Don’t Look Behind You

Whether she still lived there was something Ben Benson would check as soon as possible.
    Carlson said that when his son Douglas, who was now forty-three, heard about the discovery of body parts on the family land, he remembered visiting the Hesse family when he was a teenager.
    “He, my wife, and my sister Marilyn went over to their house,” Carlson said, “and Douglas remembers that he noticed Mrs. Hesse had a number of new ‘scars’ on her face. As kids will, he asked about it, and ‘Mr. Isaak’ told him that Geraldine had recently had a face-lift so she could look ‘thirteen or fourteen years younger.’ I think Mr. Isaak was about that much younger than Geraldine Hesse.”
    Ben Benson asked them if they had heard from Geraldine Hesse’s family since they moved out. Christmas cards? Letters? Any phone calls?
    They had not. “When Mrs. Hesse moved out, she left no forwarding address,” Carlson said. “She also left with rent due, and an empty oil tank—which was supposed to be left half-full. It’s right here in her lease.”
    Geri, her husband or lover, and her two daughters sounded like a strange family. Not quite fly-by-nights, but close to that. Geri Hesse
had
probably been near fifty in the latter part of the seventies, old enough to have one grown daughter and another around nine. She had apparently been living with a younger man; perhaps she had had a face-lift so he wouldn’t notice their age difference so much. Her older daughter was said to be “a knockout”—or she had been at that time.
    One thought kept nagging at Ben Benson. Where was “Mr. Isaak?” Had he moved away with Geraldine and her daughters—or had he remained on the Canyon Road property until the earth gave up what was left of him?
    And who was Isaak? Benson figured that he might have been the man who told Owen Carlson’s son Douglas about why Geri had so many scars on her face. That, in itself, was fairly mean and must have embarrassed Geri. The younger man could have simply told the kid that that was a personal question and none of his business. But then, kids do ask awkward questions and the answer had certainly shut him up.
    There were so many blank spaces in the backstory of this case. At this point, Ben Benson didn’t realize that he was going to have to trace two extremely complicated family trees.

Chapter Three
    There is nothing more important to a murder investigation than knowing just who the victim is. Aside from serial killings, sexually motivated crimes, and those that take place during robberies, most homicides are committed by someone close to the victim(s), often someone they know and even trust. Benson had virtually no solid clues to who the long-dead man might be, nothing beyond the possibility that his surname could have been Tarricone.
    He hoped that the media’s coverage might bring someone forward who knew something—
anything—
about the person whose bare bones offered no secrets about his identity. Truckloads of soil from the property had been run through a screen at the company where Travis Haney worked, without any personal property popping up.
    Sergeant Benson gave his permission to release that soil; they had gleaned all they could from the lot on Canyon Road.
    But as Benson watched the news flashes about the case, someone else did, too.
    Jan Rhodes, who worked as an administrative staff assistant in the Major Crimes Unit of the King County Sheriff’s Office in Seattle, watched the report on the grisly find in the Summit area of Puyallup and her heart began to race. She handled missing persons reports in King County and saw instantly that there were similarities to one of her cases.
    There was really no reason that Jan Rhodes should know about a missing report on a man who almost certainly had disappeared in Pierce County—and not King County. And yet it had ended up on her desk. In fact, she had found it so compelling that she had kept the missing man’s photograph on her desk. She was determined to find him—alive or dead. When she saw the news flash about body parts discovered in June 2007, it struck a chord with Rhodes.
    “Oh my God,” she said to herself as she frantically tried to scrape her cat off its sleeping place on her telephone book. She immediately contacted Pierce County and was directed from one department to another until finally she was told that a Sergeant Benson was the lead detective.
    “We have a missing persons case,” she said in an email to Ben Benson.