “A gas-powered chain saw?”
    “I can’t—I don’t, I assume so. I don’t think they make electric chain saws, do they?”
    Renee thought she and Nick had gone into the store together. She believed she had probably paid for it.
    “And then what did you do after you bought the chain saw?”
    “I used it on Joe.”
    Until this moment, neither Benson nor Wood had felt that Renee was anything more than an accessory after the fact; now they began to suspect that she had conspired with her brother to have him come down to Washington State to kill Joe Tarricone.
    “You used it on Joe. Did anybody else use it on Joe?”
    “Nick—I’m not saying that we, you know, we would, you know … Sometimes, you’d hold, you would hold him while Nick used the saw.”
    “So it was a joint operation? Was your mom helping as well or was it just you and Nick?”
    Even for seasoned detectives—detectives who knew that Joe’s body had been dissected cleanly with a power saw—the conversation was grotesque. They fought to hide their own feelings. With the spirit and image of Jimi Hendrix on the walls surrounding them, they listened to Renee as she brought back the scene in the basement of a now-destroyed house.
    “Mom was down there as well. Whether she was holding him—I don’t know, but I have the memory of the three of us being in that basement.”
    “What specifically was the chain saw used for?” Ben Benson asked.
    “To make it so the body wasn’t so heavy—”
    “Okay. What part of the body was dismembered?”
    “Arms, legs—”
    “Did you cut his head off as well?”
    “Oh, God, I don’t remember that. I think so, I don’t—I don’t recall.”
    “Now, was this horribly messy?” Benson prodded.