Don’t Look Behind You

from his briefcase and ransacked his office, the false scene of the crime might look as though it occurred hundreds of miles from where he’d actually died.
    His vehicles left behind in Puyallup warred with that explanation. And several people recalled that Joe was at the birthday barbecue—the last time
anyone
the detectives talked to had ever seen him.
    What about the new Mercedes? Renee said that Joe had bought it for her, just as he had offered her the wedding trip to Europe. He was trying to buy her, and she wasn’t having any of it.
    “What did you do with the plane tickets he threw down—after you said no to his proposal?”
    “I don’t believe we did anything with them.”
    “You don’t recall cashing them in for money?” Wood asked.
    “It’s possible. I don’t remember—it was thirty years ago.”
    “But Joe didn’t pick them up. He threw them on the ground and his heart’s broken?”
    “He threw them down. I believe he threw them down. He was very angry.”
    Renee said the Mercedes had been taken to her aunt’s house. Joe had tried to give it to her in Alaska, and he brought it down to Washington. “I didn’t want it—I didn’t drive it. I had a new Alfa Romeo that I leased at the time.”
    How long had the Mercedes been there? Perhaps Joe had driven it down before his final visit; he couldn’t driveboth the Mercedes and his yellow meat truck and camper at the same time.
    Denny Wood asked Renee about the wound in Joe’s head. She didn’t know what had caused it. Was it from a bullet, a baseball bat, perhaps a knife? She apparently had forgotten what she said about the gun.
    “I don’t know. It was just a head wound. I can’t recall if there was blood,” she said slowly. “It’s almost as if—like it’s in black and white.”
    “But you knew he was dead at that time?”
    “Yes.”
    Renee Curtiss’s memory was growing more and more clouded. She was fairly sure that they had kept Joe’s body in the basement for a few days before they dissected his body and buried the pieces.
    “Was he put in a freezer in the basement?”
    “I don’t recall.”
    “Well, think back. You were either working the chain saw or holding on to the limbs while they were being cut off. It’s a huge difference if somebody’s flexible and warm or whether they’re stiff as a board and cold and frozen. Was he frozen when you cut him up?”
    “I don’t recall that.”
    “Was there a freezer in the basement?”
    “I think there was a small chest freezer.”
    “Was there a freezer big enough to put a body into?”
    “I don’t think so. It was small.”
    Ben Benson and Denny Wood had begun interviewing Renee Curtiss at twenty minutes to five, and it was nowsixteen minutes to six. By the time they finished, their subject’s answers were mostly “I don’t recall.”
    They had begun believing that she hadn’t been present when Nick Notaro called Joe Tarricone down into the basement on the pretext of fixing the washing machine, that she wasn’t there as Joe bent over, all unaware, and was shot in the head.
    Now they were sure from both her answers and her failure to answer that she had been far more than a shocked witness
after the fact
of Joe’s sudden, violent death. They believed that she had been there during his murder, standing beside her mother and her brother.
    They also believed that she had phoned Nick in Alaska and asked him to come down and “take care of her problem” with Joe.
    And Nick—who had always vowed to protect his sisters—had done just that. He had put the blame on his dead mother at first and then admitted shooting Joe himself. But he denied that either Renee or Cassie had been there. He said Renee had been in Hawaii—but she hadn’t even mentioned Hawaii.
    Well, Cassie hadn’t been in Puyallup. She had been in Anchorage, Alaska.
    But Renee had been there. She was shocked when Ben Benson informed her that she was under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder, which is basically a murder charge. Grim faced, the two detectives, with Renee handcuffed between them, walked out of Henry’s Bail Bonds. Her expression was stoic. The new world she had fashioned for herself had come tumbling down.
    Renee was going to jail, a thought that had probably never occurred to her.
    Renee Curtiss spent the night of March 24 in jail. The next day she was led into court for her arraignment. Both Renee and her brother Nick were charged with first-degree murder. Despite the fact that