Don’t Look Behind You

“Describe for me, were you cutting through his clothing or had you taken his clothes off?”
    “The clothes were not off.”
    “So the chain saw went right through his clothes?”
    “Correct.”
    “Did you ever hold the saw, and remove any part of Joe’s body?”
    “Possibly. I think I was mostly holding.”
    Even though the crime had happened three decades earlier, this interrogation sent chills through the detectives—and, possibly, through Renee Curtiss. It was a scene thatalmost anyone would want to bury deep in his or her subconscious memory. Renee described how each body part that was severed was put into black garbage bags. When they got too heavy, they were taken to the backyard where Nick Notaro had dug deep holes.
    Renee was sure that all that remained of Joe Tarricone had been buried on the property; they hadn’t removed hands or feet or head to take them to another disposal spot so they would be more difficult to identify.
    The two detectives both thought about Nick Notaro’s statement that his mother had killed Joe and put him in the freezer. That could not possibly be true.
Three
people could not move his body without dissecting it into pieces.
    “Okay,” Benson asked. “How did Nick kill Joe?”
    “He shot him.”
    “And what did he use to shoot him with?”
    “A gun,” she said vaguely. Renee said she had no idea where Nick had obtained the gun. As she remembered, her brother had given her a handgun after the murder, and asked her to dispose of it. She wasn’t sure how long she had it—but she had been on another boyfriend’s boat on Lake Washington, just off Mercer Island, when she threw it in the deep water. The boat owner—also named Joe—hadn’t seen her toss the weapon away.
    As far as Renee knew, Joe Tarricone didn’t carry a gun, although she thought he might have had one in his truck in Alaska. “So many people had guns up there.”
    “Okay, I’ve been told,” Benson began, “that Joe was known to carry large amounts of cash with him. They sayhe carried a briefcase, and a lot of his business dealings were in cash?”
    “That’s correct.”
    “How much cash would he carry at any given time?”
    “Oh—it could be upward of a thousand dollars.”
    That would have been quite a lot of money in 1978. Asked about which of Joe Tarricone’s possessions were left at the Canyon Road house, Renee had a memory lapse again. She didn’t think his yellow truck with the camper on it was there because she believed it wouldn’t make the drive down from Alaska. (It
was
at Canyon Road after Joe vanished; Geri said Joe had signed it over to her.)
    “The briefcase where he carried his cash?”
    “You know,” she said. “I believe there
was
a briefcase, but I believe that was put back in the office in Alaska. I don’t know if Nick did that or if my mom did when she went up for Nick’s trial [for Vickie Notaro’s homicide].”
    “Speaking of that, you and your mom mentioned several times back then that Joe’s office in Alaska had been ransacked. Was that something to make it look like there was some kind of problem he had up there?”
    “You know, I don’t recall that … I wasn’t up in Alaska, so I wouldn’t have known his office was ransacked.”
    But, surely, Renee’s mother—Geri Hesse—would have told her about finding Joe Tarricone’s office a shambles after someone had trashed it? Benson thought that was something that Renee would remember.

Chapter Sixteen
    Renee Curtiss’s answers came more slowly, yet she didn’t ask for an attorney or stop the questioning. When Denny Wood took over the questioning, she looked at him warily.
    “How did you know the briefcase got back there—you said it was returned to Alaska?”
    “Joe never went anywhere without his briefcase.”
    “You knew he was dead,” Wood pressed. “Why would your mother return the briefcase? He didn’t need it up there. He’s not taking it anywhere. Why would anybody return a briefcase that had nothing in it?”
    “I don’t know. There wasn’t anything in it.”
    “Well you mentioned—right?—that you sat down and had to come up with a plan?”
    “Right,” Renee said softly.
    Wood outlined that their plan might have been to make it look as if Joe Tarricone had returned to Alaska alive and well, since they believed no one would find his body or prove that he’d ever come to Washington. If someone could have broken into his Alaska office, murdered him, andthen stolen the cash